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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)

Thursday, June 29, 2006

UD Does Mother Theresa


Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor…. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.



UD and her daughter will be reciting these impossible instructions of Mother Theresa’s at the wedding this Saturday of UD’s niece, Giulia. They were asked to do a reading, and they were honored to be asked, and UD will try to do her sentence or two from it slowly and serenely. She will pretend to believe that you can spread love to your neighbor.

UD would revise the paragraph thusly:

Spread love in a reasonable number of locations: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to your dog…. Although students who come to you complaining about a grade are unlikely to leave happier (though it’s not impossible), do all you can to make most of the people who come to you leave better and happier. Although I know no one capable of this, certainly not myself, try to be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.


She leaves for Boston tomorrow. Blogging should continue pretty much unimpeded, given UD's obsessive ways.