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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, December 03, 2006

Caravans of Cabs...

...on Lexington last night, not one of them available, so UD and her sister walked to Rocky O'Sullivan's on a clear and bracing evening.

Tiny place. All seats taken. Irish accents everywhere.

I found strange the absence of cigarette smoke. I'm old enough to assume all pubs will be smoky.

Ordered a Guinness while considering what it was going to mean for me to stand in a sweltering packed room for the next two hours, listening to someone I'm not that excited about. Meanwhile, my sister quickly made friends with fellow Dempsey (and Morrissey) fans in the room.

With her taken care of, it occurred to old UD that she could donate her (untouched) Guinness to the guy at the bar who kept pointing out that she hadn't started swilling it yet. And then, having dispersed her worldly goods and seen to the welfare of her sister, she could leave.

Which she did. Outside the bar there sat a silent yellow cab with a chatty Pakistani in it who was happy to drive her back to her hotel.

A perfect night out on the town for UD, in other words, whose sister arrived many hours later, having done the long Lexington Avenue walk all over again, and having had a terrific time.