Just wondering what my beloved Nabokov would say this morning.
Just wondering what my beloved Nabokov would say this morning.
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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
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
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
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
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
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
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The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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.
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[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
December 19th, 2019 at 12:42PM
Perhaps “I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them.”
December 20th, 2019 at 11:23AM
Ravi: Lovely. I like a phrase that comes right after that: The soul must rely on the dust of its husk.
December 20th, 2019 at 4:15PM
I also like
“How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the fair, an orbicle of jasp”
but then so did Kinbote and it doesn’t really apply to your initial post.
What should I think about Pale Fire the novel, the poem within, and all the critical ink spilled over them?
December 20th, 2019 at 6:51PM
I confess that Pale Fire is the least accessible of Nabokov’s works for me (unless you include awful Ada); I have for years taught and adored Pnin and Lolita and Speak Memory and the spectacular short stories. But what I took from PF, I’m afraid, was the practically unbearable description (for me, at least) of Hazel Shade’s life and death. I somehow couldn’t get past the fully convincing human cruelty and grief of that part of the novel to romp cleverly above it all in the playful rest of it. I realize this makes me dull and no fun.
December 20th, 2019 at 7:21PM
Thanks. Agreed, PF’s “Glass Menagerie” section is very difficult. Pnin didn’t register with me. There was a story, it ended and that was that.
December 20th, 2019 at 7:31PM
And of course Pnin is full of much more frontal cruelty than PF – the scene in which Pnin thinks he has broken the beautiful punch bowl Victor has given him, or all of the scenes in which Pnin’s gentle kindly eccentric ways are received with condescension and contempt by American idiots — these are similarly rough going for hypersensitive UD. And yet I love Pnin, and can keep reading it, while PF somehow repels me.
December 20th, 2019 at 9:33PM
My recollection is that Pnin was treated badly by everyone. I have Speak Memory on the shelf, need to read it one of these days.