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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)

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

MORE REFUTATION OF THE
NEA'S INSISTENCE
THAT SERIOUS READING
MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON
[see UD, 7/12/04]



From a commemoration of Marjorie Williams [see UD, 1/17/05]:

"In 1990 she captured the vanity and the grasping that would ultimately undo Bush the First's budget director Richard Darman in [a] 10,000-word profile for the Washington Post Magazine. Apparently stunned into stupefaction by the Williams gaze, Darman takes Marjorie to his home overlooking the Potomac where it's his idea to lead her on a narrated tour (the wife and kids aren't there) at jog-speed. First the priceless view of the river, then quickly through the living room and up the stairs as he repels questions about the family photos and into his bedroom, outfitted with a pair of four-poster twin beds. Marjorie notes aloud that he's reading T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," and he amends sharply, 'Re-reading.'"