Andrew Corsello’s The Bitch is Back article from GQ on the boorish subject of Ayn Rand Assholes is probably the best takedown of Ayn Rand’s followers (and Alan Greenspan and Wall Street) I’ve yet seen and certainly the funniest (other than Stephen Colbert’s). It was about time for an article like this to appear and I am glad it was Corsello who wrote it.

I myself became an unabashed Ayn Rand fanatic when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I’d been reading the works of Victor Hugo and so I was totally primed for discovering another “Romantic” (note capital “r”) writer like Ayn Rand next, but it wasn’t via her well-known fiction that I discovered the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, but rather a more obscure volume called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I read extremely slowly so I could take in the complexity of the thought. It’s a very dry, technical book, but made a huge impression on me (more on this below, it merits special mention).

The next thing I read was Anthem, which is interesting enough, but slight compared to her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged which I read after that. Eventually I would go through nearly ever word of hers in print up to about 1979. I mean everything. Via mail order I collected single issues of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter until I had them all and I kept them in bound cases like holy relics. This is what can happen when bright kids read Ayn Rand, they get obsessed, but hopefully, like me, they will grow out of it. Discovering Lenny Bruce, Marx, Marcuse, Crowley, Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre deprogrammed my teenage ass but good and by the time I was 14 and I soon stopped caring about Ayn Rand altogether. (In my case I was young enough not to have had any shameful, reactionary moments to cringe about and regret, not like young Marty Beckerman)

By the time I was in my twenties and living in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, I’d see young, obviously Republican, stock broker types reading Atlas Shrugged on the subway and I’d feel silent contempt for them. Discovering Ayn Rand after high school is bad enough, but to discover her post-college is true pathetica. Her strident greed is good moralizing about the ‘virtues of selfishness’ (one of her best known non-fiction titles) would have an appeal to would be Gordon Gekkos, of course, but… yuck. Talk about an impoverished intellectual diet.

Many people who loathe Ayn Rand tend to go on about what a cack-handed writer she was, but this is not strictly true because her books, even the 75,000 page Atlas Shrugged are real page turners. I can absolutely see why Atlas Shrugged is still one of the all time best selling books in history—I was captivated by it myself, of course. The characters are vivid. The book’s plotting—which has tons of relentless momentum despite the novel’s legendary heft—is a tour de force. It’s Rand’s dialogue that seals her reputation as an author you just can’t take seriously. To be fair, she was writing in her second language, but the problem with her books is that no one actually speaks to one another, they just make speeches at each other. Hectoring, long-winded speeches. It’s fine to read stuff like that as a teenager, but when I crack open one of her books today, I shake my head in disbelief at how bombastic and horrible her writing is. It’s Dan Brown level tripe.

If you don’t believe me, try this one for size, the trailer for King Vidor’s screen version of The Fountainhead with a script by Rand herself. Can you imagine how difficult it was for the actors to get their lines out and try to sound convincing saying them?!?! (It’s one or the other!)

 
Here’s a clip of Ayn Rand on Phil Donohue’s talkshow that I recall seeing at the time it originally aired. She got really peevish with both Phil and the audience at points. Check her out. Who talks like that?

 
*One quick thing I wanted to say about Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is that it is an unfairly ignored and misunderstood work on how concepts are formed, shunned by academia simply because it was written by Ayn Rand. Had it been written by Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead or Wittgenstein, it would be (rightfully) celebrated as an important philosophical treatise.I may think Ayn Rand sucks as a novelist, but I highly recommend this book.

 
Last month, the NYT Magazine cover-featured an article about Carl Jung‘s infamous Red Book, or, as the Times called it, The Holy Grail of the Unconscious:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland.  The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say ‘Liber Novus,’ which is Latin for ‘New Book.’  Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils.  If you didn?

Very clear and spot-on interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson on what he calls the Technopathocracy of modern society: complete disconnection, lack of community and Internet-mediated insanity, and the Intentional Community as the solution. Right on. He makes the incredibly salient point that “dropping out” of Internet culture now is the same as “dropping out” of the mainstream in the 60s.

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

(Arthur: Peter Lamborn Wilson [aka Hakim Bey] on the intentional community)

 
An interview with Joe Bageant, author of the excellent book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

Bageant offers insight into American redneck culture and tries to explain Birthers, tea baggers and how Republicans have become so infernally adept at convincing working class Americans to vote against their own self-interest, like now, with the current health care debate. Do not miss Deer Hunting with Jesus, it’s essential reading if you want to understand the deeply ingrained psychological complexities that make up modern America, whether you are American yourself or not.

Mick Farren, legendary British counterculture radical, sci-fi/horror author, cultural journalist, critic, blogger and rock ‘n’ roller has had another birthday. I hope it was a happy one!

I couldn’t resist pilfering another of Mick’s rants, they’re just too good, too eloquent and too true:

It?

Richard Metzger speaks with author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen via Skype from his home in Northern California. Derrick is the author of thirteen books including ?

 
Jim Jones, Fitzcarraldo, The Mosquito Coast...nothing sucks me in quicker than a tale of a dashed jungle dream.  That’s why I’m bracing for what seems like a harrowing read in Greg Grandin’s account of Henry Ford’s Amazonian misadventure, Fordlandia.  Despite the story’s familiar trajectory (man—> jungle—> tragedy), the details sound remarkable:

In 1927, Ford, the richest man in the world, needed rubber to make tires, hoses and other parts for his cars. Rubber does not grow in Michigan, and European producers enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the rubber trade because of their Asian colonies. So, typically, the car magnate decided to grow his own.

The site chosen for Ford?

We can be rich in cotton and mining metals and silkworms and we can makes things, we can make things cars, the machine can make it for us…on the East Coast they have slaves and they believe in slavery and made in China, but on the West Coast, the new West Coast, we don’t believe in that. We believe in the union and that’s what we are.

(via reddit)

Interesting essay about the “lost” patents and inventions of Buckminster Fuller:

Buckminster Fuller sought patents for his works to document in an enduring form what an individual could invent for the betterment of humanity.  A primary resource for Fuller?