Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, yeah, this is my first (and only) fiction reading list update for 2021. Normally, I read enough that I break the year  into two halves, but that wasn't practical this time around. Oh, not because of how awful 2021 was, since it wasn't, but mostly because I exclude academic titles from these productivity lists, and academic reading seems to have monopolized my time this year -- a product of all the research I did on the anthology. The end result is a very  un impressive fiction reading list for the 2021. In fact my fiction reading has been so sparse of late, I deliberately volunteered to review a biography of John Wyndham, a writer I'd never heard of, just to force myself to read more fiction books as research. ... and ended up loving Wyndham, by the way. FINAL STATS FOR 2021 : 6,155 pages (or 31 books) over 365 days,  which averages out to about 17 pages per day. For reference, last year in 2020 -- the real year of the pandemic -- I read over 16,000 pages of fiction. Co

Here's something cool by Contingent Magazine .... a list of books and articles  published in 2021 by non-tenure-track literary scholars. (There's a distressing number of us, alas.) Because of the unbearable slowness of academic publishing, I had a relatively ridiculous seven (!) peer-reviewed articles come out in 2021 -- not to mention 2 non-peer-reviewed articles and one book review, but I didn't bother including those. Overall, it's been a wonderful publishing year, and something of a mental relief to have my insane backlog of academic scholarship taken out of publication limbo.  Still, the high number of quality monographs from fancy university presses by contingent scholars is, I think, a source of legitimate despair for the future of academia.

Well, here come a new minor publication from The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching  ... it's a short personal narrative about what teaching during the pandemic taught me, and written to be as accessible as possible to all audiences. It's called " GoogleDocs and Zoom: A Love Story ." Not a very important publication in the grand scheme of things, but it was a short quick write -- basically did it over a few days when I was on a five-day holiday in California with a few friends last June.

As one does, I found myself suddenly in desperate need of knowing when, how, and if Old English folk dropped their 'aitches. And, while researching this question, I came across this line of text from a O.E. grammar book from 1922 (specifically, E. E. Wardale's An Old English Grammar ): "Note:--It will be observed that the loss of h was later than Breaking." Except that I know no idea what this "Breaking" -- with capital letter! -- means, nor does the one medievalist friend with whom I consulted. And this is where my familiarity with epic fantasy is maybe causing some issues, cuz now I keep thinking, "Oh wait, does she mean when the Dark One helped cause the Breaking of the World?"

It's official. ... last night I hit "send" on Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology , and it's now in the hands of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. I'm highly excited about the anthology overall, and while I no illusions about how much any academic sells, I do think the topic fascinating and the scholarship (if I say so myself) pretty far-reaching. 49 different poets 152 poems 53,000 total words of editorial content, which includes 20,000-word introduction 11,000 words of headnotes 5,000 words in Appendix C 17,000 of footnotes. All contracts signed, except for one minor hiccup and one person for whom I couldn't find any contact information. All permission-to-reprint fees paid for out of my own pocket. And I managed all this in "only" eight months. The last three months have been particular brutal since, as Director of Undergraduate Studies, I've been putting in 10-12 hours days for seven days a week, ev

The secret of academic writing is, of course, TONS and TONS of melodramatic pathos! Two quotes from my (now completed!) introduction for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: "Much too much Society verse, I fear, has suffered an even unkinder fate than this—surviving, if it survives at all, only in damp basements, dusty attics, and long forgotten old desk drawers."  "Still, generally speaking, most unpublished poetry finds only one fate. It disappears quietly into the night: unknown, unloved, unrecognized." As I put the finishing touches on this sucker, too, I've been reflecting on what makes a final-stage proofreading successful. One thing I think about is reading speed : as an academic, you read papers much faster than you do when composing (or revising) them, and I've found that this changes the actual phrasing a writer should use -- for instance, I tend to remove lots of qualifying phrases since, during a speed-read, I realize that the

So, having just received my copy of Tolkien Studies , I dropped everything (as one does) and immediately starting reading "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2018", the year-end literature review of all things published on Tolkien during that calendar year. These literature reviews were a godsend to me as a graduate student, and they're absolutely vital for anyone hoping to keep up with the field. Well, my essay on Verlyn Flieger's two YA novels published in A Wilderness of Dragons  (ed. John Rateliff) as a Festschrift  for Flieger, ended up getting some very nice coverage. Like, one-of-the-nicest-things-anyone's-ever-said-about-my-research coverage, which meant more both because it was so unexpected and because I assumed that this book chapter in particular would likely never be widely read. The review's worth quoting in full: Dennis Wilson Wise drills deeper into Flieger's use of fantasy fiction to comment on her Tolkien scholarship in the most exten

YES!!! So, my two contributor's copies from the most recent issue of Tolkien Studies  have just arrived .... my article is " Depth, Globalization, and the Domestic Hero: The Postmodern Transformation of Tolkien’s Bard in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Films ," and I think it'll be a highly useful application of neo-Straussian and Marxist theory to Tolkien Studies as a field. Here's a quick recap of the argument. Afterward, though, I'll spend this entry discussing the absolutely tortured publication path my brave little article had to follow. ARGUMENT : Does anyone remember the scene from The Battle of The Five Armies when Alfrid Lickspittle asks Bard, “The Master’s mantle was there for the taking, but you threw it all away. And for what?” Bard doesn't answer, but Jackson, who's not really known for his subtlety, quickly pans the camera to Bard's children, thereby implying that family (duh!)  is important. Anyway, that's Jackson in a nutshell. He takes

 Randomly browsing through C. S. Lewis's letter, and, in a letter to Warnie dated 22 Nov. 1931, he writes: To read  histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves--well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things that great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then .... Although the emphasis on "great men" might now count as among the "silly things," this sentiment, by and large, is still how I tend to read novels, and which I see little enough in contemporary literary criticism ...

So, after holding my article hostage -- hostage , I tell you -- for four years, the editor of The Baum Bugle , Sarah Crotzer, has finally published it into her most recent issue: “Delving into Nome Man’s Land: Two Traditions in Baum and Tolkien.” Baum Bugle , Autumn 2021, pp. 13–22. Interesting story behind this one. Sarah suggested the original idea to me back when we were in grad school together, maaaaybe right after she became Bugle editor, I don't remember. Anyway, I sat on the idea for a while. Then, in December 2017, tuckered out from my long article on gender violence in Stephen R. Donaldson, and wanting to write something short and spiffy for the CV, I turned to L. Frank Baum. Since I knew this break had been coming up, I'd been reading a whole bunch of Oz books in preparation. So, once the fall semester ended, I plunged into a 5-week writing spree where I wrote two short articles back-to-back -- the first an essay on magic words in fantasy (but especially Baum, of cour

So, I recently had (for another context) to articulate my basic philosophy of being a book reviews editor, so thought I'd shared that here.  Basically, my view of what a good book review entails appears in Fafnir's book review guidelines . Long story short, this is what I expect: The reviewer should assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses. . . .  If a book has more strengths than weaknesses, or vice versa, please let that be reflected in your structure. We consider it a standard convention of the review genre, however, that even highly laudatory reviews contain some critique, even if a minor one; likewise, even highly negative reviews should contain some elements of praise. In terms of unwritten policies, I return all submissions -- with comments -- to the reviewers within 24 hours. Besides expediting the total publication process, this is a form of practicing compassion for contingent labor and the busy workloads of all our reviewers. About 80% of our reviews require

So, I received an email out of the blue today from Dr. Donald "Mack" Hassler, a former editor of Extrapolation,  a prolific critic within SF Studies, and also my Honors thesis advisor at Kent State University back in .... let's say, 2005-2006 it must have been, so fifteen years ago. Anyway, he had just seen my recent article in Extrapolation about Poul Anderson's poetry, and dropped me a line.  Here's part of what he said: The new issue of Extrap just got to me in the mail, and I am delighted to see the new long piece by you.  Also, I see that you are now Director of Undergrad Studies in Arizona. I remember the old days in the Honors College so well and am very proud of how you are moving in the profession. He was a good advisor, too -- gave me free reign to do what I want, and very patient. If I remember right, after a summer of working on my thesis** alone, I then handed him a 100-page mess in September, un-proofread, with comments like "INSERT EVIDENCE HE

So, back in April 2020, right as the quarantine was launching into full swing, I got randomly contacted by a Tolkien fan society in China, the ArdaNEWS Studio , asking if they could translate my (then) recently published  Journal of Tolkien Research article, " On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward an Epic Fantasy Criticism ," into Chinese. For people with a good memory, I blogged about it here . Despite the best of intentions, as you might expect, the project was delayed because of COVID. Since I know the translators are all volunteers and Chinese grad students in English, and that translation is a major effort in the most optimal of conditions, at one point I even offered to make them a donation. The group declined, gracefully, because they wanted to maintain their non-profit status. Anyway! I just got a long, super apologetic email from their main translator saying that, yes, the article is now fully translated and proofread, but .... they weren't really happy with

So, there's this non-affiliated scholar named Bobby Durie who, on Twitter, posts frequent and interesting nuggets about H. P. Lovecraft in a series that he calls "Deep Cuts." In the following Deep Cut , he has a brief but remarkably information FAQ about Lovecraft's cat, whose name HPL uses for the four-footed ghost-rat sniffing kitty in "The Rats in the Walls." Since I've actually taught this story a number of times, I'm posting this here as a reminder to share with my students at a later date.** ------- ** Typically, rather state the animal's name in class, I just call him The Cat with An Unfortunate Name" (CWUN)™.

I don't drive or have a phone, so never got into podcasts, but I just listened to The Prancing Pony Podcast  and, holy cow, they're amazing -- funny, well-spoken, great readers of Tolkien's text (they even do voices!), and they prepare with much useful background research. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to them. The following two episodes are about Saruman. Both reference a 2016 open-access article of mine , from the Journal of Tolkien Research , that reads Saruman closely together with Plato's Republic, which is how I found the podcast. When they posted the episode on twitter, someone kindly thought to tag me. Anyway, here are the episodes:  Episode 217: Fooling Yourself (The Angry Old Man) . They begin talking about my article at around the 51 minute mark, although the set-up begins at about the 48 minute mark. They continue talking about it for a fair bit. Episode 218: The Renegade . Mention of my article begins at around the 34 minute mark, though the set-up comes

 So, MythCon 51 is about halfway through its first day .... but, luckily for me, the roundtable I had to moderate is now complete! One of my little terrors about academic, in fact, is the challenge of moderating a conference panel or roundtable. On one hand, the task is super easy, and your main job is just to be invisible. On the other hand, the task is so easy that a moderator-induced catastrophe is all the more cringe-worthy. And moderating a roundtable isn't actually all that easy. For this one, we had a roundtable featuring 3 of last year's winners of the Mythopoeic Society Award, one critic and two novelists. Since I'd only read the critic, I had to hurry up and read the two author's books, plus do enough google-research to ask intelligent but open-ended questions of the panel. We managed to get through 3 of my 5 prepared questions, which I should perhaps have anticipated, before opening things up to the general Q&A. Anyway, since I did an insane amount of pre

 Ellard, Donna Beth. Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures . punctum books, 2019. I was reading this book because a blind peer reviewer, who otherwise had offered some very nice suggestions on an article submission, suggested I consult it for the history of Anglo-Saxon/Old English studies. Although I'm not qualified to speak on the ongoing debates about "whiteness" and institutional racism within contemporary medieval studies (a big source of debate in recent Kalamazoo conferences), I can certainly state that this particular book, or at least its first chapter, left me completely under-whelmed. In one sense, I admire Ellard's writing style .... an auto-ethnographic, personal sort of academic style that is becoming increasingly common. A good recent example is Ebony Thomas's The Dark Fantastic , which won a World Fantasy Award last year. Apparently, too, publishers like it because it makes academic writing more readable -- something that I'll always support

So, I was reading an article on quality peer reviewing (cuz I'm a geek like that), and I discovered that there is a community out there devoted to recognizing quality peer reviewers .... normally, a thankless task that conveys no professional benefits to the reviewers. This community is called Publons . I only browsed the website briefly, so I'm posting about it here partly to remind myself that I should later check it out more fully . It's also geared more to peer reviewers of scientific articles, who I gather tend to get more requests than humanities scholars. Still, given that my MLA presentation last January suggested a need to somehow recognize peer review within the academic community, I found this discovery of Publons quite intriguing!

Mind. Blown. So, I'm at the coffee shop, and I'm watching the person across from me reading Lin Carter's fantasy sword-and-sorcery novel, The Tower At the Edge of Time (1968) -- a horribly bad novel by a horribly bad writer. Just to give you sampling, here's one sentence that I've always remembered: "His body was that of a gladiator, or a god, magnificent in its manhood and virile strength, like the gold statue of Lionus the Hero which stands in Argion, the Trader's World, in far Orion. It was burnt a golden bronze, seared by the fierce ...." (And that's where the GoogleBooks snippet ends. But really, where does one go after "manhood and virile strength?" And how many pulp S&S clichés can  you pack into one short paragraph? Well, let me tell you: Lin Carter's not the type to let that sort of challenge unanswered!) I read the book sometime in 2007, I think, during my MA at Ohio State. Just a random book I read unrelated to anythin

Word has just officially come down: for the next two years, I'll be the new Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) for the University of Arizona's English Department. The following is a daunting list of all the tasks now my responsibility: Assess and evaluate undergraduate course curriculum and course scheduling Provide support and coordination for English Honors program Manage undergraduate scholarships Coordinate assessment, undergraduate Address student inquiries, complaints, and requests Work closely with academic advising team to anticipate and address student needs Collaborate with Program Coordinator on undergraduate matters Write newsletter Create and run activities related to recruitment and retention Lead meetings: UGCC, Collaborative English Team Honestly, I'm rather shocked that I got the position. After all, I'm a mere  lecturer .... contingent faculty ... for one of the largest English Departments in the entire country (and for a top-tier R1 research ins

 One of the stranger outcomes of doing research for the anthology is that you find relevant poetry in the craziest  places. For instance, I now know more about Asatru -- a modern religion of Odin worship -- then I ever thought possible. This is thanks to the website Odin's Gift run by a modern pagan woman and poet from Germany, Michaela Macha. The website's a massive collection of pagan-related works and verse that I just stumbled upon a few weeks ago -- I forget how specifically. Well, I emailed Michaela to ask if her site had any specifically alliterative poetry, and she directed me to the following page:  Alliterative Poetry in Old Norse verse meters . Looking through it, I quickly discovered something astounding: a link (broken) to a poem called "Invocation" by Paul Edwin Zimmer. Now, I've found "lost" poetry by Paul before ... namely, the stuff he wrote as "Master Edwin Bersark" for the Society for Creative Anachronism. And I previously k

Weird. Apparently James Blish, the SF writer, did his Masters thesis on Ezra Pound .... and actually SOLD it to The Sewanee Review for $375. (And that's in 1950 dollars, folks. Converting that into today's terms, that's around $4,111.)** Anyway, I'm going through it .... and finding that it's eminently readable. Here is Blish, tackling the claim that Pound's poetry is contentless (that is, that his manner is his matter): "To which one might respond that only in the universe of literature is it possible to say 'Nobody has yet found the Mississippi, if there is such a river,' years after it has been found and marked plainly on available maps in its proper location. It should not matter -- but it does -- that ten eminent men and forty parrots have said that there is no such place once these maps have been circulated, and other travelers have been there ....." Which all had me chuckling, I have to admit. ("Ten men and forty parrots!") Ov

You might recall the classical story of Solon of Athens once going to visit Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus asks Solon to name the happiest man he has ever known, believing that Solon would pick himself, but instead Solon -- being Solon -- picks a random low-born nobody. Surprised, Croesus asks why. In short, Solon replies, "Well, he's dead now, so we can safely judge his life. ... let no man count himself happy until the end." And, indeed, King Croesus's own end ended up being an unhappy one. So I was reminded of this tale while researching some background information for Jere Fleck's magnificent praise poem, a coronation ode for King Aonghais Dubh MacTarbh, a person in the Society for Creative Anachronism beginning his second term as king of the East Kingdom. As you might expect from a praise poem, Fleck speaks quite highly of Aonghais, and he borrows many of the traditional themes and motifs from the skaldic tradition in Old Norse literature.  Being the natural

Gawd, it's been a month since my last entry .... basically, I've been overwhelmed with busyness, thanks to the end of the semester and working on the anthology. (Oh yes! I now have an advance contract from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology!) Anyway. I just read Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns . It's one of those poems that gets ultra high praise .... but that I know that I didn't quite, even after multiple readings, and reading a few reviews and commentaries. (Generally, I'm so much better at prose than at verse). But then I read the following short review by John Heath-Stubbs, an accomplished poet: "Like his other poetry it pays the compliment to the reader of not going to meet him half way. [True, dat!] I cannot say that I fully understand the direction of these poems, after more than one reading.” But, still, Heath-Stubbs continues on, saying (somewhat vaguely) that they’r

Sometimes, you want to write academic articles brimming with social justice issues, critiques of capitalism, and trenchant analyses of our current culture situation. Other times, you just really want to write about evil possessed vampire demon swords. The idea for my latest publication in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , "A Brief History of EPVIDS," began as something of a joke idea. You see, not long before, while doing some work on Paul Edwin Zimmer, on the last day of 2018, I'd read  Blood of the Colyn Muir, the novel that Zimmer co-wrote with Jon DeCles. This novel is cheesy pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction, but I enjoyed it, and the the battle scenes are hardcore. Anyway, not long after, I'm walking to the gym, and this idea just sorta pops into my head: the all-powerful sword in Sword of the Colyn Muir sure had an uncanny resemblance to Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer from his Elric of Melniboné stories. (I really don't like the Elric tales, but any

Oooh, this one appeared without me realizing -- my latest article, from Gothic Studies : “ Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats in the Walls .’” As usual, I'd like to post the riveting tale of how this article came to be. It originally developed because of the ENGL 160D Monsters course I teach for the University of Arizona ( see my syllabus ). When first offered the class, I knew that there'd be Lovecraft in it .... except I didn't really know much about Lovecraft. So I picked "The Rats in the Walls" and his more famous "The Call of Cthulhu" almost at random, and then began a Lovecraft reading binge to educate myself on why Lovecraft was actually a big deal. My "eureka" moment came after my second semester teaching the course. As one knows, when you teach, you have to break stories down to help your students understand them. Well, when I broke down "The Rats in the Walls,&

I remember, when researching A. E. Housman for my prelims (concentrating on his poetry, obviously, from A Shropshire Lad ), coming across this quote from wikipedia: Many colleagues were unnerved by his scathing attacks on those he thought guilty of shoddy scholarship. ... He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all three, saying: " Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head." Well, by happenstance, I'm looking at his introduction to Manlius's Astronomicon , and the guy really doesn't let up. This [1579 edition of Manlius] is his [Scalinger's] greatest work; and its virtues, if they had fewer vices to keep them company, are such that it is almost importunate to praise them. True, there is luck as well as merit in the achievement: many of his emendations required no Scaliger to make them, and

So, the Inklings at Oxford. There's a couple different well-known remarks about them by famous students, primarily after they revised the English Language Syllabus in 1931. This revised syllabus featured Anglo-Saxon rather heavily (even moreso than other British universities at the time) and excluded anything later than the Romantics. Auden, for instance, said that Tolkien's lectures on Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon mesmerized him. Less kindly, Kingsley Amis -- later author of the first academic novel,  Lucky Jim -- called Tolkien "incoherent and often inaudible."  But what did students think of the course-of-study itself? Well, I was breezing through the autobiography of John Heath-Stubbs, who attended Oxford in the early 1940s, and whose major work is the long epic poem  Artorius (1972). To my knowledge, I've not seen any Tolkien scholar ever peruse this source. Anyway, Heath-Stubbs isn't much read nowadays, but if his name rings a bell, it's probably because

So, wow.  Normally, I've never paid much attention to Nobel Prize winners, at least outside the usual Anglo-American canonical figures still taught in university curricula (so: Faulkner and Steinbeck yes, Kipling and Pearl S. Buck no), but I've recently had to read, as research, The Long Journey by Danish Nobel Laureate Johannes V. Jensen . Not sure what I was expecting, but a plotless Darwinian mythologization of the Nordic racial type told in absolutely beautiful prose wasn't exactly it. None of those elements are an exaggeration, either. The prose is absolutely breath-taking. It almost has to be, since  The Long Journey can only loosely be considered a novel. The "plot," so to speak, spans forty thousand years of human history from our primitive origins during the Ice Age, to the Germanic tribe of the Cimbrians and their robust but quasi-primitive beliefs, to the Gothic cathedrals of the Catholic Church, to the "triumphal" west-faring of Christopher

Thanks to an eagle-eyed peer reviewer, I just realized that Poul Anderson's epigraph to a short story "Chain of Logic," a translation of verse 45/46 of the Elder Edda's   Völuspá , is not actually his  translation. Rather, Anderson took it almost verbatim from A.G. Chater's English translation of The Long Journey by Nobel Prize-winning Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen. Except that the  Völuspá  verse isn't Jensen's own translation, either. Jensen had, in turn, borrowed the verse from H. G. Møller's original Danish translation in 1870. So this has led me on a merry-go-round of trying to compare various translations in languages I don't actually speak. Thank god for Google Translate, online ebooks, and amenable colleagues! First things first -- Jensen took the verse straight from Møller without changes, so that's simple.** Next question. We got two English-language versions of verse 45/46, one by Chater, another by Anderson. The latter, as I m

So I just learned (or re-learned) that today, February 28th, is Kalevala Day in Finland, the day when they celebrate the Finnish national "epic" collected by Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. Tolkien, of course, had an early fascination with this poem, which he first saw in W.F. Kirby's translation as a teenager. By pure coincidence, though, I was reading The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis just last night, and saw that CSL also read and admired Kirby's text. Here's a part of it: After Kirby's K alevala Sound of weeping in slender grasses Rose, a mourning in the pretty woodland. Round him mourning were the tender grasses, Flowers of leaved glade were grieving, Fading for the maiden's marring; Woodland weeping for a mother's daughter. In one place no grass was growing, Flower-forsaken, earth was naked, Where he had done the unholy thing, Where maid had fallen and man stolen Maidenhead of his mother's daughter. Lewis, as you can see, keeps the trocha

Well, there it is -- my first MLA completed. Despite the unfortunateness of an online-only conference, I'm glad I participated .... although, granted, MLA doesn't have much to offer a scholar of SF and fantasy, as there was virtually nothing worthwhile about those topics there. (The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts will always be better!) All in all, I attended two panels on Fredric Jameson,* and all the CEJL (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) panels about academic publishing. My own panel, "Publishing While Precarious," was a CEJL panel, in fact. So, since I'm unlikely to ever publish an article out of this presentation, here's my conference paper that I presented at MLA 2021: “ Treating Contingent Labor with Compassion: Strategies in Journal Publishing for Reducing Wait Times ”. At least a few people really liked it ... and one respondent, too, really appreciated the point made between wait times and academic "Quit Lit."