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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)

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

UD, Controversialist

Thoughtful article in GW's Daily Colonial newspaper about the university's culture of creative writing, to which a recent essay of UD's, writes the reporter, has added a dab of color:

Soltan published a controversial essay in Le Culte du Moi last semester entitled “Zero Creative Writing Growth,” which was written in response to honors program English students who chose to take creative writing courses over literature courses. In the piece, Soltan asserts that “Nothing strangles serious writing faster than...unearned praise, self-absorption, and shallow learning. To which I’ll add another destructive element: lack of worldly experience.”

“I just think that at some point you have to decide whether you’re going to spend the time learning the canon of literature or spend most of your time writing your own fiction, reading other people’s fiction, etc,” Soltan said in an interview. “I don’t really think that the two are particularly compatible if you want to be a serious student of literature or a serious creative writer.”

..."So many people were willing to defend to the death that there wasn’t zero creative writing growth,” said [one student]. “People have spent time writing whole…con essays about that one little article that appeared in this small student publication.”