Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, the Mythopoeic Society has a brand new member -- me. Yes, I know, I know, how could I have waited so long after being almost halfway done with a dissertation? Well, much like my membership in the Tolkien Society, which I joined so I could participate in the wonderful 2015 Tolkien Seminar in Leeds, England, I needed a boost -- I might talk about that later. Anyway, they sent me an issue of Orcrist #4 (dated 1970) as complimentary to new members. Leafing through it, and I noted a number of interesting things: Lloyd Alexander, author of The Prydain Chronicles, wrote a letter to the editor, Richard W. West. He praises LOTR as "one of the greatest masterpieces of literature." That shouldn't have surprised me, except it kinda does. I don't think it mentioned that on his wikipedia page when I was looking him up. The letter is especially intriguing because I'd read The Prydain Chronicles a few months ago. So . . . huh. A Tolkien connection! Another letter to...

Well, a contributor to Scientia et Humanitas just asked if he could take me out to lunch as a "thank you" for my help in publishing his essay. I was pleasantly surprised and told him I'd be delighted to accept. He probably had to work harder than any of our contributors to make it into the journal. His paper was in economics, which none of us understood of course, but we got independent confirmation that his argument was sound. More significantly, though, his prose was littered with EFL mistakes. (He's originally from Bangladesh.) We made him go to the Writing Center 4-5 times, gave it to a heroic copy editor, and even then I had to meet with him several times to fix passages and hammer out the References page. All in all, I must have spent 10-15 extra hours working with the contributer to get the paper publishable. The ends, though, justified the meanings. I've never seen anyone so proud to get their academic work published, and he even got a Deans' Distingui...

Our latest issue of Scientia just came from the printer's. Mostly, it looks pretty good. A noticed a few things, though, which was aggravating. The cover page, which I never had a chance to proofread personally, used a semi-colon instead of a colon. Don't even know how that got in there, since I assumed the formatter just copy-and-pasted. Then I saw another typo in Nick's essay that I should have caught, but it's pretty obscure so I hope no one really notices. But then I noticed that the headings for our biology paper were screwed up as hell. I know I did those correctly, and they're right in our latest .pdf version. That means that the headings got screwed up by the printer in some way. How the hell does that even happen? I forgot to double-check the formatting for our economics paper, but I got my fingers crossed that the printer didn't screw up any of the special formatting. Nonetheless, it feels good to see the issue in print. I look forward to working...

So, okay, a few weeks ago I reviewed two of CW's novels . Now, I gave All Hallow's Eve a  chance, and -- well, okay, let's be blunt. Over and above any eye-roll-inducing supernatural themes Williams may endorse, I've come to the conclusion that he's just an awful stylist. I was still on the fence with his first two novels. Although I didn't really enjoy either, I gave him credit for a talent for characterization, and I got through the relatively plotless Descent into Hell by skimming the long prose passages. But my patience finally hit a wall with All Hallow's Eve. I couldn't force myself to read more than half of it and, after two and a half novels, I feel confident in grading Williams's style from mediocre to bad. The Good He does have some lovely diction and phrasing Strong mixture of sentence structures I do like his deftness in interweaving literary and biblical references None of that, however, overcomes . . .  The Bad (and the u...

A review of Arda Reconstructed by Douglas Charles Kane. I did this a few years ago, only just thought to put it up here. Apparently some of Kane's criticisms of Christopher Tolkien caused a stir, which I can see -- although not wrong per se, they're more than a little unfair. Ultimately, my main criticism will be Kane's reflexive acceptance of the integrity of authorial "intention." Otherwise, though, I thought this a quite useful book. I've consulted it upon a number of occasions. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published "Silmarillion"(review)             One of the more perplexing questions about J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumously published The Silmarillion concerns how, and to what extent, Christopher Tolkien changed or advanced the work of his father during the editing process. Typically, there are two main camps of thought: either Christopher merely assembled Tolkien’s relatively finished notes into a publishable form or he wrote t...

While I've been hard at work on my Saruman chapter, I've also been reading The Instrumentalities of the Night by Glen Cook. Cook is, probably, my most favoritest hack writer, and I'd actually forgotten just how good he can be. I'm currently reading the fourth and final volume of the series. Interesting story about that. Two years ago, book IV earned the great distinction of being the only book I've ever "pre-ordered" -- and that includes the full hardcover price. Seriously, years went by with me on pins and needles as I waited for him to finish. Then . . . . . . .then the book arrives, I get about 60 pages in, and . . . blah. I just put it down. It wasn't bad, but that was exactly the time when I'd begun studying for my Preliminary Exams. I was so excited to start that nothing off-list could entice me. So the book went to the shelf, and I let Cook simmer on the back-burner.*** Then, a few weeks ago, I found an out-of-the-way peer-reviewed fanta...

So, while I've heard about Charles Williams in relation to Tolkien, I'd never actually read anything by him. In fact, only last summer did -- as I read Carpenter's The Inklings --  did I begin to know anything about Charles Williams at all. Being famed for the "third Inkling" is a bit like being famed for being the third wheel. Anyway, while Carpenter had a fairly positive portrayal, he couldn't well ignore Williams's intense interest in supernaturalism and the occult. That put me off instantly. I'm already at a disadvantage in Inklings studies insofar as I can't take their religious views as seriously as they did, but the marginalization of hocus pocus and superstition is one of the happiest byproducts of the Enlightenment, so Williams's major theme had absolutely no personal interest for me. But duty calls, so I finally read two of his novels: War in Heaven  and Descent into Hell . All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. Williams has a qu...