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Where I’ve Been.

In case you missed me.

At four AM, all the electricity in the house – in the town – went out.

PEPCO said it’d be back on at eleven this morning. It’s still out.

I spent the day waiting for electricity and reading To the Lighthouse for my independent study group on postmodern fiction tomorrow (we’re starting with a modernist novel for comparison). I’ve read this novel many times – taught it often – and enjoyed it. This time, however, I found it tiresome, mannered, and depressing. Go figure.

When not reading the novel, I played happy Haydn pieces on my just-tuned piano, and went around and around my acre picking up twigs and branches from last night’s windstorm.

A rather frustrating day. I did get a poem out of it.

***************************


At Four a Windstorm Blew the Lights

At four a windstorm blew the lights.
I slid a door and hauled out of night
Florida air that purpled the sky
And made the dark house stand by

For some fireworks. Death flared!
I scanned the ceiling, scared:
Streamers of nothingness!
Infinite means measureless

I said. Measureless to man, like Xanadu.
So take the measure of infinitude
Just as it is, unsparked and uncandescent,
Unelectric charge inside the head, incessant.

The sparklers drifted and arc’d,
Their spectacular bursts unmarked
By carillon, spinet, or choir.
The only holies in that unholy fire

Were human faces.
Firing up the cosmic spaces.

Margaret Soltan, January 25, 2010 8:27PM
Posted in: poem, snapshots from home

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One Response to “Where I’ve Been.”

  1. Michael Tinkler Says:

    I had – but I’d written it down to early semester trauma – not weather-trauma!

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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

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

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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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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.
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University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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