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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)

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME: Post-Thanksgiving



Rich, intellectual, outdoorsy - in its latest issue, Washingtonian Magazine - the local “we’ve got money and status” glossy - describes the residents of UD’s hard-by Bethesda, Maryland hamlet in this way. Reviewing the new restaurant in town, the Washingtonian describes UD and her ilk stopping first at the post office to pick up our “New Yorkers and L.L. Bean catalogues,” and then dining at the restaurant, described by another reviewer as “the Pottery Barn store with food.”

UD stopped reading the New Yorker a long time ago, and though she gets Bean catalogues by the bushel, she throws them away. Yet the Washingtonian's stereotype is true enough. It lacks only the adjective “neurotic.” UD’s husband swears he saw, one afternoon, in the post office’s trash bin, a magazine called Psychotropics Today. There are very few offices for rent in the restaurant’s building, but one of them has a therapist in it.