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Jacobin's recurring "this book/film is socialist and therefore good" feature has almost never led me to something I enjoyed, but Rodari's Telephone Tales was a rare exception. Both I and certain children I know liked that book a lot, especially the more gleefully silly entries (like the story of the palazzo made of ice cream, or the one in which the stuffy town of Busto Arsizio creates a building full of things for its rowdy children to smash, and then everybody has a grand old time). So I looked for other Rodari to try and found this, also translated by Anthony Shugaar.

It's an extremely strange extended "fairy tale," where the chaos and whimsy occasionally become grotesque and threatening. The best part is the surprise ending, which is much more in the spirit of the Telephone Tales than what comes before. Shugaar's introduction says the villains stand in for the Brigate Rosse, but if that's so the implications are less clear than the liberal both-sidesism he seems to draw from it. Anyway, not as great for children---not so much because of its ideological indeterminacy (about which: who cares, really? when they're old enough, give them ST:TNG and Terry Pratchett and they'll turn out okay)---but because it's just not as fun. Forse sarebbe meglio in italiano.

Actually I read the Project Gutenberg transcription of a reprint of the first edition. This has been on my queue for a long time because of its reputation as a send-up of identity politics avant la lettre, which I thought would be fun to read, back before the backlash had brought us the likely end of civilization. In the meantime it’s become somewhat research-related, since I learned from Brooks Hefner’s book Black Pulp that Schuyler was a crucial figure in black newspaper fiction. Anyway, this novel is more of a Menckenian highbrow satire than anything else. Highly readable and very funny in parts—though, speaking of the great backlash, the spoof of presidential election politics is very, very close to home in 2025. Schuyler understood quite clearly the dynamics of the party system and the opportunities it offers to ideological entrepreneurs of any race who know how to exploit racism and class conflict.

Despite explicitly repeating the literal party line on racism being used to split the working class, the novel finally tends toward a Swift-like “Tory anarchy” more than any kind of radical challenge to the existing order. I think.

Got to this via the TV adaptation and a desire for something as silly as possible to read. It is certainly very silly. Twilight x Gaudy Night. Content warning: ridiculous fantasies about a successful academic career. The only contingently employed person here is a minor rival who is killed off to make a point.

The quality of the writing is appalling, as one would expect from a professional historian; the sentences fall like lead on the page. All that is of course just fine, and I enjoyed the elaboration of the fantasy—by which I mean the magic, witchy parts, not the Defrosting the Frozen Alpha Male romance parts. I'm not sure the author doesn't feel the same. At the level of plot, it bears comparison to Robert Jordan's experimental masterpiece, Crossroads of Twilight: hundreds of pages in which nothing at all happens to the superpowered protagonists. I think I'll stick to the idiot-box version, which is crafted with a little more eye to regular peripeteias.

Through some administrative oversight I was allowed to offer an undergraduate seminar entirely focused on Ursula Le Guin this semester. I thought it would be clever to mix in her version of the Daodejing, so I finally read it straight through instead of dipping into it. My students rightly suggested we look at the book as Le Guin’s self-conscious effort to popularize Laozi: obviously you should go elsewhere for Sinological rigor. Le Guin’s annotations and the presence of her own voice in the text clearly signal her desire to make Laozi applicable for a late-20th-c. US audience that wants gender equality, peace, and less wreckage of the environment…and for a mid-to-late-20th-c. genre writer committed to ideals of art as conveying deep “truth” in ambiguous or elusive form.

Le Guin is vocal about her distaste for the “manual for princes” interpretation of this text—that is, the scholarly consensus that the Laozi belongs to philosophical debates about social order and political rule in the Warring States period. But this may be symptomatic, considering how much her own writing is itself not-so-secretly a manual for non-princes. She takes liberties that are philologically unacceptable, and her general editorial / translational tone clearly owes a lot to the nineteenth-century amateur tradition. Her acknowledgments led me to learn a little about the fascinating oddball Paul Carus, whose zinc-magnate family set up a syncretic religious publisher, Open Court. Carus produced, inter alia, a character-by-character gloss of “Lao-Tze’s Tao-Teh-King” (1898), which Le Guin says was her first Daodejing, found on her father’s shelves.

I had this on my shelf because I have often taught early English translations of "The Postmaster" and "The Hungry Stones" in my Early 20th-c. lit course. Wanted something bite-size to read so I read a couple stories...then kept going through the whole collection. Tagore truly has range (generic, social, tonal). Somewhere in the middle of the selection there is a run of pathetic people unable to escape their misfortune seen through the pitying but aristocratic eye of a external narrator---that got a little wearisome, but then things turned around or possibly Tagore went after different rasas. He writes a hell of a ghost story. The most powerful stories are about wronged women (or girls: but child marriage generates ambiguities). The whole collection seems to balance on the same tension as my students and I always find in "The Postmaster": is it a secular critique that takes the side of the victims of (colonial) modernization, or do these victims get ironized too from a more spiritualized, transcendent perspective? Not a deep thought for one to have about Tagore, but anyway: good read!

This Penguin has a good quantity of notes and a nice glossary that gives, especially, some guidance in understanding how the translator has handled Bengali expressions of kinship/respect/etc.

At first I picked this out and read just one chapter in order to assign it as a token radical view in a cluster of essays on education and inequality. But then I couldn't stop myself and read the whole thing after the semester was over. It is an actual real-life Marxist reflection theory (supported with the toolkit of postwar US social science: linear regressions, IQ scores, and all). B&G's "Correspondence Principle" asserts that the structure of school is determined by the structure of the economy it feeds people into. Unlike a lot of reflection theorists, they have a historical and causal account of how this might be, pointing out that US educational reform has pretty much always been driven by business and political elites. So they manage to arrive quasi-independently at Bourdieu's idea that education's social significance lies not so much in the content of schooling as in the way it shapes people's dispositions to fit their social destinies and thus legitimates and reproduces the class structure. It's amusing to imagine a mirror-universe John Guillory writing a version of Cultural Capital with B&G instead of PB as the guiding theorist (actually JG does cite their other work in that book).

Somehow these powerful and still-compelling arguments cohabit with a poignantly dated circa-1968 radical framework. The student and urban rebellions demonstrate that the socialist revolution is within reach; people are fed up with the capitalist system, whose unbearable contradictions will bring it crashing down any day now; and so on. A big introductory chunk of the book is devoted to an exposition of quite orthodox Marxism, but actually they seem to me to turn frequently to what Boltanski and Chiapello call the "artistic critique" of the second spirit of capitalism, as opposed to the critique of exploitation: for B&G what is worst about both the capitalist workplace and the capitalist school is the lack of autonomy and creativity in workers' lives. "Liberated education," they call it, will prepare everyone for economic democracy. But as we now know in hindsight, an ostensibly more creative and independent workforce can be exploited just as much---or even more---than a rigidly controlled and hierarchized one, by making jobs more precarious, exploiting the critique of bureaucracy to destroy social rights and workplace regulations in favor of a cult of the unfettered capitalist job creator.

And as for "liberated education," though the idea still lives its zombie life on pedagogy Bluesky or whatever, come on.