Sounds like somebody went to a safety school!
Salon’s esteemed advice columnist, Cary Tennis, on the Ivy League:
I know what it is like to befriend the moneyed and beautiful sons and daughters of the Ivy League and to watch them drive off when the fun is over; I know the sickening flush you feel when the historic room you are standing in, where canapes are served on silver platters by obsequious caterers of unknown descent, becomes a room in which you are the very thing that does not belong — a thing to be removed, a thing to move away from lest unpleasantries erupt. One awakens in such a room as one awaking from a dream for the first time seeing with dizzying clarity the occupants as they are: sycophants of the court, transparently hungry for a crumb, self-hating, malnourished, their gazes cold as a lizard’s gaze, their winter fingertips the temperature of junkyard metal.
Apparently Mr. Tennis has never heard of financial aid. Or irony, given that the advice-seeker goes by “J.A.P.” and the address suffix is “slave_narrative.”
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March 21st, 2008 at 8:04 am
At least the dude knows how to write well.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:55 am
You left out the best part:
“The Ivy League scions of empire whom you so admire will leave you standing in the snow by the side of the road when the fun is over. You will think there must have been some misunderstanding. But there was no misunderstanding. The car was full of other Ivy Leaguers so they left you in the snow by the side of the road … like a slave, or a nanny, or a field hand.”
Start up the bus.
(P.S. Block quotes! Block quotes!)
March 21st, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Both schools are very eager to have me, which I must say isn’t a bad situation to be in.
Of course the shitty programs are eager to have you; they get countless hours of undergrad teaching and grading out of your for the bargain price of an English dept. grad stipend. Sure, you have zero career prospects, but at least you get to enjoy nine years of graduate school in which you convince yourself that you’ll be the exception that lands a tenure track job because your brilliance was confirmed by the fact that some Ivy grads befriended you.
What idiots still go to grad school in the humanities?
March 21st, 2008 at 4:41 pm
This has nothing to do with financial aid and everything to do with intellectual insecurity. The gnawing, kneading, gut wrenching insecurity that comes with walking among but never been a part of the sons of privilege. The constant striving, it ruins people, their own ambitions betray them. We are inexorably drawn to the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Tennis may denounce Eliot but he’s channeling Fitzgerald.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:50 pm
If he is as brilliant as he thinks, why didn’t the Ivies accept him to begin with?
March 21st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Now I remember why I avoided introspection. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to drink to excess with my i-banking signing bonus.
March 21st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
@ViolentQuaker. You better save than boni son. Banks are blowing up left and right. Just ask your buddies who were all signed up to go to Bear Stearns.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:26 am
“Or do we need somebody like Rimbaud or Blake, or better yet like Whitman?”
Umm… Rimbaud ended up an outlaw slave trader in Africa. Sounds like Cary needs to do some more research before he randomly name-drops literary figures that he vaguely associates with some kind of social dissent. And he should lay off the overwrought T.S. Eliot bashing too; the self-satisfied ass.
And @S: people get PhDs in the humanities for many noble reasons, and you should be grateful to them rather than a mouthy little ingrate. Our country clearly needs more professors in the humanities; your ignorant post is proof enough of the decay of civility among the supposedly educated.
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Whitman? Really?
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
this is a BEAUTIFULLY written entry.
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
this writer is unbearably pretentious. but he’s right– I would kick the state school kid who I’ve known for a couple months out of my car in favor of my college friends who I’ve known for four years.
oh wait. that sounds rational?
March 25th, 2008 at 3:30 am
unless i’m badly mistaken, the “ivy league friends” part was a very brief aside in a letter that was mainly about how he should weigh his priorities when considering a graduate school (with said friends not being one of them). why on earth did this advise columnist focus almost entirely on a short and tangential part of the letter?