This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, March 25, 2004

HOT

My husband thinks I should take the word "hot" up there [^] out of my description of GW, the university where I teach. It is a little silly, I guess - GW ain't that hot.

Still, at the moment the place is definitely on the boil. Onaccounta even as I sit here watching my Literary Criticism students take their midterm exam, some band they assure me is semi-famous is on the quad just outside the window, hotting up the crowd that's gathered on a spectacular spring afternoon to welcome John Kerry and Howard Dean.

How do you write an essay about what Kant means by purposiveness without purpose while the Democratic presidential candidate calls out to his flock a few yards from your ear? It's distracting enough that overnight all the campus dogwoods have flowered and a warm sun's come in; now they've piled on a political rally too.

Still, my students seem to be doing okay. Very bright and charming bunch, this class. I reminded them, as I handed out blue books, that they chose to attend a university four blocks away from the White House. If they wanted quiet, they should have gone to Kenyon.

Over the years at GW, I've grown accustomed to screaming convoys of presidential limos on the street below my office. Once we all had to stay away from our windows until we got the all-clear, while President Clinton arrived to give a speech here. A sharpshooter stood atop the building across from mine, ready to pick me off if I decided to water my spiderplant.

That's pretty hot, ain't it?

---------------------------

[ps. - Kerry's speaking to the crowd now. Maybe it's my weak ears, but it sounded as though the crowd was more excited a few moments ago, when Dean was speaking...]

[pps. - By way of explaining my continued ambivalence about "hot" - in 2002, GW was one of twelve universities named 'most hot' by Kaplan/Newsweek...