Salon advice columnist Cary Tennis uses today's column to respond to his numerous vitriolic online critics. To sum up, people who criticize him are stupid and mean and when they die no one will care. "Perhaps they are accustomed to owning the world and naming the chairs. They see a person sitting in the advice giver's chair who is not doing it the way it has always been done, and they are infuriated, and they believe that they own that chair and they know who should be sitting there. It's as if they want to call the club membership to a vote." Also making fun of Cary reinforces the class system! Seriously, someone needs to explain what he's actually going on about here. We lost him a couple paragraphs before "Lack of self-knowledge is truly a luxury of the self-absorbed." Stop naming the chairs! [Salon]
Leave Cary Tennis Alone!
5:18 PM on Fri Jan 11 2008
By Pareene
1,349 views
25 comments







Comments
Cary, have got a girl for you! Her name's Lou Taylor, and I feel like you'd just .. understand each other.
Regarding picture above: does anyone ever wonder when Cary's gonna get the stitches taken out of his eyebrows?
I consider my dislike of many thousands of things mineral, plant and animal to be my own problem that perhaps by the end of my life will no longer be so all-encompassing
Umm. What sort of minerals could Cary Tennis possibly hate?
@Pope John Peeps II: I've got a real fucking problem with molybdenum.
My chair is a neat old beat up Eames but I have never learned to properly pronounce that. Instead, I call my chair Max.
something I learned from listening to my parents' Neil Diamond albums is that when people start anthropomorphizing chairs, it's time to jump off that train.
You know what else "is truly a luxury of the self-absorbed"? A 1,700-word preamble to your goddamn advice column.
Cary, we don't say you're a bad writer because we think we own you. We say you're a bad writer because your columns are too long, you're self-involved, and you don't answer the questions clearly. Also, your tone indicates that you are batshit crazy.
Dude is pulling, like, the greatest and longest-running variation on the newtojezebel scam ever. Or, he's batshit crazy.
@lawyergay: Awesome.
@lawyergay: WAH-HA!
@lawyergay: Woodwardite has been on my shit list for years.
That was just completely incomprehensible. Is there an editor involved at any point with his column?
Wow. I'm just stunned.
@moff:
"newtojezebel's Activity
newtojezebel's ability to comment is not enabled."
True. Very true.
Oh, leave him alone already! His column is a fantastic cure for insomnia!
I don't really find the mix of irritation and confusion that he typically engenders particularly conducive to sleep.
I feel sorry for the chair.
Why does Cary suck? See: Cary's column about why other people suck for saying he sucks.
i can't believe he actually wrote that. as if whining endlessly at the beginning of the column is going to make it better. also, his book is a collection of the "best" columns from the site? who's going to spend $17.95 on stuff they can read in the site archives for free?
Just remember, Cary: There are many advice-giver's chairs. And there's an ass for every last seat.
@kakapo: He reminds me of my cat, except a lot less talented.
How can I get paid five bucks a word to write about how people who don't appreciate me really suck? I mean, isn't that what Livejournal does for free?
That reader deserved a more concise and interesting response. Well, he actually deserved a response, initially instead of Tennis going over his Life N' Times first.
@moff:
Well said. And I have a cat who's currently in heat and discovering new "talents" every hour or so....
Cary, you are alive and still no one cares.
Cary's writing and advice are both excellent. I think Gawker is funny and all, but I've never understood their obsession with "Cary Sucks!"
I think he's fabulous now. At the same time, I know I would have enjoyed making fun of him a long time ago too. I wouldn't have understood the column when I was 19, trying to rush the right sorority and hating everyone who seemed the least bit vulnerable. I wanted to be a winner. Fwiw, Cary isn't talking to people like that. He's talking to the people who won, and realized a lot of it was luck. And the people who lost, and realized the same thing. That takes a little bit of experience, and some clear-eyed observation, as well as the honesty to admit it.
I can see how that would be a column not everyone would want to read. But I honestly don't understand the hate. Self-awareness and empathy are really so that offensive that they must be shouted about for months and months and months? Give it up. This is like watching my best sorority girl friends pick on the people who aren't too cool. There's more to life than cool. And the cool enforcers get boring when they can't let it go.
Cary and I used to be co-workers back in the 90s, and he's a very nice guy. I'm not crazy about any advice columns, but think he does an acceptable job.
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