Stratofanatic's Emporium

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon

Well, the editor for  MOSF Journal of Science Fiction  just emailed me, asking if I'd be interested in being their book reviews editor. I declined.  Just being offered that particular editorial position was strange. During the interview, I explicitly stated that I had no interest in repeating my work as a book reviews editor, and that I wanted to take the next step in my career. Perhaps there were Zoom connectivity issues ... at one point, after talking for three solid minutes about my experience with  Fafnir , the second interviewer asked me, "Do you know anything about book reviews?" Trying to be polite, I played off the question as her maybe thinking that, when I said "reviews editor," I meant something like what a managing editor does with arranging peer reviews. Still, the question proved that she hadn't done basic due diligence by reading my CV or my application letter. So, red flag there. Even so, even if they had offered me a different editorial posi

So .... it seems pretty clear that the IAFA, the major organization for the academic study of fantasy, is currently something of a dumpster fire. I won't mention the absolutely horrendous last three issues of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , which were   published after the retirement of Brian Attebery; that's another blog post, but the editorial team's lack of experience was pretty obvious. For right now, I just want to talk about the IAFA itself, and even from my semi-outsider's perspective as a rank-and-file member -- the whole organization looks to be in absolute disarray. For some background, there were major discussions last year about moving our annual conference, the ICFA, out of Orlando, Florida. That's not been unusual lately. Scholars in the humanities are overwhelmingly left-leaning, and some people across several different academic organizations have wanted to make political statements by boycotting holding conferences in red states. (My own view