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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)

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

YOU ARE THERE



[My little slide show of daily life at the nation's most expensive university (scroll down) did little to satisfy the curiosity of UD readers, who continue to pester UD with "what's it like to be there" questions. I've therefore decided to introduce a new running feature, which I'll call -- after the old CBS show -- YOU ARE THERE.]



The escalator that lifts me from my meticulous car on the Washington Metro to the top of the Foggy Bottom station in the morning is quick and quiet.

Street level, I'm greeted by four men with live computer consoles floating above their heads. I don't know what they're selling, or how their computers are attached to them, but the men are fun to look at.

Above the consoles floats a mild and cloudless morning. The sky is broken by the khaki and silver of the President's helicopter approaching the White House helipad.

Latte at the hospital Starbucks? It's ten paces to my left, through the quiet doors of the lobby, where a security guard will nod at my GW card. I can sit at a big table, stretch out my books and papers, and listen to interns at the next table discuss Senator Johnson's prognosis. I can glance outside at the men with computers on their heads.

Latte at the library Starbucks? Its interior is amazing. From 18th Street's mild air, I enter an aromatic den in which students, their fingers clicking out a background to Ella Fitzgerald, stare at laptops. Alpaca coats and pashmina scarves cover armchairs. Everyone's wearing boots, jeans, and turtlenecks. Little smoky vignettes arise as people here and there sip from their cups and replace them on grainy tables.

In Academic Center, my office is all windows. Last semester the Defense Department's white security blimp hovered outside for hours. When Presidents visit, we stay away from our windows while, on nearby rooftops, soldiers with machine guns watch us. Pompous motorcades, all fluttering flags and throttled engines, also make good viewing.

My before-lunch class, two floors down from my office in a high-tech classroom with floor-to-ceiling windows, is composed of thirty-five young people who have thoughtful things to say about James Baldwin's short story, "Sonny's Blues." The heroin haze of its setting is as far from most of their lives as it is from mine, but Baldwin's theme is existential, and we're more or less getting it.

Lunch is a chance to relaunch an old friendship at a restaurant behind the State Department. My friend and I have a couple of years of catching up to do, and as we talk about our lives, we overhear foreign service officers discussing their next assignment in Croatia, daily life in Baghdad's Green Zone, and rumors of high-level resignations. The restaurant is brightly lit, and full of flowers.

My after-lunch class, down the hallway from my office, is a discussion of James Joyce's early struggles as a writer. I can see that a number of my students, themselves ambitious to write, are fascinated by Joyce's insane determination. Two of them come up to me after class and want to know more.

It's late afternoon, and I'm back in my office, packing up for the day -- which means cradling Joyce's Ulysses and the Norton Anthology of Short Stories against my chest (no briefcases for me), along with a lined notebook, and heading back to the Metro.

The men with the computers coming out of their heads are gone; the man who sells tulips and roses is there now. Everyone's holding a Starbucks cup which puffs a little smoke into the air. It's crowded as I descend the escalator, but still quiet, and the Metro car is quiet too, with a few pulsing cellphones. I open Ulysses to Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The woman next to me reads along.