Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, back during grad school, I made myself two vows. First, I wouldn't read any more "quit lit" (i.e., academics writing about leaving academia), and second I wouldn't read any more diatribes bemoaning the academic job market. Those decisions were simply good psych management. If quit lit was depressing, akin to watching a car crash, then reading about job market woes would had even Pollyanna looking for the nearest tall building. Anyway, they're both related subgenres of academic writing, since the job market is the major reason we leave academia. While I'd personally never stop trying to read, write, and publish everything I could, academia's still the only occupation (other than lottery winner) where you can do that full time. Even today, though, I still can't believe my unimaginable good luck in landing a lectureship at the U of Arizona. Although anything less than a tenure-track position at a major research university can't honestly count as...

Of all the Zimmer stories and poems I've had to track down, "The Border Women" excited me most -- women don't often make a large appearance in his fiction. Unfortunately, I've had the damnest time finding the darn thing. First, I interlibrary loan'd it. Took forever and, when I got tired of waiting, I purchased it from two different sellers on Amazon. The first seller cancelled on me. The second, after missing his first Amazon-imposed delivery deadline, also missed the second self-imposed one after I contacted him. So I just cancelled that one as well.  But the book has arrived at the U of A, and I pretty quickly saw why it was relegated to Special Collections (meaning that I couldn't check it out of the library). The book itself was in good shape, but apparently it was part of a limited 300-edition volume. That limited edition business explains why I had such a tough time finding it on Amazon itself. Anyway, what do I think about the story itself? ...

So, a super cool thing happened to me about two years ago . . . and I didn't notice until just the other day. Back in 2016, I published an article in The Journal of Tolkien Research about Saruman, rhetoric, and Plato's concept of thumos . Well, what I noticed the other day was that Dimitra Fimi, one of my favorite Tolkien scholars, actually tweeted the link to that along with a compliment. I always read her work whenever I come across it, and I even had the pleasure to review her edition (co-edited with Andrew Higgins) of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages , so that tweet just tickled me pink. It took me two years to notice that tweet, btw, since I so rarely use my twitter account. I should probably use it more, though, especially as the forum has been kind to me. Within my first week of opening my account, as a matter of fact, I saw the CFP for a festschrift of. Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff, and that actually turned out to be one of my first officia...

I first encountered Jemisin through her novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms . I didn't care much for it, I remember. Really, I only read it because she seemed to be earning as much praise for being an African-American fantasy author as for writing good books,*** soI was curious about her work. But, although the book wasn't good enough for me to continue the series, it was nonetheless good enough that I didn't mind giving her most recent series, The Broken Earth , a try. I read The Fifth Season (2015) about a year after it came out, and it utterly absorbed me. Now, over the last week, I finished The Obelisk Gate (2016) and The Stone Sky (2017). Let me say -- well, damn. Wow wow wow. Words fails me. The term "masterpiece" can be thrown out too cavalierly, but I don't know if even that quite cuts it here. It's been a long time since I read something so original and so gut-wrenchingly powerful.  Part of me cannot help wondering how more deeply I would ha...