Though the Olympics aren't quite over, I thought it'd be good to bring people's attention to the openly queer athletes who've succeeded in Beijing, despite the stigma often attached whenever sports and sexuality cross paths.  

Stories like theirs often slip between the cracks, despite 24/7 coverage of the games.  But as long as stereotypes exist about the ability of gay, lesbian, bi, and trans athletes to perform at the same level as their peers, we need their stories to remind us that they can and do succeed.  

Here's a quick roundup of athletes who are not only at the top of their game, but also open members of the LGBT community.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  This long defunct series is soon to be revived full time, but the current kerfuffle over the New Yorker cover is practically begging for a discussion about the nature of satire, its history, form, and intents.  

In the past few days, a lot of text has been spilled over what is and isn't necessary for satire to work.  I want to make one thing clear from the outset: I'm not here to discuss whether the New Yorker cover was offensive or not.  I am here to clear up some misconceptions about what satire is, what it "should" be, and how it works.  I'll be addressing specific criticisms at the end of diary - but first let's have a primer on satire itself:

A rambling riff on the oddness of New Orleans as part of this cycle's NOLA/Gulf Blogathon...

(h/t to Jay Elias for linking this in a diary at Docudharma, and to webranding for linking it in a comment this weekend)

Lest we forget why we fight, the New Yorker had a long but outstanding article last week about the soldier who snapped the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib.  Specialist Sabrina Harman's letters home about the torture methods make for difficult but necessary reading.  Make no mistake: this, and not the excessive parsing of candidates' statements, is why we're all here.

Submitted for the NOLA diary-athon.

You've read about the situation in New Orleans.  You know there are still crumbled houses all over, that thousands have never come back, that the economy is crippled and crime out of control.  You've heard that the levees are still unimproved, the local politicians are corrupt or ineffective or both, and that the cable news networks no longer see the issue as sexy enough for your attention.  You've wondered if things can get better.

Good news: this diary is dedicated to you, and what you can do to help.

*sigh... I don't expect this to be a popular diary, all things considered, but this is my first foray into writing a candidate diary, and I'll probably regret it.  

I'm not writing about the candidates per se: I'm writing about how you and I assess information, and whether the intensity of primary season causes us to leap at conclusions we might otherwise not if we were thinking more clearly.  The candidate race is very heated, which means that every comment and every intonation are coming under intense scrutiny.  That means it's doubly important that we take care not to let our opinions get ahead of our brains, although the temptation is strong otherwise.  

Yes, this is about the 60 minutes interview...

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  I regretfully have to announce a few-month hiatus on the series, at least until the summer.  Unfortunately the real world has a way of infringing on my valuable internet time, and with a dissertation defense looming at the end of the semester I can't really justify the weekly half-day spent putting these diaries together.  

But a hiatus is not a GBCW, and I fully expect the return to the series as soon as this particular hurdle is cleared.  In the meantime, follow me below for a few quick announcements, future writers to be explored, and requests...

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last time we discussed gay Harlem Renaissance author Richard Bruce Nugent, who tapped into the experimental cadences of black modernist literature to spin fantasies on queer life long before it became acceptable to do so.  This week we're going to talk about another American experimental writer, albeit one who achieved enormous popularity both at home and abroad.

With torture and extraordinary rendition so much in the news, it may come as something as a surprise that today's subject experienced the agony of unjust political imprisonment first hand.  But in 1917, this recent Harvard graduate and volunteer in a World War I ambulance corps found himself thrown in prison for "espionage" without recourse to any legal defense.    Fortunately for history (and for us) the experience did nothing to crush his puckish personality, and he went on to become one of America's most warmly loved artists.

Follow me below for a jaunt with this 20th century master, and don't forget your capital letters and punctuation:

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it's filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it.

But not for long.

This past week I had the great luck to attend an advance screening of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, now the third (and a half) major incarnation of Sondheim's 1979 musical, based on a 19th century pulp slasher.  Sweeney is the greatest of all musicals, combining sophisticated music and well-written characters in an almost impenetrably dark moral fog.  

What's most interesting from our perspective is the way Sweeney Todd grapples with the problem of capitalism, an issue foregrounded in the classic Broadway staging and to some extent in the new film version.  Let's take a closer look at a few moments that emphasize this critique.

Note: This essay contains spoilers, and plenty of them.  If you don't want to know what happens in the musical/film, stop reading now.  

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last time we met over the wreckage of the Civil War and acid humor of one of its most famous veterans.  This week we'll stay in the United States, but jump ahead a few generations to an almost-forgotten writer who merits a closer look.

After World War I, black soldiers returning from the front were disgusted by the treatment they received from countrymen they'd fought and died defending.  At the same time, black intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois and Alain Locke began to envision a cultural project that would elevate the African American experience in the eyes of its otherwise cultural oppressors, while political activists like Marcus Garvey brought  pan-Africanism to the streets of New York.  Throw in a sudden burst of artistic imagination and some seriously talented writers, and you've got all the ingredients for the Harlem Renaissance.  

Today we're going to talk about one of its most fascinating personalities.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last week we sailed to ancient Mesopotamia to search for everlasting life with the great king Gilgamesh, and along the way we learned about ancient Sumeria from the venerable Moonbat.  This week we'll jump forward to 19th century America, where a journalist with a bitter sense of humor is reshaping the horrors of war into brutally incisive portraits of human nature.

Ambrose Bierce: soldier, journalist, war correspondent.  He fought in the most brutal Civil War battles and waged a one-man war against the entrenched interests of Big Railroad in California.  He moved in all levels of society both here and abroad, then disappeared during the Mexican revolution, possibly killed by Pancho Villa's forces.  He was suspicious of politicians as of human nature in general, and since his death has become synonymous with acidic misanthropy.

Let's take a closer look at some of the works of this distinctly American writer...

Greetings, literature loving Kossacks!  Earlier this week, the venerable Moonbat wove a history of ancient Mesopotamia, of Sumeria and Akkadia and Babylonia, of kings and tyrants.  Today it is my daunting challenge to supplement his essay with a close reading of Gilgamesh, the semi-fictional account of a Sumerian king on a mad quest for immortality.

If you haven't read Moonbat's excellent introduction to the history of ancient Sumeria - drop what you're doing and read it now!  Then you'll be ready to wrestle with the ancient man-god-king before he drags us to the edge of the world in search of eternal life.  Along the way we'll meet goddesses and giants, scorpion-beasts and feral men, and we'll learn about life before the Great Flood...

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  I apologize for my two-week hiatus from the series, but the demands of real life took me away from the computer longer than I expected.  And what better way to celebrate a re-start than by picking up with a writer whose work is so recent, the ink is practically still drying on the page...

How do we form our identities?  Do we rely on our parents, our neighborhoods, or our religion?  What happens when those sources are compounded by immigration, or by mixed families, or by social circumstances that don't align in ways that suggest convenient ways of defining ourselves?

At least one author is diving headlong into this mess... And she's doing it with style.  Join me below for a conversation with one of England's most talked-about young authors.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last week we discussed the bizarre and wonderful Oulipo, who helped free us from notions of rules and rule-breaking by refocusing our attentions on structure and organization.  This week we're going to take a step back and throw ourselves into one of the largest debates around literature: the canon.

What is the canon?  It's that generally accepted corpus of books that we consider "great", even if there's a bit of variation about the specifics.  It's why our high school reading lists are similar without being identical - Homer, Shakespeare, Twain - and why certain books get the deluxe leather-bound treatment centuries after they've been written.  But the canon is also a  problematic concept, and today we're going to talk about why.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last week we traveled to contemporary Japan to rub elbows with bestselling pseudo-surrealist author Haruki Murakami.  This week I'm taking a slightly different tack than usual and profiling a group rather than an individual author.

Did you ever wish you could break free from the constraints of language and literature and simply express yourself purely?  Well, one group of mid-20th century writers would tell you that's nonsense, and we're bound by more constraints than we even realize.  In fact, why not pile on more!

Sound crazy?  Then let me introduce you to the wickedly funny, darkly screwball, surprisingly warm group of radical theorists who started meeting in France in the 1960s: the Oulipo.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last week we let ourselves be absorbed into the beautiful incomprehensibility of Job.  This week we'll zip ahead thousands of years to a writer who's still churning out novels today - how's that for a flash forward?

Here's a situation to consider: it's the middle of the night in an abandoned temple in the middle of metropolitan Japan, and Colonel Sanders (yes, that Colonel Sanders) is telling you that the fate of the world relies on your flipping over a rock.  There's nothing underneath the rock, and nothing seems to happen when you move it, but the man from the chicken bucket seems awfully insistent.  What do you do?

Welcome to the wonderful, weird, and occasionally horrifying world of Japan's most (internationally) popular novelist.

Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks!  Last week the series had a guest poster who tackled a close reading of one of Edith Wharton's best known works, The House of Mirth.  This week we're going to crawl into the WayWayback machine to address one of history's most baffling short stories.

Why do people suffer?  If there is a God, and he does have a 'plan', why do people who believe in him find themselves suffering the same indignities as people who don't?

I have no interest in the religious side of this question (I'm an atheist), but the it makes for fascinating art. If you think religious texts aren't appropriate fodder for literary analysis... well, then this ain't the essay for you!

Otherwise, join me below for a trip through ancient Edom.

No Literature for Kossacks from me this week (I had a very good fill-in earlier today), so I decided to post an essay on zombies.  Why not, right?

If that seems too fluffy a topic, it shouldn't be: genre fiction is very serious stuff among academics, because it sometimes has greater insight about contemporary social and political issues than mainstream art Where genre fiction has its hardest time is with middlebrow critics: no horror films have won an Oscar for best picture, for example.

With that in mind, I want to turn back to what I'll unapologetically call the greatest of all horror films - maybe not the scariest, maybe not the best-acted, but certainly the richest and most thought-provoking: a low-budget 1978 gorefest called Dawn of the Dead.  If nothing else, the film is an excellent snapshot of mainstream American culture on the cusp of a particular type of collapse (the 1980s), and a brilliant combination of social critique, dire prediction, and philosophical density. It's also funny as hell and set the high (low?) water mark on what was considered an acceptable display of violence and gore. But let's start with some background: