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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)

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

PROFESSOR MITCHELL


' THE KING IS BACK

[Harvard Crimson] Students still searching for that perfect gut should head to the Carpenter Center today at 1 p.m. for round two of “American Film Criticism” with visiting lecturer Elvis Mitchell, who regaled students last year by drinking with Bill Murray during class and assigning no reading for the entire course.

Last semester “Professor” Mitchell went from star film critic at The New York Times to, as Larry Summers characterized him in an interview last spring, “Who?” How far will he fall this time around?

If the first class is any indication, pretty fucking far. Our spies report that, true to form, the dreadlocked critic delivered a threadbare syllabus and a rambling lecture on “pretty much whatever he felt like talking about.” Added another attendee, “Pootie Tang may or may not have been mentioned three times
.” '

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(UD's father-in-law, you may recall [see UD, 1/22/05], had to work hard to convince Le Corbusier to build the Carpenter Center [UD, 12/24/04] at Harvard. Corbu would be proud.)