Stratofanatic's Emporium

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 .