Yesterday, Benjamin Szumskyj emailed that his Fritz Leiber: Critical Studies, was now officially out of print. I turned sombre at the news, because that anthology marked the last remnant of my academic aspirations.
In any number of alternate universes, I am probably teaching English at some university. For years, that was my intention in this one. But finances, family, and a reluctance to work towards a doctorate put an end to those ambitions years ago. I was so disillusioned by academia that I even stopped my critical work on the American fantasist Fritz Leiber and emerged myself in the world of technical writing. All that survived was Witches of the Mind, the revised version of my master’s thesis, selling a few copies every year and being praised by the half dozen other people in the world who were interested in the subject.
Several years later, Szumskyj, then a semi-professional fantasy scholar, contacted me, praising Witches and eager to lure me out of academic retirement. Mostly, I resisted the temptation, but he did manage to coax from me a contribution for Critical Studies, “The Allure of the Eccentric in the Poetry and Fiction of Fritz Leiber.”
The writing of the article was a painful reminder of academic discourse; as Phred Nguyen, the member of the Vietcong in Doonesbury said when hearing Marxist jargon for the first time in a long while, I kept thinking, “Man, I’d forgotten we talk this way.” I enjoyed writing it as a prolonged daydream of what might have been, and I think I managed to say something original, but after it was done, I had no desire to follow up with more articles. Literary analysis was no longer what my life was about.
Still, now that the rights have reverted, I like the idea of giving the article a semi-permanent home. I’m posting it here under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license for any who might be interested in what else I write when I’m not discussing free software. After all, it’s not everyday that you get to read a relic of an alternate universe.
Off the Wall 