That article listed off a bunch of businessmen I’ve never heard of and right-wing politicians who pander to anti-intellectuals. And Greenspan. I’m not seeing that as reason to read her. Her fiction’s basically ham-fisted Jack Chick tracts for her simple-minded views. Any fictional work in which a character delivers a seventy page monologue is very thinly veiled propaganda, and terrible fiction.
I read more of her “philosophical” writing (mostly for entertainment). Her attempts as serious philosophical writing made her look like a talented fiction writer in comparison. I was never able to finish a book, despite them being so bad they were generally pretty funny. I’d usually either hit a tautology presented as a deep insight (A=A) that was spun into all sorts of magical thinking, or hit a passage where she stepped way over the line as a racist/terrible person such as calling Japanese people savages in mud holes (in Philosophy, Who Needs It) and would go do something else.
Well, in fairness, it was a good book in my memory. It’s been… ugh… 28 years since I read it, so I’m sure I’ve forgotten all the wooden characters and dull bits and just recall the Frank Lloyd Wright stand-in designing classy buildings.
Wait until you read some biographies about what a shit FLW was to his family, employers, clients, etc. He really was the right choice to embody Rand’s “philosophy”.
Oh trust me, I have. FLW was not a nice man by any means; it’s easy to see why he embodied the “virtue of selfishness” that Rand admired so much.
My favorite apocryphal FLW story was when I toured Fallingwater; the tour guide pointed out the low doorways and told us that Wright specifically ignored his client’s request for doors that’d accommodate his 6-foot-plus height and made all of the doors about 5’10". When the client complained and asked why, Wright said “They’re perfect for me. I’m 5 foot 9 and nobody needs to be taller than that.”
I wonder what Ayn though about Stalin’s daughter (Svetlana Alliluyeva) being married to Frank Lloyd Wright’s protege and becoming close friends with Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow.
What I also remember is Rand’s puerile philosophizing. Even then, I had some dim sense that adults who bought into it weren’t thinking very deeply about how any society actually works.
I definitely remember having a conversation with my English teacher (a big Rand fan) that went something like this:
Me: So Howard Roarke lives for himself, and the only thing that matters is his uncorrupted artistic statement.
Her: Correct.
Me: And Toohey is an altruist who makes buildings that are popular and fill a public need, but aren’t very original.
Her: Correct.
Me: And… Toohey’s the bad guy?
Her: Oh, most definitely.
Me: Huh.
On the other hand, if your attempts to belong somewhere keep failing, it becomes easier and easier with every year to tell the society to go screw itself.
Yeah, @milliefink is right… this group of happy mutants don’t always agree, but we certainly all fit in here… probably because we mostly value our differences and respect them.
Q: You were interested in the writings of Ayn Rand decades ago. Do her words still speak to you? A: Oh, no. That was 40 years ago.
Peart was, what, 23 when he wrote 2112? I had NFI about anything when I was 23 either, but fortunately nothing I wrote then ended up in millions of teenage bedrooms.
