Category: Books

Good day. I notice a lot of traffic dropping by from IMAO, and I wanted to clarify what my esteemed spouse said in the comment to Frank J’s props for Michael Moore.

Hey, I say The Big One when it ran at the artsy Tivoli theatre here in St. Louis back in the 1990s. I liked it well enough. After all, corporate power abusers are the same fun targets for drive-by rantings as governmental ones, ainna? So when I spent my four bucks to join the Quality Paperback Club, I selected Stupid White Men. I knew the basic plot, so it’s not like I was getting something I wasn’t expecting.

It became a boon that I bought it in paperback. I could more vigorously “dialog with the text” without damaging the furniture or walls of my home. Highlighting? Marginalia? How about a schnucking drop-kick when Moore pillories the new attorney general for disposing of gun background checks as the law says he should–which Moore calls ILLEGAL! How about a backhand expulsion of the tome the eighty-second time Moore describes Bush as illegitimate? I forget at what point I spiked the book to the floor and stomped on it, but I made it all the way through.

I’d recommend the practice of paperbacks when reading books with which you disagree. It’s not always the case that you’ll feel such vitriol that you’ll need to physically abuse a book, but when lies, quarter-truths, and whatnot cover most of the material between the title page and the “About the Author” section, it’s best to be safe from gouging drywall, concussing cats, or hurting yourself.

Thank you, that is all.

Also in the Atlantic Monthly this month, but not online (go check), a cartoonist named Edward Sorel does a page and a half Little-Annie-Fanny rendition of Ayn Rand’s life. Great! She married Frank O’Connor, she bopped Nathaniel Branden, then she died.

Of course, this simple rendition doesn’t even have the depth and subtlety of Branden’s Judgment Day, for crying out loud. There’s something wrong with reducing a full and long life into nine panels. Oh, what the hell, let’s Fisk it:

1. Panel 1, Russian emigre, changes name to Ayn Rand. Check.
2. Panel 2, She marries Frank O’Connor for a green card? I’ve heard they were in love, but that’s a little complicated for one panel of a cartoon.
3. Panel 3, The Fountainhead published and movie rights bought. That’s right, but what’s the idea jabbing at Jack Warner, head of the studio who bought the movie rights? Aren’t you slamming Ayn Rand here?
4. Panel 4, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden wed. This accounts for 11% of Ayn Rand’s life and accomplishments? Wait a minute…here it comes….
5. Panel 5, The Start of the Affair. Ayn and Nathan, rutting in a bed….
6. Panel 6, The Affair Part II. Branden feels guilty, and Ayn is a shrew.
7. Panel 7, Atlas Shrugged published, “A cult is born.”
8. Panel 8, The End of the Affair. Branden has an affair with someone under 65, and Ayn excommunicates him.
9. Panel 9, Ayn Dies. Alan Greenspan is there, and look how he’s effed everything up now.

So a full third of Ayn Rand’s contribution to literature and philosophy is that she bopped a second-rate self-esteem motivational speaker? I disbelieve and make a sign of warding here. It’s true, she erred, badly, with the whole Branden thing, but that’s hardly the sum of rational egoism or the messages within her novels and nonfiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I too have been cast from the reasoned land of capital-O Objectivism for thinking Ayn was less than perfect and that maybe Branden made some contributions to the objectivist cause, but to limit her life to nine panels, and her entire obra to an ill-advised affair and other cynical motives is to ignore the content of her work. Of course, maybe that’s the goal of modern criticism, or maybe modern critics just can’t make it through ~2000 pages of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

But I have. Twice, each. Nyah nyah.

So go watch Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life for the story beyond the cartoon. Beyond, perhaps, the cartoonist’s comprehension.

Robert B. Parker’s fond of having his characters in his Spenser novels say, “Hitler liked dogs” as a way of illustrating how even the worst antagonist might have some refined or sympathetic characteristics. This month’s Atlantic Monthly also illustrates that Hitler liked books and was somewhat well-read.

As author Timothy Ryback recounts, Hitler gathered a large library beginning after World War I and collected books until his suicide. Ryback discovers a large amount of “dialoging with the text” wherein Hitler makes margin notes and underlines passages. This marginalia provides a sort of insight into his thought’s developments. The article’s a fascinating read.

Let this be a lesson to sophisticates, academics, and aesthetes who look down their noses at people with less formal education or less widely read in those contemporary “classics” that dictate the intellectually “in.” Being well-read differs from being good, or being right.