Essay Test: I Am All Yours and You Can Quote Me

                     Marshmello + Far East Movement: Freal Luv

The following essay was written in response to the University of Chicago's supplementary admission prompt:

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

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Chicago is not yet stamping out hundreds of angel headed hipsters. That’s corporate unorthodoxy. That’s Facebook execs acting Moly inspired stupid at Burning Man. That’s some epic shit dude. Marshmello me. Really?

You try to take your quirkiness seriously. Yes, ok, so it is branded and t-shirted fun comes to die stuff too, but still, I would gladly sit in an unsterilized room in a sketchy Hong Kong mall waiting to get my intellectual tear tattoo. Then I’d show everyone that I’ve killed my share of clichés.

I’m ready to take out the Wall Street sleek suits who work too many hours on the verbal exchanges that make their way around the globe in micro-milliseconds, gathering speed as they meme into increased Likes and emoji smiles, backed by healthy steroidal and sugar enhanced back room deal-making selfies and oh so deep data. Yeah, I’ll do it. You know what I do when I hear the oxymoron ‘corporate culture’? I reach for my…

Oh never mind, that’d be way too politically incorrect. And yes, I would too. I do dare and double dare you. But take me I’m yours is not me. Just try and you’ll see. I take no prisoners. Not when it comes to words. Not this little girl. Dylan and Ginsberg are over. This new girl’s in town wearing my badge of dishonor proudly, plainly, not insouciantly come hither ironic, that’s too PostMod for me. My red letter days and nights are not Hester inspired. No, it’s the red weather of tigers. My quicker blood does not contemplate escape. Put that in your pipe and toke it, my bloody Valentine.

In case you haven’t noticed I steal tongues, shove them in my mouth, nothing secret about it, no madwoman and no attic.  Borrowing is for timid women. I am not afraid to artiste myself naked in front of a crowd, verb myself right where I’m standing, in the open, smiling, looking right into your Sandberg inspired soul. Here I am. Come and get me.

I believe in truths, but there is nothing self evident about me or my country. Time to make a choice. Vote your conscience. Vote twice. Vote from the cemetery of Great White Ideas. I’ll win. I will. I want to.

I’m ready for my close up. Are you?

But you know you want me too. Let’s get consent out in the open. Don’t be afraid. It’s time to make me great again. Pull the lever. I promise never to repent. I promise to electrify you.

Me too you, she said.

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Questions:

Rate this essay from 1-5 with 5 being the highest. What rating did you give it and why?

What 3 words would you use to describe this writer?

How would you describe the tone of the essay.

How would describe the writer's voice?

Is the writer smart?

Where is the writer from, what kind of economic background? If the writer was a member of an under-represented group would this change your interpretation of the essay? Why or why not? Should it?

Is this essay a risk? If so why? Would you tell the writer not to submit this essay to U Chicago?

Are there too many references throughout the essay? How are quotations or paraphrases viewed by admission officers?

Should admission essays avoid  any suggestion of sexuality, violence or politics?

What are the political views of the writer? Defend your answer.

Would you want this person as your roommate?

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Footnotes

Angel Headed Hipsters:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
     starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
     for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
     connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
     in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
     across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

Opening of Allen Ginsburg's Howl

Moly: MDMA (aka Ecstasy)

Marshmello: EDM star

Where fun comes to die
some students at U Chicago wear this t-shirt

Burning Man: Burning Man is an annual gathering that takes place at Black Rock City—a temporary community erected in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.(from Wikipedia) http://burningman.org/

Teardrop tatoo: symbolizes the wearer has killed someone

Whenever I hear: (“Wenn ich Kultur höre...entsichere ich meinen Browning!”)
       Hanns Johst (1890-1978)  German playwright and Nazi SS officer

Hester inspired: Hester Prynne, from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

Red Letter Day:a day that is pleasantly noteworthy or memorable. (Wikipedia)

the red weather of tigers

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

 The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

quicker blood

I never hear the word “Escape” (144)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I never hear the word “Escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation –
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars

Only to fail again!

My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine are an Irish rock band formed in Dublin in 1983. Since 1987, the band's lineup has consisted of founding members Kevin Shields and Colm Ó Cíosóig, with Bilinda Butcher and Debbie Googe. (Wikipedia)



no madwoman and no attic

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which Gilbert and Gubar examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective.(Wikipedia)

Borrowing is for timid women

T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Sandburg

Chicago 

BY CARL SANDBURG

Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

opening lines of the poem

 believe in truths, but there is nothing self evident

 Vote twice. Vote from the cemetery

Chicago has long been known for voter fraud and for getting votes from people who are dead

I'm ready for my closeup

Gloria Swanson's famous last lines from  the film Sunset Boulevard