Is Salon Magazine advice columnist Cary Tennis insane?

[astro]

Is this some sort of absurd joke or is he really this clueless and self absorbed? If you want to do some sort of semantic analysis on the meaning of advice columns save it for magazine articles, don’t use your readers as puppets.

'll occasionally look at his “Since You Asked” advice column in Salon if a question looks interesting. His advice is usually tentatively, almost reluctantly given, with lots of qualifiers, and I sometimes wonder what business he has being an advice columnist, but this particular answer was over the top. Here’s a woman in serious pain asking for useful advice, and apparently he’s going through some existential crisis so he feels it’s necessary to give some sort of stream of consciousness deconstructive commentary on advice columns in general. I had to look twice to make sure it was not some sort of meta-joke.

And then – but you know what general opinion I was going to trot out today? I was musing about advice columns, and the essential lie at their core. A novel forces its characters to live through whatever it is. That is the great cruel power of the artist: To force his characters to live through whatever he chooses for them. That is the novel’s great purity and its great honesty. Its characters have no escape except what the novelist offers them. They cannot take refuge in any of the bland escapes available to you or me. They are skinless. A novel thus forces us readers back upon ourselves as well, offering us no refuge.

Then after lots of pissed people write in he gives this little wonder.

I left clues that this was a conscious act, a theatrical performance meant to create tension as an antidote to sentimentality. The biggest clue was that I made no attempt to intrude gracefully; I intruded clumsily, like a buffoon. And what column did I choose for my act but one so black and white, so clearly one-sided! It would have been easy just to soothe with words, as I so often do. But to avoid sentimentality and its attendant boredom, one must highlight tension, contradiction and complexity. One must remind oneself and readers that although this column draws liberally from the language and literature of psychotherapy, it is not psychotherapy. It is a difficult hybrid literary form fraught with contradiction.

[Magiver]

It looks like the magazine matched his answer to a different question or no question at all. Or he’s crazy.

[burundi]

Cary Tennis isn’t insane, but he’s an astonishingly self-obsessed, pretentious navel gazer. A crack-addled monkey would give better advice. In one of his more recent columns, a woman with a two-week old baby wrote in to say that her husband had just told her he didn’t love her anymore and wanted to leave. Cary’s advice: take two weeks off and get away together without the kids. Which doesn’t seem too awful, except that he seemed to have forgotten the part about the two-week-old baby. Because it’s so easy for a mother to leave her neonate for two weeks. He’s given worse advice, but that’s the first example that comes to mind.

[LSLGuy]

I haven’t ever read the guy (or Salon), but in general, advice columns are NOT about providing advice to the one person whose letter is chosen. They’re about providing entertainment to the hundreds of thousands who read the column. Heck, they’re jst as effective if staff writers invent the letters. Dave Barry could have a very entertaining & profitable advice column full of utter nonsense.

From the samples above, I’d say he’s a tedious wanker. But the magazine must believe he’s providing entertainment or they would not keep running him. Given what Salon purports to be about, this makes some sense, at least to me.

[Zsofia]

Yes, he’s absolutely batshit insane. I used to read him just to lose touch with the real actual world. However, unfortunately, he is clearly not as batshit insane as he pretends to be and is mostly tedious wanker. (He is also not as smart as he likes to think he is.)

I like “Dear Prudence” on Slate for a real advice column.

[Czarcasm]

Moving thread from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

I like Ask A Bee.

The Onion | America's Finest News Source.

[tremorviolet]

Yeah, his advice isn’t particularly helpful but presumably anyone who writes to him is familiar with his style and knows what to expect. I usually read the letter, glance over his answer and then just go to the letters which are more interesting anyway. But I do miss Garrison Keillor who had the column before Cary; he was interesting and helpful.

[Giraffe]

Holy crap, they still let Cary Tennis give advice? Years ago, back when I still read Salon, I read a few of his advice columns and was astonished both by how useless his advice was and by how unbearably irritating his attempts to be clever or interesting were. Horrible.

[Baldwin]

Christ, what pretentious twaddle. Why would anybody write him for advice on a real problem?

[lisacurl]

I had no idea this Cary Tennis was a real person. I honestly thought that feature was an advice column parody.

[spazurek]

Wow, not a single defender? Ok, I’ll volunteer. I’ve actually had him answer a question for me in print! (I’m not telling which one…)

I think he’s a thoughtful guy with good albeit rather predictable priorities – stick with your family, follow your heart. But I enjoy his analysis of how societal forces bear on our individual choices, usually to the detriment of the individual. He’s quite up front about using his column as a forum for sociological analysis rather than really trying to solve anyone’s problems (although he was surprisingly concrete in response to my query).

I think he’s actually remarkably unpretentious; his method is mostly intuitive rather than scholarly. Or maybe it’s just that I’m a pretentious twit myself?

The uproar over the column in question is quite bizarre. Nobody writes Cary to get a detailed plan for how to solve a problem – he doesn’t do that. Sometimes it’s just helpful to hand your problem to someone who’s thoughtful and whose values you respect and see what gets going in their mind. And there’s a side benefit: a large cadre of (occasionally very thoughtful) readers will weigh in with letters!

[ouryL]

Evidently, no one has bothered to read the entire column.

The part quoted was an “aside*” -something Cary was addressing to the general audience, not the the woman herself.

*An aside is a literary device in that an actor speaks to the audience; he/she is not heard by the other characters.

[VinylTurnip]

Perfectly reasonable. During one session, I begged my psychiatrist to give me a reason why I shouldn’t just surrender and commit suicide. Before answering, he turned and pontificated to a video camera for several minutes on the oppressive burden of being a therapist. Then he plugged his new book.

Cary’s a thoughtful guy, but I find his colleague more helpful.