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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, October 11, 2007

The prose of writer Doris Lessing...


...captures Sweden's highest blessing.







I was thinking about a
passage in a Lessing novel
a couple of days ago,
while brewing some Marco
Polo tea. It's from
The Golden Notebook,





















her best-known work, and
it has the book's narrator,
Anna Wulf, a British woman,
recalling the time
she bedded a stranger -- an
American doctor she'd just
met on a plane.

She quotes him saying, at the
moment of truth, things like
[UD doesn't remember
the exact quotation]
"Hey wow!
This is really great!
I mean, ma'am, this is
super-duper!"