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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)

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Snapshots from Home:
Love Minus Zero




Last night, at the Walter Johnson High School spring concert, UD's kid and the rest of the Madrigals sang an updated version of the WJ alma mater song -- one verse for each decade or so of the school's existence.

The 'sixties verse [UD graduated from WJ in 1971] was appropriately Dylanesque. As they sang, the Mads made amusing peace signs to each other...



Today's Bob Dylan's birthday. Who knows why, of all the Dylan lyrics in my head, I return most often to these. Looking at them on the page, I don't think they're all that good. But they must have something. For decades they've had a front row seat in my frontal lobe.



My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all...