To Cary:

There's no snob like a reverse snob.

And writers really should write what they know about. I think you were having too much fun watching the Gatsby of your imagination. F.Scott, not Gatsby, went to Princeton, however.

To the LW:

I'm a survivor of an Ivy Ph.D. program. Worked my way through, as a matter of fact. It wasn't the hardest thing I've ever done. The hardest thing was to leave a tenure track position because I saw it as a dead end. Fortunately, the degree had taught me to learn like a superconductor -- and I learned one of the other things that the Ivies teach as naturally as breathing: how to network.

There was a good article recently on how graduates of programs in things like slave literature, queer literature, and other very narrow and fairly modern specializations have a better chance of finding work, even if it's in the expository writing and other service areas of an English or general studies or other type of humanities department.

But if you go on for the doctorate, I'd say that the only reason to go on is for the sheer love of the subject because, unless you are very fortunate as well as very good, the love of the subject (and some adventitious student loans) will be what you will graduate with.

It has proved, in my case, to be enough. Enough to remember what I learned with the same love with which I entered the program; enough to enable me to find outside work that I try hard to keep.

Writers write. You have the MFA, and the South has a magnificent tradition of literary fiction. Why wouldn't you go there?

You've already had one stint of underemployment. You've already had a nervous breakdown. So if I were you, as tempting as the higher-status school is, I'd go where you have the best chance of a life and of funding. You are no good to the Ph.D. program nor it to you if you wash out into a hospital or disability, and it can happen in a tough first-year program. I've seen it; it's not pretty.

I realize you feel as if you've "wasted" time. This won't make a damn bit of difference to you, but I earned my Ph.D. when I was 27, which was insanely young in the humanities. It was the right move at the time. Long term, I don't know. That's someone else's story.

But if I were going on for a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in slave narratives, I think I'd hesitate to use the term "retarded" as a pejorative: the scholar of one badly disadvantaged group shouldn't insult another. And I'd proof: "teachers" should be "teaches."

Those are nits. Good luck, and I hope you make the decision that's right for you.

I have always dressed fashionably and conventionally, except when I haven't felt like it or I've been doing something that requires grubbies. Then, I don't wear makeup either.

Sweet drinks are a GREAT way to get sick-drunk. I prefer Laphroaig, Lavagulin or Macallan 18.

You know, I was all ready to go FLAME ON about a discussion I -have- seen, about how the Noble Horse-riding Tomboy or the Physics Student is a nobler woman by far than the classicist or the medievalist or the Fine Arts student because physics and science are "male" disciplines (which someone should tell my college, which has probably produced more women earning PhDs than any other school, regardless of size).

This? This reduces the semiotics of clothes and the discussion of what a feminist is to a Cosmopolitan-type article (and yes, I've had articles read to me or read it in the hairdresser's). That's not feminism; that's fluff.

Tracy, don't scratch your face off. Terrible for the skin, doncha know? Scratch their faces off instead. Or hide their silly books, spine in, in the bookstores. There's a nice, nonviolent solution.

Eliot was -not- a Boston Brahmin like the Charles Eliot who served a 40-year term as President of Harvard. He was a Midwesterner who acculturated and subsequently became a British subject.

Is that what Lynn said, Parson Jim, or are you on your own hobbyhorse?

Dead and crippled -soldiers- and Iraqis and Kurds and everyone else in the UN "peacekeeping" forces. Many of them are male. Many are female.

How come "man" is natural gender, while saying "woman" is not?

You just like to grouse about losing a share of the pie you should never have had. Which is not a discussion that is decent to get into when we are mourning losses, and if you don't know that, delete the title from your moniker.