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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, April 30, 2006

My memories of the man?

His enormousness. He sat in his living room (book-lined; big piano; Persian rugs) in an oversized chair, which he dominated. For diminutive UD, sitting across from Galbraith was like looking at the Lincoln Memorial.

He had a deep slow sly voice, which he used (on the occasions I was there) to tell elaborate, funny stories about politics or his travels or academia.

A wealthy man, he was unpretentious. His farmhouse in Vermont was spartan, though rich in the memorabilia of a life well-lived. His country library was full of old Anglo funny stuff: Dickens, Thackery, Wodehouse.



Here’s a nice quotation from him, reminding me of one of my favorite Camus passages: “If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

Camus, in “Return to Tipasa,” wrote: “In order to prevent justice from shriveling up, from becoming nothing but a magnificent orange with a dry, bitter pulp, I discovered one must keep a freshness and a source of joy intact within, loving the daylight that injustice leaves unscathed, and returning to the fray with this light as a trophy.”