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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)

Thursday, May 12, 2005

POSEUR ALERT


I hope Andrew Sullivan doesn’t mind my using this wonderful title of his. “Poseur Alert,” a regular feature of his blog, quotes from articles and interviews in which poseurs express themselves. Here’s UD’s contribution, taken from the “House and Home” section of today’s New York Times:


“I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity,” [novelist Caleb Carr] said. “I spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. … I am a dark person… I’m a fairly ascetic person.”

…Mr. Carr estimated that his [country] house, which has about 6,000 square feet of living space and about 3,200 square feet of porch, cost about $1.25 million… [H]e wanted a house that had all the modern conveniences, from radiant heating to a satellite dish…

It’s a beautiful place, the visitor tells Mr. Carr. If you can’t find peace here, you can’t find it anywhere. “I can’t,” Mr. Carr says…