Stratofanatic's Emporium

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...

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...

Okay, so I'm already hooked on Game of Thrones . I knew I would be -- the books are great. (Actually, funny story: I loathed the first two books, perhaps mostly because the first scene of the first book seemed to encapsulate a hoard of fantasy cliches, but I gave the series another chance when I read a plot summary of the third book -- and the Red Wedding. That was the only time a plot summary could legitimately be called jaw-dropping.) Anyway, the missus and I are five episodes in, and we've run across a little problem. GoT, as even fans must admit, is a little gory, . . . and Martina just truly dislikes that sort of thing. It doesn't bother me at all, although I hardly consider it a major selling point, but working through this issue is getting tricky. I can't just not watch the series, since I both want to and need to for my field of study, and she doesn't want me watching 60+ hours of anything without her, so she's soldiering through. I do, however, have...

Walking down campus the other day when I heard this student, evidently some sort of Marxist frat brother, say to another, "It's all hegemony, bro! Everything! This university, everything!" Good gawd, it's day two of classes and I already have to hear about hegemony. Also, last night, I had the Game of Thrones class I'm sitting in on. My director's teaching it, which is awesome, as is the number of friends I have in there. Now that I've been ABD for a year and a half, I'm getting kinda nostalgic for the classes. But I have to admit that not having to write anything makes the experience even better. I'm also super pumped to start the HBO series. I've read the books but, obviously due to lack of a tv, have never seen the series. Last time I checked a few years ago, it wasn't available on-line. (I actually contacted HBO customer service to verify that.) Now, though, apparently there's a thing called "HBO Go." I'll give tha...

 . . . is always loveliest. Okay, okay, I'm neither taking nor teaching any classes this year -- one of the perks of the Writing Fellowship. But I still love the feel of fall and the excitement of first day. After four months of campus being a ghost town, seeing all the students on campus energizes me. Although I'm not taking or teaching classes, I will be sitting in on my director's Game of Thrones this Thursday. Got a number of friends in it, and it'll be a nice way to stay in touch with the department. It's real easy, otherwise, to feel like you no longer belong. Interesting tidbit: since Martina worked the admin side of academic, she always hated the beginning of the semester. Can't say I blame her, hearing her stories!

Finished the last Black Company book last night. Could have finished it a week ago, but I only had a 100 pages left and I needed a free night where I could savor it. All told, between nine BC books and portions of The Instrumentalities of the Night , I've gone through about 4,000 pages of his fiction this summer. That also includes a few forays into his Garret P.I. books, a series of hardboiled detective fiction set in a fantasyland. I don't really care for the hardboiled-ness (although they have the typical Cook flavor), so I didn't actually finish any of them. My article on Instrumentalities  should be ready shortly. I read somewhere that one should not submit anything in the first two or last two weeks of a semester, so I'll hold off until mid-September to send that off. Fingers crossed. Cook, though, really is an unacknowledged master. The other day, I read an old  New York Review of Science Fiction  article by Steven Erickson, who writes in a similar mode of Gr...

So, I'm a few chapters in  Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness , a recent book by Helen Young. It just came out, and I've been looking forward to it. Still not sure what I think of it -- Whiteness Studies as a field is not up my alley, but Young certainly seems to be handling her material relatively well. Two things, though: 1. Eccentric and excessive capitalization. Skin colors such as White are consistently capitalized, as are the genres (Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc), but "eurocentric" is not. The latter sort of typographical cutesy-ness strikes me as more annoying than politically edgy. But the excessive capitalization gets on my nerves even more. If I'd wanted to read German, I'd actually bother learning German. 2. This may be the WORST proofread book I've ever read. Seriously, on nearly EVERY page there is a comma splice, a grammatical mistake, strange spacing, something . This book is from Routledge, for crying out loud. ...

Though it kills me to say so, since Prof. Barkley must have worked extremely hard on this book, this monograph is getting to be a train wreck. Combined with the highly questionable assertions, the chapters themselves are loose and unfocused. They usually begin via a comparison with some great modernist work (Proust, Hemingway, Joyce, etc), which I actually like. But then the tone seems to be, "Donaldson is taking on these same things, and he's doing it better." Barkley continually brings in references to popular and high culture, as well as current political events, trying to situate SRD in the "modern" (i.e., late 20th- and 21st-century context), but the discussions grow increasingly shallow. Really, there's only so much "timeless truths" types of commentary that one can stand. Worse, I found myself unable to find very many quotable or paraphrase-able ideas from any of her chapters. Anyway, I took a little look-see through the bibliography.** It...

Michael D. C. Drout, my all-time favorite Tolkien scholar, once made a remark in one of his essays that a common reason articles get rejected from Tolkien Studies is that they simply treat Tolkien as too perfect and infallible. That's something which makes a lot of sense to me -- the collateral damage of studying a major author is that you now know all the mean/rotten things that can be said about him or her. (I once took a class from a Hemingway scholar who told us not to worry about offending him if we hated Hemingway, since the prof  had already heard it all and could probably even help us out with mean things we hadn't even thought of yet.) Well, I think Christine Barkley's Stephen R. Donaldson and the Modern Epic Vision might be running afoul of some of those same problems of excessive praise. Got the book this afternoon -- just 1/10th of the way through, and the book's still in the "Rah, rah, greatest author of all time" mode. Even worse, her clear passi...

The honor for snarkiest style sheet would have to go to Philosophy and Literature . Their style sheet contains the following advice to authors: " Many authors with whom the editors deal appear not to understand that Philosophy and Literature does not have house copy-editors whose sole job is to carry out mechanical or stylistic copy-editing of manuscripts. Where a manuscript is sloppily prepared, it is either the editors themselves or the author who must make it right. We urge authors to cooperate in careful manuscript preparation. It is frankly unfair to expect the editors to do the work of authors, and it will very likely result in delaying the appearance of a manuscript." What astounds me is that a good, peer-reviewed journal like P&L still has to specifically tell potential contributors this. It reminds me of what I have to tell my students. It gets better, though! After telling authors how much they hate automated footnoting in submissions, the editors say this...

. . .  pissing around on the internet, obviously. A few weeks back, I noticed that the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts , the organization which publishes the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, has had a discussion listserv up for a few years. I only noticed it because that's where they post their calls for reviewers. Well, apparently the IAFA listserv is a veritable treasure trove of various other things as well, including CFPs for various book projects. Seems like there's a few every month or so, and it makes me wish I knew way more topics and had way more time. And I also learned that, if I just "like" most of the scholarly journals that have facebook pages, you get tons of stuff that way as well.  The IAFA facebook just posted a CFP for Octavia Butler, which is here . I've only read Kindred, but I'm struck by what a good opportunity things such as this are. A lot of times, even though grad students are immersed in academic l...

Definition of a nerd-out: you get excited that someone has written a new monograph on Stephen R. Donaldson. The book is  Stephen R. Donaldson and the Modern Epic Vision   by Christine Barkley, from McFarland's  Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy series of books. Alongside W. A. Senior's Stephen R. Donaldson, that makes this the second monograph on SRD that I know of. I remember Barkley from my senior thesis research on Donaldson, and, from what I can gather, took advantage of retirement to finally flesh out a long love of hers. I can't say how much this tickles me -- possibly because I love SRD, partly because it was just a nice surprise. I'm immediately ordering it from interlibrary loan! Also, from the publisher's blurb, I think I'm going to like some of the chapter titles: "Ur-lord of the (white gold) ring," "Portrait of the artist as a young leper," "Remembrance of some things past."

I learned recently that anthologist and editor David G. Hartwell passed away recently. I didn't know much of his work, although apparently he did a ton of things -- including founding the New York Times Review of Science Fiction . The way I know him is through a book he edited co-edited with Kathryn Cramer in 1994 -- a collection of short stories called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder . It was a beautiful green, leather-bound volume originally purchased from Walden Books at the local mall. This was highschool for me and, although I'd been reading fantasy for ages, I got this particular book because of that gorgeous cover. My love of the short story form begins there: Masterpieces first introduced me to Harlan Ellison, Graham Greene, William Morris, Patricia McKillip, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a number of others. Now that I think of it, Masterpieces is the reason I first started writing short stories in the first pieces. (Prior to that I was trying to write a novel, since...