Stratofanatic's Emporium

Submitted my final grades for my ENGL 373A: Brit Lit I (Beowulf to Milton) class on Friday. This was, hands down, the most fun I've ever had teaching. Partly it was just teaching something semi-within my research area. Partly it was teaching upper-division students in the major. Another part was just having a great bunch of students. Some vital stats for the course: 43,000 words of lesson plans created, plus D2L shell 6 PowerPoints created 150 quiz questions created 10 possible short essay questions created for mid-term and final 81% average grade in the class overall I checked for comparison, and my Monsters course only has 25,000 words of lesson plans. That's almost a direct result of studying for this course -- I'm not a medievalist or Early Modern scholar, so there was truly a prodigious amount of pre-course research involved. To help prep those lesson plans, I created an additional "historical notes" document that's another 13,000 words. Overall, ENGL 37

So, last year, the facebook page for the Southern California CSL Society asked if any scholars would like to present at their monthly meetings. Since I had just finished some work on Lewis, I emailed the fellow and we set something. Then it got delayed from double-booking, and then delayed again. They mentioned maybe doing something in September -- i.e. two months ago -- but never contacted me. I forgot about the whole thing and only remembered the other day. So I contacted the point person, who responded with an annoyingly brief and unapologetic message. He also asked what I'd be talking on ... when that had already been established last year. Scrolling down four message would have answered that question. So I just deleted the whole thread and said the hell with them. I only made the offer in the first place they their society specifically asked for scholars, but I really don't want to waste my time with an unprofessional group.

Well, fate has conspired to force me to do several blog posts of late. This one ended up being a hassle, too. As Awards Administrator for the Mythopoeic Society, I'm in charge in shipping out the Aslans -- i.e. the trophies -- to that year's recipients. This year the ordeal took me two (2) trips to the trophy store, two (2) trips to the Post Office, and four (4) trips to FedEx for a whole host of reasons. .... mainly because the trophy store screwed up the first time around, and I didn't catch the error until later. (Then also because FedEx is good at packaging items for international shipment, but the Post Office has drastically cheaper rates.) Long story short, however: the Aslans are now shipped! Three of them international, two of them domestic. The only thing left is for me to get reimbursement. Also, I learned (slightly too late) that I can use my UA English Department's FedEx account to get huge discounts on various services. Well, now I know for next year.

So, here are the dangers of pedagogy when you're teaching a subject area outside of your field of professional study AND don't much care about proper pronunciation:  Within the last week in ENGL 373a, my Beowulf to Milton class, my students have (kindly) corrected my pronunciations on the following: (Southwark (apparently it's "south-verk," not "south-wark" -- this one was particularly embarrassing because I had just told them that the Thames is pronounced "Tems," not "Thames"!) Boccaccio ("boc-ca-cho", not "bo-ca-chi-o")! Scheherazade ("sche-her-a-zaud," not "sche-zhur-zaw-de")! And then! We were discussing the Hundred Years War for Chaucer, and somebody asked me if that was when Joan of Arc lived. I answered with an intelligent, "Um," because I honestly didn't know.  I'm so lucky my students seem to like me, cuz oh man, if they didn't .....

 So, a prospective replacement for me at Fafnir  just asked me some questions about the position, and I ended up writing a too-long email. Since I haven't posted anything in a while, I'm deciding to share here: --------------------------------------------------------------- Hi _____, Great to hear from you. Yeah, when I started as reviews editor, I was in the same boat -- absolutely  no  idea what to expect. So I don't mind talking about this at all. I'll go through a list of topics in order: Start time . Yes, you'd be officially reviews editor for 1_2023, and your name would appear on the front matter for that issue. However, we currently have a backlog of about six reviews for looking at, so a new editor would informally start whenever, since those are the submissions that would appear in 1_2023. In my view, best practice is staying about one issue ahead in terms of reviews ready to go. This means that there's never a last-minute scramble for content, or that

 Today, in my ENGL 373a Beowulf to Milton course, we took our midterm from 9:30 am - 10:45 am. Less than a few hours later at 2 pm, less than five-minutes walk from our building, there was a shooting incident at the Harshbarger Building. The individual hasn't been apprehended, but police have a description for a suspect. All in-person classes have been canceled, and we're being asked to stay away from campus. We also just got a message a few minutes ago saying that the person shot has just died. No other details have been released yet, whether the victim was a student or what the motive might have been. I'll be staying tuned, but it's an unsettling situation. EDIT: the suspect has now been taken into custody.

Well, here's one of the first signs you're a "real" academic -- a blurb from me on an academic book. I'm actually quite excited about this volume ( Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy by Matthew Oliver), which is about style in epic fantasy texts. One thing Oliver does exceptionally well is describe stylistic features in a really concrete way, through actual quantifiable stylistic techniques. There's none of that "impression of" nonsense or cherry-picked sample sentences from which egregious over-generalizations are made. Incidentally, my wife and I saw Oliver's presentation at ICFA 2022, and his was one of her two favorites of the whole conference. (My wife is a non-academic.) Turns out she really appreciates concrete arguments as  well!

So, this really bucks me up .... I discovered a random blogger, Joe Hoffman, whom I discovered through a recent mention o n Brenton Dickieson's own excellent website  A Pilgrim in Narnia , and I saw that Hoffman was interested in Poul Anderson. "Cool!" I thought. "I'm working on Poul Anderson too." Then I noticed that among Hoffman's keyword categories was "Alliterative Verse." Growing excited at seeing someone else interested in this same thing, I clicked the link .... and, right off the bat, immediately saw a   highly laudatory reference (and link) t o my own paper published last year in Studies in the Fantastic , “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry”. The link used by Hoffman was to the version on Humanities Commons.  It seems like Hoffman was also familiar with Jere Fleck and the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia, two groups important in the Modern Alliterative Revival. It'

Well, this was a pleasant surprise .... I've just received my first official invitation to contribute to an edited collection. The book is called Tolkien on Screen (Kent State UP), and it's a history of cinematic adaptations of Tolkien edited by Thomas Honegger, Hamish Williams, and Lukasz Neubauer. Unfortunately, I'm already completely swamped with writing projects up through the next year, so I had to decline, but I wish them the best of luck on the collection.

Just back from my first Mythcon! Well, my first in-person  Mythcon .... I attended the virtual one in 2021, which was my first year as Awards Steward. This year's event was held in Albuquerque, which isn't that far from Tucson, and the wife and I were doubly excited because of our admiration for Breaking Bad . By sheer coincidence, the city was unveiling statues of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman on the day of our arrival, and the actors, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, were in attendance. We missed the statue unveiling, but we twice tried to reach the Convention Center to see the statues. The first time, the Center was closed (it was a Saturday), and the second time it had closed temporarily due to "lockdown" -- certainly, a weird thing. Who calls a threat to a Convention Center? Luckily, our first Uber driver told us that the actors were throwing out the first pitch in the Albuquerque Isotopes game, i.e., the Triple-A minor league affiliate for the Colorado Rockies, a

Finally completed -- every single lesson plan for the Brit Lit I (Beowulf to Milton) course I'm teaching this fall. ... although technically, it's called "British and American Literature: From Beowulf to 1660." Anyway, there's 31,000 words of text in the document, plus one detailed PowerPoint to help explain the Gael/Briton/ Celtic/Anglo-Saxon thing (something that's always perplexed me about early British history), and of course all my quizzes set-up in D2L. Normally, working this far ahead seems crazy to me, but the subject matter is still unfamiliar enough that I decided to forego the standard week-by-week route .... and, honestly, I needed to see the shape of my entire course before even finalizing a reading list. I never imagined that I would need three weeks for Chaucer, for instance .... I'm truly amazed, though, at some of the possibilities created by this course's parameters. For instance, the combination of British and American literature in

I've taught the online version of my Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others class so often now that I rarely, if ever, check my end-of-semester evaluations. Well, I randomly did this time around, and there's a few gems: "Cut back on the homework! You shouldn't expect me to work 18-24 hours a week on this class." Well, technically it's the University of Arizona that expects that .... "Three due dates per week is too much" (several variations on this) A case can be made for this, granted, but the problem is that, if I reduce the course to two due dates per week, that means each due date is 9-12 hours per work, and the procrastinators will mostly fail. So it's a pick your poison scenario, alas. "How we were regarded as students seemed more personal than my previous classes. Which was a positive aspect for sure." Well, thank you, student! I do try to be a friendly, enthusiastic sort. "I truly think Dr. Wise is my favorite professor I

Just happened to glance at the latest issue of Journal of Inklings Studies , and I immediately saw a reflection by A. C. Spearing on C. S. Lewis as a research supervisor while at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s.** This struck me for two reasons. First, I've been reading a shit-ton of Lewis's literary scholarship lately, and I HAVE THOUGHTS . Second, Spearing is one of the few medievalists whom I've actually read. Way back during my time at Ohio State, I encountered Textual Subjectivity (2005) while taking a medieval literature course, and now learning that Spearing had studied under CSL is mesmerizing me. Anyway, I loved Spearing's reflection, and I'd highly recommend it . There are several passages I want to comment on specifically, so I'll take them in order. p. 112: "As is indicated by the quotation marks round ‘supervisor’ in his letter, and by its general tone of reluctance, Lewis was opposed to the professionalization of literary research and t

Well, hey! Apparently, I've now risen to the ranks of Scholars Who Have Been Cited on Wikipedia. A friend sent me the screen shot yesterday .... he was looking at the page for Stormbringer, the sword in Michael Moorcock's S&S Elric stories, and they quoted me. If you can't read the screen shot, it says: Literature scholar Dennis Wilson Wise wrote that "a weapon like Stormbringer reinforces liberal selfhood in a particularly concrete way. It carries a continuous external threat to personal autonomy, and it subverts a fully rational self-determination. Modern fantasy heroes, especially in epic fantasy, often rail against "destiny" or a prophecy, but such destinies and prophecies lack Stormbringer's sentient specificity." Of course, now I drastically want to re-write the whole paragraph .... taken out of context, I'm not sure the quote makes a whole lot of sense. Also, why did I put "destiny" in scare quotes? But cie la vie .... it'

So, been reading this book, Dragons in the West  (Oxford UP, 2021), and there's a pretty interesting Tolkien reference in there -- as you might imagine, perhaps, considering the book's subject.  Anyway, Ogden is basically writing a culture history of western dragons, though actually more "encyclopedia" than "history," and there's been a couple of distinct dragon permutations. In the Classical world, for examples, dragons (Gr. drakon ; Lat. draco ) were almost entirely giant snakes with preternatural abilities or roles. Then the artwork in the early Christian era started conflating dragons with sea monsters, which gave dragons their animalian heads and bulbous bodies. For legs and wings, though, we had to wait for dragons to start being conflated with demons and the Devil. By the 9th century AD, the dragons is a wyvern-creature and basically set, though the Western world needed until the turn of the 15th century to make them four-footed creatures permane

Looks like there's a massive hot mess at  Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts right now. Last summer, Brian Attebery announced his retirement after 16 years, and the Board then issued a call for a new "editorial collective." "Well," I thought, "this is exciting! I have a ton of publishing experience, including five years of editorial experience,  plus a World Fantasy Award, so I'll apply ... JFA would be a dream job." So I spent three work-days pouring my heart and soul into an application letter. It's some of my best writing ... for what it's worth, here it is . Despite my qualifications, I nonetheless kind of knew I had no real chance. First, I'm an outsider to the IAFA community -- no real connections, and I'm not good at socializing with random people at conferences. Still, I'd heard enough buzz to guess that JFA was looking hard to diversify .... and I know academia well enough to know that my kinds of diversity (working c

I greatly admired Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann's recent book, Tolkien as a Literary Artist  (2021), which takes a Corpus Stylistics approach to The Lord of the Rings , but I LOVED John R. Holmes's review of it in Journal of Tolkien Research .  Even as a book reviews editor, it's rare to see such a lucid and artistically elegant piece of writing.

And ... BOOM . With final grades submitted, this half-semester is now officially over. What I did over these last 8 weeks: taught two (!) accelerated online classes wrote one 11,000 word article (altho this includes work from winter break) wrote one book review wrote my conference paper normal editorial and administrative stuff with Fafnir and MythSoc Admin stuff as Director of Undergraduate Studies, which is more exhausting than teaching by far. This was my third brutal half-semester in a row, but there's a light in the tunnel for 7w2 .... At least I'm done with teaching for the year, thank god. But for now, Spring Break here I come.

Last night just had my  review published in the  Journal of Tolkien Research  on Peter Grybauskas's A Sense of Tales Untold , yet it's mostly an extended reflection on academic labor and Tolkien Studies -- the pressures that contingent academics must face, plus the limits they must endure, as we strive to do original research. This was also the review I was writing when I posted my last entry on the ethics of academic book reviewing .

Recently, a book reviewer for Fafnir  approached me with a problem. His first draft was vague and meandering, but that isn't necessarily unusual, as  most of our reviews need revision. Still, this fellow was a good academic, and it turns out his first draft was messy for a reason. Namely, he was floundering on the ethics of critically reviewing a book whose politics he so ardently supported. Although there  were  criticisms that he considered valid concerning the book's structure, he didn't feel right about expressing them. I appreciated his reaching out to me. I'm a relatively chatty kind of editor, though of course many don't have the time. And the ethics of book reviewing is a real thing. My own viewpoint is slightly different from James Gifford's , who among other good advice nonetheless recommends Books that fulfill career requirements simply cannot be read the same way as those that come after tenure and therefore without the same material demands on the a

Time for two reviews by me from the SFRA Review ! Belatedly, I only just now realized that I never mentioned my review of Robert Waugh's book, The Tragic Thread of Science Fiction (2019), which SFRA Review published last November. You can find my review here . It's maybe the most negative review I've ever written, but his New Criticism framework -- yes, really, New Criticism (!) -- doesn't hold up much. I'm afraid. I was honestly disappointed .... I'd read some of his Lovecraft criticism a while back, and his article on "The Rats in the Walls" was clearly a notch above what most other Lovecraft fan-scholars were doing. Anyway, my most recent review -- just came out today -- is a highly laudatory review of Amy Binns's biography of novelist John Wyndham, Hidden Wyndham (2019).** Just for giggles, I've managed to make references to Thomas Pynchon, Elena Ferrante, C. S. Lewis, and an extended analogy with A. S. Byatt's novel Possession . Check

So, been doing some research on Tolkien's curricular changes at Oxford in the late 1920s, and so I've been going through Raymond Edwards's biography Tolkien , which is absolutely fantastic on these issues. I'm struck again by how good & useful this book is. A clear love of academic detail, a careful knowledge of everyone whom he mentions even in passing, but also smartly restrained in drawing connections -- often illuminating ones -- and interpreting the known facts. And while I'm praising biographies, let me give a shout out to Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond's Chronology and Reader's Guide . Unlike maybe Edwards's biography, these are hardly an unknown set of books, I know, but there's just so much to be said for their format: 2,300 pages of pure facts without all the interpretative apparatus and story-telling of a normal biography. This really opens up the possibilities for researcher's asking unusual questions that a normal biograph