Not to denigrate Eco, but his novels aren’t what anyone would describe as readable page-turners. The Island Of The Day Before might be the second densest novel I’ve read after Ulysses. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Shamefacedly, I never managed to get through Finnegans Wake.)
Ayn Rand committed many many sins against prose and polity but if you’re going to sweep that tar-laden brush around you better be careful who else you’re liable to spatter with it. Long-winded jeremiads can be found in every quarter. Their lack of quality does not necessarily indict their validity.
The oligarchic lipstick/sledge metaphor is pretty good though.
To each their own. Obviously lots of people disagree with you about her prose being “turgid”, although I know that’s the pat criticism that people like to level at her. Just like people who identify as “conservative” are supposed to call Kurt Vonnegut an irrelevant crackpot. Personally I think she writes beautifully, especially to the ear of a teenager, which I think is the ideal target audience of Atlas and Fountainhead. I think that’s what makes those books so dangerous. Its kind of like Pink Floyd: absolutely horrendous lyrics couched in beautiful music, which makes the ideas seductive to people of a certain age.
I don’t think she writes “beautifully”, but certainly her writing is a siren song for a certain kind of person, usually a young man, who feels that their intellectual talents are underappreciated, and that the attraction of her writing for such people would be less dangerous if the writing was really as difficult as some are suggesting.
My frozen head in a jar. Being carried around by Elvis’s headless corpse, from space. Cause thats how undead-head-in-a-jar-space-Hitler likes to roll.
Or in other words… you can’t win an argument with someone who believes there’s a promised land in the liminal spaces between sincerity and insincerity. Because I am post discourse here.
The best thing about Pink Floyd is the full intro to ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Can’t say I found them particularly seductive.
The fact that teenagers are scratching about looking for someone to do their thinking for them is no recommendation of the sort of people willing to provide this. Quite the opposite.
Finnegan’s Wake is not a book. It’s a reflexive exercise of the collective unconscious, imposed by Joyce. A literary Mandelbrot set whose implicate order defies rational thought and the very notion of authorship.
Well, northern Bavaria has a wide variety, from the Nuremberg style to the Bayreuth and Kulmbach style to the Coburg style (which also are unique in that the Coburgers add pine cones to the charcoal fires). Munich has its Weisswurst, but those are cooked in water and are too delicate to fry.
Don’t let the good people of Nuremberg, Bayreuth, Kulmbach, and Coburg hear that they’re living in “northern Bavaria”. While this may be the case from a political POV (thanks mostly to Napoleon), their stretch of the countryside is called Franconia (Franken), and they’re usually quick to insist that they are not “Bavarian” in any way, shape, or form.
I know, I lived up there for two decades before moving to the Landeshauptstadt. You would think belonging to Bavaria for 200 years would make a difference, but the Franconians (especially the Upper Franconians) can be a stubborn lot. Oh, and up in Hof, they bristle at being called Oberfranken, just as the Coburger sometimes think of themselves as apart from Franconia and look to Prince Albert the way Altbayer look to their Kini.
The only thing that unites Franconians is their claim not to belong to the region they belong to.
So not banning the book and allowing people to freely read it means no neo-nazis, right?
Which don’t even begin to dip into the right wing, white power organizations here (or in countries where the book was not banned)… It never became a best seller here, but I also don’t know how often people decided not to carry it in book stores as a matter of course. And I have no idea how many libraries carried it, allowing people with regular access to it. Plus, does anyone count sales of alternative sources, such as white power organizations that have their own publishing arms? Or copies bought and shared?
This isn’t to say I’m in favor of banning the book, just that we need to look for other explanations for the rise of far right nationalism, other than just it’s related to this book.
Maybe my memory is failing me, but doesn’t it contain a 50 page soliloquy where Rand basically just possesses her protagonist to say, “Let me tell you what I think.”?
Then again, my favourite book as young adult was Thus Spoke Zarathustra (I don’t have time for the "Thus Spake Zarathustra translation) so maybe my idea of what young adult fiction is supposed to look like is off.
