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Why do Ayn Rand's book suck?
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Anonymous
If you buy Toyota, Honda, or Nissan, you are buying union product. They don't have unions here, but they sure do in Japan. Guess you will have to sell your car. Or maybe you drive a BMW, Mercedes, or Audi so you already have a union product. Wink. wink. |
Anonymous
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Stick to the topic, dumbo.
It's now about Ayn Rand and her look alikes.
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Anonymous
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Great article on Rand, and Atlas Shrugged (cut and paste, since it's off of a facebook page):
[quote]The release of Part I of the long-awaited film adaptation of Ayn Rand's last, longest and most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, brought the topic of discussion among people like me and most of my friends, who discuss novels and films and political philosophies, back to the topic of the 20th century's most morally repulsive "major writer." I call her this not because she was an influential nor even talented writer - far from it. Her four novels, particularly her two most famous ones, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are, as works of fiction, utter swill - boring, pretentious and repetitive. They are the types of novels in which rooms in a mansion are described in obsessive, almost obscene detail, only to be populated by characters more flat and one-dimensional than the pages on which they live. They are novels which have as their dramatic climaxes 70-plus page philosophical monologues - in other words, not novels at all, but treatises scantily clad in the trappings of fictional stories, in that she invents names of people to say and do things and throws in a few sex scenes. Creepy, rape-like sex scenes. Rand's supposed stature comes not from the quality of her storytelling, even by the lurid, sensationalistic artistic standards of a popular fiction writer. I have yet to meet even the most ardent of admirers of hers who has praised, even in passing, her characterizations or ability to craft a sentence, compared to, say, the fans of a Stephen King or Tom Clancy or Jacqueline Susann, let alone Raymond Chandler or J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert A. Heinlein. She does not even receive the praise for being, if not artistically meritorious nor factually accurate, at the very least guilty entertainment, which explains the popularity of Dan Brown. To love Rand is to love her philosophy for its sake. There, Rand has many admirers, although not as many as they believe. The film "Atlas Shrugged: Part I," despite being praised by admirers, grossed not even a fifth of its already bargain basement $10 million-dollar budget on its opening weekend, with a per-screen average that seems respectable in comparison to the opening weekend of the much more mainstream "Scream 4" but pales in comparison to the American debuts of the similarly niche French period romance "The Princess of Montpensier" and the Italian romantic thriller "The Double Hour." (By either metric - gross or per-screen average - when the free market which Randroids exalt speaks, it speaks much more highly of that weekend's box office winner, the family friendly garishness that is "Rio."  Yet what Rand's followers may lack in numbers and/or in willingness or ability to cough up for a movie ticket, they make up for in prominence. Her praises have been sung from politicians such as Rand Paul and his father Ron to cultural commentators and entertainers such as Penn Jillette; the so-called "Tea Parties" of 2009 which have been credited for the election results of 2010 were often strewn with signs with such slogans as "Atlas is shrugging" or "I am John Galt" (a reference to the hero of Atlas Shrugged); among her closest friends in life was Alan Greenspan, who was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and stayed in that post for nearly 20 years.I do not know whether or not Reagan personally read Rand's novels. To be honest, I doubt it. Yet his appointment of Greenspan to the Federal Reserve - arguably the most significant position in the American economy - speaks volumes of his economic philosophy. Remember, Greenspan was one of Rand's closest friends and an avowed "objectivist" (the term by which Randian acolytes identify themselves). I will be returning to the Reagan economic philosophy in a moment, but for now, it is worth repeating: Ronald Reagan appointed one of Rand's closest friends, her "collective" as she herself called them (and boy howdy, do I want you to remember that for the rest of this article), as the most important figure in the American economy. These are not the sorts of crazy leaps Glenn Beck might make on a chalkboard. When it came to the economy, Reagan agreed with Greenspan enough to put him in charge of it, and Greenspan agreed with Rand enough to identify his philosophy as the one she articulated. As for Rand, if her characters are flat and one-dimensional, it is because she was as an author, in her own words, a "romantic realist." It is worth noting that other authors of her era and previously - Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Liam O'Flaherty - were deemed as romantic realists by others, by critics. Rand is perhaps the first author to have applied that sobriquet to herself. (Subsequent writers who have adopted are frequently imitators of Rand's.) It is an unusual term in that it is an apparent oxymoron, romanticism being a movement whose authors (Goethe, Pushkin, Shelley, et al.) presented an idealized portrait of humanity, and realism's authors (Eliot, Tolstoy, Flaubert, et al.) presenting a, well, realistic portrait. The romantic realist, then, would present a portrait combining elements of the ideal and the realistic, a depiction Rand herself said portrays life "as it could be and should be," with the "could be" indicating realism and the "should be" indicating romanticism. A romantic realism may be, for instance, the detective protagonist of a Raymond Chandler novel, whom Chandler described in his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder" as: "The best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." Yet even as Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a fourth, parallel movement to romantic realism had already begun, one which might accurately be called "unromantic realism" or "postmodern realism." In Jonathan Demme's Oscar-winning postmodern realism 1991 film "The Silence of the Lambs," the most famous and frequently quoted line comes from the serial killer Hannibal Lecter: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." Less remembered is the line of dialogue which precedes it. Spoken by the film's protagonist and heroine, Clarice Starling, an idealistic FBI trainee who is meeting and measuring Hannibal up for the first time, it is: You see a lot, Doctor, but are you strong enough to point that high powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to. The irony of Clarice's line is she doesn't really need to have Hannibal look at himself per se. She needs him to look at another man. She has come to him to gain his insights into another serial killer nicknamed "Buffalo Bill," whose only connection to Hannibal is an overly broad FBI profiler psychological sketch of all serial killers everywhere, which Hannibal has already dismissed as a "blunt little tool." Her challenge, for Hannibal to "point that high powered perception at" himself, to "look at [himself] and write down what" he sees, is entirely unnecessary for her mission. Clarice's challenge is at the heart of postmodern realism. Where postmodernism implores audiences and artists to explore their relationship to art, postmodern realism implores them to explore their relationship to romanticism. "It's all very well and good," the postmodern realist author says, "to say the world could be and should be this way. But before we continue, what is it about this world that you think it SHOULD be this way?" In that sense, postmodern realism can be seen as a reaction - and a sorely needed one, at that - against Rand's brand of romantic realism. Early postmodern realist works such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" or Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, let alone later cycle works as Rob Reiner's "Misery" or Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, deconstructed the hero myth by imploring the audience to take a hard look at the supposed hero and, by extension, author. Given that we're romanticizing him, what about him exactly are we romanticizing? Yet postmodern realism goes a step further even than this. If you, the audience, like him in spite of yourselves, what do you like so much about him? It may seem strange to a casual observer that in the '70s and beyond, the "heroic" murderer would become such a prominent figure. Even in "Rear Window," the protagonist is merely a casual voyeur of cold-blooded homicide. Yet by the time Martin Scorsese (who borrowed his first personal film's title "Mean Streets" from Chandler's romantic realist description) made his first undeniable classic "Taxi Driver," the link between heroism and sociopathy was already so blurred as to be nonexistent. This lack of distinction can be seen in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick, in Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," in Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." Far more strange is the fact that in post-Reaganite art, the vicious murderer is such a prominent figure (Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and the film of the same name; Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and the film of the same name; Jeff Lindsay's novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter and the TV series Dexter, David Chase's series The Sopranos, etc.). Yet in 1928, when she was first formulating her philosophy, Rand spoke of a certain figure, a one Mr. William Edward Hickman. In speaking of him, she laid bare the underlying principles of her philosophy, and those principles were that sociopathy is not only a necessary evil, but a positive good. Few postmodern realist works have so eloquently expressed the insanity of her own hero worship.[/quote] |
Anonymous
Commodities are under attack. The price of silver just dropped 25% since Friday. Consider that a lesson on the fickle world of precious metals. This is why you can't put your ss money into gold. |
Anonymous
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Somebody today was recommending in the New York Times that the US Treasury sell off gold to forestall default ... if the Reps don't agree to raise the debt ceiling.
A big sale of government-held gold => a big drop in the price of gold. |
Anonymous
The threat of a big sell-off may be enough to push the price down. |
Anonymous
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I doubt all the gold in Fort Knox could pay more than a couple weeks' debt.
I wonder if there was some wannabe Hunt brothers getting busted up a bit there. |
Anonymous
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"utter swill - boring, pretentious and repetitive"
Just like a lot of DCUM threads. |
Anonymous
And you are forced to read them by ...? |
Anonymous
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Anyone hear the news about the planned second and third installments of Atlass Shrugged, The Movie? Apparently, the funder/producer of the series--angered by the shitty reviews Part I received--decided he was going to "go Galt", and not even produce parts 2 & 3. So that'll show you parasites!
Anyway, the incredibly excellent trailer to Atlass Shrugged Part 2 can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seKhVJDOzlQ |
Anonymous
| On the subject of Ayn Rand, I suppose the public has voted. Atlas Shrugged the Movie has grossed $3 million to date. Ouch. |
Anonymous
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So. This thread isn't about Ayn Rand look alikes?
o_0 |
Anonymous
What's the o_0? |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Yeah, it's the conspiracy of the reviewers, not the fact that the movie lost a bundle. He's not "Going Galt". He's failing. |