Stratofanatic's Emporium

When I was researching for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology , one of my most important early resources on finding poets was a website created by Paul Douglas Deane, a linguist with a strong historical interest in the alliterative meter.  He hasn't updated the site in years, but the imminent publication of my anthology did  inspire him to work on a complete overhaul. The site is now much more user-friendly, and he's found over a dozen new modern alliterative poets about whom I knew nothing before. It's quite impressive. So, check out  Forgotten Ground Regained ... new and improved!

It's official: my article revealing the first religious poem C.S. Lewis ever wrote, "Sweet Desire," is now published by English Text Construction . Here's the link: " Dating 'Sweet Desire': C. S. Lewis’s Education in Alliterative Poetics ." I've already blogged about my core argument here , but here's the gist: ....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 . For metrical geeks, however, the article's most compelling points will involve how one poet progressed in terms of his skill in writing Old English-style poetry. For anyone familiar with the alliterative meter, so...

Well, my l atest book review just dropped in Journal of Tolkien Research : a review of a Tolkien's classical sources. Feel free to read my full review of  J.R.R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics (2023) , but it's an useful book that probably won't interest many folks outside of its narrow disciplinary focus. However, my final paragraph brings up a particularly killer idea regarding Tolkien, diversity, and the "open society," and that may be of interest to folks. I took it on, though, because (a) a hard copy was offered, and I now only review books in exchange for a hardcopy, and (b) it keeps up my streak of one published review every year since 2016 -- that is, eight years running. And I'm guaranteed a ninth year from two reviews in queue. This is a pretty meaningless streak, mind you, but why not.

So, there's a meme going around where a cartoon characters is acting calm and collected despite like a zillion swords pointing at him .... and the meme goes, "What opinion about academia would point you in this situation?" And for me personally, it seems like I have quite a few opinions that would fall into that category. A sampling: Upper-admin is an easy scapegoat, but faculty themselves often make terrible administrative decisions. Academia has good points and bad points, like any other job. Every job has politics -- not just academia. If you want to become (and stay) an expert in your field, working overtime is a must. Peer review works fine as a system. "Reviewer #2" gets a bad rep mostly because academics just can't take legitimate criticism. The humanities egregiously over-produce PhDs. 80% of tenured professors should never, ever complain about their workloads.