Catching up & Future Plans
plus resolution to post at least weekly!
Now that the three conferences in three months marathon is over, I want to take a few moments to catch up on a few things, list a few projects I am planning to start in the next few months, and make public my resolution to post here weekly (at least)! I hope to do more, but I think the weekly post is doable. Ideally, I’ll be finishing the half-dozen or so posts I have saved in the drafts folder, but I also have ideas for new projects that I’m happy about. Then I will close with a dramatic teaser!
So, first catching up: I posted a few months ago about the issue of Substack’s tolerance and promotion of Far Right Extremists (FRE). I did some research and was not able to find another option that I could be sure would not go down the same road as SS (the extremist posts get the clicks, and the money, and social media generally has been going through the process Corey Doctorow calls enshittification).
If you’re interested more details about what I found out and why I have decided not to leave this platform (for the time being), I’ll be glad to explain more in the comments (to try to meet my new weekly resolution, I need to work against my habit of autism monologues in which which I try to say ALL the things and run out of energy and don’t post!). The result however, is that I’m staying here although I completely understand why and support those who make the decision to leave.
My resolution is to post at least weekly (if I write it down, it will help). So in furtherance of that plan, and because I’m going to be staying here, here are some of my plans:
Second, future plans (three!):
I hope to start interviewing people writing about Tolkien (which I define quite broadly in my previous post — scroll down to the fifth item!) this summer. So if you’re interested, email me at robinareid AT fastmail.com. [ETA: Thanks to the alert reader who notified me I had an extra email in my email address: “fastAmail” is incorrect, but it’s now corrected]. If you know somebody who writes about Tolkien, see if they’d be interested.
I also plan to start a series of posts spotlighting Tolkien scholarship (may be monographs, may be anthologies, may be single articles, may be blogs) that I think deserve more recognition and why I think so and why they are important to me!1 This series won’t be the sort of academic review (though I have written those for journals and I am fantastically grateful to find good reviews about scholarship!): it will be more of a personal response! Most of these will be work I loved and find important, but I reserve the right to post on occasion about a publication I have, er, issues with! As a teaser, the first book featured will be Amy Amendt-Raduege’s “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible approach will deal with anthologies that I think have some problems overall but have some fantastic individual chapters!).
I will post a poll to solicit feedback from you all, including suggestions for posts/topics and things I can do to encourage discussion.
And, finally, a teaser — not only will I be announcing the new co-chairs for the Tolkien Studies Area of PCA in a few months (probably after the August board meeting, if all goes as planned), I have a really exciting new project that I can hardly wait to tell you all about (*glides mysteriously away*).
There is something of a tendency in Tolkien scholarship, which I suspect is typical for all academic fields, to hyperfixate on the Big Names. Our field is young enough that I can remember when it didn’t exist (heh). Verlyn Flieger, Jane Chance, and Tom Shippey are what I call the Big Three Founding Members (there was criticism and analysis before them, by fans and reviewers but in this case I mean the people who established Tolkien studies in academia). I have books by all of them, and read them when I did my shift from feminist speculative fiction scholarship to Tolkien scholarship, and they are important to know about — but the scholarship has developed in the mumble mumble sixty or so years since, and, depending on what people want to write about, there are many others works that need to be read (and increasingly, as I go and do all my weird stuff, I rely on them less and less, with the exception of two major essays by Verlyn that I consider some of the most important *recent* work — more about those later!).