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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)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

There Was a Moment...

...a rather long moment, on the George Washington Parkway, when UD despaired. The cabbie was sure we'd get to the WETA studio on time, but we were stuck in thick slow traffic and had a way to go.

The News Hour producer shared my worry. He called every five minutes wanting to know our exact location. "We're at Key Bridge... Traffic's moving pretty well..." "We'll keep our fingers crossed."

The driver told me harrowing stories about his long 9/11 afternoon, when he went back and forth to the Pentagon taking injured people, people in shock, to the hospital.

"Okay, looks as though you'll make it," said the producer in his last phone call. "I'll be standing outside the building with the makeup person... It's all going to have to happen very fast."

So UD was whisked, with five minutes to go to our segment, to the makeup room ("Can I...?" "Do whatever you want with me."). As UD was powdered, she chatted with her interviewer about how it'd go.

Under big lights and cameras, UD fixed her stare 'pon her interviewer, as per instruction, and felt oddly calm. It occurred to her that if she'd gotten there a half hour early and had to listen to everyone giving her advice and shit, she'd maybe have been nervous. But the rush of it all was kind of fun, and she was so delighted to have gotten there on time, and after all she admires Doris Lessing and wanted to say why...

In short, as close to a piece of cake as you can get when it's live and in front of millions...