Stratofanatic's Emporium

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 hav...

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...

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...

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.

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 ...