George Bernard Shaw famously observed that the teaching of Irish history should be mandatory in England and forbidden in Ireland. In the same spirit, I have sometimes thought that the novels of Ayn Rand should be mandatory for a certain kind of beaten-down hyperintelligent 16-year-old girl and forbidden to everyone else.
Q: How do you pronounce Ayn Rand's name?
A: With a snort of derision.
The little I remember of The Fountainhead is the rape fantasy played out when Roark forces his sweaty self upon Dominique, and she loves him for it. So like most other smutty "romance" novels (they're more like "Stockholm Syndrome" novels).
Has anyone ever made it all the way through John Galt's mental masturbation at the end of Atlas Shrugged? We mediocrities want to know.
I have it on good authority that at least some people have. I myself never attempted it, for fear that I'd never return.
"Shorter: your misery marks your superiority."
That goes back way before Rand.
"A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household." -- Jesus, Mark 6:4
The Lord Jesus Christ, helping put-upon coeds wallow in self-pity for over 2 thousand years.
Q: How do you pronounce Ayn Rand's name?
A: With a snort of derision.
Brilliant.
One of my closest colleagues thumbs through her dog eared copies of Rand on almost every conference flight. I find it disturbing, but we still get along. It probably reinforces her tendency to an embattled mindset, but I would say the outlook generally makes her a good colleague. She decides what is right and fights stubbornly for it. I would say she doesn't lack for empathy generally, and tough love can be a very appropriate philosophy in academia.
I missed the novels during whatever stage they would might have held my attention, and I can't bring myself to spend my time on them now. (My wife says she went through a 6 month infatuation at the beginning of college.) Unfortunately, that means I can only criticize them by hearsay, which is kind of lame.
You know, the 'philosophy' is idiotic and unpleasant, the sexual politics is just icky, and the writing is bad, but they aren't bad trashy beach books. I grew up reading similarly wooden and talky '40s through '60s SF, and while I can accept that my literary taste is desperately weird, there's something I like about it.
I've often thought that Rand was a wasted architectural/design critic -- while the moralization about it is just silly, the bits of the books where she's describing things, buildings, objects, whatever, are where her writing really perks up and gets interesting.
I've know a number of serious Randroids -- never met anyone who claimed to have read all of John Galt's speech.
I'm with LB. Atlas Shrugged is an above average pot-boiler.
As for Rand qua intellectual influence, you'll get no defence of A=A philosophizing from me. "I owe no debts but to Aristotle": that's about as good a sign of the crank mindset as you are likely to find.
What Rand did possess, however, is a genuine talent for linking her moral intuitions to memorable images and scenes. Has anyone given a better description of regulatory capture than "Aristocracy of Pull"?
I'll grant you that most of my distaste for Rand (which is extreme and non-negotiable) comes from her glassy-eyed minions rather than her directly. I could list the many, many things about both her writing and her philosophy that make me brand her a half-assed, less talented version of L. Ron Hubbard, but mostly it comes down to a complete and utter lack of anything remotely approaching a sense of humor. Perhaps she gives a good description of regulatory capture - I wouldn't know - but god, Das Kapital reads like Oscar Wilde by comparison.
Rather than casting stones at Ayn Rand and her devotees, it seems more the spirit of this place to propose that he who is without literary/philosophical sin cast the first one. I can't; I was pumping my fist and shouting "fuggin' a-right" through every page of Eldridge Cleaver's psychotic Soul On Ice. And me a white kid, and it's the 1980s, way past the Black Power moment, and Cleaver himself was at that time giving speeches under the aegis of the Unification Church.
Admitttedly to commemorate the "Rand Centennial" seems hard to justify; the only lefty equivalent I can imagine is if the Utne Reader has a special Carlos Casteneda centennial issue when that day rolls around (it, and they, may have already for all I know).
You're all dupes.
Sincerely,
Strictly Canonical Since Junior High Ogged
Now I'm kinda curious. Is there a cliff notes for "Atlas Shrugged" somewhere?
Unfogged breaks down when Ogged takes a brief vacation. Replacement bloggers aren't available, only a commenter who does nothing but gay jokes. But Ogged, a two-bit blogger, bullies his silent partners into recruiting Fontana Labs, despite the risks involved. Labs signs on, and the worst possible result occurs: The blog descends into a cesspit of frat-house jokes and uncomfortable homosexual innuendo. An army of like-minded stunted commenters descends upon the blog, and it collapses under the weight of its self-referential humor.
Thanks, Labs. Buns of Steel wasn't a porn series, was it?
This stunted commenter was making lame frat house jokes here long before Labs was recruited. Call me Ishmael.
ogged,
Thanks. Somebody should invent a gadget that would search the internet for stuff and let you know where it is.
Okay, I skimmed the Cliff notes, which is, for this day and age, all that is necessary.
Shorter "Atlas Shrugged" - Socialism bad, communism worse, the world should kiss the nerd's asses.
Motors and steel and TRAINS, of all things, these don't age well, do they?
I loved her. She proved to me at age 11 that women could be incredibly brilliant. She wrote so convincingly of redistributionism as slavery. When all around me lied about God and drugs and selflessness and love and property, she gave me crystalline truth.
David
You should look into drugs and love again. They're much more fun once you get a few years past 11.
Read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as a teen, and never felt anything other than repulsion, save an uncontrollable amount of eye-rolling. The best I can say is that I read one or the other during a horrific 14 hours or so spent almost entirely on the can during a bout of non-stop intestinal disorder at age 17 or 18.
The two experiences did seem to go together very well.
I strongly suspect that having read pretty much the entire run of Astounding from 1933 on, on microfilm, at age 12, including decades worth of 1938-on John W. Campbell editorials, and unbelievably vast amounts of other science fiction in the same time period, innoculated me against Rand.
When all around me lied about God and drugs and selflessness and love and property, she gave me crystalline truth.
I was scanning quickly and initially, before the huge double-take, read those last two words as "crystal meth".
One of the Rush albums, 2112 I believe, is dedicated "to the genius of Ayn Rand" or something like that. That was more than enough to put me off her but good.
But yeah, it's really her minions that I can't stand. Yes, it's unfair that the jocks and rich kids got all the attention and plaudits in highschool, when I and my studious friends were, you know, like really smart and stuff. But wallowing in the pity of that once you're above, say, sixteen or so is just so very annoying and unseemly, not to mention pointless.
Mitch,
One reason I enjoyed the Heinlein stories was that the smart and capable flourished. It was much more hopeful.