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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)

Thursday, December 30, 2004

THE AILING OLD BOWL




[UD makes a poem out of an article
in yesterday's Washington Post]




For I considered the frailty of the system:

That a field goal kicked by a schoolboy is worth fourteen million;
That the ill-gotten Bowl won’t send a penny to tsunami victims.
And once my queasiness at 93 million in payouts subsided,
I wracked my airy little head and decided.

Congress should not be soothed, or fooled
Into considering the big football schools
Some sort of academic endeavor.
For they are of corruption a sewer,

A sculptured and blazered buffet,
A vote-swapping, kickbacking, cash-grabbing trophy
Scheme without a single redeeming quality.
Their hoarded revenues, I thought, should go to charity.

For I considered the system, and its frailty.
Posted at: 12/30/2004 08:15:00 AM