Stratofanatic's Emporium

Sadly, I just heard the news: the Green Dragon, a Tolkien-themed pub in Murfreesboro, is closing . For someone doing a dissertation on Tolkien at Middle Tennessee State University, one might expect me to have visited the Green Dragon oodles and oodles of times. In fact, it was only two. As a non-driver (and non-drinker) living on a grad student's stipend, I never went out, especially not to bars 4 to 5 miles away on foot. Hence, the first time I visited the Green Dragon was part of a day-long adventure just after Martina had permanently re-located to the U.S. We made the trek, had lunch, and then proceeded to the cinema, where I believed we saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Star Wars: Rogue One. Since this was just before Thanksgiving, we bought two turkeys, saving one for our eventual Christmas meal (our first as a married couple). Then we Ubered home. All in all, a good, good day. Our second time at the Green Dragon was much less memorable. We visited the pub on...

Well! Out of the blue, I was contacted by a publisher a few days ago with a request to review a book proposal. Obviously, for reasons of anonymity, I can't give any details, but the mere request itself floored me -- someone, somewhere, must have given them my name -- someone competent to judge such things.** As one might imagine, though, I had absolutely no idea how to do a competent book proposal review; they're not one of those genres of writing you ever encounter as a graduate student. Luckily, googling "How to do a book proposal reviews" brings up a ton of advice articles and whatnot, including this one put out by Cambridge UP . Anyway, finished up the review over the weekend,and the publisher seems quite happy with it. I'm also surprised at how much fun doing this review was -- focused my attention on a number of things in the field I've only paid passing attention to before. ------------------ **From what I'm gathering online, it's not un...

When hunting for books to be reviewed in Fafnir , I realized that the University of Minnesota Press has been doing some good work in weird fiction and monster studies. One of their forthcoming books is The Monster Theory Reader (2019), edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, incidentally the reviews editor for JFA , and one of the reader's notable inclusions, at least according to the advertising blurb, is "Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s foundational essay 'Monster Theory (Seven Theses).'" Well! I've been teaching that essay each of my two semesters for ENGL 160D: Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others . You see, when I first got the class, I had no clue about anything in Monster Studies as a field, so I did a quick search in the library. Cohen's essay was basically the first thing I found -- and that's how I chose it for my course. Yes, I know, not a rigorous methodology . . . but, now that I know that, by pure luck of the draw, I've been ...

So, here's a memory that takes me back -- during my research trip to UC Riverside, I read many issues of Star*line , the official newsletter (and poetry publication) of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. This association was founded by Suzette Haden Elgin, so, as one might imagine, I saw her editorial work and poems everywhere. Quite an interesting figure, too -- after raising a family of 5 kids, she went back to school to get a PhD in linguistics, and her efforts in speculative poetry all came towards the latter part of her career. Also wrote a fair number of SF novels, too. Anyway, one of her side projects was a book called The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense (1980). What makes that title interesting is that, amazingly enough, I remember hearing about that book back in high school . The connection is the SFF writer Piers Anthony. I used to really like Anthony -- A Spell for Chameleon was the first fantasy novel I ever read. All told, I read about 30 or 40 of his book...

Well, just returned home after a 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside. All in all, results were something of a mixed bag. On one hand, I have a much better sense of the conversations that surrounded Poul Anderson's efforts in 20th-century alliterative versecraft -- formerly seen as only the province of Tolkien, Auden, Lewis, and a few other Brits.  On the other hand, I had hoped to find vast secret treasures troves of alliterative verse lying forgotten in various poetry mags and fanzines. Alas, not so much. I did uncover a few such works that I hadn't before known about . . . maybe, maybe , enough to squeeze a second article out of my research trip. Nothing I found, however, will likely shatter the heavens in terms of breath-taking original finds. Oh well. Even no information is some information, as they say (or at least I do). Still, the lack of success wasn't for lack of trying. Excluding dead time, overall I spen...