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Massed Hours of Life-Triumphant

We’re really not in Rehoboth anymore.

I’m on a boardwalk near Pier House, and the ocean beyond the ropes and poles is aquavelva.

The sky, divided from it by a thin line, is a weaker, more conventional, blue. Sky blue.

Pelicans and gulls rest on pilings. The pilings are graywhite against the aquavelva.

“Try to get it away from the pelicans and near the barracuda.”

A guy fishing off the pier gives advice to another guy who, having caught a small fish, drags it back and forth in the water in hopes of catching a barracuda with it.

“Fastest fish in the water,” the first guy says to me. “Had a big mackerel the other day and I’m reeling it in and here comes a barracuda and just grabs it.”

But I’m trying to get across the beaming fantasy, the crayola storyboard, of UD‘s current setting. Such a cotton candy concoction. Nature can’t be serious.

The cotton is the clouds, stretched out and using just enough of the sky to be picturesque. Seaplanes buzz beneath them.

“The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair.” This is Saul Bellow’s narrator in Ravelstein, describing a peak moment in Paris in June. “I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.”

You feel that about the people around you along the water in Key West. There’s an unhappy assurance of their inability to keep up.

Margaret Soltan, March 13, 2009 1:44PM
Posted in: snapshots from key west

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

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truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

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The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
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Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

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Roland Greene, Stanford University

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Carlat Psychiatry Blog

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Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

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Money Law

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Ducks and Drakes

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The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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