Phil Taylor: Revealing reaction 'Being called gay remains the most damning label in sports. Items like the Post's hint at that truth, and reactions -- or overreactions -- like the one from Koufax drive the point home. The moment that athletes begin to treat rumors of homosexuality with less outrage is the moment that papers like the Post will stop printing them.

Obviously, there are gay professional athletes. If any of them were considering coming out of the closet, it's easy to imagine those thoughts disappearing when they see how desperately other athletes and ex-athletes strive to make sure they aren't stuck with that tag. When the athlete in question is someone like Koufax, widely considered to be one of the classiest and most principled sports figures of all time, it can only have an even more chilling effect.'

The Chronicle: 2/21/2003: Getting Emotional What fascinates Ms. Sedgwick about Tomkins's work was his understanding of shame. She calls it "the place [in his work] where issues about the self, and the boundaries of the self, become really acute. Shame is what happens when there is a crisis between identifying strongly with someone else, reaching out to them, on the one hand, and encountering a check on that identification, a rebuke."

For Tomkins, that crisis is definitive. Shame is, in effect, the matrix from which individual identity emerges. But it is also an experience that precedes (and exceeds) our ability to name or understand it. The experience of shame, says Ms. Sedgwick, "doesn't come ready-made with an explanation."

This is extraordinary news. Google has purchased blogger.com. Terrific, I think. Extraordinary.

How much power should one company have over a million-plus independent voices? Think of the number of times blogger.com has gone down due to technical problems. Now think of the power of a company that might -- for whatever reason -- turn off the servers that parcelled out those voices.

If you are interested in the problems of knowledge production and the intersections between the 'humanities' and the 'sciences', you might check out an informative exchange over at Edge, "The New Humanists." The essay itself is arrogant and full of holes, though some his charges are dead-on, but the responses are worth attending to.

One of the most extraordinary articles published in the New York Times within memory . . .

Young Japan:
Films and lectures, Spring 2003, UNC-Chapel Hill
All events are free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Carolina Asia Center, African and African-American Studies, Asian Studies, and the New York Japan Foundation

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | In search of a lost literary giant Ostensibly, "Stone Reader" (which opens this week at New York's Film Forum before a planned national rollout) is the story of how hard it is to be a genius, or at least a "serious" literary writer, and of how fickle the fortunes of the publishing industry can be. But that is an old and tired story; what "Stone Reader" offers that's new is its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one.

From left to right:

Kara Keeling, Harry Dodge, Robyn Wiegman, Silas Howard, Tyler Curtain

3 February 2003, Duke East Building, Duke University after screening and public discussion of By Hook or By Crook (Steakhaus Productions, 2002).

You have to attend the Ms. Film festival and workshop this Saturday, 8 February 2003. Terrific site, terrific stuff.

While you're at it, take a look at Flicker Films, and join a chapter near you!

Some of the most intense and interesting work being done in academe is happening in American Studies. I will link to a polemic against American Studies, but I warn the reader to take Alan Wolfe's diatribe to be a barometer of the extraordinary power of the ideas and scholarship that is being generated in AmStudies across the board. There is not a single scholar or intellectual whom he cites in his rant who doesn't do interesting and productive work. It is an exciting field to watch and learn from.

What I think is interesting about the article is how it articulates a set of anxieties, confusions, and allegiances to at times competing intellectual, ideological, and nationalistic interests. I hope it will engender a productive discussion about what triggers this type of anger and emotionalism, and concomitent insistence on a retreat to a canon and past set of epistemological and methodological assumptions. Moreover, I am fascinated about how 'gay' is attached to past academics, intellectuals, and scholars in order to secure the writer's 'liberal' creds, not to mention to tangentially gesture towards the integrity of the "original"/non-corrupt canon in the first place.

I spoke at Duke University this evening on a panel with Harry Dodge and Silas Howard about their extraordinary digital video, By Hook Or By Crook. The panel went well and the attendence for the video and talk afterwards was tremendous. My comments about the video are posted on the web in PDF format. (If you cite my talk, in whatever format [paper, editorial, blog, whatever], please drop me a note to let me know.) In the meantime, try to see the film as soon as possible. It is an extraordinary intervention in queer cinema, and advances the range of narratives that queer folk tend to tell each other, beyond the tired dramas about coming out, or coming out and dying. While my comments were suspicious about using masculinity to stage "female body" agency in public spaces, I am also an enthusiastic supporter of the complex social and critical communities who came together to make this video.

I think that critical theory and literary studies often misunderstands what should be a productive/accretive relationship between past literary critical work and present models of cultural and literary production. One way of recovering this is to re-read work -- amazing, intense work -- such as Love and Death in the American Novel. I have a pleasantly conflicted relationship to that text, but my reading of his work has never not been productive.

As a queer theorist, given the sheer amount of information that folks in my field need(ed) to know (like all specialists), I was not trained in important work such as Fiedler's -- though like a lot of graduate students, I found his work for myself. Surprisingly, I found that Love and Death was the great repressed work of queer theory -- influential, but little cited, while much indexed and admired. I am sad to see his energy and polemics pass. I want to echo Linda Wagner-Martin, however, and say yes, we should all wish to do so much and so much good.

Leslie Fiedler made me think thoughts that I had never thought before. I cannot imagine a more sincere tribute or recommendation.