Stratofanatic's Emporium

In an effort to support more alliterative poet, I've just added several reviews on Amazon for Launcelot Schaubert's The Greenwood Poet . Not SF or fantasy, but heavily Inklings-indebted. What I wrote is below.

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.

The news just dropped that Verlyn Flieger, co-founding editor of Tolkien Studies and one of the most eminent Tolkienists who ever eminented, is stepping down as editor after 22 years. Yvette Kisor will be taking her place. Major, major news, and I wish everyone well.

Publication is imminent! About a week ago, I got the proofs back for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology , and just yesterday I got the official cover. I'm loving it.  And actually, simply picking a cover gave me the hardest time. When I got Rowman & Littlefield's marketing guide, I just couldn't find any layout I liked, nor any image from their stock photos that said "alliterative meter." So I just ended up going for an eye-catching SF/fantasy alien landscape. That seemed as thematically appropriate as anything, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it seems to work in actuality.

Abrams, Annie. Shortchanged : How Advanced Placement Cheats Students . Johns Hopkins UP, 2023. Over the summer, I did "assessment" for the AP language & literature test. They had originally contacted me because I'm a Director of Undergraduate Studies for a university English department, and they paid $500 for the labor. Now, granted, this payment is partly for self-advertising purposes; now they can put a "UArizona" faculty member as an assessor on promotional materials. But they did solicit feedback on the quality and fairness of the questions, and overall I didn't think it was a bad exam. These AP tests  are important, too. At the U of A, for example, a score of "4" or "5" allows an incoming freshmen to place out of English 101, so that's a significant savings in terms of tuition. It also improves retention and times to graduation. But I know Advanced Placement also faces a lot of criticism, which is why I just read Annie Abra

Well, that  was lightning fast. Just ten days ago I achieved an unofficial academic rite of passage by getting accepted into Notes & Queries .... and now the article has been published online. N&Q is one of those quintessentially English-y things: short, fact based articles on random questions in literary and textual history. Not a big publication, but a classic one -- the journal's been around for 120+ years, and it was hilariously parodied in Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex . Anyway, my article (only 1700 words long) is called "A Tale of Two Essays: The Inklings on the Alliterative Meter." It's long been known that Tolkien wrote an essay on Old English meter called "On Translating Beowulf " in The Monsters and the Critics , and that this essay originated as a preface for a student edition prose translation of Beowulf in the 1940s. Well, Tolkien promised his publisher a "few words" only to end up submitting a 36-page document instea

The immediate glow of that Mary Kay Bray award from SFRA is wearing off, and that's when they get you. Gerry Canavan from the SFRA just asked me to serve on their awards committee for the next three years (and chairing the third year). I should have expected that, of course, but characteristically wasn't. Anyway, I said yes. Even though I'm not quite sure how I'll fit it into an already packed schedule, service to the field is important, and it's the least I can do. At least the reading for this award won't overlap with my reading for the Mythopoeic Society Awards. The MKB stuff occurs in mid-winter, whereas my MythSoc stuff won't normally start until the spring.

Ah .... so, a nice moment just now. At the awards banquet in Dresden, the Science Fiction Research Association  has just granted me their May Kay Bray award for best review published in 2022 by the SFRA Review . The review itself is on a biography of the SF writer John Wyndham, the guy who did The Day of the Triffids . I'll post my acceptance remarks below -- they'll also be published in the SFRA Review soon -- but if anyone would like to read the review (it's short! ), it's online and open-access. ACCEPTANCE REMARKS Receiving the Mary Kay Bray Award comes as a huge surprise to me, not to mention a great honor. Normally when one writes a review, you do it as service to the field. They’re a nice break from teaching and heavier types of academic writing, and for myself, at least, I often pick subjects on which I have only passing familiarity. Reviews are therefore good excuses for me to dive into little research tangents, and that’s exactly what happened with Amy Binns’s

I'm not saying this is the reason academic journals are having a tough time finding qualified peer reviewers for their articles, but it certainly doesn't help: the sheer impersonality of things. Recently, one journal sent me a request (a form letter) through their automated system. I did the review in a few days, which is lightning fast in academia .... and all I got was a form letter "thank you" in response. No human interaction  at all, and considering that I gave free but high quality labor, the experience was highly alienating. Another journal,  Gothic Studies , does a similar thing: it simply sends out a list of 10 or 15 articles that need reviewing to everyone whom the journal has previously published. Nothing personalized. Basically just this: "Dear Mr. X, please do free labor for us. Thank you." Then, when I did once review for this journal, it took them two weeks to even acknowledge receipt of my review. That irritated the hell out of me, and I have

After discussing with the UA Library about e-version option for Paradise Lost , I noticed that their version of Milton's poem from Floating Press begins with the following "disclaimer": While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Needless to say, this is maybe NOT the edition I'm going to choose for my students!

The process has been a hard one, and a long one too, but  Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) is finally,  finally going into production.  As you might imagine, this leaves me quite excited. Even surprisingly excited .... because, honestly, this whole process has been a nightmare. Please don't mistake me: I'm not the kind of academic who sees publishers as the enemy. Many honest, diligent people work in academic publishing; many are excited about their roles in providing the public with ground-breaking research. Nevertheless, I now understand all too readily the frustrations and rage that can lead academic authors into seeing publishers in adversarial terms, so, just to put my own feelings to rest, I'll write out my experiences with FDUP/R&L. Hopefully, this exercise will be cathartic so I can enjoy the months that remain before the book's launch date. As some background, I initially contacted FDUP in Februa

I did one of these writing  productivity reports three years ago , and they're basically  my way of cataloguing how much I've produced in a particular time span. As an academic, writing for publication is part of the job .... although technically, as a contingent academic with no research support and who teaches a 4/4 load (and sometimes more), all this work goes uncompensated and mostly unrecognized. Still, I keep track, because that's what I do. So, in the three years since my last writing productivity report, which postdates the quarantine, I've written: 6 articles (although two are quite short) the editorial materials for 1 forthcoming book 3 book reviews The total word is officially  100,298 publishable words , or 92 publishable words per day. That figure, however is honestly somewhat depressing given my work ethic and how I've basically stopped "wasting time" by reading actual fiction. In my previous 3-year productivity report, my total word count wa

 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

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.

Ay yai yai! So I just graded 50 five-page essays for my 373A class in less than 30 hours, and the students will be getting them back during their very next class period. These quick turnaround always mattered to me as a student and as an academic, so I hate dawdling. Overall, I composed nearly 13,000 words of individual feedback, which is about 260 words per student. The last two days were intense, but at least they're done. Just in case anyone is interested, here are the "general" comments I offered to the class on D2L afterward. They very much align with how I try to present myself as an instructor: ------------------------- Hey everyone, So, final essays have been graded, and we have a pretty decent range overall. As you can see from the class statistics below, the average grade was a C (75%). The most common grade was C+ (75-79), and the next most common grade was A (90-94). A few people absolutely knocked it out of the park altogether. I gave everyone substanti

I don't often talk about writing pedagogy here, but given that most of my teaching is for Writing Program classes, and that my professionalization is continually ongoing, I've obviously developed many, many views on the theory and practice of writing, especially in Writing Programs. Anyway, we've recently devised the draft for a "values statement," and it's loaded with words like compassion, autonomy , equity , inclusion , and curiosity . The whole thing made me roll my eyes, and in response to this draft, I presented my objections to the entire statement in the following manner ----------------------- So .... I'll be honest. I absolutely hate this statement. The bolded words [ compassion, autonomy ,  equity ,  inclusion , and  curiosity]  are a simple list of abstract-noun buzzwords, and although I have no real objections to any word in particular (for example, what rational person would reject autonomy?), that is largely because each buzzword is so vague

Recently started reading Amber Lehning's The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien's Myth of Wilderness  (2022), and while I'm not far along enough in the book to offer a final opinion, I did get stopped in my tracks by one early remark in particular:  Had he written nothing else, " Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics" would have been enough to rank Tolkien among the great critical thinkers of Western literature. (8) It's hard to believe that no one, nowhere, in the entire  production process, caught this truly wince-worthy hagiographic exaggeration. Of course, Tolkien's essay undoubtedly is the single most famous essay ever composed on Beowulf , but still ..... "great critical thinkers"?  Tolkien was a brilliant philologist, to be sure, but even among medievalists there's a lot of competition for the spot of top dog. When you branch that out to great "critical" thinkers of all Western literature, that makes me qu

Yeah, this maybe will be a weird post, coming from a Tolkien scholar. Still, reflecting more on John M. Bowers's excellent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (2019), I realize that Tolkien would have struggled badly as a modern academic ... and that I, most likely, would have resented him deeply as a colleague.  Not as a person , mind you; Tolkien's a decent enough fellow. But my feelings are very much the product of academic labor under the modern neoliberal university. Thousands upon thousands of academics in various states of precarity: contingent laborers who, despite exceedingly high competence in every area of academic labor (research, teaching, and administration), and despite no research support, poor wages, and stressful labor conditions, nevertheless toil in precarity while certain excessively privileged faculty (certain tenure-trackers, Ivy Leaguers, etc.) muddy along with at best middling competence. Don't get me wrong -- as a philologist, Tolkien was brilliant, and he

 Well, it's that time of year again .... February 15th was the deadline for nominations to the Mythopoeic Society Awards , and, as awards administrator, it obviously fell to me to share those lists with the committees yesterday. We have a pretty good range of books across all four awards categories, and I'm excited to start reading them -- the scholarship awards, anyway, as I don't have time to be on the two fiction committees. Thanks to my recruitment efforts, too, we have 14 new members across the four committees, which, if it doesn't double the size of the previous committee members, comes pretty close. Fresh blood is especially important in the scholarship awards, which have traditionally had relatively few members compared with the fiction committees.  Probably this weekend I'll start ordering books from ILL and Amazon. It's going to be a good next three months!

So, having finally read enough of Chaucer now that I thought myself able to read John Bower's Tolkien's Lost Chaucer with justice, I did so .... and really liked it. Perhaps the most common critique I've seen in the reviews is that many of the correspondences he draws between Chaucer as source and Tolkien as author are rather weak. These occur mostly in the book's latter half -- the first half is more straight literary history about what went down with Tolkien and that book. At the same time, the Chaucer linkages that Bowers make between Tolkien and the Reeves's Tale and (especially) the Pardoner's Tale are particularly solid -- I thought the last bit about the Pardoner quite strong as well. Maybe the most fascinating part for me, personally, though was Bowers's claims that Tolkien suffered an "anxiety of influence" from 19th-century medievalist Walter Skeat ... something I don't think I've ever read before, but which perfect sense for an a

That's a wrap, folk. Our latest issue of Fafnir, volume 9, number 2 , has just been published, and that's officially my last horrah with the journal. It's been a pretty rewarding time overall . Over the course of the last five years , I've had the opportunity to work with some fantastic editors and, of course, reviewers. In fact, it's probably been working with the reviewers themselves that I'll remember best about this experience. Although I'm closing out my tenure with relief -- the burnout was starting to get to me -- I'm still immensely proud of everything we've managed to accomplish these past five years. Anyway, here are the highlights and personal accomplishments: Developing the reviews section from scratch.  We went from having 0-1 reviews per issue to about 6-11 per issue under my tenure. Ushering almost 100 reviews to publication, oftentimes through several drafts. Many reviews were from graduate students and Early Career Researchers.  Wor

So, reading through my first-time course evals for ENG 373A. In general, I'm satisfied with them. As per usual, students found my energy and style especially appealing, and they also gave high marks to accessibility and ability to make material interesting. Nobody complained about unclear expectations. Overall, the commentary was quite positive, and several students self-reported enjoying the course highly. The complaints were also pretty standard. I still talk too fast. Unlike my freshmen course on Monsters, however, there were almost no complaints about "too much work." Still, several people offered the standard complaint about "harsh grading." (This remark, which also tanks my ratemyprofessor score, continues to confound me, as 70% of my students got A's or B's. Historically, I'm pretty sure at least some of these complainers have actually gotten A's in the course overall. I struggle to come up with an explanation that don't sound like an

It's well-known that Tolkien pronounced his name tol- keen , not tol- kin  (like most Americans do) ... but here's a conundrum. Did he emphasize the first syllable, or the second? In other words, TOLL -keen or toll- KEEN ? Reading Bowers's Tolkien's Lost Chaucer , which is fantastic, and he says that he confirmed that the accent's on the second syllable through people who worked with him. (His first source was Reynolds Price's Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back , 2009), and then he confirmed Tolkien's supervisee V. A. Kolve.  However, in CS Lewis's essay "The Alliterative Meter," he clearly puts the accent on the first syllable. The line goes like this (the capitals belong to Lewis): "We were TALKing of DRAGONS | TOLkien and I". So, Tol -keen. I'm going with Lewis here for now, because part of me has really never cared about proper pronunciation. So, personally, I'll keep saying Tolk- kin, like a good 'Murican. Sti