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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)

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Finals

The banana, the Celtics cap, the nose rings,
The randomly uprising sneezes and the class response -
Bless you!
Yes, bless you on this darkling plain, ranged with dark things:
Exam books from Picasso's blue period; gray pens like unlit wands;
Gray sweatshirts with cryptic insignia; prewashed dirty jeans.

It's open book, but no answers lie within.
Quotations from Kleist and Kafka, yes, but not what anything means.
So you sit, guilty of dust and sin,
Pondering from your sad depths the scenes
Replayed before your rifling fingers
Of pregnant virgins and beetles with apples on their backs;

Pondering how it is that that nice I.B. Singer
Could turn out to have so black
A worldview. Well, all of them do.