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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)

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says...

... satire is extremely difficult to write.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Nation, finds a perfectly satirizable subject - overpriced college educations - and manages to fall flat with it. Why? Because satire shouldn't be about your anger and sense of futility. When your peevishness dominates, the thing's undercooked. Satire is done to perfection only when you've removed your aggravation.

Ehrenreich needed to let this piece sit overnight. Then she needed to go back to it and make it amusing rather than sneering. Take a gander. (And if you know UD, you know she's fine with Ehrenreich's dig at George Washington University. UD's problem with the piece is style, not content.)



Here, by way of contrast, are two successful examples of satires which, like hers, adopt a persona.

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Posted at: 9/09/2007 10:56:00 AM