Stratofanatic's Emporium

This hasn't quite been a Keatsian annus mirabilis, but the last 12 months have nonetheless been extremely good for me. (I mean, outside of getting married, of course!.) Last July, I came back from London after the fantastic Tolkien Seminar in Leeds, and I almost immediately began writing out the paper I had presented at the seminar -- and my presentation, for the mildly curious, is  available on youtube , along with the presentations of numerous others. I ended up scrapping the Strauss part because, quite frankly, it was a half-rate idea. Instead, I concentrate on fleshing out my argument for the essential "unity" of the whole 1977 Silmarillion . (The textual history of the book doesn't bear that thesis out, but, thematically, I think I have a very compelling case.) So, classic case of a conference presentation directly leading to a later peer-reviewed article. So, anyway, my productivity: Essay on the issue of narration in The Silmarillion (forthcoming in To...

Reading L. Sprague de Camp's Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers. Trying to explain Edgar Rice Burroughs, dede Camp writes that he "offered a cynical formula for success as a popular writer" (22): Be a disappointed man. Achieve no success at anything you touch. Lead an unbearably drab and uninteresting life. Hate civilization. Learn no grammar. Read little. Write nothing. Have an ordinary mind and commonplace tastes approximating those of the great reading public. Avoid subjects that you know anything about. This would have been a fantastic list . . . if Burroughs had ever actually said any of that. Thanks to the glories of the internet, I managed to track down the original source as an article for the Saturday Evening Post by a journalist named Alva Johnston, which can be found here . The list pretty clearly belongs to Johnston. Ah well. I hadn't had much hopes of de Camp's book as being all that accurate, anyway.

So, just reading Lin Carter's book Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy , apparently the first work ever written on fantasy as a genre in its own right. (Todorov's book came out that same year in 1973, though.) I got interested in Carter recently because of his role in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which basically did everything to create fantasy as a publishing genre -- and Carter pretty much codified all the canonical "pre-genre" fantasy works. And given how much the old-school academics hated Tolkien, I'm shocked to realize that Lin Carter basically has the same opinions. Just check this out: “ The Lord of the Rings  breaks down into certain favorite scenes and belovec characters, rather than lingering in the memory as a coherent work every part of which is equal to the whole” (117). Okay, fine. You remember certain scenes and characters better than the book itself. I'm cool with that. Except. . . .   "Part of the trouble with Tolkie...

Apparently I inadvertently bullied a small child yesterday. The Rec has been filled with hoards of screaming children lately, and their trainers (keepers? Human-shaped collie dogs?) like to line them up against the wall outside the weight room. Seems like some water from my water bottle flew out and splashed one of the munchkins. How do I know this? As I was leaving the weight room today, I heard this small voice pipe up: "Sir, you splashed me with water yesterday." I stopped. I took one look at the kid, saw his wide quivering eyes, and very nearly turned myself in to the principal's office. So I apologized and offered to let him splash me with some water (as I had my water bottle right there). But he said, "That's all right, sir!" Thanks, kid. Conscience eased.

So I just encountered  this  website, which purports to list the word counts of several major fantasy books. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the site, since the blogger seems to assume that a typical page equals 400 words, and there's no telling if they are using the hardcover or paperback versions of these fantasy novels, which makes a huge difference.  Still, the list is interesting. Ole' Tollers comes in at a modest 500,000 words, making The Lord of the Rings the short story of the bunch. The first two Covenant trilogies by Stephen R. Donaldson also come it around this figure. George R. R. Martin's The Song of Ice and Fire is a "mere" 1,740,000 words -- and I say "mere" because several series have word counts that extend to the millions. Janny Wurt's  The Wars of Light and Shadow  isjust a tick over 2 million words, and Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond + Niccolò just a tick under. (Never heard of either writer, btw). All ten of Donaldson...

So, wow. The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published my article, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ." What astounds me is that I finished the piece only two weeks ago and already got back the peer reviews. Of course, no real reason WHY the review process has to take months, but it just usually does. Kudos to the anonymous reviewers, great praise upon them, for working so quickly. I might even more appreciative of their promptness than of their kind remarks; I barely had to do any revisions to the article. The process went so fast, in fact, that the publication barely feels real. One of the great advantages of an online open-access journal, too, is instantaneous publication. As I'm learning with the several other articles I have in circulation, the publication process generally takes even longer than the review process. Anyway, this has been a good week. I finished my review of Harry Potter essays, and the edito...

MSN has a very good  piece  outlining exactly what happened with Ms. Trump's plagiarism of Michelle Obama's convention speech from 2008. This fiasco has completely overwhelmed the dominant narrative surrounding the Republican Convention, which is a bit of a shame. While Ms. Trump committed a clear case of plagiarism, this is not a "fail the course" kind of plagiarism. I would, in fact, have overlooked it in one of my students-- had I even noticed it. Instead, I would have simply had a talk with that student. According to the article, Melania decided to substantially revise the speech given her by the professional speechwriters, which I think is laudable. (And remember, even though she's been in the country a long time, English is not her primary language. I'm still impressed that my wife's English is so much better than many native speakers'.) And, furthermore, it's perfectly okay for someone to browse similar speeches from the past to find a mod...

The title says it all! Every once in a while, you accidentally find yourself in the academic equivalent of that old celebrity game, "Dead or Alive?" Just scrolling through my newsfeed this morning, someone had reposted a piece in the   Los Angeles Review of Books   by a certain Catherine R. Stimpson. The article is entitled " The Nomadic Humanities ." As dedicated Tolkienists realize, way back in 1969 Stimpson helped form the vanguard of anti-Tolkien polemics by mainstream academics, granting her (in the process) the dubious distinction of having written a very bad, bad, terrible book on Tolkien.** Approaching ole' Tollers from a Marxist and feminist perspective, she finds him lacking in pretty much every respect. Reading Tolkien, she tells us, is "not like reading   real   books, like   Alice in Wonderland   and   Finnegans Wake " (43, her emphasis). He is an "incorrigible nationalist" (8) with a "lucid and conventional theory ...

Here's a recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Eduction, " Why Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers ," made available temporarily (i.e., don't need to pay to access). The subject of bad academic writing is a near and dear one to my heart, so this particularly caught my interest. Noah Berlatsky's basic point is that, no, academics don't write badly out of willful obscurantism and disdain for the masses -- they're simply bad writers, having never been taught otherwise. While Berlatsky's right in the sense that most academics just can't -- rather than won't -- write clearly (plus they also generally lack the incentive, although the publishing industry is gradually changing that), I think he otherwise misses the point. Many academics do write badly on purpose, and they often try to justify this by an argument along the following lines: "If I use jargon and esoteric terminology, that is only because my subject matter is difficult, and e...

So, about a year ago, TBR (the Tennessee Board of Regents) mandated that all schools -- including my dearly beloved university -- must give a 2% across-the-board pay increase. This, of course, is a much needed gesture, since my school chronically under-salaries its employees, at least in relation to comparable institutions. This alleged "across-the-board" pay increase, however, did not apply apply to contingent faculty, a group which includes grad students (me), adjuncts (who haven't had a pay increase since 1999), and I believe full-time temps.** So, "across-the-board" did not apply to the most heavily exploited group at the modern university -- people who are barely making minimum wage. I bring this up because, apparently, our dearly beloved university has just finished a study comparing our faculty salaries with comparable institutions. The study discovered what we already knew: we are way behind. The e-mail announcing this news, sadly enough, also stated t...

So, Slate.com just posted an article on  The Lord of the Rings , which I learned about via  David Bratman's  response on The Tolkien Society website. The article's not that great, and what made me roll my eyes is precisely what Bratman liked about it: it's whole-hearted admiration and approval of Tolkien. Personally, I've never liked excessively hagiographic articles on people's favorite writers -- even if you like the writer under discussion yourself, it's always a bit like someone coming on too strongly on a first date. Rally, incisive and critical pieces where I actually learn something just interest me more. This may be one of the (many) reasons I never got involved in fandom of any sort -- the constant vague encomiums annoy me. Kakaes's constant references to Tolkien's "magic" and "original grandeur" particularly gets on my nerves. These terms don't mean anything. They're just superlatives meant to indicate the writer of ...

One of the weak areas of my dissertation, I know, has been studying Strauss and Tolkien almost exclusively during my "research phrase." Of course, even here I have only scratched the surface of the available secondary literature on either figure, but I am ambitious enough that I want -- even need -- to situate my work within wider fields. So I have been, surreptitiously, catching on up on fantasy criticism in general on the side. I've gone through most of the major works, and Farah Mendlesohn's  Rhetorics of Fantasy thoroughly impressed me. And while I've heard of Brian Attebery before and may have even included him in my senior thesis on Stephen R. Donaldson way back when, I couldn't remember anything about his theories. So when I saw that he'd won the most recent Mythopoeic Award this year, I immediately ordered his book off interlibrary. I also wanted to see what beat out Michael T. Saler's As If: A Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Having j...

Apparently, the International Quidditch Society created “Title 9 3/4,” based off Title IX, which aims to promote gender equality in the sport by mandating there's a 4-gender-max on the team's playing field. That's awesome on a number of levels. In related news, though, currently reading this academic article about Quidditch that, though extremely intelligent and well-written, is making me shake my head at the entire “everything is a social construction” crowd. “[M]en did claim [on various quidditch blogs] that females made the game slower, less physical, and often less competitive. Thus, to truly see equality and acceptance, both by the individual and the culture, the language of gender and sex must be challenged.” So, the basic idea seems to be that, if ONLY the dominant discourses on gender and sex can be changed, we can forego hegemonic masculinity and come to a true equality. The difference between the average male and average female athlete has nothing to do with...

Olsen, Corey. Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Print . Granted that my expectations were low, but Corey Olsen’s book was much better than I expected. Internally, I tend to divide books on Tolkien into two categories: "real books" (with new information for scholars, academics, and high-level fans) and "fan books" (which are basically just a super-fan talking about something they love). I'm morally okay with the latter, because it's cool when people just do their own thing, but readers do need to keep the limitations of such books firmly in mind. Olsen’s book clearly falls into this latter category of "fan books". It has no secondary research and offers nothing but various observations on various plot points. Nonetheless, it has a clear and delightful style, and he goes from point to point rather well. (It’s telling, btw, that I have to consider "clear logical progression of ideas" noteworthy a commer...

So, way back when as I first started researching Tolkien, I thought, "Gee! I'll be the first guy ever to marry Tolkien and Leo Strauss together!" For those of you not in the know (or not interested in the history of political philosophy, rather), Strauss is a semi-well-known German-born political philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1940s. His main theme is the revival of classical political rationalism. All in all, though, he's an extremely cool writer to pair with someone like Tolkien. Anyway, long story short, it turns out I'm not as cutting edge as I thought. I've now uncovered three separate Strauss-influenced essays on Tolkien. Brogan, Joseph V. “Tolkien On Res Publica .” Conference Papers— American Political Science Association (2003): 1-42. Academic Search Premier . Web. 19 Jan. 2015. Smith, Thomas W. “Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination: Mediation and Tradition.” Religion & Literature 38.2 (2006): 73-100. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2014 .  ...

Oooooo, just got my first introduction to academic predatory publishing! Apparently, something called Journal of Literature and Art Studies wrote begging for the conference paper I presented at South Central MLA. The rank desperation raised my suspicions (as well as my curiosity), so I googled them -- and someone who clearly didn't know English very well had done their website. I mean, I know that subject/verb agreement is a tricky thing, but . . . anyway, at that point, I figured it maybe wasn't something I wanted on my C.V.  Doh