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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)

Friday, June 08, 2007

Snapshots from Home

A Regular UD Series

You already know my life isn't like other people's. I don't own a television set. I don't drink alcohol (I drink almost no alcohol -- the occasional glass of wine and, during the summer, a few pina coladas. No moral objection to it. Just don't like it.). I don't drive.

It's the not driving that scandalizes everyone. The not driving plus not caring about car culture. I don't care what car Mr UD buys. Although I love to listen to Car Talk, I don't care about cars, trucks, and motorcycles. I don't care if my kid - now in learner's permit territory - gets a learner's permit (and so far she's showing less eagerness than her friends. My evil influence?).

None of this -- the not driving, the very little drinking, the not watching tv -- is ideological. Driving, at least in congested DC, pisses your life away. TV's depressing. Liquor doesn't taste good.




Anyway, here's a snapshot of last Wednesday chez UD.



Because she doesn't drive, she either gets a ride to where she wants to go from one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who do drive, or she takes a cab or the metro or a bus, or she walks.

Walking's been pleasant around here, with the mild early summer weather, and UD's doing a lot of it.

On Wednesday, she had to go to American University's library. (When AU's ex-president Benjamin Ladner was imploding due to greed issues, UD covered events closely. Type "Ladner" into the Search thing up there for background.) UD was trying to get the proper citation for The Diaries of Samuel Pepys. For the book on beauty she and her co-author are about to send off, they're obsessively checking and rechecking their footnotes and bibliography, and for an excerpt from the Pepys (pronounced peeps) diary in which he swoons over some beautiful music, UD hadn't provided a full citation.

It was on the shelf at AU, so UD - on a rather too hot and sunny day - walked the mile from her house to the metro, and then walked the two miles (I'm guessing these distances) from the station nearest AU to its campus. Helen Kaminski hat on head, prescription sunglasses on nose, she trudged.

She liked AU's library. When you get off the elevator on the third floor, you're greeted by a circle of beautiful leather chairs in front of a window overlooking a very green quad. Doesn't feel like an urban campus at all.... And there they all were, all of the volumes, including hers, Volume Nine. She pulled it off the shelf, fluttered the pages until she found her passage, noted the page number, and then noted everything else she could think of about the book (UD's never quite sure when a full citation is really really full), and then put the book back on the shelf. This took five minutes.

She then walked back to the metro station, intending to stop on the way at a music store she liked. Maybe there was a new Henry Purcell songbook. But the store had disappeared.

Back in 'thesda, she walked the last leg of her trip, to her house.

Quite a lot of effort for a citation. She enjoyed the outing, though. And, since I know you've been waiting for it:



The Diary of Samuel Pepys,
February 27, 1668. Eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Volume IX, 1668-1669. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 94.