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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)

Sunday, May 15, 2005

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME



UD’s JOYCE-THEMED SPAWN
SPENDS EVENING WITH
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN


It was summer in full-throated ease last night as UD‘s little one (now four inches taller than UD) sang at GW’s Lisner Auditorium in the premiere of the children’s opera, “The Nightingale,” based on the Andersen story. The kid was part of a small group of gray-robed girls (“Our costumes suck. The courtiers get the good costumes.”) who sang the voice of the nightingale in a work by the Latvian/Canadian composer Imant Raminsh.

There were seven in our family-and-friends audience cohort, and none of us remembered that the story ends not with Death triumphing, but with the restoration of life to the Emperor. This pleasant surprise, and the fact that it was a fine performance, accounted for our noisy weeping as the curtain fell. We fought among ourselves for tissues…