Stratofanatic's Emporium

Tomorrow's going to be a rough, rough day. We leave at 11:30 am for the airport, and we should touchdown in Nashville at 6:30 pm. That'll be fine, but I'll then head immediately for the Greyhound station. At 10 pm I'll embark on a 16-hour bus trip to Texas. At least I'll have one night to wash up and rest before the interview on Thursday. On the plus die, I managed to read four (short) books during my week here in PA. I actually had to buy more books, since I didn't have enough for my trip to Texas. Efficiency, dear sirs, efficiency.

I flew up to Pennsylvania on Wednesday, half to see my family and half for my 20-year high school reunion. The reunion was last night; it was nice seeing everyone but also awkward, as anyone who's ever attended these things probably knows. I was extremely anti-social back then, so I don't quite have the experiences useful for making a reunion a memorable experience. As nice and mature as everyone is now, it's hard to come up with small talk after the standard "what have you been up to?" questions. The wife and I ended up leaving after a couple of hours. Glad I went, though. Anyway, that's not where the busy week comes in. We're flying back to Nashville on Tuesday . . . and, Tuesday evening, I'll be taking a Greyhound to east Texas where I have a job interview. (The wife will head home directly.) So, I won't even have time to go home before I immediately start traveling again. It's a 32-hour round trip for a 1-hour interview, but this job look...

I've always had a vexed relationship with Patricia A. McKillip -- I go back and forth on how much I admire her novels. Originally, I'd gotten into her because she's a favorite of Stephen R. Donaldson. Much as I love Donaldson, though, I could never quite make out what he saw in McKillip. Part of that, I think, is that McKillip works so much with emotional abstractions that it was hard for Young Me to get a handle on her. To date I've gone through: The Riddle-Master trilogy (2 out of the 3) The Cygnet series (on which I wrote a bad narrative theory paper during my MA program) Fool's Run (loved it) Winter Rose (couldn't finish it) The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (intriguing) several short stores (loved them all) Actually, here's a story about my general cluelessness. I've known forever that McKillip had been a World Fantasy Award winner -- but I couldn't figure out which of her books had won the award. (And no, this was not in the pre-Google day...

So, a bit ago while composing my fantasy syllabus, I was embarrassed that coming up with female protagonists for fantasy novels gave me such a hard time. Not that there's a whole lot out there, but still. Anyway, I took it upon myself to try correcting that particular hole in my fantasy literary knowledge. My first excursion was into Tamora Pierce's Alanna, a 1984 fantasy text. That experiment, shall we say, was not a success. The protagonist, Alanna, pretends to be a boy so that she could become a knight, but the plot (and characterization) was so dull and predictable that I could barely finish the novel. Then I tried Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy. . . .  Quite impressive, I must say. I wouldn't necessarily place it in the first rank of fantasy fiction (the series is almost all plot), but that plot is fantastic and captivating, the world-creation truly unique, and Nix's style is admirable. I read the first book, Sabriel, constanty surprised at how quickly it wen...

Well,  by graduating yesterday,  I have now joined the ranks of the academically unaffiliated and the unemployed. This is actually the first graduation since high school that I've attended -- I skipped both my BA and MA graduations. All in all, the experience was cool. Thankfully, a few years back MTSU decided to separate graduate and undergraduate ceremonies, so we managed to get out of there within 90 minutes. Anyway, pictures: That's all four of our graduating doctoral students from the English Department. From left: Sarah Gray, Mo Li, Fadia Mereani, and of course yours truly. Another one:

I'm not a fan of Charles Williams, but Grevel Lindop's biography of him, Charles Williams:The Third Inkling , has been widely praised, even winning a Mythopoeic award for Inklings Studies last year. About the only criticism of Lindop's book I've seen concerned it's name. Tolkien scholar David Bratman, for example, has argued that calling CW "the third Inkling" unfairly puts CW into the shadow of Lewis and Tolkien, whereas people interested enough in CW to read a biography of him would undoubtedly rank him higher. Thus I was startled to see a reference by Sorina Higgens in her edition of CW's verse drama,  The Chapel of the Thorn,  to Lindop's then-unpublished biograph:  Charles Williams: The Last Magician .  Off the top of my head, I suppose the name change came very late in the process, probably at the instigation of the publisher. A title linking CW to the Inklings, rather than to the occult, would probably sell a lot more copies. In terms o...

The journal I edit, Scientia et Humanitas , had its annual "Proofreading Party" last evening. Three of our staff managed to make it, and together we did the proofs for all seven of our accepted articles. The thing was quite fun, actually, and it was the first time I'd ever met two of the three attendees in person. One of them, I was dismayed to learn, is 15-year-old college sophomore -- and he was pretty good at his proofs. Talk about making me feel like an underacheiver. Our associate editor is now finishing the layout and the corrections. No set date for sending the final manuscript to the printers, but it should be soon. The only hold up is that we might get two extra articles added in last minute.