Saturday, 09 April 2005

Queering Turner Field?

So there I sat, on the couch, watching the Braves slaughter the hapless Mets with one eye and reading David Dobb's Reef Madness with the other, when I see Jose Reyes foul a ball off into the stands.  For those of you unfamiliar with the conventions of baseball telecasts, after a ball is fouled off the camera sometimes follows the ball into the stands, finds the person that caught it and zooms in him or her.  As often as not, the foul ball's caught by a young man accompanied by a young woman; and often as not, the young man's reward for shagging the ball is an enthusiastic, energetic kiss--both the young man and the young woman hopping at this point--from the young woman whose life he saved with a timely shag. 

Turner Field, the home of the Atlanta Braves, sits outside the city proper.  Braves fans are notoriously rural--famously supporting John Rocker after his diatribe on the purple-haried queers with AIDS who comprise the entirety of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's communter population--so when the camera followed the Jose Reyes foul ball into the stands and captured two men engaged in ritual post-ball-shagging osculation, I could hear the clinking of millions of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans hitting the floor from all the way out here...

...on another, more scholarly note, the following query came across H-Net's American Studies listserv this morning:

Can list members suggest ways to introduce the topic of sexual orientation into a pre-Civil War American literature survey?

Let me translate that for you:

I want to engender a discussion about a historical period but I don't know any works in that historical period that will allow me to introduce the only subject I'd like to address, so could some of you people who know the primary works in the period I've been hired by my university to teach tell me which ones I can queer so I don't have to stop reading Judith Butler to do something unimportant like gain expertise in the field in which I have a Ph.D.?

Sometimes rampant unprofessionalism amuses me; sometimes it disgusts me; sometimes it leaves me numb.  Cross your fingers and wish me the last tonight. 

Apr 9, 2005 9:19:11 PM | Academia, Books, Current Affairs, Evolution, Science, Sports, Television

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Speculation and the Reefer, er, Reef Currently reading David Dobb's excellent (if unfortunately titled) Reef Madness and its generalist claims about the intellectual culture in the 1830s, '40s, and '50s dovetail nicely with what the ones I would make were I writing a popular intellectual history instead of a dissertation. (Were that I writing a popular intellectual history! Were that I could write something well, and appealing, and with a chance--slim though it would be--to alter the contemporary intellectual scene, i.e. the small but devoted readership of The New York Review of Books.) But I have a few complaints, foremost among them Dobb's desire to speculate when he's already informed us that he lacks the grounds to. For example, Dobbs says Alexander [Agassiz] never wrote a memoir, and as an adult he actively sheltered himself and his family from the sort of scrutiny his father had invited. His surviving letters reveal little of his personal history, for while there are many, he destroyed those more intimate. His letterpress letter books have crucial pages razored out, and the papers lack diaries and letters mentioned elsewhere. (37) Dobbs wears his ethical commitment proudly here, and signals readers of it throughout the text with the usual speculative flares: "would," "probably," "if," "possible," "possibly," "likely," etc. (The magnum opus of speculative non-fiction is still, to my mind, Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, but that's another post.) But he intermingles what he knows from what he thinks he knows too, well, seamlessly. The narrative moves at so brisk a clip that passages like this one which follow the one quoted above almost slip by unnoticed: Having spent the previous eighteen months in limbo as his parents parted ways, by all reports sensitive and prone to melancholy anyway, Alex probably fet something short of "especially happy" that winter. (45) Now, that has all the markings of a successful bit of speculative non-fiction, by which I mean it's self-conscious about its status as history and calls attention to itself as an act of speculation. But I take issue with that "especially happy." It comes from the memoirs of a family member of Alex's mother Cecile (with whom Alex had spent that winter), who relates her saying the Freiburg winter, with its bracing summer air, was an especially happy time for the children. Alexander now became a proficient skater, an art in which as a young man he excelled...the boy and his mother spent many happy hours, while she sat in one of the high-backed sleds of that region, which he skillfully guided through the gay crowd of all ages who glided gracefully over the ice. (45) Dobbs feels sufficiently strongly about the constitution of young Alexander Agassiz that he sees no problem casting doubt on his mother's account (admittedly learned second-hand) of that "especially happy" winter. It's one thing to speculate when faced with a lack of evidence, another speculate in the face of it. I've seen this tendency in the work of professional biographers--Janet Browne's exhaustive life of Darwin brims with it--but...

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