Stratofanatic's Emporium

Academic efficiency is a topic that obsesses me. Although academic culture contains a fair amount of underground animosity against "productivity pressure" and the Protestant Work Ethic --  The Chronicle of Higher Education  is full of it   -- I'm still continually strategizing ways to be more efficient with my working time. This attitude has gotten me through grad school  and  a full-time contingent faculty position without any mental health issues, so there's that. Plus, I just love working for its own sake.  Anyway, here's my latest attempt at self-assessment. In my last year of grad school, I used to keep of yearly productivity record for my writing (see  here  and  here ). Once I began publishing regularly, though, I soon found yearly records impractical. After all, you can wait up to 11 months to get back a journal's reader's reports**, and the revisions sometimes take as long as the original submission. So, here's my first ever...

Ah-ha! A Youtube content creator named LA Quadling just put up a short review video of the latest issue of The Baum Bugle , which features an article by yours truly on the history of magic words. (The article is celebrating Baum's novel The Magic of Oz , which contains an unpronounceable magic word called "Pyrzqxgl.") And, luckily, Mr. Quadling quite liked my article. Check it out if you're interested -- it begins at 3:10 in the video and lasts for just over a minute.

We've now hit the three-month mark for quarantine. Stuck at home working instead of Starbucks, this is how I've managed to do: 2 academic articles (18,000 words total) 1 book review (2,000 words) 2 encyclopedia entries (4,000 words total) Saved about $200 worth of coffee. That last number, incidentally, is especially painful.

So, the last two months of quarantine were spent writing two essays on modern alliterative poetry in English -- one on Poul Anderson, another on the fandom and genre writers who found in Anderson (and Tolkien to a lesser extent) an example and model. The second essay, especially, was an odd one for me. It involved a lot of emailing random people, especially folks in the Society for Creative Anachronism, on whatever they might have known.** Anyway, I managed to find some really enthusiastic, friendly members who were founts of knowledge. One was Beth Morris Tanner, who co-wrote a booklet for The Compleat Anachronist series on pre-modern verse forms. Another was Sandra Straubhaar, someone previously unknown to me but (I realize now) has been long involved in Tolkien studies, including several entries for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia edited by Michael D. C. Drout. Sandra also helped me with a really tough question. The SCA customarily uses medieval personas, and I couldn't discov...