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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





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)

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

FOR WORLD AIDS DAY, A Couple of Remembrances



"In this dream, I'm in a seaside resort city, made up of all my childhood seasides - Coney Island, Margate, but mostly Atlantic City in the 1960s. I am staying with my father at one of the old hotels several blocks back from the beach. Between us and the beach lies a seedy amusement park, made up of all my childhood amusement parks, mostly Coney Island which I explored so thoroughly in 1961 with my brother Mark.

Dad and I decide to go for a walk on the beach - perhaps I engineer this as an opportunity to finally tell him. I start down the street but he indicates we have to take a detour around the amusement park. 'But this street has direct access; we don't need to go five blocks out of the way,' I complain. I am already tiring from the walk. He is adamant. I am about to say, 'I'm too weak to go the extra blocks because I'm dying of AIDS.' But I can't say that because I haven't told him yet.

... But so crudely transparent! Have I no subtler symbology by which to mediate my fear of writing the letter to my father, or no more finely drawn characterization of him than this Lacanian cartoon, insisting that we 'take the main way' and avoid 'the amusement park'?"

UNBECOMING, by Eric Michaels





"I find operatic arias to be very moving now - showy and subtly coarse, technically elaborate, lengthy, embarrassingly detailed and impolitic, un-American, and beyond the hemming and hawing of dialogue.

My dreams are mostly of vacations again and have a still-sweet quality; they even comment on the sweetness of the air and light in a strange, new place where I am a tourist. It is a maybe cheapened version of paradise. The dreams usually end in a gentle drowning, and then I wake.

I ought to have dinner. I haven't eaten or taken my pills - just a little suicide. I mostly live because of Ellen, although I might put on a show if any of the grandchildren were in the apartment. It is unbelievably strange to live when things are over, when things are done with. Poor Kundera. It is the unbearable lightness of not-being. What do you suppose an embrace of mine would be worth now?"

THIS WILD DARKNESS: The Story of My Death, by Harold Brodkey
Posted at: 12/01/2004 11:52:00 AM