Daniel Jenkin-Smith

I had a nightmare in which I attended a lecture delivered by Donald Trump on the virtues of AI.

Diagnosis: too much lurking on Bluesky.

Issue #6 of Bureaucritics is out now!

Catch up with the latest in art, fiction, and scholarship about bureaucracy.

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#newsletter #bureaucracy #administration #officeliterature #bureaucraticfiction #parliaments

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Welcome to Season 7! Let's kick off a year of fan favourites and camp classics with our trashiest novel yet: Gaston Leroux's 1910 'Phantom of the Opera'.

Abby has the time of her life, Daniel is checked out, and our new imaginary producer, Diane, keeps us on task.
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TOMORROW: If you thought 2026 already couldn't get any worse, our new series starts with Gaston Leroux's thoroughly stupid 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1910) - a rare example of a novel that's *more* incoherent and histrionic than its musical adaptation.

Downloaded it!

Sounds like the sort of thing I *should* have read!

Book cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a Black woman and Black child tending a garden next to the presumably titular cabin.

Book cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a blonde girl in a white dress reading a book to a Black man in rags, while they both sit in a shack with a hammock, while a white woman looks on approvingly. Also, there is a dog.

Book cover for Uncle Tom's Cabin showing an illustration of a bunch of white men standing around looking at a Black man in rags. One of the white men holds a whip.

Super old-fashioned book cover for Uncle Tom's Cabin, showing a woman of ambiugous race talking to a Black man, while she points at something in the distance. They are standing in front of the presumably titular cabin, and also there is a whip and a pair of shackles hanging from the title letters of the book.

In our final banned book episode, we celebrate (?) Christmas with the inappropriately summery (but sufficiently maudlin) 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852).

Turns out, everything we knew about this book we learned from 'The King and I' and was therefore wildly incorrect!

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We come out all guns blazing for our Christmas episode, and the final instalment of our banned books series, with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Civil War-causing/-winning 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852) - what's more, it's crammed with sizzling Quakers...

Out on Wednesday!

Book cover of Lord of the Flies showing an illustrated up-close picture of Piggy's face (or just his eyes, nose, and forehead), specifically showing his cracked glasses. It's all in red and black and looks ominous as hell.

Cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a terrified child's face with war paint on, seemingly peeping out of a spiky conch shell. It's illustrated and creepy.

Illustrated cover of Lord of the Flies showing a conch shell pouring blood. Chill!

Illustrated cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a backlit jungle setting against a setting sun, with a bunch of creepy looking silhouettes of boys, one of whom is holding a spear, standing next to a shack. A couple of boys in the hazy background appear to be doing war dances holding spears, and they're the creepiest of all!

Happy (early) Thanksgiving, Shelfers! Don't pull a spear on or chuck a boulder at a relative. Not unless they *really* deserve it.

More importantly, Happy International Men's Day: no girls allowed in our episode on William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' (1954).

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'Rank-and-file Francophile' - can somebody do something with that, s'il vous plait?

It's human nature to be a snotty private schoolboy - or so William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' (1954) tells us - and we got into the spirit of this message with plenty of quibbling over pronunciation.

Episode out on Wednesday!

'One fly to rule them all, one fly to find them' etc.

It must be a two-piece.

And a real tyrant.

Mortal Questions, by HR Smoke/Andrew Smith 14 track album

'Deliver me from calamity; from muddy boots and whirlpools; deliver me lunch.'

Another album from my dear old dad - a retelling/reimagining/detournement of 'Dark Side of the Moon'. Feat. yours truly on heavily distorted concertina in the final track: hrsmokeandrewsmith.bandcamp.com/album/mortal...

Looking to compile the definitive collection of portrayals of tyrants in bikinis. So far I've just got Caligula in 'I, Claudius' (1976) and Louis XIII in 'The Devils' (1971).

Please get in touch if you have any others. Thanks.

Book cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a bunch of (presumably) masked naked stick-figure lads dancing around with spears, on a red background that's dotted with flames, and also there is a big snake there.

Book cover for Lord of the Flies showing a chaotic drawing of a jungle with loads of tiny lads looking lost in between the plants.

Book cover of Lord of the Flies, showing a boy's face peering out from a bush, or perhaps wearing a sort of headdress mask thing made of leaves. I don't precisely know what I'm looking at. There are also a bunch of flies on a tree trunk or something in the foreground by his jaw.

Book cover for Lord of the Flies showing a Rubenesque young lad in a schoolboy's uniform, with a fuck-off great big fly behind and over him, looking like it's almost going to pick him up. There are a pair of shattered glasses separate from this image, below the book's title.

Some of you guessed our clue correctly:

For International Men's Day (19 November), we will be release the most laddish book we've ever read on the show: William Golding's 1954 anti-colonialist schoolboy castaway narrative, 'Lord of the Flies'.

No girls allowed, and 'Sucks to your Auntie!'

I had a great time at the 'Files, Forms, Fictions' symposium in Bonn last week. Excellent blend of bureaucracy chat, Adenauer anecdotes, and Bönnsch beer.

Thanks again to @alexandrairim.bsky.social and her colleagues for an excellent conference!

Back in Office We’re back!

Bureaucritics #5 is now online!

It brings along a busy stretch of new publications, from the just-printed to the just-planned, plus fresh calls for papers and events.

Thanks again for having me on!

Book cover for Catcher in the Rye showing a young man in a red hunting hat walking between two cliffs, which have rye fields on top, but are also New York skyscrapers.

Book cover for Catcher in the Rye showing a young man in a red hunting hat smoking a cigarette and the puffs of smoke turn into ducks flying away

Book cover for Catcher in the Rye showing a red hunting hat with no one inside it.

Book cover for Catcher in the Rye showing a psychotic looking red carousel horse hovering over a New York cityscape. You know this cover. This is the famous one. It's everywhere.

Hey, ya phonies! Enjoying back-to-school? Well, our (anti)hero sure isn't! Join us for JD Salinger's 1951 ode to teen angst, 'Catcher in the Rye'.

Let's all have Buckfast at Tiffany's, put on weird hats, and argue about who has it worse in winter: ducks or fish.

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a man in a suit and tie stands in front of a sign that says the work is mysterious ALT: a man in a suit and tie stands in front of a sign that says the work is mysterious

Episode 15 drops this afternoon, 1pm BST. It should be fun. An episode about bureaucratic utopias/dystopias featuring an interview with Daniel Jenkin Smith, author of The Rise of Office Literature and co-host of @smfmspodcast.bsky.social.

Looking forward to this - love the swish poster!

A week today we'll be putting out our next episode and you can listen to me chatting about bureaucratic dystopias (and utopias) with @dcjenkin-smith.bsky.social of @smfmspodcast.bsky.social 'fame'!... I use fame in scare quotes because I know he'd want me to!

If Dorothy didn't squash the Wicked Witch of the East, the legalistic Munchkins, still loyal to the Witch, would've subjected her and Toto to a Kafkaesque cycle of trials and appeals - all sung-through: 'The Bishop is in hock to the Lollipop Guild, but they're a front for the Lullaby League (etc.)'

"Jenkin-Smith brings to his readers’ attention authors and periodicals that literary histories have meanwhile discarded or longtime ignored."

Alexandra Irimia on Daniel Jenkin-Smith's The Rise of Office Literature, from @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alexandra_ir...

Hello! Thanks a lot. Your help was instrumental in my application for a funded PhD, so the book probably wouldn't have come out without you!

Thanks for this lovely review of the book!

Recorded, and released, during a heatwave, we discover in this episode that high temperatures can yield provocative new visions about literature and culture.

Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' (1953) - out tomorrow!

Just finished recording an interview with the super smart @dcjenkin-smith.bsky.social of @smfmspodcast.bsky.social fame on the relationship between bureaucracy and utopia/dystopia! Lots of great insight and a really fun chat. Looking forward to the episode making its appearance.

Cover for Fahrenheit 451, showing a very shiny full-face fireman's helmet, reflecting the image of a burning book

Loads of people guessed correctly! Our next very banned (and, ironically, often burned) book is Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopia about the perils of anti-intellectualism, 'Fahrenheit 451'.

Tune in on 13 August for a lot of histrionics about technology!