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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 16, 2004

ING


It’s just UD and a sleeping construction worker this morning at the little red tables in Penn Place, her town’s one commercial building (she’s waiting for the 8:40 train to Union Station.) The town post office is here (residents have successfully fought home delivery for decades), as is the town archive, the town administrator, the town restaurant, and the town therapist.

The amount of activity around this just-renovated and enlarged building (delivery vans, street stripers, pickups with cherry trees in the back) reminds UD of the vocal minority of townspeople who were opposed to this change. One of them, on the day the Town Council passed a motion to go ahead with it, taped a piece of cardboard up in the old post office lobby on which he’d written, in morbid calligraphy, IF YOU HAVE TEARS, PREPARE TO SHED THEM NOW (Shakespeare).




One can swing this sort of small town data Barbara Pym’s way, grinning at its absurdity, but UD is disinclined. There was a slightly thready privacy about life here once, now replaced by a natty something which has us closer to quaint fakes like Middleburg and Burlington than we’d like.

UD is heading into DC (she’s now on the MARC train) to give the first of her two final examinations - this one on Don DeLillo, who writes about precisely this sort of American success story, the series of events by which a real place becomes a concept.

UD has now transferred from the MARC to the Metro. Her ride is free, courtesy, as the conductors keep announcing, of ING Direct, a new bank in town. How much would it cost, UD wonders, for her to do the same? “Your free ride today is courtesy of UNIVERSITY DIARIES, a blog about American university life…”