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Showing posts from 2016

And the newest issue of Tolkien Studies is out!

My two contributor's copies arrived yesterday, and I'm just tickled pink. As my first major professional publication, I've been waiting for this quite a while -- I finished the article by August 2015, had it accepted by October 2015, and now (sixteen months later) it's finally hit the world. This is also the first actual copy of Tolkien Studies I've ever owned. Since my library offers free printing, I've just printed out all the essays that I've needed. In fact, I didn't even realize that TS came out as a book (rather than as a journal) until about a year ago. I haven't had time to do more than skim through things, but I'm pretty excited about a lot of the contributions. And I'm always delighted by the "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" section, which was perhaps the single most useful thing for my dissertation that I found.

MTSU makes the Chronicle of Higher Education

Indeed, the title says it all. The article (which is about relations between the town and the Muslim community) may be found here . When I first came to the university in 2011, someone told me about the mosque controversy, and I said, "What, that was here?!?!? " It made national headlines -- a group of locals were protesting the building of a mosque here, claiming that Islam didn't fall under the protection of the first amendment because it was an ideology rather than a religion. I remember hearing about it, but the name of the town never registered -- until I actually started living here. As an added bonus, the article even quotes from one of my professors.

Reading Mr. Fritz Leiber

One of the fruits of my expedition to Grump's Book Peddlers this past semester is that I managed to get all seven books of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series for the bargain basement price of 14 bucks. These were the original 1960s Ace paperbacks, by the way, which came with its own surprises -- the 6th book, for example, has a full page ad for Newport cigarettes, which is the most Mad Men thing I can imagine in a fantasy collection. Anyway, I was clued in to Leiber, not only because he's a pretty major figure who I knew little about, but because my work with Glen Cook this summer made me realize that I don't have a strong grasp of sword and sorcery as a genre -- and it's fair to say that, prior to Tolkien, S&S was the major single outlet for fantasy in the popular market. While I knew the basics of S&S, I hadn't consciously read much in it. What worried me slightly is that I read Jack Vance's A Dying Earth a few months ago and was appalled

A look at S. T. Joshi and "Junk Fiction"

I've been seeing the name "S. T. Joshi" everywhere lately, so after doing some scholar stalking, I was impressed by just how energetic and prolific he's been, not only in speculative fiction scholarship, but in a host of other matters as well. The productivity listed on his bio page is amazing. Then I got hooked on a book of his called Junk Fiction: America's Obsession with Bestsellers .*** Intrigued by that theme, I tried ordering it on Amazon, but it's over $60 bucks. I didn't feel like ordering yet another book off interlibrary loan, so I just looked at Googlebooks. Sure enough, parts of it are there. And I was quickly struck by a lingering oddness in his introduction. So, first thing. Joshi distinguishes between "good elitism" and "bad elitism" (8)**, by which he means that the former judges books based on their quality whereas the latter category dismisses entire swathes of literature due to genre affiliation. For my part, I lar

Golden Opportunity Nearly Missed (But Nonetheless Flubbed)

So, after enjoying Stefan Ekman's monograph on fantasy maps, I did a little entirely-normal-and-not-at-all creepy "scholar stalking," Well, I found his CV and saw to my surprise that his most recent publication was in Fafnir: A Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research . "Huh!" I thought. "That's weird -- I just published a review of Jamie Williamson's book there." Turns out that I'd been so busy with job applications and finishing my dissertation chapter that I never had the chance to look through the issue properly. Well, I did -- and discovered that, at the end of the journal's title page, was an advertisement for a new co-editor in chief position! Now, I'm already currently editor in chief for Scientia et Humanitas , MTSU's journal of peer reviewed student research, but I graduate this May and know I'll miss being a part of academic publishing. And working with Fafnir would not only have been good for

REVIEW: Stefan Ekman's Here Be Dragons

Just finished Stefan Ekman's Here Be Dragon : Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings . Without beating around the bush, this is a truly innovative book with an insightful approach, and it took a perspective I'm not instinctively attracted to -- i.e., a non-human-centric ecocritical approach -- and managed to produce some valid insights within popular fantasy literature.***  Indeed, unlike some other recent books on popular fantasy, Ekman's insights didn't make it sound as if he hated fantasy literature -- always a positive! All in all, quite a book book. (***As a teenager, I loved maps and songs in fantasy novels. Over the maps in particular I would study for hours -- the one I remember being most fascinated by was the map for David Eddings's Belgariad . Now, I tend to skip both the maps and the songs in fantasy songs. Older and wiser? Who's to say?) Anyway, here's an annotation interspersed with commentary. Enjoy! Ekman, Stefan. Here Be Dragons: Explori

3 1/2 Straussian readings of Tolkien!!!!

A while back I wrote that I've encountered three Leo Strauss-influenced articles on Tolkien . Well, looks like I've found another 1/2 of Strauss-influenced article. The "half" comes due to the fact that the author, Mary Keyes, isn't really a Straussian, at least not in any obvious way. She doesn't use any of the standard terminology (except the phrase "one's own") or ways of framing questions that appear frequently among Straussians, but there's a few half-clues. She was a fellow presenter at the Tolkien and Political Science conference from 2003, where the keynote speaker was clearly a Straussian. (He's one of the people I mention in the link above.) So, some chance that Keyes has at least encountered Strauss. She cites Allan Bloom's translation of The Republic and Harvey Mansfield's and Delba Winthrop's translation of Tocqueville; both Bloom and Mansfield are prominent Straussians. How is Keyes's article? Well,

Reading Lewis's Space Trilogy

 . . . and by "reading" Lewis's Space Trilogy, I mean I sure as heck tried to read his Space trilogy. I got through  1 1/2 of the books. You see, I'd made the conscious decision a few months back to work my way through the Inklings besides Tolkien. My Charles Williams project didn't go very well (except maybe for War in Heaven ), so I was hoping to redeem myself with my Lewis project. I've actually read the Narnia series twice. I remember enjoying it during my first stint in grad school, back in 2007 or thereabouts, although I don't recall quite picking up on all the religious elements. They darn well punched me in the face during my second go-around, though. I re-read the series last winter break, and Lewis's didacticism and brazen certainly just got to me. But I get it -- I'm not the target audience. Well, it was more of the same with his Space trilogy. OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET I did get through this one in its entirely, and it had some def

Acedemia.edu is full of Rainbows and Puppies

So, meant to post this a month ago, but it slipped my mind. After I published my essay on Saruman, Thrasymachus, and rhetoric , I also posted it to academic.edu . Then I forgot about it. Well, I opened the site back up in late October, and two messages were awaiting me. One guy -- someone from the London School of Economics, no less -- complimented me on my "beautiful writing," which warms my heart. I certainly try, y'know. Another was from a faculty member in classics and world religions who thought my essay's introduction would be a great way to introduce Gen. Ed. students to standard issues from philosophy and rhetoric. Pretty awesome.

Grumpy's Book Peddlers

Well, on this happy Gobble Day, I'm where I always am -- Starbucks, working on the dissertation. A few days ago, I helped my friend Sarah get a load of P.G. Wodehouse books she'd put on layaway at a used bookstore called Grumpy's. Apparently, she got quite a deal -- 40 Wodehouse (pronounced "wood-house," I was told quite vehemently ) books in hardcover, at 8 bucks apiece but 20% off.  So, mission happily accomplished. What made the encounter intriguing, however, was how thoroughly it proved to me that I lived in a red state. The guy had a "Trump" sticker on his front door (this is a business, mind you!) and a "Jesus is Lord" sticker as well. That actually reminded me of another business in town that has had "Obama did not build this" painted prominently on the side of its outside wall. Well, I walked into the bookshop to the sound of Christian talk radio, which is unsurprising enough, but then I saw that Mr. Grumpy himself was doing

Deconstruction running amok!

Came across this facebook post I did about a year ago, well before I began the blog here. It's about one of the deconstructive postcolonial articles*** in the special issue done by  Modern Fiction Studies back in 2004 or so. I was amused: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, bother. I'm reading a postcolonial/deconstructive critique of LOTR, and I came across this sentence: "Thus, any critical 'naming' of Tolkien's work that this analysis may arrive at, if such a naming is indeed possible, will be double-voiced, traced with echoes, shadows, and split subjects." Translation: "Read through the next 20 pages, and I double-dog dare you to find one single assertion in the whole piece. Seriously, just one proposition -- I'll give you a million dollars. If this entire article doesn't waste your life, then I've wasted my time in stringing together all these unrelat

REVIEW (Part II): Special Issue of Journal of Tolkien Research 3.3

This is the second part of my review of  JTR's  special issue on "Authorizing Tolkien" -- the first part can be found  here . Not to keep anyone in suspense, but let me say that I really liked what this issue is doing. The following are all high quality articles and, although I have a special place in my heart for the piece by Thumma-Walls, every following piece certainly deserves a perusal. Reid, Robin A., and Michael D. Elam. “Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Works.” Authorizing Tolkien. Spec. issue of Journal of Tolkien Research 3.3 (2016): 1-10. Web . The editors' introduction. The issue of “adapting” a work, especially when the themes of that adaptation differ from the original author’s, is a highly vexed question. The editors argue that “one needn’t be alarmed by adaptations” (2) because we should see the act of “borrowing as one that has analogies—even if not perfect—in a long view of literary histo

REVIEW (Part 1): Special Issue of Journal of Tolkien Research 3.3

Still reeling from the shock and horror of last Tuesday, but academic blogs, as they say, go on. Issue 3.3 of The Journal of Tolkien Research was a special issue dedicated to adaptations (primarily game and popular culture adaptations) of Tolkien's work. I gotta say, I really liked the general concept of the special issue. Although I myself have very little interest in ever writing an article on popular culture, it is still something that can tell us a lot about audiences and how those audiences look at and view Tolkien. It's a very new area of research and maybe might help define the identity of JTR, carving out a critical space that Tolkien Studies seems unlikely to delve into. Any critical comments I might have are very minor, and they relate to typos and some inconsistent citation.  ( JTR's style guide for citation seems both crazy and unhelpful.) But I would like to start this review on what may be one of the best -- if not the best -- article on Tolkien written thi

Tolkien and Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha

Recently read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855) , mostly for reasons of the (distant) Tolkien connection. Tolkien read it, and liked it, and apparently Longfellow earned some inspiration from the meter -- trochaic tetrameter -- of the Finnish  Kalavala . John Garth, after noticing the similarities between the death of Smaug and the death of Megissogwon, already did a nice piece on the connections ,** and I don't really hope to add anything major beyond a few observations. In the Letters, the only reference to Longfellow is indirect -- when Tolkien compared his philology to Lewis Carroll's fascination with math, he makes an interesting remark. With characteristic self-deprecation, he says that "this stuff of mine is really more comparable to Dodgson's amateur photography, and his song of Hiawatha's failure than to Alice " ( Letters 22). The poem Tolkien is referring to is Carroll's " Hiawatha's Photographing ," a c

Poor Lost Soul . . .

Currently reading Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman, Mieville and Stories of the Eye by Andrew Rayment. Smart book, but he's much too heavily enamored -- as might be expected of the title -- of poststructuralist theory. He loves needlessly arcane terminology, even inventing it where none already exists (hence his distinction between Pragmatikos and Allos ), and his style has all the weaknessess, obscurities, wordiness, and puns we've come to expect that that style of academic writing.*** And he's absolutely in love with Slavoj Zizek, whom Rayment is clearly imitating. As I'm reading this, I can't help thinking, "You poor fool -- you never had a chance." Zizek should be considered a poor of abuse for undergraduate and graduate students. ***Examples of the style: “Crucial to this notion of opening up is the way in which representation of both the ‘real’-world elements and the domain at one step removed in an in-existent space un-

REVIEW: J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and the Birth of Modern Fantasy by Deke Parsons

One probably ought not review a book for which you didn't read past page 45 (and even then only skimmed), but for things like this was the internet made. Still, sometimes the character of a particular book makes itself very clear, very quickly. Judging by the title, Deke Parsons's J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy (2015)   looks like a fascinating text. The problem starts once you begin reading. The introductory chapter -- a scant 2 pages -- is not an introduction. There's no hint of a thesis. Instead, Parsons gives us . . . well, I don't know. A 2-paragraph biographical statement on Tolkien, Howard, and the creator of Superman, Jerry Siegel, followed by a final "concluding" paragraph. Seven paragraphs total. Outside of all his writers living in the 1930s (and he doesn't even mention the Great Depression until the 7th paragraph), Parsons does not even present transitions or segways when switching from Tolkien, Howard, and Si

Sabermetics and English majoring

I was recently nominated for a departmental award, and part of the application process is a short (<500 word) essay. Given the inanity of the two essay topics, I thought the committee is basically using this as a writing sample. Anyway, since I actually had to put some thought into this, I decided to re-post my response here. It involves sabermetrics and baseball. Additional, since my hometown team, the Cleveland Indians, just made the World Series, I thought this extra appropriate. PROMPT: Or, what is the one thing outside of the academic world that you are currently learning ? Why? How do you think your experience as an English major has contributed and will contribute to that desire and pursuit ?   Academic life allows little time for hobbies, but perhaps my most important non-academic obsession is baseball. This obsession goes well beyond community league softball or keeping tabs on the playoffs (go Cleveland!). Instead, my passion for the game has led me into the fie

REVIEW: Jamie Williamson's The Evolution of Modern Fantasy

My review of Jamie Williamson's exemplary literary history of fantasy, recent winner of a Mythopoeic Society award, has just been posted on-line by the journal Fafnir: A Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research . Anyone interested can check it out here .

Bob . . . Dylan?

Well, apparently writing literature is no longer a requirement for receiving a Nobel Prize for Literature. Call me an old-fashioned curmudgeon if you will, but this news about Bob Dylan genuinely surprises. Sure, he's a pop culture / protest icon. Sure, give him a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys. Give him two! But the most prestigious prize for literature ?  I've had arguments about this before, but singing/songwriting just doesn't qualify as "literature" (however arbitrarily you define that term) -- it's not even on the same boat. Song lyrics, bereft of their music, just aren't as good line-for-line as lyric poetry . . .  and lyric poetry is itself an inferior art to epic poetry or prose forms of literature. (Yes, William Wordsworth, I'm telling you that you can just go to hell.) No one can really  say much of anything important in a few stanzas. And having lyrics bolstered by music makes writing them so much easier. You can get away with

First round of job apps -- DONE!!!

Well, there it is -- 22 applications done and submitted. As might be expected, I built up steam as I went along, especially once I got all the basic materials written. Also, I picked up the knack of tailoring the cover letters to the institution without re-writing the whole darn thing. But, all told, I've spent the last two weeks gathering my relevant documents, writing my materials, and filling out the often tedious applications. (Thank god for auto-fill.) I'm so mentally exhausted that I'm actually looking forward to picking up Mr. Dissertation again; actually, going two weeks without working on its makes me quite uneasy and uncomfortable. Now I just have to wait until I start hearing back (or not) from the institutions . . . and feel guilty about all the time-consuming work my poor letter writers have to go through. Alas and alack, round two of these job applications is just around the corner as well. I've heard that December/January is the big season. So I'l

So, um . .. thank goodness for national disasters?

So . . . yeah, my brother. I saw him briefly last December at my wedding but, prior to that, I haven't seen him in a few years. We get along great, though -- we're just awful at keeping in touch. So I got a surprise phone call this afternoon from Nick of all people. He asks me, "How big is your apartment?" After duly telling him that it's larger than a breadbox, I inquired for the specific reason of his query. "Well, yeah, you heard about about Hurricane Matthew?" "Yes, but that's in Florida!" "Yeah, but go google a weather map. Savannah [Georgia] is going to get hit hard too. My work just closed down, and we got the order to evacuate. So we're looking for somewhere to go." Hot diggity damn, I told him. To make a long story short, my brother, his fiance, and their two dogs are coming for a visit. See, national disasters are great!

An Itchy Red Pen Finger

Got the page proofs for my essay in Tolkien Studies a few days ago. It took me a bit to figure out how to mark up a pdf (apparently you use Adobe -- I feel like a grown-up!) but, as I got going, I got the lurking suspicion that I'm going to irritate someone at the publishers. Only minor revisions are advisable at the page proofs stage; really, you're supposed to look only for typos. I did find two legitimate typos, and I also cleaned up a few passages where the proofreader disapproved of my original syntax but had made the corrected version much clumsier. I also fixed a number of references -- my original manuscript used the Houghton Mifflin paperback edition of The Silmarillion (second edition), having not realized that the pagination differs from the hardcover edition. The TS editors (bless 'em!) made most of those corrections, but a few of the more obscure references had been missed. So I borrowed a hardcover edition from the library and fixed that. But that's only

And let the bloodbath begin!

And my "bloodbath" I mean the academic job market, of course. Just went through the MLA Job Information List , creating a spreadsheet for all "possibilities." I have 15 on there, although realistically only about 3-5 of those really seem like a possibility. (I.e., my academic interests are tangential, or the job is located in India , which I suspect the wife might not be too keen on.) All in all -- not too good, but I knew that going in. I do have the consolation of thinking my c.v. is pretty good for an all-but-dissertation doctoral student. Still, we'll see how things go.

Paul Edwin Zimmer

As a kid, few fantasy book made as much of an impact on me as Paul Edwin Zimmer's two 1983 Dark Border books, The Dark Border  and King Chondos's Ride . It was the first series of book that I "got" for the themes it was invoking, rather than just its plot. I started thinking about Zimmer recently when a trip to the bookstore uncovered  A Gathering of Heroes,  a clear sword and sorcery novel that I'd  heard  of but could never find. All Zimmer's works are decades out of print, sadly enough. He seems like one of those writers whose good novels have gotten lost in the bulk of fantasy bestsellers in the 1980s, the fate of many mainstream "literary" novelists At the very least, I've never seen Zimmer discussed in any literary or academic context. There's no academic work on him (although he himself once wrote an article on Tolkien's verse for Mythlore ). He has quite a decent wikipedia page, though, apparently both for his contributions to

Readers beware of Cambridge!

Not feeling like working on the diss, so I just did a few library searches for recent books on fantasy literature. Came across two books from "Cambridge Scholars Publishers." Name rang a bell, so I did a quick google search. No sooner did I type "is Cambridge Schol--" than google auto-filled the query to "is Cambridge Scholars publishers a good publisher".  Guess that answers my question.

Tolkien and Sidney on Rhetoric?

Given that I just published an entire essay on Tolkien and rhetoric in JTR, I was a bit surprised to recently discover an article on just that topic. (Almost) The piece is "Is Tolkien a Renaissance Man?" by Tanya Caroline Wood, an essay in Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by Clark and Timmons. Although admitting that there's no evidence that Tolkien ever read Sidney's Defense of Poesy, she does a hardcore rhetorical comparison between Sidney's essay and Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories."  Basically, both pieces mix the genres of  encomium (which praises and elevates its subject) with the defense (vindicates an accused subject). The rest of the essay simply pinpoints mutual uses of classical rhetorical devices such as refutatio . There's no real "so what?" answer, and the piece never rises above bare comparison, but I was simply intrigued that there have been attempts to link Tolkien to classical (or, in this case, Renaissance) r

Fiddlesticks and Confound It

So, alas, the panel at the international Kalamazoo conference was full, so my abstract got kicked back for consideration to the General Session. All of which is cool. But then I got an e-mail from the panel organizer asking if I'd be willing to moderate. I said I'd happily moderate the session, but I couldn't give a definitive "yes" until I'd heard back from the General Sessions selection people. He replied, "Oh fiddlesticks, of course I should have thought of that." That tickled me pink. In other news, the wife and I arrived home yesterday from visiting family in PA. Visiting family is always nice, but I always get twitchy when I go a full day -- much less a week -- without doing substantive academic work. But I'm back in the grind at Starbucks this morning!

N.K. Jemisin

So, given that N.K. Jemisin is the hot new thing in recent years, I decided to give her another chance. I read the first book of her Inheritance trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and wasn't greatly impressed. It started off new and terrifying, a young woman meeting a god -- and who can trust a god when that god explains about the beginnings of time and reality? But then the novel turned into a straight political narrative involving humans and gods. The gods, who initially seemed terrifying, ended up having motivations and grudges and clear comprehensible motives just like everyone else, and I never bothered to finish the trilogy. However, I can't say the same about The Fifth Season, the first book in Jemisin's The Broken Earth series. This is book f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c. The quality leaps right off the page from the very beginning, which is refreshing since the last few series I've tried and quit had quite pedestrian prose -- workmanlike, usually clear, but somewhat

It Must Be Abstract!

The title of this post, of course, is a reference to Wallace Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." (Ha, look at me saying "of course" there.) Yesterday I wrote not one -- not two -- but three abstracts for three different potential pieces. Two will go to conferences, one will go to a special issue being put out by a journal. I'm half-crossing my fingers that not all of them get accepted. The conferences will be expensive, and I'll probably only get funding for one; as for the journal article, well, I'd have to write the article from scratch, and I am working on a dissertation, after all. For the moment, though, the opportunities do seem too good to pass up. The conferences, btw, are the big medievalism conference up in Kalamazoo (which has three Tolkien-specific panels), and the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, which just looks ultra fun.

Odd Coincidences: Aliette de Bodard

So, the discussion forum for the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (a mouthful, ain't it?) recently had a discussion of Vietnamese literature and Vietnamese writers. Someone mentioned the French-Vietnamese writer Aliette de Bodard. What makes this so odd is that I'm reading her at this very moment. I had seen that she'd done a fantasy trilogy influenced by the Aztec empire and, since the Aztecs are a special interest of mine and don't get a lot of play in Western literature, I decided to check her out. Halfway through the book, my judgment is halfway between "surprisingly competent" and "relentlessly mediocre." On one hand, when you hear "fantasy trilogy based on the Aztecs," things can so horrendously wrong, but de Bodard has clearly done her research. The weirdest thing is that she's writing detective fiction -- not epic fantasy -- in the Aztec world (i.e., the actual Aztecs, not just an invented secondary world

Memorial Service for Prof. David Lavery

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His memorial service -- a "Celebration of Life" -- was held yesterday morning, as well as a reception afterward. There must have been a few hundred people there -- friends, family, colleagues, students, and so forth. His absence has truly left a big hole. I only attended the Celebration, as the reception was too far away for the wife and I to walk, but it was very well done. Four colleges, four former and current students, and two family members all spoke. The basic theme not only perfectly described Dr. Lavery, it was something he would have loved to hear about himself: "Relentlessly generous with his time, a great scholar, a great human being." Rhonda Wilcox, the co-founder of Whedon Studies alongside Dr. Lavery, had a story which I thought quintessential Lavery. Some years ago, Lavery had been invited to give the keynote address for the very first Joss Whedon conference, which was being held in England. He could have gone, of course, but he said, "Do you

Dr. David Lavery, co-founder of Whedon Studies

Some very sad news to report. My dissertation director, Dr. David Lavery, passed away yesterday morning. The whole English department is in shock. I saw him last just last Thursday, and he seemed in good humor, high energy, and the best of health. He had dozens of projects in the works -- including maybe organizing an academic sub-conference forthe upcoming "Con of Thrones" being held in Nashville next year. The reality of his passing has yet to set in. He was a great colleague and friend, and, while I always knew he had something of a cult following among the graduate students, even I have been surprised by how devastated so many people have been. For my part, I always intensely admired him. He genuinely enjoyed the life of the mind, and he loved popular culture, and he was relentless in helping not only his graduate students but all graduate students succeed. I remember, about a year before I ever took a class with him, watching him and Dr. Hixon give a publications works

Workers Rights and Academia

Back during my first orientation at my current university, the Dean of the College of Graduate Studies gave us a "pep talk." He gave us the standard "4-year plan" information, but he also said something else interesting -- enraging, actually. "Graduate school is a pretty good deal," he said, "which is why you get the salary you do. If it was any higher, you'd never want to graduate." He said it jokingly, but he was serious, too. He also called our graduate stipend "beer and pizza" money, not something we are meant to live on. (Given that I do 60 hours per week, I assume he wanted us to take out unpayable student loans.) When another friend of mine questioned him on our lack of health care coverage, he brought out that "not supposed to live on your stipend" line. I started thinking about that moment again after two recent incidents. First, a friend of mine recently had someone hit&run on her rental car. She had a re