Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, I have a total of five entries in TLE -- two on Beagle, two one Stephen R. Donaldson, and one on Le Guin's The Dispossessed . Like most online platorms, too , TLE counts its. The hits for Beagle? Between 60 and 80, which isn't bad for something that came out 2 weeks ago or so. Donaldson? He's been out for over a year, and both entries are in the 400s. Again, respectable. How about Le Guin? So far, there are over 3,000 hits . . .. in under two months . I'm practically dying here.

Recently just had three good-sized encyclopedia entries published in The Literary Encyclopedia : The Dispossessed [by Le Guin] Peter S. Beagle  [bio] The Last Unicorn [book by Beagle] If anyone would like to see the entries but doesn't have institutional access to TLE , just send me a message, and I could forward a pdf.

Ah . . . . I've made my first appearance(s) in "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies," the literature review published each year by Tolkien Studies . Personally, I love "TYW." As a grad student who knew very little about the secondary scholarship on Tolkien when he hit ABD, this bibliographic essay was a life-saver -- an exhaustive treatment of all the relevant scholarship since 2001.** ( TS began in 2004, and the TYW does three years in the past.)  So, my mentions: #1 My first essay in Tolkien Studies , which argued that The Silmarillion should be read as a unified text rather than a compilation. The reviewer, John Magoun, whose work I've not previously encountered, was rather ambivalent. On one hand, he said the article is an "extended and clever brief" (206), and it "semi-plausibly" defends its viewpoint. He did, however, think my final section was "rather weak." Still, what really stings is this: "Ignoring questi...

So, in my next-to-last post , I related the rather mind-boggling incident of a young-ish academic who, submitting a review to me, had plagiarized my own review on that same book. Well, I'm happy to report that this situation will apparently have a happy ending. After a few sternly worded e-mails, it looks like the reviewer in question will work diligently to produce a new, better review. I won't know for sure until it's actually submitted, but I'm hopeful. As I mentioned in my earlier post, this was a teachable moment-- that's always my gut reaction in these kinds of cases, whether I'm dealing with undergraduate freshmen or more advanced academics. Sure, it astounded me that a doctoral student could believe I wouldn't notice the plagiarism. But everyone has to learn sometime, and one's first foray into professional academic discourse can be intimating. And while I'm more than willing to use my meager institutional authority strategically to employ ...

I'm ridiculously happy that I've managed to latch onto Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research . Last July, after a fair bit of legwork, I managed to get us enrolled in the Directory of Open Access Journals, a nice piece of street cred that will raise our profile and grant greater exposure to our articles. Now, we're busy in the process of earning our DOAJ Seal of Approval for following best practice in open access publishing. There's a lot of steps involved in this, but one of them is liberalizing our copyright so that authors, not Fafnir , retain it without restrictions. Esko just sent our the information e-mail out to our editorial board, and it just strikes me as immensely cool that I'm involved in something that requires e-mails to an editorial board.

When I first became reviews editor for Fafnir , there were a number of things I never anticipated. Late reviews, for one thing -- we give people three months for their review, but I still have to chase up over half of our volunteers, which is a colossal waste of my time, as well as simply being unprofessional. Also surprising are all the reviews -- a majority of them, in fact -- that require moderate to heavy revision. Maybe that shouldn't shock me, but it does. And then, of course, there was the case of the experienced Big Name academic who sent us a review both incompetent and unpublishable, and got huffy when politely asked for a re-write.** The weirdest case, though, is what happened to me yesterday -- I was sent a review that clearly plagiarized a previously published review. The catch? The review they were plagiarizing was my own . Not even joking. The reviewer was smart enough to have written all the words themselves (typos included). But the ideas, specific analysis a...

One of our professors is sadly unable to finish out the semester, so the last 5 weeks of his senior-level course in "Travel Fiction / Travel Narrative" was advertised through out departmental listserv. I jumped at the chance -- it would have been a fantastic new line on the c.v., plus doesn't it just sound fun? And I had the qualifications for it, too, with a doctorate in contemporary British and American literature. Only catch was that I don't formally know much about travel narrative or Latinx and minority literatures (this professor's emphasis). I told our Undergraduate Director that, of course. . . . and they ended up going with someone else. Oh well. Would have been awesome, though.