Stratofanatic's Emporium

Some very sad news to report. My dissertation director, Dr. David Lavery, passed away yesterday morning. The whole English department is in shock. I saw him last just last Thursday, and he seemed in good humor, high energy, and the best of health. He had dozens of projects in the works -- including maybe organizing an academic sub-conference forthe upcoming "Con of Thrones" being held in Nashville next year. The reality of his passing has yet to set in. He was a great colleague and friend, and, while I always knew he had something of a cult following among the graduate students, even I have been surprised by how devastated so many people have been. For my part, I always intensely admired him. He genuinely enjoyed the life of the mind, and he loved popular culture, and he was relentless in helping not only his graduate students but all graduate students succeed. I remember, about a year before I ever took a class with him, watching him and Dr. Hixon give a publications works...

Back during my first orientation at my current university, the Dean of the College of Graduate Studies gave us a "pep talk." He gave us the standard "4-year plan" information, but he also said something else interesting -- enraging, actually. "Graduate school is a pretty good deal," he said, "which is why you get the salary you do. If it was any higher, you'd never want to graduate." He said it jokingly, but he was serious, too. He also called our graduate stipend "beer and pizza" money, not something we are meant to live on. (Given that I do 60 hours per week, I assume he wanted us to take out unpayable student loans.) When another friend of mine questioned him on our lack of health care coverage, he brought out that "not supposed to live on your stipend" line. I started thinking about that moment again after two recent incidents. First, a friend of mine recently had someone hit&run on her rental car. She had a re...

Okay, so I'm already hooked on Game of Thrones . I knew I would be -- the books are great. (Actually, funny story: I loathed the first two books, perhaps mostly because the first scene of the first book seemed to encapsulate a hoard of fantasy cliches, but I gave the series another chance when I read a plot summary of the third book -- and the Red Wedding. That was the only time a plot summary could legitimately be called jaw-dropping.) Anyway, the missus and I are five episodes in, and we've run across a little problem. GoT, as even fans must admit, is a little gory, . . . and Martina just truly dislikes that sort of thing. It doesn't bother me at all, although I hardly consider it a major selling point, but working through this issue is getting tricky. I can't just not watch the series, since I both want to and need to for my field of study, and she doesn't want me watching 60+ hours of anything without her, so she's soldiering through. I do, however, have...

Walking down campus the other day when I heard this student, evidently some sort of Marxist frat brother, say to another, "It's all hegemony, bro! Everything! This university, everything!" Good gawd, it's day two of classes and I already have to hear about hegemony. Also, last night, I had the Game of Thrones class I'm sitting in on. My director's teaching it, which is awesome, as is the number of friends I have in there. Now that I've been ABD for a year and a half, I'm getting kinda nostalgic for the classes. But I have to admit that not having to write anything makes the experience even better. I'm also super pumped to start the HBO series. I've read the books but, obviously due to lack of a tv, have never seen the series. Last time I checked a few years ago, it wasn't available on-line. (I actually contacted HBO customer service to verify that.) Now, though, apparently there's a thing called "HBO Go." I'll give tha...

 . . . is always loveliest. Okay, okay, I'm neither taking nor teaching any classes this year -- one of the perks of the Writing Fellowship. But I still love the feel of fall and the excitement of first day. After four months of campus being a ghost town, seeing all the students on campus energizes me. Although I'm not taking or teaching classes, I will be sitting in on my director's Game of Thrones this Thursday. Got a number of friends in it, and it'll be a nice way to stay in touch with the department. It's real easy, otherwise, to feel like you no longer belong. Interesting tidbit: since Martina worked the admin side of academic, she always hated the beginning of the semester. Can't say I blame her, hearing her stories!

Finished the last Black Company book last night. Could have finished it a week ago, but I only had a 100 pages left and I needed a free night where I could savor it. All told, between nine BC books and portions of The Instrumentalities of the Night , I've gone through about 4,000 pages of his fiction this summer. That also includes a few forays into his Garret P.I. books, a series of hardboiled detective fiction set in a fantasyland. I don't really care for the hardboiled-ness (although they have the typical Cook flavor), so I didn't actually finish any of them. My article on Instrumentalities  should be ready shortly. I read somewhere that one should not submit anything in the first two or last two weeks of a semester, so I'll hold off until mid-September to send that off. Fingers crossed. Cook, though, really is an unacknowledged master. The other day, I read an old  New York Review of Science Fiction  article by Steven Erickson, who writes in a similar mode of Gr...

So, I'm a few chapters in  Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness , a recent book by Helen Young. It just came out, and I've been looking forward to it. Still not sure what I think of it -- Whiteness Studies as a field is not up my alley, but Young certainly seems to be handling her material relatively well. Two things, though: 1. Eccentric and excessive capitalization. Skin colors such as White are consistently capitalized, as are the genres (Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc), but "eurocentric" is not. The latter sort of typographical cutesy-ness strikes me as more annoying than politically edgy. But the excessive capitalization gets on my nerves even more. If I'd wanted to read German, I'd actually bother learning German. 2. This may be the WORST proofread book I've ever read. Seriously, on nearly EVERY page there is a comma splice, a grammatical mistake, strange spacing, something . This book is from Routledge, for crying out loud. ...