Stratofanatic's Emporium

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 ...

So, thanks to a retirement within the department, a General Education literature course called "Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Aliens, Ghosts, and Others" open up . . . and my application to teach it was accepted.  I'm surprisingly excited to teach this course -- "surprisingly" since, while I like teaching, I don't like it nearly as much as I like research. Hence much of my reading over the last month has been to familiarize myself with monster theory and, of course, reading a bunch of relevant texts (particularly those ghost stories I mentioned in my previous post).  Anyway, I've developed a pretty nifty looking syllabus (I <3 multimodality), but here's the reading list: Beowulf , translated by Seamus Haney Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , translated by Simon Armitage Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text , edited by J. Paul Hunter Crane, Stephen. "The Monster" Hill, Susan. The Woman in Black Wilde, Oscar. The Canterv...

So, after really liking Susan Hill's The Woman in Black , I've made a foray into other ghost stories. Currently most of the way through M. R. James's work. Although it kinda reminds me why I never got into ghost stories in the first place (the "weird" factor just isn't intellectually interesting enough for me), I did have an odd de ja vu experience while reading "Casting the Runes." First, I was just predisposed to like this story -- the villain is a warlock who goes crazy after having his paper on alchemy rejected via peer review. Right up my alley, right? But I continue on with the story, and I realize it's striking similar to an academic horror novel I once read, Publish and Perish . Well, I look things up, and sure enough, the author's note admits to using James's original story as a pastiche. Strikingly appropriate, of course, but it's odd the connections you see if you keep on reading long enough.

Cultural Studies is a nice field of study, but damn, they can be awful, pretentious, and self-indulgent writers. Examples from one article that I'm now not going to bother reading all the way through: "The prowling and lurking, interrogating, and transmogrifying textual (re-)composition of monsters is deconstructive, abjective, and intertextual." And, under the theory that no Foucault reference in an introductory clause can be too convoluted or verbose, we get the following anti-gem: "Writing after, and thus chasing, Foucault's prowling, knowledge-altering (and mutating) monster . . . ." And, in the "Short sentences and more rigorous main verbs, academics, dammit!" category, we get: "The conundrum that emerges from the friction between, on the one side, the scrutinizing and destabilizing intellectual disposition of literary theory and, on the other, the metonymic and representational mode of the anthology to represent a theoretical...

So, back as an undergrad and an MA, I used to keep detailed reading lists of my reading for a semester, just as to keep track of my productivity. I eventually got out of that habit, and it actually became impractical during my doctorate -- I "read" so much literary criticism, often simply gutting the book for the main ideas and arguments, that it's not quite fair to give such books a page count. (At least with fiction you can be assured my eyes have diligently gone over every page.) Well, I managed to do a productivity report for the first 5 months of 2018. I'm not counting any non-fiction or literary criticism, of which there was a fair bit. Here are just normal books (including some C.S. Lewis) that I've read: N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate , 350 pg. N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky , 350pg. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn 600 pg. Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension , 800 pg. Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages , 700 pg. Blake Charlton, Spellwright...