Stratofanatic's Emporium

Ah, good news. My general education course, ENGL 160D: Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others , has now been designated as meeting Quality Matters Internal Review Standards for online course design excellence. I don't get nothing for it, but it's a nice little perk. The designation is also a total bear to get -- besides doing a two-week online training earlier this summer on how to apply the QM rubric, the rubric is just a bastard to actually apply. There's 42 criteria, many of them involving "aligning" your course content with course-level and module-level Student Learning Outcomes, and much of it is admin-centered rather than student-centered. (That is, students never care or read these SLOs, but they're useful from an admin perspective.) If you miss even one of the essential criteria, you have to revise the course. Luckily, despite a 25-page review document, I only missed one of the 42 criteria, so revision wasn't that bad. All in all, ...

 A few weeks ago, I posted a lengthy blog entry on the mysterious colophon implanted by the Del Reys onto their new line of Ballantine fantasy books in 1977. Thanks to reading Anthony's  A Spell for Chameleon,  I thought the colophon a basilisk at first but after consulting with Douglas Anderson, we concluded that it was probably a  cockatrice ...  which I found interesting because Doug, apparently, had always heard the symbol referred to as a griffin, even though griffins aren't two-legged critters. Anyway, after some more digging, I found a few other tidbits. In Piers Anthony's second autobiography, How Precious Was That While,  I found the following passage (p. 134): So, one of the unanswered questions from my original post was, "Why did Lester del Rey apply his signature colophon to certain fantasy novels but not others?" The answer, apparently, turns out to be spite . After checking Donaldson's book covers on the ISFDB, Anthony's story check...

My latest open-access publication: " The Hesitation Principle in 'The Rats in the Walls, " in Supernatural Studies . This was originally a section I cut from my article on the same Lovecraft story (forthcoming in Gothic Studies,  due March 2021). Only started revising this piece after GS accepted the main article , but Supernatural Studies was so amazingly quick with peer review and publication -- basically, five weeks overall -- that it's actually appearing a good half-year before my Gothic Studies article. Just one of the quirks of academic publishing. On a personal note, this is officially my 10th peer-reviewed publication .... though five more are forthcoming. Just nice to finally hit double-digits, though.

So, I meant to do this post several weeks ago, after I'd read Stone of Tears and posting about several Goodkind interviews . Then this nutty semester happened, and of course Goodkind himself passed way on September 17th. Yet, now, I'd like to complete about my thoughts .... particularly on Goodkind's  Sword of Truth series, but focused on the one novel ( Stone of Tears ) I read. Violence So ... yeah.  Damn,  there's violence galore. Even ignoring the few hundred pages of sex-torture that Richard survives in Wizard's First Rule , Goodkind apparent reserved a special store of gruesomeness  for  Stone of Tears : more torture, cannibalism (albeit by good guys, the Mud People), characters being flayed alive, gang rape (p. 414), threats of gang rape, genocide .... Goodkind runs the gauntlet of awful things that human beings can do to one another. None of it evokes much real horror, apart perhaps from one character who is flayed alive. Either Goodkind doesn't have the ...