Stratofanatic's Emporium

 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 go unanswered!) I read the book sometime in 2007, I think, during my MA at Ohio State. Just a random book I read unrelated to anyt...