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"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)

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Suffering Succotash

“Perhaps we professors turn to satire because academic life has so much pain, so many lives wasted or destroyed.”

Oy. Again with the pain. Elaine Showalter, a retired English professor, wrote this in the introduction to her study of academic novels (the intro’s online at the Guardian). As speculation goes, UD finds it painfully unpersuasive.

Americans in general live the most pain-free lives of any people in the world (and I don’t only have in mind the availability of the sorts of drugs to which Justice Rehnquist, a Placidyl fan, was addicted). They are, scads of them, affluent, healthy, and maintained on a rich diet of entertainments.




Among this group, professors, with their pleasant surroundings, bright and eager students, long summers, and astounding degrees of autonomy, are particularly pain-deprived. If Showalter really thinks significant numbers of them are "wasted or destroyed,” UD suggests a trip to New Orleans.

Professors can spend their lives sampling French bread or sticking more straw into their straw houses or poking around the gardens of Pompeii. (Read Jane Smiley’s academic novel, Moo, for details.) The hallways around UD’s office at GWU yesterday echoed emptily because so many of her colleagues are on leave. And because yesterday was Friday and almost nobody teaches on Friday.

Puh-leeze.