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Sacred and Profane on the Northeast Regional

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Heading south in the Quiet Car (having gotten there via the Alewife Greenway, the Red Line T, and South Station), gazing at the moment (we’re stationary) at a black car on the next track on which big white letters say DO NOT HUMP, UD considers how she got herself comfortable in this seat. First she fiddled with chargers; then she put in her ear plugs and listened to Schubert songs (her discovery of Lezhneva’s Im Frühling has her rooting around in Schubert); then she leaned back for a light nap, during which she listened to the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, Hour Two, kept at a gentle grumbly baritone (UD finds deep male voices deliciously soporific, and the more the merrier).

At one point, Richard Dawkins woke me up and made me laugh:

When [the liturgy] becomes intelligible, the nonsense becomes more transparent. If it’s in Latin, it can survive much better because the nonsense is camouflaged. It’s rather like a camouflaged insect; it can get through the barriers because you can’t see it. When it’s translated into not just English but modern English you can see it for what it is.

Later, Dawkins said that he once listed among the six pieces of music he’d take to a desert island Bach’s Mache dich mein Herze rein, so I switched over to that.

Make yourself pure, my heart
I want to bury Jesus himself within me,
For he now within me
Forever
Shall have his sweet rest.
World, depart from my heart, let Jesus enter!

Margaret Soltan, February 26, 2016 11:50AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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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

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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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Ducks and Drakes

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The Bitch Girls

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Tenured Radical

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