Ayeeee

Working too much on papers makes me odd. Odder I should say. I guess it should be ... "more odd." Blehhhhhh.

Today I stumbled on this most amusing Florence King column being retread-ed on National Review Online. It was on lady novelists and included several amusing parodies of their work. I particularly enjoyed her bit on Ayn Rand, mostly because in my own little brain I have done similar things. For instance, I always liked to imagine what a hard-core objectivist would do in suburbia:

Scene: Grocery Store

Bagger (I mean, "looter"): Paper or plastic?
Dagny Taggart: Who is John Galt?

or perhaps, in Tunisia:

"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world."
He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the Tunisian dinar.

Or perhaps we could have a Howard Roark in the days before classical Rome who wants to build columns and triglyphs on all his buildings, but who has to fight the dominant traditions of building hovels which were copies of lean-tos which were copies of caves which were copies of ...

For what it's worth, I should point out that I think Ayn Rand was out of her mind most of the time and that objectivism is a bankrupt philosophy that utterly distorts the ideas of legitimate, rational self-promotion and self-interest. However, I have to admit that when I was younger and more cynical (now there's an unusual phrase!) I thought it was the finest set of ideas ever to spring from a mind half-baked, as is testified by my well-worn copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Although, incidentally, I never finished Atlas Shrugged because I could not wade through Galt's lengthy diatribe. And my intellectual connection with Fountainhead wasn't all that strong; I remember having an irrational dislike for Roark because I have always hated modern architecture, when in fact I should have disliked him because he was an advocate and devotee of of the "virtue" of selfishness. ;)