Stratofanatic's Emporium

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.

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.

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 subgenre -- 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 app...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...