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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)

Friday, April 07, 2006

Although Everyone’s Favorite Metaphor
For The Duke Lacrosse Story…


…is “The Perfect Storm” (i.e., a confluence of every conceivable destructive plot element), for UD it has now headed into what she calls Trailer Park Meltdown. Here, the principal actors, most of whom have criminal records or unpalatable pasts, produce nothing as glamorous as a perfect storm, but rather

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water…



What? I’m not allowed to quote T.S. Eliot? You think it’s pretentious to quote The Waste Land? Predictable? Pathetic? You’re the one who page-viewed a blog by an English professor.