Stratofanatic's Emporium

Just happened to glance at the latest issue of Journal of Inklings Studies , and I immediately saw a reflection by A. C. Spearing on C. S. Lewis as a research supervisor while at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s.** This struck me for two reasons. First, I've been reading a shit-ton of Lewis's literary scholarship lately, and I HAVE THOUGHTS . Second, Spearing is one of the few medievalists whom I've actually read. Way back during my time at Ohio State, I encountered Textual Subjectivity (2005) while taking a medieval literature course, and now learning that Spearing had studied under CSL is mesmerizing me. Anyway, I loved Spearing's reflection, and I'd highly recommend it . There are several passages I want to comment on specifically, so I'll take them in order. p. 112: "As is indicated by the quotation marks round ‘supervisor’ in his letter, and by its general tone of reluctance, Lewis was opposed to the professionalization of literary research and t...

Well, hey! Apparently, I've now risen to the ranks of Scholars Who Have Been Cited on Wikipedia. A friend sent me the screen shot yesterday .... he was looking at the page for Stormbringer, the sword in Michael Moorcock's S&S Elric stories, and they quoted me. If you can't read the screen shot, it says: Literature scholar Dennis Wilson Wise wrote that "a weapon like Stormbringer reinforces liberal selfhood in a particularly concrete way. It carries a continuous external threat to personal autonomy, and it subverts a fully rational self-determination. Modern fantasy heroes, especially in epic fantasy, often rail against "destiny" or a prophecy, but such destinies and prophecies lack Stormbringer's sentient specificity." Of course, now I drastically want to re-write the whole paragraph .... taken out of context, I'm not sure the quote makes a whole lot of sense. Also, why did I put "destiny" in scare quotes? But cie la vie .... it...

So, been reading this book, Dragons in the West  (Oxford UP, 2021), and there's a pretty interesting Tolkien reference in there -- as you might imagine, perhaps, considering the book's subject.  Anyway, Ogden is basically writing a culture history of western dragons, though actually more "encyclopedia" than "history," and there's been a couple of distinct dragon permutations. In the Classical world, for examples, dragons (Gr. drakon ; Lat. draco ) were almost entirely giant snakes with preternatural abilities or roles. Then the artwork in the early Christian era started conflating dragons with sea monsters, which gave dragons their animalian heads and bulbous bodies. For legs and wings, though, we had to wait for dragons to start being conflated with demons and the Devil. By the 9th century AD, the dragons is a wyvern-creature and basically set, though the Western world needed until the turn of the 15th century to make them four-footed creatures permane...

Looks like there's a massive hot mess at  Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts right now. Last summer, Brian Attebery announced his retirement after 16 years, and the Board then issued a call for a new "editorial collective." "Well," I thought, "this is exciting! I have a ton of publishing experience, including five years of editorial experience,  plus a World Fantasy Award, so I'll apply ... JFA would be a dream job." So I spent three work-days pouring my heart and soul into an application letter. It's some of my best writing ... for what it's worth, here it is . Despite my qualifications, I nonetheless kind of knew I had no real chance. First, I'm an outsider to the IAFA community -- no real connections, and I'm not good at socializing with random people at conferences. Still, I'd heard enough buzz to guess that JFA was looking hard to diversify .... and I know academia well enough to know that my kinds of diversity (working c...

I greatly admired Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann's recent book, Tolkien as a Literary Artist  (2021), which takes a Corpus Stylistics approach to The Lord of the Rings , but I LOVED John R. Holmes's review of it in Journal of Tolkien Research .  Even as a book reviews editor, it's rare to see such a lucid and artistically elegant piece of writing.

And ... BOOM . With final grades submitted, this half-semester is now officially over. What I did over these last 8 weeks: taught two (!) accelerated online classes wrote one 11,000 word article (altho this includes work from winter break) wrote one book review wrote my conference paper normal editorial and administrative stuff with Fafnir and MythSoc Admin stuff as Director of Undergraduate Studies, which is more exhausting than teaching by far. This was my third brutal half-semester in a row, but there's a light in the tunnel for 7w2 .... At least I'm done with teaching for the year, thank god. But for now, Spring Break here I come.

Last night just had my  review published in the  Journal of Tolkien Research  on Peter Grybauskas's A Sense of Tales Untold , yet it's mostly an extended reflection on academic labor and Tolkien Studies -- the pressures that contingent academics must face, plus the limits they must endure, as we strive to do original research. This was also the review I was writing when I posted my last entry on the ethics of academic book reviewing .