Today, the following review of Sex Addict appeared on Steven Shaviro's blog. Steven Shaviro, for those who don't know, is a cultural critic whose works include The Cinematic Body, Passsion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory, Connected, Or What It Means To Live in the Network Society, and Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. The review was one of the most intelligent reviews of the film that I have read, and it was also one of the best written. It was a thrill to discover it this morning.

Steven Shaviro was a graduate student at Yale when I was there as an undergraduate. I didn't know him well, but we did have a couple of conversations at that time. It was Shaviro who introduced me to the work of Sam Hsieh, the Taiwanese performance artist who did year-long performance pieces, his first being to lock himself in a cage for a year (with no reading or writing materials), the second being to punch into a time clock every hour on the hour for an entire year, the third being to live exclusively outdoors for an entire year (this piece was aborted prematurely when he was arrested by a New York police officer for defecating in public), and the fourth and final piece being to tie himself to a woman (whom he didn't previously know) with a three foot rope for an entire year.

Sam Hsieh's work became a huge influence on my own view of art, and it is to the infinitely curious and ever-probing mind of Steven Shaviro that I remain indebted.

It was also Steven Shaviro who introduced me to the music of Glenn Branca, and whose preference for Emily Dickinson over Wallace Stevens (which I considered heresy at the time) pushed me to a greater understanding and appreciation of her work, for which I am also eternally indebted.