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More books I looked at in December
Some Desperate Glory
I'm just gonna put this here (this is about 80% of the way through):
I think that's got to be why the Wisdom stuck them back in there, in the world where Earth died, when the Wisdom was preparing to kill itself! I do absolutely think this was what Tesh intended, but I think she could maybe have been just a bit better about connecting the dots there?
Atlas Shrugged (Rand, skim)
Oh boy, this book.
a) You know, Rand actually has a reasonable number of good points as an author; she can write a compelling and well-put-together story. "Can" may be the operative word there -- because what happens in this book, in practice, is that the action just completely stops every couple of pages (!) so that either a hero can drone on and ON about how Objectivist philosophy is the greatest, or the villains can go on and on about how they are Villanous non-Objectivists. (At least they do not usually go on for quite as long as the heroes!) This could have been a much more compelling book if 90% of if had been cut!
b) I love The Fountainhead with a guilty love but I do not love this book as a whole in the slightest, though it definitely has its moments (see (c)) . Partially because there are way more speeches, but mostly I think because Fountainhead really had only one pure cartoon villain (Ellsworth Toohey) while everyone else was actually sort of a mix of good and bad impulses -- my fave woobie Peter Keating, Guy Francon, Katie, Gail Wynand of course... like, they weren't necessarily the good guys, but you could have at least fleeting sympathy for all of them. Even Howard Roark has one moment of humanization! In AS it's all either "we are the scum of the earth muwhahaha" cartoon villains or "we are too pure Objectivist for this world" heroes (John Galt never gets even that one moment of humanization that Roark does), with most of the actual interesting people getting two scenes of screen time and then dying horribly to demonstrate how terrible the villains are (Cherryl Taggart, the Wet Nurse). Ugh.
c) Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia only get, like, 20 pages of time together in this entire monster 1000-page book, but boy they are very intense gay pages.
d) I described Dagny Taggart to D. as the girl that all the other boys are in love with and also she is Not Like Other Girls! Oh Ayn Rand, you did all the tropes and didn't even know it. But it's OK, because her two suitors that she didn't want, Rearden and Francisco, have a Pure Gay Love (see (c))
e) oh man, reading this as an adult, it is... very clear... that Ayn Rand has a domination kink. The number of times, between this and the Fountainhead (but even markedly more clearly in AS than in TF), that she talks about how the woman is so totally turned on by the man forcing her and not getting her consent, is really quite something. I felt, reading those bits, like it was a window into Rand's sexual preferences that I really was not super comfortable with!
f) Speaking of Rand's kinks, there is this impassioned defense of adultery halfway through the book that immediately made me go, "Hmm, sooooo what were the dates on that affair with Nathaniel Branden?" and I was totally unsurprised to find that, yup, that totally started before this book was finished and published
g) Occasionally I'd be hit full in the face with "tell me without telling me that you've never been in the company of small children for more than five minutes!" I have lost the page number and am not motivated to go back to try to find it, but there's this bit where one of the hero characters is ruminating that human beings are by nature rational until they're taught by society not to be. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh Ayn Rand. I mean, my first response was "please go talk to a toddler and then tell me that again," but also you... do not have a great track record in being rational either (see (f)).
I'm just gonna put this here (this is about 80% of the way through):
"Destroying a whole capital world wasn't just a shortcut to end the war," Avi said. "It destroyed our manufacturing base--our networks--our science. Chrysothemis isn't going to build a god machine anytime soon. No one is. With the old one gone, that technology is--" He closed his fist, like someone crushing something out of existence. "For the next several centuries, at least."
I think that's got to be why the Wisdom stuck them back in there, in the world where Earth died, when the Wisdom was preparing to kill itself! I do absolutely think this was what Tesh intended, but I think she could maybe have been just a bit better about connecting the dots there?
Atlas Shrugged (Rand, skim)
Oh boy, this book.
a) You know, Rand actually has a reasonable number of good points as an author; she can write a compelling and well-put-together story. "Can" may be the operative word there -- because what happens in this book, in practice, is that the action just completely stops every couple of pages (!) so that either a hero can drone on and ON about how Objectivist philosophy is the greatest, or the villains can go on and on about how they are Villanous non-Objectivists. (At least they do not usually go on for quite as long as the heroes!) This could have been a much more compelling book if 90% of if had been cut!
b) I love The Fountainhead with a guilty love but I do not love this book as a whole in the slightest, though it definitely has its moments (see (c)) . Partially because there are way more speeches, but mostly I think because Fountainhead really had only one pure cartoon villain (Ellsworth Toohey) while everyone else was actually sort of a mix of good and bad impulses -- my fave woobie Peter Keating, Guy Francon, Katie, Gail Wynand of course... like, they weren't necessarily the good guys, but you could have at least fleeting sympathy for all of them. Even Howard Roark has one moment of humanization! In AS it's all either "we are the scum of the earth muwhahaha" cartoon villains or "we are too pure Objectivist for this world" heroes (John Galt never gets even that one moment of humanization that Roark does), with most of the actual interesting people getting two scenes of screen time and then dying horribly to demonstrate how terrible the villains are (Cherryl Taggart, the Wet Nurse). Ugh.
c) Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia only get, like, 20 pages of time together in this entire monster 1000-page book, but boy they are very intense gay pages.
d) I described Dagny Taggart to D. as the girl that all the other boys are in love with and also she is Not Like Other Girls! Oh Ayn Rand, you did all the tropes and didn't even know it. But it's OK, because her two suitors that she didn't want, Rearden and Francisco, have a Pure Gay Love (see (c))
e) oh man, reading this as an adult, it is... very clear... that Ayn Rand has a domination kink. The number of times, between this and the Fountainhead (but even markedly more clearly in AS than in TF), that she talks about how the woman is so totally turned on by the man forcing her and not getting her consent, is really quite something. I felt, reading those bits, like it was a window into Rand's sexual preferences that I really was not super comfortable with!
f) Speaking of Rand's kinks, there is this impassioned defense of adultery halfway through the book that immediately made me go, "Hmm, sooooo what were the dates on that affair with Nathaniel Branden?" and I was totally unsurprised to find that, yup, that totally started before this book was finished and published
g) Occasionally I'd be hit full in the face with "tell me without telling me that you've never been in the company of small children for more than five minutes!" I have lost the page number and am not motivated to go back to try to find it, but there's this bit where one of the hero characters is ruminating that human beings are by nature rational until they're taught by society not to be. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh Ayn Rand. I mean, my first response was "please go talk to a toddler and then tell me that again," but also you... do not have a great track record in being rational either (see (f)).
no subject
Ha ha ha, oh wow.
And re: an author's kinks shining through, Kim Stanley Robinson's het couples always feature a woman who is taller than the man. As inadvertently revealed kinks go, it's kind of a charming one.
no subject
Oh, that is a charming kink!
no subject
I seem to recall reading that at some public speaking event, she was asked where she came up with the Howard/Dominique fireplace scene, and she said, "Wishful thinking."
In general, she tended to enshrine her personal preferences as the One True Way, and then develop a philosophy around her preferences as objectively (pun intended), universally correct.
no subject
In general, she tended to enshrine her personal preferences as the One True Way, and then develop a philosophy around her preferences as objectively (pun intended), universally correct.
I read Fountainhead so I could do that high school essay contest (which, lol, I find it hilarious that I wrote something along the lines of "the attitude in the book has a lot of good points but can go too far" which was so clearly in retrospect not what they were looking for) and Atlas Shrugged because, idk, it was there, but I didn't know much about Objectivism itself. And then I read The Passion of Ayn Rand in grad school, and found out about allllll of that (both what it was and what you say in your comment, plus bonus "when you do that you can really mess up people's lives") at once. It was a wild ride.
no subject
* Altruism is pointless. So are dogs. A cat is a far more sensible pet. A cat is objectively valuable.
* I liked this movie. Cats are inherently valuable animals. It makes sense that there should be a movie about a cat. I could demonstrate the objective value of a cat, if I wanted to.
* He meets a dog, which neither finds food for him nor protects him from danger. He would have been better off with a cat. There are no cats in this movie.
no subject
AHAHA. Indeed!
I think that's got to be why the Wisdom stuck them back in there, in the world where Earth died, when the Wisdom was preparing to kill itself! I do absolutely think this was what Tesh intended, but I think she could maybe have been just a bit better about connecting the dots there?
Huh! at that being in there. I think you're right that this must be the explanation Tesh intended for Wisdom's choice, but, yeah, the connection still needed to be made better (and also it's still not a great explanation -- "several centuries" does not seem like much on the scale of the universe, which is the scale I'd expect a god machine to think on). But this is where your other explanation, which I still like best, shores it up, so.
But really interesting to know that there is an attempt at an explanation, at least.
no subject
But yeah, I like my other explanation best too ;)
no subject
Ahaha, that's one of the relatively few things I knew about her, actually! That she was very into the idea of the perfect man dominating the perfect woman, and how it affected her POV on feminism.
You've gotta be right about the Wisdom, yeah.
no subject
I'm delighted you agree with me about the Wisdom :D