Ayn Rand: WHY does everyone despise her so much?

Hey, have you ever listened to Rush's 2112, Maria? I think you might like it. It's a 70s prog-metal concept album based on Anthem. Drama galore.

[sterl is on verge of tears of laughter in a v. dignified work situation]

I don't agree with anyone's impressions of her books though. I loved Atlas, thought the Fountainhead was 300 pages too long and wanted to rip out Dominique's throat within about, oh, two sentences of her first appearance, and thought that We the Living was the least ridiculous, most compassionate book I've read by Rand.

You know, I'd given thought to starting a thread about Miss Rand, only to abandon the idea because I have very strong opinions about her oeuvre. No offense, Maria, but I think everything about Rand was total crap ... crap literature, crap pseudo- philosophy, crap cult of personality, crap politics. Re her literature, I employ a phrase Vladimir Nabokov used when discussing some other awful Russian novelist -- "mountains of triteness, plateaus of platitudes" -- because it fits so well; totally inelegant and ass prose, wooden like the Black Forest, completely unrealistic (and unentertainingly so). Total ignorance of human psychology (Sigmund Freud would have had a field day psychoanalyzing Miss Rand) and a seriously fucked-up and morally repugnant view of economics. Philosophy was nothing but a very dumbed-down Nietzsche, with a total ignorance and misunderstanding of Kant (her favorite whipping-boy).

Also, I've mentioned it before, but I'll say it again. Anthem was by far the silliest, most inane and unrealistic of the dystopian novels. I had family that lived in a bonafide, Stalinist nation, and their day-to-day reality was nothing like Anthem -- Brazil, Kafka, Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, even Zappa's Central Scrutinizer were closer to the truth of pre-1989 Poland based upon my relative's testimony. I was also disappointed when the composer in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be Rachmaninoff (and not either Prokofiev or Stravinsky) ... the only interesting thing about that massive waste of good trees.

She could have cut down on the size of the book as well

Anyway, I actually escaped adolescence and all never having gotten around to reading Rand or really caring to read her. I wonder if being an Tolkien obsessive excludes Rand worship and vice versa -- then again, I guess Rush is proof the two can coexist. ;-)

Methinks I'm liking Ethan more and more. Maybe I'll dig deep in my wallet and buy him whatever dope joint CD he has his heart set on this week ...

Not true, not true. As I've said before, the character of Ellsworth Toohey is worth the price of admission alone, because it nails so many similar people to the wall so precisely. The scene where he's surrounded by his protegés -- a woman who wrote a novel that's nothing but literal nonsense, a man who writes poetry that is of similar bent, and so on -- (and in other words, incompetents whom Toohey hails as deep artists) -- is absolutely priceless, and is so dead-on accurate in its portrayal of that kind of quietly malevolent, infantilizing insipidness.

For me, anyway, that made me glad I'd read The Fountainhead, even if it was deadly depressing at times in its pallor. Rand's at her best, in that book, when she's on the attack.

Now that you mention it, Ned, 2112 may be a better story. It leaves out this sexist element and the book (I thought it read "Ego?") as well as adding the outer-space element and the guitar and the oracle and the battle at the end. Favourite moments: when Lee screams "I stand atop the spiral stair/An oracle confronts me there," "Temples of Syrinx" the whole way through, the "We have assumed control" bit, the "My lifeblood spills over" part.

Actually, nothing in Anthem (or 2112) really makes a case for libertarian capitalism. It just advocates a general sort of liberal individualism that nearly everyone in the Western world already believes in.

Rush were influenced by Yes but they didn't use Mellotrons (I don't think) or have the classical and folk elements. Their tunes weren't as pretty. They had a lot more hard rock elements. Aside from the odd single I have trouble stomaching them from Moving Pictures onwards. I like side 1 of 2112 (the actual concept album part) and what I know of their other 70s stuff.

np: Classic Yes

I think Rand's case, on the western end of the Cold War, anyway, is one of ridiculous overstatement of an idea that everyone already agrees with more than enough. It's something like the equivalent of, say, an Amish woman breaking away into the modern world and making an impassioned argument that driving cars is not a sin.

Why does everyone?

Oh man, I love Sterl's post upthread. It makes me imagine a scene where intrepid protagonist unearths a treasure chest, in which is a large, glittering uppercase letter I. I read Anthem a few months after this thread and fuck if I remember what actually happened in the end, the I trumps it.

I was disappointed there was no priest-filled Temple of Syrinx, too.

I enjoyed reading The Fountainhead in college, but then I was an architecture major and some of the grander notions about the craft appealed to me at that age. I've never read anything else by her, but now I kind of want to reread her now that I know more about her and her other books.