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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)

Sunday, January 16, 2005

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME


“For President Bush's second inauguration this week, soldiers in full battle gear and toting M-16 rifles equipped with grenade launchers will be on hand to protect a restricted, pedestrian-only zone from George Washington University to Capitol Hill and everything in between.”

Ah, to be sure they’re envying us over at the University of Utah! Students and faculty there can carry their own wee guns, yes; but here it’s about grenade launchers and M-16s …

UD’s brogue is onaccounta she’s about to begin teaching, this Tuesday, her Modern Irish Literature course -- though already the Thursday meeting of the class has been cancelled, GW having decided to close the campus on Inauguration Day. … UD is always being shooed off campus because of IMF protests (see UD, 10/1/04), or presidential speeches (3/25/04), or inaugurations.

Joyce’s still sad music of humanity hasn’t much of a chance here.




In Snapshots from Home, UD has chronicled, among other things, the pretty much non-stop excitement of teaching in Foggy Bottom -- the presidential candidates on the quad (UD, 3/25/04), the white spy blimps in the sky (UD, 9/29/04), Crossfire in the student center (10/30/04 and 1/7/05). It’s hard for her to imagine a university more ‘of the moment,’ and less inclined to quiet reflection, than GW. Her literature classes take place amid the large din of jets in and out of Reagan National, and the small din of cellphones pulsing in her students’ pockets. When UD attempts to reconstitute for her listeners Stephen’s morbidity, guilt, humor, and self-disgust, his intricate hidden self, she knows that the blatancy of the famous world which is her setting will always shout down her efforts.

And yet, and yet, and yet -- perhaps the victory, for UD, is sweeter than it’d be if she taught at William and Mary. I mean the victory that occurs when you occasionally overcome the power of all that noise; when you notice in some of your students an awakening of real attentiveness, real seriousness.
Posted at: 1/16/2005 04:16:00 PM