summer reading list

summer is famous for reading, and mine officially begins when my yin and i reach North Carolina in less than two weeks time. through some sublimely bizarre confluence of events, our arrival coincides not only with Father's Day, but with the official start of summer. we're going to be there eight weeks before moving on to visit friends and family in New York, and in honor of our time there i've fabricated an informal, incomplete syllabus:

Week 1:
Jacques Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Lacan, besides being a dead Frenchman, is also the author of one of my all-time favorite sentences and is renowned worldwide as one of the most difficult to understand men in an already difficult to understand field and culture.

Week 2:
Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology

i first learned of Zizek from a friend of mine in her bedroom. unbeknownst to either of us, that particular incarnation of our relationship was mere inches from its dissolution, and we watched a documentary on this mad Slovenian on (probably) a Saturday night in (definitely) Fort Lauderdale.

Week 3:
Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World

rounding out the Lacanian contingent is Kaja Silverman who, unfortunately, is not related to Sarah. i learned of this particular Silverman from my thesis advisor, and as far as i can tell this book is about looking, desire and anxiety, two subjects with which i'm quite familiar.

Week 4:
Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed

Ms. Gilbert seems a reasonable way to celebrate the midpoint of summer, especially considering the subject of her first book, Eustace Conway, lives just minutes from my father. in one of those strange quirks of fate, my dad and brother held palaver with "the last American man" about the same time that i was becoming familiar with Gilbert's immensely pleasurable, albeit somewhat problematic, Eat, Pray, Love.

Week 5:
Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle

the Situationist International is undoubtedly one of the most interesting groups that came to prominence during the turmoil of the Sixties, providing cogent critiques of capitalism as well as coming up with kickass terms like Debord's "psychogeography." the group's influence on the Paris uprisings of May 1968 are enough to provoke mist-eyed nostalgia in even the most cynical former and would-be revolutionaries.

Week 6:
René Viénet's Enragés & Situationists in the Occupation Movement

building on Debord's theoretical work comes this memoir from Viénet which, if nothing else, promises to provide a counter-balance to Gilbert's presumably sentimental book from two weeks earlier. i'm totally unfamiliar with this text, but it has some nifty cartoons as well as amazing photographic images from May of '68.

Week 7:
Susan Sontag's On Photography

this is one of those books i've been meaning to check out forever because it seems to be referenced in virtually everything i've read for the past six months. furthermore, i watched a documentary on Annie Leibovitz about a year ago and the idea of one of the world's most famous photographers being involved with one of the world's foremost scholars on photography captured my imagination in some way i can't quite explain. it would be like Roger Ebert dating Julia Roberts, except not really at all.

Week 8:
Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions

i've loved Borges since my second year of college, when i had a mad graduate student named Hasan Malik for my "Intro to Fiction" class at Chapel Hill. this man (Malik, not Borges) is responsible more than anyone else for my love of difficult books. he would pace and curse and sweat and spit through each and every class, convincing a room full of nineteen year-olds (or at least me) that literature could be just as exciting as punk rock. one of the stories we read in Malik's class was Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which remains one of the most brilliant, absurd short stories i've ever read, no offense to Donald Barthelme.

(an analytic afterthought)

after giving my reading list the once over, i'm pleased to see that half of the authors (Zizek, Silverman, Gilbert, Viénet) listed are still alive, and only three are Americans (Sontag, Gilbert, Silverman). interestingly the three Americans are also the three female authors, and i'm not sure if this says something about the relationship between gender and translation, gender and authorship, or merely a side effect of my own taste and proclivities.

there are also some missing items from this list, books that i plan to read intermittently and as needed. these include: Rohit Mehta's translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, John Cage's Silence, D.T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism, and Osho's The Buddha Said...

all these books are equally obtuse and poetic, written exclusively by male authors equally dead. fortunately, there is only one power-crazed bioterrorist guru on the list (Osho), and i feel his presence is admirably offset by the inclusion of an opium addicted harbinger of modernity (Baudelaire). i'm sure others that will sneak there way in over summer, and my plan is to provide miniature book reports as the summer progresses. with this in mind, please post your suggestions or send an email to:

circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

many thanks, as ever...