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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)

Monday, May 22, 2006

Withywindle and I

Withywindle, a commenter on a must-read thread -- scroll down to “ACTA Report, “How Many Ward Churchills?” -- at Tim Burke’s Easily Distracted, is very impressive. Knows how to write, and knows how to reason, and is willing to continue to respond to challenging comments from other commenters as he/she defends the basic proposition that American university professors who preach rather than teach should be discouraged from doing so.

UD doesn’t agree with everything Ww says, but finds Ww’s general position legit, and is particularly impressed by Ww’s ability to withstand the commenter who accuses Ww of “resentment.” UD calls this response -- popular among academics who cannot argue -- drive-by psychoanalysis (UD’s colleague Justin Frank is unbeatable at it). It is one of the main reasons the sainted Invisible Adjunct closed down her site (as it happens, Oso Raro has a spectacular appreciation of IA up today).



Another comment in the Burke thread made UD happy:

There are plenty of irresponsible professors out there who don’t understand professionalism or pedagogy on all sides of the political spectrum. Generally these same people find ways to avoid teaching undergraduates the further they advance. I am hoping that those of us who like to engage in difficult and unresolvable debates with our students remain in the game.


Happy because she hadn’t thought before this of that trajectory in her teaching life -- more and more toward undergrad teaching (though I enjoy working with graduate students on their dissertations)…. At a party on Saturday for graduating English majors, a couple of UD’s students came up to her with their digital camera. “We want to show you something,” they said, and began clicking through their pictures.

They showed me the two of them smiling in front of some big, sort of derelict buildings in what looked like New York City. And then they looked at me, waiting for me to recognize the location.

“New York City?”

“Yes. And?”

“Um. I don’t know… "

“Think DeLillo!” [They’d both taken my Novels of Don DeLillo course.]

“… Great Jones Street??” [Site and title of DeLillo's early novel, Great Jones Street.]

“Yup!”




For some people, the word "rewards" implies things like stock options. For UD, it’s when your DeLillo students make a pilgrimage to Great Jones Street.