Brainiac Summer Reading -- Part 4 of 5

4th installment of Brainiac Summer Reading series: books of intellectual, philosophical, critical interest.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION
Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Chic Ironic Bitterness" (Michigan), by R. Jay Magill Jr. Magill is a multitalented guy on whom I've had my eye for quite some time. Formerly the executive editor of the excellent magazine DoubleTake, he's also a talented illustrator, and a scholar of American culture. His new book, which was awarded the 2008 Eric Hoffer Notable Book in Culture prize, got its start in 1999, when Magill wrote a small review of Jedediah Purdy's supposedly anti-irony book "For Common Things"; since then, it's blossomed into a close study of irony as an American social attitude and critique. Magill carefully draws distinctions, which I appreciate: Dave Eggers's "A.H.W.O.S.G." isn't ironic, Magill notes correctly, even though most journalists and reviewers assumed that it was. I also appreciate the fact that, like Purdy, Magill wants to resurrect irony's moral dimension, its liberating powers. To this end, he approvingly quotes Samuel Hynes's 1961 comment that contemporary irony is "a view of life which recognize[s] that experience is open to multiple interpretations, of which no one is simply right, and that the coexistence of incongruities is part of the structure of existence." Amen.

"Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius" (Harvard), by Detlev Claussen. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. I've been waiting for years for a full-scale, English-language biography of T.W. Adorno, the great, cantankerous negative dialectician and social critic. Claussen's newly translated 2003 intellectual biography traces the consummate anti-totalitarian's life and work from his childhood in Frankfurt to his Weimar-era friendships with Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, to his exile in America during WWII, to his death in Switzerland in 1969.

"In Defense of Lost Causes" (Verso), by Slavoj Žižek. I've criticized Žižek and his starry-eyed fans before, but I think Žižek is always worth reading. Here, the globetrotting philosopher and social critic daringly attempts to extract a kernel of truth from the failures of totalitarianism; that is to say, he argues that postmodernism's reflex antitotalitarianism goes too far when it rejects universal values, global emancipation, and other lost causes that we've been instructed to associate with the excesses of the French Revolution and Stalinist Russia.

"Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City" (Viking), by Mark Kingwell. Is the city an extension and embodiment of human consciousness? University of Toronto philosopher and public intellectual Mark Kingwell, a regular Harper's contributor and author of several very smart, engaging books, including "Better Living" (1998), "The World We Want" (2000), and "Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams" (2006), thinks so. What Benjamin did for Paris, capital of the 19th century, Kingwell does for New York, capital of the 20th -- and for Shanghai, capital of the 21st. He writes, at one point: "Only close attention to the complexity of lived experience can redeem us from one-sidedness, abstraction and reduction, in architecture as in politics." And in theory and philosophy, too! That's what I enjoy so much about Kingwell's writing, watching him pay close attention to various complexities.

Full disclosure: Kingwell and I are collaborating on the forthcoming Idler's Glossary (Biblioasis).

"Nobody's Home" (Open Letter), by Dubravka Ugresic. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Last summer, I reported that Chad Post, formerly of the Dalkey Archive Press, was assisting in the creation of a literary translation program at the University of Rochester and starting a new literary imprint (Open Letter) dedicated to publishing translations. Ugresic, an incisive expat Croatian novelist and intellectual whom I once interviewed for Ideas, has followed Post from Dalkey to Open Letter. In this series of essays, she writes ironically about life in exile, bottled-water drinking tourists, the Eurovision song contest, and more.

"Master of the Mysteries: The Life of Manly Palmer Hall" (Process), by Louis Sahagun. Manly Palmer Hall is sometimes described as the most important American esoteric instructor of the 20th century. (If you're not interested, as I am, in the fringe religious groups, freemasons, eastern gurus, and esoteric societies who thrived in Southern California from the early to the middle part of the last century, stop reading now.) Hall was a Canadian-born mystic, whose 1928 encyclopedia, "The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy," made him famous around the world among amateur scholars of religion, mythology, mysticism, and the occult. Sahagun, a staff writer at the LA Times, follows Hall's career from his arrival in Los Angeles as a teenager in 1919 to his transformation into a famous student of the occult, to his years lecturing from coast to coast and hobnobbing with Hollywood producers, to his patriotic WWII-era efforts to convince Americans that the creation of the US was part of a great ancient philosophers' experiment, to the postwar years in which he hosted Elvis, astronauts, and others at his Hollywood compound, to his mysterious death in 1990.

"Coming of Age at the End of History" (Soft Skull/Counterpoint), by Camille de Toledo. Translated by Blake Ferris. The Paris-based Toledo (not, it seems, his real name) is a 32-year-old filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist. Here, he examines the post-1989 counterculture, asks himself what Europeans his age are protesting against, and analyzes the manner in which cultural dissent has been neutralized over the past two decades. Le Monde: "A real find, brilliantly written, and astonishingly mature."