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| Photo from "Exile on Main Street" Recording Session |
Once again, I am going to post the essay I call "Torn and Frayed" (after the song from the Rolling Stones' seminal album "Exile on Main Street"). After that I am going to post 2 comments in reaction to the essay.
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| The Boys Ready For Another Tour This Fal |
I’ve always told stories, but it took me a long time to
tell them the way I meant to tell them. An early stab of mine at this art form
was fraught with a clash of cultural norms: my kindergarten teacher, Miss
Callin, didn’t approve of my fairytale. I was fresh out of the realism of The
Paper Bag Princess, in which a princess saves her prince from a dragon, only
for the feckless suitor to spurn her because the dragon burned her clothes and
all she’s got to wear is a paper bag. Scorning the superficial romanticism of the
Cinderella and Snow White (oh, those cute anthropomorphized animals!), I’d had
my princess leave her kingdom and spend her money on a trip to see the world.
That version of the story never saw the light of day. My
teacher exercised her right of censorship, and suddenly the princess was giving
her money to the poor and marrying a prince. I found the new ending
dissatisfying, lacking somehow in the qualities I prized—whatever those were,
but it had something to do with truth, and with avoiding oversimplification. I
may be projecting my current opinions onto my former self here, but it seems to
me I didn’t want to do things the same way that Charles Perrault had done them.
Considering I was fighting against conformity, it’s odd
that in my preteen years I stopped trying to beat them and joined what I now
call the “full of crap” school of thought, which prized elevated sentiments and
left any moral uncertainty out of the picture. Sure, I was in good company:
most of the Baroque and Romantic poets could have backed up these high ideals
and unrealizable aspirations. I came to this way of thinking through a trap
that has snared older and wiser than I: I fell for the falsely heroic, truly
violent “chivalric” ideals of Pierre Corneille’s El Cid, a heavily
pro-dying-for-honor 17th-century French play, studied by French
eighth-graders for admittedly breathtaking verse and its, shall we say, rather accessible
level of psychological complexity. I read rather too much of Corneille’s work,
which always portrays the world as it should be, and I then started seeing the
world as it should be.
For me, goodness became adherence to moral beliefs. Doubt
basically came from the devil. To a child, there was something seductive about
the certainty of never being wrong. I was intellectually walking around with
blinkers, a perfect example of how reactionary children can be, but this is the
kind of world where everyone loses their delusions eventually.
Right on cue, my teenage years helped shake things up. When
I was sixteen, my influences expanded once and for all into the twentieth
century. It was the century of Albert Camus, who proclaimed it was absurd to
search for a meaning to life. His philosophy, at first glance, looks like a
“life has no meaning” brand of nihilism. But the meaninglessness of life gives
you a blank slate. Life doesn’t acquire a meaning on its own; you have to find
meaning in it, to live with passion, in a way that means something, and refuse
absurd rules that impede your search for a free, meaningful existence. For
Camus, no ideal could possibly be worth giving up a day in this world. It was a
philosophy far more beautiful than dying for a belief.
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| Controversial Album Cover of Exiles |
The chaotic twentieth was also the century of Bob Dylan and
the Rolling Stones, who have nothing to envy the laconic poetry of Hemingway.
Whoever thinks the Beatles are so much deeper than the Stones should
listen to “Torn and Frayed,” off Exile on Main St: a love letter from
Mick Jagger to Keith Richards that tells along the way of how violently
outsiders are rejected by “main street,” the world of normal people in which
they live. In the song, the drummer is a codeine addict: “doctor prescribes,
drugstore supplies; who’s going to help him to kick it?” Society feeds the
junkie’s habit while it prosecutes him for possession, and never lets him
return to normality. Exile took me down into the “barrooms and smoky
bordellos” that the music portrayed, and I found that beyond my insignificant
sphere, there was more than one real world. Doing “the right thing” was a hopeless
aspiration. The hero of the story is a man who is perceived as immoral, and the
villain resides in the normal society of doctors and drugstores.
To break the lesson I’ve learned down into a maxim would be
both to dumb it down and coat it in sap, but basically, life isn’t simple and
no belief is a sufficient guide to life. When I realized that, I had wholly
broken from the “full of crap” tradition and recovered my artistic roots. But I
am glad the journey was necessary because it was worth more than just returning
to my starting point. I’ve learned to be lucid and honest, seeing things clearly
and telling the truth about them.
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The first response to this essay comes from one of the most senior contributors to the influential site, "College Confidential:
Quote:
| Torn and Frayed: what do you think of this essay?
|
For what it is worth, only a masochist would read a single word after this gem of a sentence "Scorning the superficial romanticism of the Cinderella and Snow White (oh, those cute anthropomorphized animals!)
Overwrought by a half and pedantic to the extreme, this essay is almost impossible to finish. I could add punctilious, donnish, and priggish ... after a quick search into the next thesaurus, but then I would simply sound like this person.
Keeping it short, this person obviously received horrible advice. Reproducing this drivel with or without authorization just compounds the problem, as one might think this hopeless hodgepodge of words might be worth emulating.
Probably not the answer you expected, but here you have it!
PS As far as "tell em what you're gonna ell 'em. Tell 'em. Tell em what you told 'em." that is only part of the equation. Although it has become a CC cliché, one might be better served by "Do not only tell 'em. Show 'em! And, if you run out of words, just show 'em. It so much better!"
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The second from very novice contributor to the same site, but one who has extensive experience in admission:
I will venture to disagree with xiggi on this essay. I am reading it from the position of a former admission officer at a highly selective university (1993 - 2000) and now as a college counselor at an international high school (2 schools overseas and one in the US where I now work). That's all I'll say for now about who I am.
Pedantic, sure. This writer sounds incredibly authoritative and confident about what she has read and what she likes to do (tell stories her own way). Donnish, okay, for the same reason. I'll stop with those two adjectives. When I was being taught to read applications, a couple of colleagues senior to me, including our dean of admission, would sometimes have to remind us (if one of us had a strong reaction to a student's braggadochio about what he knew, or--somewhat at the other extreme--if we read an applicant with perfect test scores/grades/program, evidence in the recs that the applicant was a reader far beyond her peers, and evidence in activities/recs/other essays that the applicant loves ideas or books and writing about them) . . .we'd be reminded that, despite thinking this student's display of intellectual skill and love of learning might not be appealing, we were admitting students to COLLEGE. We didn't have faculty readers for most of our applications, but our dean and senior staff would occasionally, gently chide us that "We're admitting kids to college. To classrooms. The faculty would think we were CRAZY if we didn't admit this kid."
I could say more, but let me leave it there for now. In eight years of selective-college admission work (an applicant pool of 18,000-plus) and nine years of college counseling, I have read maybe ten essays that show me this clearly that the applicant is going to read what's in the libraries, engage vigorously with professors and classmates, and think about what he reads. Maybe change her mind; at least, reflect (which is what all kinds of application-essay advice says to do: reflect on your growth/change). This essay is all about reflection. It's about reading and writing and thinking and wanting to create. When an applicant tells me and shows me that she wants to find the truth and tell it to me: isn't this what college education, at its core and at its best, is all about?
Note: One other quick comment I forgot: I don't really see what the "risk" is in this essay, unless it's the phrase "full of crap." And to me--wearing my admissions hat, reading many thousands of essays a year--the phrase "full of crap" when applied to Pierre Corneille, read by a pre-teen in French, just makes me more interested in him.
I'm not trying to be snide here; I just honestly don't see what is the risk, in an essay in which the writer clearly knows how to create and control tone.
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My question today is which of these responses speaks to you? By this I do not mean which is right and which wrong. I think both writers have demonstrated that have given careful scrutiny to the essay and written an assessment that could be a valued part of the committee's final decision.
I have not had much success getting comments from blog readers, but your comments will help me decide if I should propose a very radical approach to essays that will create a lot of controversy. More on this once I get some comments. If I do not have some data I am not sure I can make the proposal public.
Great post. So much info to write my best essay;)
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