Reviews and Comments

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.

Taught this in a class on "ghosts in the machine" in Science Fiction, in order to supply some "real-world" ghosts and displace the hype-based idea of "AI" students are carrying around at present. Found this because one of the Internet's Great Sages, Cosma Shalizi, recommends Mitchell's writing on the subject. No surprise, I liked it; also (in hindsight) no surprise, Mitchell was Douglas R. Hofstadter's graduate student. She has a "fluid analogies" kind of perspective on intelligence, and writes well, in the popular-science mode, about developments in the field from the earliest days. Her examples of the failure modes of the various breakthrough neural nets are entertainingly compelling—and made a real impression on some of my initially AI-happy students. However, in the way of such things, some of her failure modes have since turned into (apparent) LLM successes, like Winograd schemas. She also maintains a level of calm in writing about "the Singularity" (while shredding the arguments about it) that I truly admire. Recommended for your students and/or your aggressive relations who want to tell you over the holiday table that the humanities are obsolete now.

(Trans. Kathryn G. Hansen.) Got this collection because I'd read that Renu's story "Smells of a Primeval Night" was a source for Amitav Ghosh's wonderful novel The Calcutta Chromosome, according to Ghosh himself. Actually this is the first Hindi fiction I've ever read, except for a couple of stories in Amit Chaudhuri's Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. "Smells" is a pretty incidental source for Ghosh's novel, as compared to Tagore's "Hungry Stones" which functions as something like a hypotext. But I enjoyed all these stories of post-Independence village life in Bihar, seen from the perspective of itinerant men on the margins (cart-divers, servants, musicians, debtors, etc.). There's a good amount of variety, tonally and narratively. I gather from the translator's introduction that Renu introduces quite a bit of regional "dialect" into the Hindi, but she doesn't try to reproduce that in English. She does remark that, in this Indian edition addressed to non-Hindi-speaking readers in India, she has left more kinship terms untranslated (but kept the glossary, which I certainly needed).

I think I'm old enough to be able to admit that I hadn't read this before now, though I should have when I was working on late James and aestheticism.

What is there to say? I continue to like late James better, but it's an amazing novel in its un-Jamesian-ness. In the microgenre of James-representing-lower-class-subjectivity, "In the Cage" is more appealing, kinder to its protagonist--perhaps simply because she's female. But also I don't think this novel's aestheticism sublates its snobbery in the way that later James does more reliably. More simply, Hyacinth is the wrong kind of implausible, and the melodrama, though suitable in a way, is not what I go to James for.

This Penguin Classics edition has truly wonderful notes by Patricia Crick. Very terse and helpful explanations are suddenly interrupted by a personal reminiscence of her going to a show in her childhood like one that Hyacinth and Millicent go to.