kfed2020

Not yet. I dont like the Princeton email interface... Still trying to figure out how to sync it to my gmail.

I got my email password! I guess that means it's official...

What queer classics are you both planning to read this summer? I have a stack of about 40 books next to my bed for 'summer reading,' haha. Won't happen. Most of them are books that I simply really wanted to read before grad school took over my life -- 'Housekeeping' by Marilynne Robinson, 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, things like that. (I'm a contemporary Americanist.) I can say that it was a mistake to read Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' so early in the summer. That book has put me into an irrecoverable shock.

Thanks! Most of our communications with them this summer will be through email, according to Michelle Carman. Sept 11 isn't soon enough... What kind of stuff do you all study? I'll be in the English department, studying representations and performances of pain, nostalgia and mourning in 19th and 20th century American literary and visual culture.

Awesome. How much will get stolen from us in taxes? I'm okay with the GC. I just graduated from college (yesterday!) and am content to keep living like a college student. =)

lol. Why are we the deadest of all the meet and greet boards?

I did. I'm hoping for the old GC, but new GC seems to be more likely. What is everyone going to study? English, here.

Hey, Sorry to find this so late... I'll be in English this coming year. Are there really so few Princeton people here? I guess it's a pretty small school...

100% agree.

It's optional for UPenn.

What's your field?

The adcom doesn't have to know your text! I had a successful run at grad school applications this year; for two of my admit schools, i submitted a sample on 'hood film of the early 90s, which I can't necessarily expect a Renaissance scholar (for example) to have seen -- and for my third admit school, I submitted a sample on a queer comic novel. The important thing is your ability to engage the critical literature and to display your ability to offer convincing readings of a text. And anyway, 'Empire Falls' is a respected contemporary novel. Sure, Russo is no DeLillo or Pynchon, in terms of academia's darlings. But Pulitzer winners are always fair game. =)

680 is a great score. 'Great.' But it will make no Elaine Scarry of you, that's for sure. FYI, all -- at least three members of the Princeton cohort this year had <630 on the Lit GRE. Out of 9 people. That's a third. Not insignificant, I'd say. Just sayin'.

Columbia's mean.

research; write; keep getting better at it.

Yes I heard from one of my friends that you were great. Have a great time at Harvard!

How was visiting weekend???

Lol, you crazies -- crack is whack. And it's also inexpensive, so it'd be very easy for her to nurse a fledgling crack addiction on even 10,000/yr; just ask your neighborhood crackhead. The problem is that her stipend keeps her from high-end drugs. Sad, huh?

What I still fail to understand is why you're playing dumb. What's the purpose? It's provocative in the least productive way imaginable; and it is not now -- nor was it ever, at any point in this conversation -- 'funny.' To that end, I repeat my earlier assertion that this conversation needs to end. There are more satisfying places than this to watch dogs chase their tails.

Sigh. I won't sleep until I get tenure.

I really think this conversation needs to end. Alas, I had a very nice response to this that tried to be inclusive of everyone, but then my browser closed, so you'll just get this distillation: 'Ghetto' is used to marginalize. It's really that simple. Even if it had nothing to do with your particular ideas about blackness and/or poorness, it's still used to marginalize, in precisely the way that 'ghettos' have always been determined to subjugate marginalized peoples. But it does have something to do with blackness, as this is how it's culturally perceived -- that's inescapable, and it's where the racist accusation comes from. 'Racist' may be overused, or perhaps the connotation of it just makes people defensive no matter whether it's merited or not. I don't know, but I'll avoid the term here to instead say that 'ghetto' is, racist or not, insensitive. Even if you're using it to refer to a white person, are you not using it to suggest that they're engaging behaviors or performances not typical to whiteness? I think you are, and I think we need to be honest about this fact. I appreciate that the term is used to refer, sometimes, to poorer white neighborhoods, but I'm not convinced that the term isn't inscribed with a black connotation nevertheless. And even if it were used to refer to white and black people in equal measure -- not to mention the many other racial identities -- wouldn't it still be used to marginalize? Wouldn't it still, therefore, be insensitive? [Not to mention that it'd be hard for you to escape the fact that the 'ghettoooooo' Philly environs you were referring to are predominately black. If they weren't, would you have been as compelled to use this particular term? It's something to think about.]

It takes you that many words to describe it, and yet you expect that it will be innately understood by others? Huh...

You guys are a riot. Looking back at the Am Studies website for Yale, I can't for the life of me figure out why I didn't apply!!!!! It looks amazing!!!! which is not to say Harvard isn't... But I dunno. That Yale place... they sure do get a kick out of interdisciplinarity, don't they?

no! definitely supposed to make your life harder. my problem is that all the people i'd work with at the schools i'm considering went to school together, are close friends and have talked about me amongst themselves. there's no escape!

But some of the pre-law history majors are really hot! I assure you, the hideously obnoxious know no disciplinary bounds at Harvard. I've not encountered too many at Harvard in the first place; but the ones I've run into have been studying everything from Economics to Women's studies. A douchebag's a douchebag. When is your visit weekend?