Stratofanatic's Emporium

My copy of Michael Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance arrived last night, a book which I originally read during undergrad but which I figured, well, might as well own it. And no sooner do I start reading then I see a very laudatory Guardian  review of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, which I blogged about just yesterday morning. So, apparently the book is even less forgotten than I thought! Anyway, Moorcock claimed that Poul Anderson did Norse literature so well that it just about ruined Tolkien for him -- even beyond all the other infamous critiques he made of Tolkien. Incidentally, my opinion of Wizardry and Wild Romance has apparently waned considerable since I first read it years ago. First, it's basically a survey of fantasy (romance) literature, which tend to be incredibly dull. The interspersed commentary is vivid and polemical but often head-scratching. Moorcock, furthermore, has a great obsession with style and influence. Influence tends to be a topic of overb...

So, while I've been on this sword and sorcery kick, I came across Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. It's often mentioned -- in passing -- in surveys of S&S, but I hadn't otherwise encountered it.  Reading it struck me with two things: Anderson's knows his Norse sagas and medieval literature . There's echoes of the Eddas, Kullervo, and Tristan and Iseult.  What's amazing to me about this is that Anderson wrote this book in 1954 -- and thus delved into this literature entirely independently of Tolkien's influence. This is good . The Broken Sword  is perhaps the first swords and sorcery novel where I kept wondering, "What's going to happen next?" I mean, I knew it would be something bad -- you can tell just from the source material that tragedy is around the corner. But I was captivated by exactly how everyone's hopes and dreams would come to a crashing, crushing end. It's also worth noting that The Broken Sword only tangent...

After the trauma of the election, I shut off from politics as much as possible. Mostly, I just couldn't afford the energy, not with my own precarious graduate student situation. I had a dissertation to finish and, even when I completed the first draft, there's the terrifying knowledge that my job prospects are statistically abysmal, that we're a single-income family whose income ends in April, and we're still not sure about *M immigration status, mostly due to bureaucratic incompetency. Not to mention all the c.v. building things I must do in the meantime. Plus, being ABD, I tend to be cut off from all human contact, so word of mouth filters down to me slowly. Even had I heard, though, my lack of car has, over the years, given me the tendency to block out events beyond a five-mile radius of my home. So while a part of me realized that the Women's March yesterday would be big, I didn't quite realize how big it was. All over the news and social media, I kept s...

. . . aaaaaaaaand it's over. Winter break at MTSU has always been the most deadly boring part of the year for me. Library's closed, gym's closed, town's empty, and there ain't a whole lot to do. (Not even I can work all the time.) In the past, I've managed to visit *M in London once -- and of course we got married in New York last year -- but otherwise my only resort has been to putz around and eat horribly. All that's done now, though, as this week opens up the start of MY VERY LAST SEMESTER AT MTSU .  Less than 6 weeks before I defend the diss -- and, I gotta admit, the general situation is starting to make me nervous. The diss itself is fine, and I'm pretty proud of it. But I'm more than a little dismayed by the fact that, although two committee members have started reading my diss, no one has actually finished it, much less provided feedback.  My current director, of course, had a remarkably late start, since she had to take over directin...

The 2017 class of baseball Hall of Famers is now official: Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriquez. All of them are highly deserving candidates, especially Raines -- it was a minor crime that it took the writers 10 years to elect the second greatest lead-off hitter of all time. He had a rough time because of admitted cocaine use and, of course, playing in the shadow of the greatest lead-off hitter of all time, Ricky Henderson. Bagwell never made much impression on me, mostly because he played for the small market Houston Astros, but Pudge Rodriquez had one of the most amazing arms for a catcher I've ever seen. Bonds and Clemens both fell short (because of the steroids, obviously), but this year both climbed over the 50% mark -- 75% needed for election. Clearly, they deserve in, and the allegations of steroid use never phased me a bit in regards to their monster stat lines. Curt Schilling looks like he had a rough day, though, dipping below 50%. His stats are clearly Hall...

One true sign that a movie has become outdated is when you look at its wikipedia page and can't begin the fathom how the debates that apparently swirled around a film applied to what you actually saw. As part of my Robert E. Howard kick, I've looked up the youtube version of Conan the Barbarian (1982). One thing I noticed -- Aw-nold's accent has gotten a lot better over the years. But otherwise, except for a mildly cool scene in the Temple of Set, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. One big critique was its violence -- but it's cheesy 1980s violence. One critic lamented that it killed, on his count, about 50 people, which nearly made me laugh. Both the body counts and the special effects are exceeded twice-over in any one episode of Game of Thrones . And the film was also apparently critiqued for its flirtation with fascism? Now, I remember reading one article from JFA from the early 1980s claiming all German sword and sorcery was fascist, but I couldn...

My new favorite meme of all time.

Just discovered that Signum University (the place that hosts the Mythgard Institute) will be holding a  Rogue One and Fantastic Beasts chat  this evening at 7pm-9pm. Don't know if I'll participate, but I'll probably check out what they upload to youtube afterward. Anyway, what makes that event post-worthy is that, on the Friday before Christmas, *M and I made an hazardous excursion to see precisely those two films. The theater's 5 miles away, neither of us drive, so we got a map and made the arduous, hazardous, monster-bedeviled hike. (See how adventurous it was?) Along the way we stopped at The Green Dragon, a Tolkien-themed pub here in town and virtually Murfreesboro's only source of culture -- I've been here for 5 years and never been, entirely because of the distance. Anyway, after a nice lunch, we finished the hike and watched Rogue One and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them . (Just to add to the adventure, we snuck in to the latter film.)  Rogue O...

Well, spin me around and call me Sally. Just looking through the draft program of the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), and it turns out they selected me to chair a panel on the fiction of Robert E. Howard. The weird thing? I happen to be reading the Conan series for the very first time  right now . Picked up a series of his Conan stories, edited by Karl Edward Wagner, some time back, and finally just got around to reading them. Anyway, Howard's a peach. Although sword & sorcery (and adventure) stories aren't my thing, I'm liking the Conan stories a lot better than the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Leiber. Leiber had a tendency to get cutesy, but Howard just doesn't waste any time with nonsense like intrigue or plausibility before getting to the action. And he has produced my new all-time favorite paragraph in literature. After Conan gets imprisoned by an evil magician, he's eventually set free by a beautiful young harem girl...

So, given that the campus library and gym is closed for winter break, *M and I have been rather desperate for entertainment lately. As a result, we have been plumming the depths of Netflix and Amazon Prime to an extent never before seen. One result of this boredom-spelunking is that we found a small indie film called The Rise of the Fellowship , which is pretty clearly a Tolkien knock-off --er, I mean, "tribute." The basic premise is that gamer geeks are pitted against gamer jocks (yes, gamer jocks ) in an on-line LOTR gaming competition. I won't keep you in suspense -- it was bad. The production value was decent, actually, and the acting wasn't awful, especially for a low-budget indie film, but I'm pretty sure the whole "geeks vs. jocks" stereotype died in the 1990s. (And the fact that the film's relying on stereoptypes thirty years out of date also gives you a hint at the level of characterization.) *M and I only made it about a quarter of the wa...