Stratofanatic's Emporium

Back in February, the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction issued a call for applications for editor positions, and I put my name in, of course. My term with Fafnir ended back in December, and it was time for the next step. Well, we just had the interview this morning. It went well; the editor-in-chief (they oddly call him a "managing editor") seemed like a really cool fella, and it was good hearing about the journal. Granted, I've done my own background research on MOSF JOSF , and the interviewers confirmed my impression -- they've had a lot of editorial turnover these last few years, and the journal itself is probably even in a more precarious state than Fafnir was when I first came aboard. Well, challenges and all that. The interviewers will make their decision in about a week; we'll see how that goes.

So, I've been writing an article on John Heath-Stubbs, the British poets, who's of interest to Tolkienists because he studied at Oxford in the early 1940s and wrote one epic poem, Artorius , with major sections in the alliterative meter. (Everybody knows that Auden admired Tolkien's use of Old English poetics, but Artorius is actually much better than The Age of Anxiety .) Anyway, I had the brilliant idea to look up some biographies of JHS's acquaintances in the hopes of gathering some more biographical detail on JHS himself. I found three relevant books, of which the third is the most interesting. (1) Eddie's Own Aquarius , edited by Constance Short ad Tony Carroll. This is mostly about Eddie Linden, the Irish-Scots poet who ran the magazine Aquarius for over three decades. He was close friends with JHS, though, and there's one reminisce by Robin Prising where he states that he knew nothing of JHS except his Blue-Fly poems, so Eddie took him "off to the Ca

Welp -- so, I just sent out over 100 200 emails (!) to non-majors who took our Gen. Ed classes last year, inviting them, "Hey! We're cool! Get a second major with us!" Already had two nibbles of interest, and we'll see how this works out. This isn't the first time we've tried this sort of direct advertising before, but this is larger scale than anything we've previously done. Our department actually has three separate majors -- English literature, Creative Writing, and Professional & Technical Writing -- and tons of bells and whistles: scholarships, study abroad, newsletters, publications, and so forth. We have a lot going for us, honestly, but of course the English major has been on a precipitous decline for well over a decade. So let's see if this direct advertising is brilliant, or merely desperate.