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Tolkien students in Pakistan, unite!

Random e-mail of the day -- got a message from a literature student in Pakistan, who loves Tolkien, asking for some cheaply available Tolkien books. Apparently, as might be expected, Pakistan doesn't have a whole lot of Tolkien stuff there. Well, sadly, I had to tell the fellow that, even if I had access to some cheap Tolkien books, shipping them halfway around the globe would have been prohibitively expensive. Still, I managed to directed him to the open access Journal of Tolkien Research and academia.edu, which has lots of free Tolkien stuff. Good luck to the guy. . . .

And Donaldson . . . done!

Just completed my second essay on Stephen R. Donaldson and gender violence. (The first was "revise and resubmit," and my subsequent revision is now under renewed consideration.) This second essay focuses on "Reave the Just" from SRD's Reave the Just and Other Tales . It was, in fact, the conference paper I presented at ICFA 2017 , although this version is double in length and oozing with secondary material. Still, I'm a bit unsure . . . I'm pretty confident that the close reading and analysis is top notch, of course, but I'm not sure what reviewers might think of my ultimate conclusions. Thus I'll be sending this sucker out drastically unsure of its fate. Of course, for me, surety isn't all that sure . . . I've send out articles that I believed were the cat's meow, and sometimes they've been accepted-with-no-revisions, and sometimes. . .  well!  So we'll just have to see how this goes.

Fiction Reading List: June - December 2018

Well, my fiction reading list for the first half of the year can be found here . Seems like my second half managed to be depressingly less productive than the first, but oh well. As usual, I'm not including my non-fiction / lit crit reading . . . all that's too hodgepodge for accurate counts. Hanif Kurieshi, The Black Album, 250 pg Hanif Kurieshi, Intimacy , 150 pg. Kazuo Ishiguru, The Buried Giant , 200 pg (uncompleted) Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies , 400 pg. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith , 600 pg. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger, 500 pg. Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members, 150 pg  Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 550 pg Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Shattered Chain , 300 pg. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sharra's Exile , 350 pg. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Thendara House , 400 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul's Bane , 400 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, The Illearth War , 550 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, The Power that Preserves , 450 pg. Stephen R.

Academic Novels to Avoid . . . .

Academic novels are something of a hobby of mine. . . . but I thinking the following, Trigger Warning , is one that might not make my Christmas wish list this year. It's basically every radical right-wing conspiracy theory about universities combined into one book. Here's the Chronicle's summation: here .

Top 10 Books Reading Challenge

So, there's been a "reading challenge" on facebook these last few weeks. You're supposed to post your top 10 most personally influential books with a cover photo. Well, I'm not going to spend space posting covers here, but here goes nothing. . .. (Books presented in the order in which I read them.) The Ten-Speed Babysitter , by Allison Cragin Herzig and Jane Lawrence Mali . This following one shouldn't be considered a "favorite," but it's the first novel I ever read. 3rd grade, maybe early 4th grade, I'm thinking. Previously, I had read non-fiction books about dogs and dinosaurs, but no fiction. Honorable mention: Where the Red Fern Grows , by Wilson Rawls. The Little Eddie series by Carolyn Haywood (4th grade). The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley (5th grade). I didn't read my first fantasy novel, Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon , until maybe the summer between 5th grade & 6th, although now I'm less-than-pr

Random Offer of Someone's Tolkien Hoard

So, odd but cool thing . . . got a random e-mail the other day from a nice lady who offered me her entire Tolkien collection. Turns out she was downsizing for an upcoming move. Her e-mail also included an itemized list of everything she had, and it was quite the impressive collection, I thought. Unfortunately, I already either had the books or had already read them -- thankfully, as an academic, I've learned that interlibrary loan is my friend. So I told her I had to pass, but I also knew another Tolkienist who heads the library at Pima Community College, so hopefully that'll pan out. Out of curiosity, I also asked her how she got my name. Apparently some fellow Tolkien enthusiast friend of her's in Hawaii (!) had heard of me and, somehow, knew that I resided in the Tucson area.

The "True Crimes" Podcast

From the interview I posted about a few weeks ago, the podcast(s) has gone up. The first is a mini-podcast (only 6 minutes) on " Violence and Ghosts ." The second is the first official full-length "true crimes" episode of Wildcat Crimes : " The Myths, Legends and Crimes Behind the Haunting of Maricopa Hall " -- i.e., one of the local all-female resident dorms. I appear at the 22-minute and 34-minute marks. I'm a bit embarrassed about my first answer in the full-length episode . . . the question about ghosts and women, and I answered with the old tradition about women being less rational and more emotional than men. That's true as far as it goes, but I could have mentioned the concept of transgressed gender roles and the idea of the "monstrous feminine." Plus I'm a horrible speaker. Alas. . .  still a fun experience, though.

Marion Zimmer Bradley Revisited

Back in January, I wrote a blog entry wondering why Marion Zimmer Bradley wasn't a bigger dealing of academic critics -- she was a feminist, a combo SF&F writer, an analyst of male and female sexuality, a massively influential editor, and several other awesome things. She wrote a lot of forgettable novels, as any pulp-writer does, but I wrote that entry after finishing The Heritage of Hastur and being blown away by it. After recently finishing the follow-up, Sharra's Exile , the question occurred to me again, so I did some digging, and found something that I'd originally glossed over: the fact that Moira Greyland has accused her mother, MZB, and her father Walter Breen of raping her as a child. Greyland's blog post is here . The Guardian covering this story. I had known that Walter Breen, to whom MZB had dedicated several of her novels, died in prison on multiple accounts of child abuse (and he had even written publicly on the legitimacy of man-boy relations

Interviewed for a U of A podcast!

So, one of the local U of A media students is doing a podcast on true crime, and her first episodes is on "ghosts." She asked for an interview after noticing that I was teaching a course on monsters, and of course I was delighted to participate. Just finished up now. Since she set me a list of pre-set questions, I'm just going to post them here -- fun stuff! Firstly, have you heard of the Maricopa Hall haunting, and if so what have you heard? Oh yes, sure I have. I actually first heard about the haunting of the Modern Language Building, because that’s where the English Department is. Then when I was prepping for my Monsters class this semester, I googled haunted U of A buildings and found some websites on things like Maricopa Hall haunting. The websites didn’t strike me as the most reliable things in the world, but there’s various stories for Maricopa Hall.  (a wealthy young female U of A student who committed suicide when she found out her future husb

Critiquing a Critique of Postmodernism?

Been reading a monograph by Dr. Adrian Howe, a postmodern feminist, called Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the ‘Man’ Question. She's a criminologist who approaches her subject from a poststructuralist perspective. One section tackles another criminologist critical of PM-modes of thinking, Stan Cohen. I think her discussion worth posting about because it highlights my own skepticism to PM questioning and problemization. So, Howe has two basic issues with Cohen ( States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering ). Cohen resusitates the public/private distinction that feminists hate, and his anti-postmodern way of tackling issues like denial strategies, discrediting whistleblowers, re-naming & justifications. He's critical of such things, of course, but as acts, not as matters of discourse So, let's take Howe's second problem with Cohen in particular. According to Howe, Cohen lambasts the idea “that there can be no access to current or historical

The Shannara Chronicles

I'd been hearing for a few years about The Shannara Chronicles, a fantasy adaptation of Terry Brooks clearly trying to take advantage of the Game of Thrones buzz. I've always been drastically curious about it. Brooks's first Shannara novel is, infamously, an almost point-by-point copy of The Lord of the Rings, and I knew that the series (which premiered on MTV) began with Brooks's equal, The Elfstones of Shannara . But the success of the adaptation has been always something that's aroused my curiosity. Well, no more. Last night the wife and I watched the first episode, and . . . . well, egads. Bad bad bad bad bad. Imagine a show full of ridiculously beautiful teenagers who can't act, put horrible plastic fake-looking Elf ears on them, and then insert a whole bunch of genre cliches and banalities. The Shannara Chronicles ends up being the result. Skipping the rest of the series seems like a pretty safe decision, methinks. Even for a teenaged target audience wit

Harlan Ellison Gets Roasted

Ran across a "roast" of Harlan Ellison a few days back. A few of my favorites: Screenwriter David Gerrold: "The fact that Ellison is a self-made man relieves God of a great responsibility."  Gerrold again: "I've been Harlan's friend for six years. Of course, I've known him for eighteen years. . . ."  Robert Bloch: "I first met Harlan in 1952. He was 18, and I was unlucky."  The full roast can be read here .

Lembas is tastier than you think

So, I have a teacherly friend who's doing a composition course focused on food, and one of her students picked Tolkien's lembas. Since they have to do brief e-mail interviews, Laura asked me if I'd be up for it, and of course it was. It was a fun exercise, who I decided to post the questions as well as my responses. (1) Which theory [ lembas as communion bread or military hardtack)] do you believe is more accurate, and what is your personal belief on this subject? Does it make a difference that one is a military food and the other religious? You're spot-on about the two most common interpretations of the lembas. My answer about the accuracy of one interp over the other will be extremely unhelpful: my answer is "both and neither." The question is something of a false binary. On one hand, lembas are their own thing. Plotwise, it's a convenient way of explaining how Frodo and Sam feed themselves in Mordor. On the other hand, why can't lembas be both mi

One of the ironies of being a job-hunting Tolkienist.

The MLA Job Information List went up Monday, and there's some fun job ads out there. I saw the following from Grove City College, which is about 20 miles from my hometown -- they're hiring a 20th-century British literature scholar with a focus on the Inklings. Gold, right? Alas, not so much. They're a committed Christian college, and apparently my materialist-atheist bend just doesn't qualify . . . especially as one of their four required letters of reference must be from one's pastor. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Fun Stephen R. Donaldson Quote of the Day

So, I'm re-reading a bunch of SRD interviews in prep for an encyclopedia entry I'm doing on him for The Literary Encyclopedia , and I came across the following gem. For context,  SRD is talking about the need to re-read his first 6 Covenant books before beginning The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant : When I started back on Lord Foul's Bane, to re-read the Covenant books after twenty years, I was blown away. I thought if these books had been written by anybody else, I would call them masterpieces. These books were written by somebody whose a better writer than I am now. It was a very intimidating experience. I had expected the opposite. The truth is I can find some flaws in the first six books that I wish I could change, but that didn't have to do with how they're written. I love how they were written. I was blown away, and I thought, "I can't compete with this."  Well, they are masterpieces! This quote tickles me because, if I ever wrote a maste

Ego much?

Well, here's an object lesson in how one is never too old or too famous to be childish. I recently had to reject a book review submission for being an incompetent hatchet job . . .  though, of course, I phrased my evaluation much more professionally than that and, technically, gave him the option of revising or bowing out of the review. (Obviously, he took the latter option.) When I asked for the return of the $30 book, which the reviewer received for free, he threw a minor hissy fit and refused. Oh, just grow up, for Chrissakes. UPDATE: Okay, I take back some of the attitude from the above post. We had a little bit of a back-and-forth email exchange afterward, and he remained professional, though he was still clearly hopping mad about our decision.  He also mentioned that asking for the return of a book was outside normal reviewing conventions, which might well be true, I suppose. My only concern had been that the publisher had given us that free book in good faith of having i

Forthcoming article on Zimmer's Alliterative Poetry

Well, I'm having the loveliest day today. Just got the peer review back for an article I had submitted, and it begins: "This paper is an enjoyable and effective discussion of Zimmer’s work against the background of the alliterative poetry. . . . " Mind you, that's the exactly the sort response that I expect to receive every time I submit a paper for publication, but alas, the vast majority of the ice-cold hearts of cold-blooded reviewers remain unmelted. . . .  :) Still, what's extra nice is that I greatly admire Zimmer's work, and this will be the first peer-reviewed article on his fiction.*** The subject matter -- alliterative poetry -- is also an entirely new field for me. Literally everything I know about the topic was learned in the process of researching Zimmer for an entirely different article on his work (which I submitted for publication a few weeks ago, btw). In fact, prior to that researching process, I had never even encountered Zimmer

Fall 2018 General Meeting

Thursday was our General Meeting for Writing Program instructors. Although I hated these things as a grad student, I'm a big fan now that I'm a lecturer brimming with free time (relatively speaking!). Anyway, this particular get-together was particularly interesting thanks to our invited speaker, a radical rhet/comp theoretician by the name of Dr. Asao B. Inoue. First things first -- he was a highly energetic, engaging speaker. Second things second -- he didn't pull any punches. Basically, his first statement to us was, "Grading is racist." (Put into slightly more theoretical language, which he did later: standard institutional forms of assessment reflect white hegemony and privelege.) Basically, one must act and think "white" in order to function well in such a system. As a result, Dr. Inoue argues for "contract grading."  While not a new concept, he makes it even more radically by assigning a grade -- because one has to as an university-af

Tell me how you really feel . . .

Here's an unexpected wrinkle in the life of a reviews editor. I gave a book to a reviewer some months back, and they just messaged me hoping to beg off from finishing the review -- apparently, they thought the book so execrable that, in their view, putting their candid opinion into print wouldn't do anyone any good at all. I admit that I'm now burning with curiosity to hear the (former) reviewer's critiques. The book's outside my academic field per se but has a fascinating title, so I read it when the publisher first sent it to me. While its survey-like treatment of the subject matter was disappointingly lacking in ambition, I didn't think the volume that bad. Our (now former) reviewer, however, has quite a bit of experience, so I'm just itching here. UPDATE: The reviewer's now going to give the review the good ole' college try, which fortunately saves me the trouble of figuring out what to do with the book, thank goodness.

Academic blog guilt

Sadly enough, I know I've been neglecting this academic blog. Most of the reason simply revolves around being too obsessed about the recent spat of articles I've been finishing up: two new articles on Paul Edwin Zimmer, both of which have been submitted for review, and a revision of my Donaldson essay on gender violence which came back "revise and resubmit" about a month ago. All that's left is the SRD piece, and I've been frantically revising that -- no matter what I do (and I realize I'm a perfectionist), I simply can't seem to get it "right." My self-imposed deadline for the article was yesterday, but I had to tell the editor that it'll take another week. Unfortunately, the upcoming semester begins in 10 days -- on Monday, August 20th, to be exact. I still haven't looked over the material for my online courses, either, so I'll be frantically engaged with that over the upcoming week, plus a few general meetings for department

SRD Entries for the Literary Encyclopedia

So, among the awesome things that happened to me during the Kalamazoo conference last May was that I had to chance to Dr. Dimitra Fimi. We got to talking, and she invited me to contribute some entries on Stephen R. Donaldson for The Literary Encyclopedia  ( https://www.litencyc.com ). Well, the official go-ahead just came a few days ago. I'll be writing one short entry (~2000 words) on Stephen R. Donaldson and another short entry of the same length on The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever . I'm quite pleased and grateful for the opportunity.

Review of Paul Hoffman's Left Hand of God Trilogy -- Postmodern to the Gills

A lot of times when you encounter a truly original book, it's something you either love or hate -- generally, there's not much middle ground. For me, when I read Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God trilogy, it was definitely love -- one of the most captivating pieces of epic fantasy I've read in a while. In a sense, my reaction surprises me. What's original about Hoffman is not so much his plot as his style , which strikes me as specifically postmodern, filled with pastiche and metafiction and oddly self-conscious author-narrator moments (although thank the gods Hoffman doesn't step out onto the stage himself), things I typically hate about postmodern novels.***  Anyhow, The Left Hand of God struck me as so innovative that I immediately sought out all the reviews I could find on it. Apparently my reaction of mooncalf love-eyes was not shared by a majority of critics -- the official reviewers were atrociously harsh (including one head-scratching com

Harlan Ellison passes . . . .

Oh no . . . just saw on the SFRA listserv that Harlan Ellison, one of my top 5 writers of all time, died earlier today.  I first encountered him in the first collection of short stories I ever truly loved, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder , edited by David G. Hartwell. The story was "On the Downhill Side." It struck me as only so-so, but it was enough -- or Hartwell's headnote was enough, perhaps -- to have me seek out Ellison collections at the library. . . . and I remember being blown away by Approaching Oblivion (particularly Ellison's introduction, "Knox," and "Silent in Gehenna") and Deathbird Stories , including "Pretty Maggy Moneyeyes," "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," and "The Deathbird."  After that I relentlessly sought out every Ellison story I could find. Since this was before the days of Amazon (and I was too poor to buy books anyway), looking for an Ellison collection was basically the first thing I