Has “Atlas Shrugged?”

Atlas

In Ayn Rand’s last and most defining work, Atlas Shrugged, the world’s most gifted, innovative thinkers and inventors, the great minds of the nations, literally go on strike. In a socialist, government dominated, stifling society, these men and women of brains, brawn, and business acumen prefer going underground to benefitting those who lack all of the above. Many people, no doubt, identify with these Randian heroes as they struggle to pursue and produce excellence among those who lack the ability to apprehend or appreciate their talent. They go on strike, too, abandoning such people leaving them to their own inferior devices.

Though Rand was what one writer calls a “liberatrian atheist,” her ideas, her philosophy resonate with me on a fundamental level. There is truth here. It has mostly to do with freedom and man’s Godlike ability to imagine and create and achieve glory. It shows the nasty, fallen side, too – selfishness, cowardice, and jealousy.

Rand articulates her Objectivism in mellifluous prose making all 1,168 pages entertaining reading, that and also the longest novel in a European-based language. Her characters are exquisitely drawn and the good guys, hopefully not inimitable in reality.

Not everyone is or was thrilled with the novel. The National Review has posted a somewhat negative review by Whittaker Chambers from the 1957 archives, the year of the novel’s publication. Definitely worth reading.

Not intending to provide a traditional review (they abound,) I’ll change the novel’s ubiquitous query, “Who is John Galt?” to “Has Atlas Shrugged? ” Have those whose ideas, integrity, and independent self reliance create and inspire excellence abdicated their place leaving the rest to survive on their meager wits?

No? Then where are they? In our classrooms? In our courtrooms? In our capital city?

Finally I recommend William F. Buckley’s novel Getting it Right and the d’Anconia speech on money excerpt(Capitalism Magazine.) Also read the John Galt 90-page radio broadcast, a novella in itself, and Rand’s manifesto.

While it took me nearly a year to finish this novel, I’ll never regret or forget the experience. Today I rummaged used book stores for a copy of The Fountainhead.

Our friend, Francis Coppola

He’s our friend, not because he knows us but because he loves good writing, especially short fiction. Today in serendipitous fashion, seeking a spot to submit my short shory I came across this site. Simple, artsy, and professional-looking, it would do just fine.

The two editors (there are just the two of them) suggested giving the magazine a read either online or buying a copy. I went through the table of contents for one issue and clicked on the Spring 2008 issue and began reading a story. Wow. He’s good. I’m in over my head. Another one! I can’t stop.

Proceding down the page for another read, I read an introduction to Love. Amazing. From there I perused the authors’ names, bylined by their story’s links. No way. Here are Ethan Coen (O, Brother Where Art Thou?), Wes Anderson, Margaret Atwood,  Tim Roth, and Woody Allen!

And the publisher? Francis Ford Coppola. No less.

This is big. I read Coppola’s mission statement. Inspiring. Various essays and reprints from well-known writers (Vonnegut, Dick) are there, too, along with impressive cover design. But it’s not another anthology of college text collections. Plenty of unknowns are published here, too.

Writers can enter the contest, submit a story, or join the virtual studio where “thousands” of writers critique each other. Or just read. The publication is Zoetrope: All Story.

I love stories, having been introduced to fairy tales and myth as a child. In the fourth grade I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream from an old yellowed copy, some relative’s school Signet Edition.  In third grade my teacher read us Bible stories, and I fell in love with Moses and David. (I never liked ghost stories, however; still don’t.)

After getting a master’s in English, I knew I was forever tied to the story, whatever its form. Talk to me, Do it well. Tell me a story. Use your imagination and we’ll be friends forever. You, me, Francis.

The Parable of the Gnat

When the young gnat was born, also the day of his death since gnats have a life span of one day, he asked his father and mother what he should do. They were about to die and so had little time for instructing him, but they did manage to say, just before the end, “See how we hover and spin just above this burberry bush?”

The young gnat, who was already much older, had indeed seen how all the gnats he knew of were whirling and whirling in a furious swarm just above the purple bush behind the small, yellow house.

“Ah, he said. “So that is it then.”

The young gnat got into the bottom ring of the whirling swarm of gnats and began to spin. Faster and faster, more and more frantically he flew and as he did, he rose higher and higher.

This he did until the sun slid below the top of the cherry tree across the street, and then he fell, pulled to the ground, and landed in the red clay pot that in the summer held white petunias.

Christian leaders not shacking up with novel

William Young’s The Shack is a best-seller for BN and has topped the NYT list. It’s a Christian genre book and that’s what makes its success surprising — and controversial. Albert Mohler, in a full-length radio program,  has called it “heresy,” and Lifeway has apparently pulled it. But in addition to sales, customer reviews say the book is enriching and renewing.

For me and other would -be writers the most interesting thing here is the book’s publishing history. Young, recently bankrupt and having lost a home of 19 years, wrote the book for his children and a few friends. They loved it, word of mouth marketing kicked in, and a best seller was born.

“Dear Mr. Young, we regret to inform you . . .”  Yes, the book, like so many other successes, was rejected by both Christian and secular publishing houses. Undeterred Young formed Windblown expressly for publishing his own novel. Then came a webpage. Barnes and Noble bought a few copies and when sales soared, ordered more. Many more.

Issues? Christian leaders say the book may be harmful. Fans say it’s the best Christian book they’re read. By the way, in the book God is a black woman.  A quick read will tell. I’m waiting for it to hit the used bookstores or be available at the library.

Young’s website gives the front matter and chapter one for readers. NYT Books has another review. And of course, blogs are weighing in on both sides.

Identify yesterday’s quotation

It was my title for the little homage to men yesterday:”the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is part of William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry from the Lyrical Ballads, the Preface, wherein the poet writes what became the Romantic manifesto for poetry.

Recall that Romantics glorified feelings and objected to unemotional, dry, intellectual writing. Spirit trumphed mind and skill. Of course, other characteristics applied, but most can be contrasted with the features of Neoclassical poetry of the preceding 18th century.

Here are a few examples:

]Neoclassical            Romantic
urbanity                      rural life, nature
intellect                      feelings
logic                           mysticism
adult                           child
control                       spontaneity
now                            past
familiarity                  foreign, exotic

The Preface is must reading for lovers of literature and should be interesting for just about anyone.  This link is from Bartleby’s ed. of the Harvard Classics.

“1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”

Or else what? Objectionable use of the word “must” it seems. Of course the editor, Peter Boxall, wants to raise our literary antennae because he knows we haven’t read these books, not most of them, and so with the implied inferiority of cretins like us, the challenge to our education, we read his list. We are weighed and found wanting. Score one.

A vampire book, Mr. Boxall?

According to William Grimes in the Books section of the NYT, (RSS to right)  Boxall wants to critique “canonicity.” Academics subscribe to a long-standing list of must reads of their own: what an educated person should have read to be considered well-read, having encountered significant ideas well expressed that are life and possibly world changing. The classics.  They are under scrutiny if not attack. Interview With a Vampire is on par with Nineteen Eighty Four these days.

And the point can be made:  So if I haven’t read Macbeth, I don’t understand overweaning pride and ambition? Minus Huck Finn I won’t ever comprehend racial injustice or the painful initiation into adulthood and self reliance? 

No one “must read” anything. And I suspect that good common sense, humanity, pathos and social conscience may be bred without any reading, especially fiction, which comprises most of the 1001.

Having said that, I’m a Canon-ite. I believe in the value of certain agreed -upon fictions in providing illumination, clarity, appreciation, and joy regarding the human condition, all areas.

What I object to is the cocktail party game of one-up everybody with what we’ve read. Using classic literature for snobbery and denigration is ironically unfortunate. Somebody missed the lesson in all those pages.

Meet Andy Borowitz

I “met” Andy Borowitz years ago because I read The New Yorker, but just recently (earlier today) I learned that he is “really big.” Andy got the first ever National Press Club’s award for humor. The WSJ gave him a page-one piece, and it helped get him half a million subscribers to his site “The Borowitz Report.”

He worked on “All in the Family” for crying out loud not to mention movies, plays, and books. He’s an actor. He went to Harvard. AND graduated! (Link to helpful Borowitz piece for Harvard wanna-be’s at graduation time!)

And I just thought he was a funny guy who managed to get submissions “like magic” into The New Yorker! But seriously, Andy’s writing makes me laugh out loud. His “Report” offers a daily 250-word satire piece, usually based on politics or the news.  Just read through the headlines and slugs and you’ll see what I mean!

My favorites are the more social writings like “Hot or Not,” which my students always loved and a faculty member threw into my waste basket. Or the historic work on trailblazers like Pavlov’s brother.

The “Report” is archived fully, but older New Yorker essays, mostly from “Shouts and Murmurs” are published as abstracts and are available for a price.  Below I’ve linked a few more COMPLETE ones to get you started so I can create more fans for somebody else!

Remember all that stuff you were going to quit doing after January 1? Well it’s May 20, and I bet you are saying, “Resolutions? What resolutions?”

Tired of political “pundits?” Well, the “Father of our Country”  was also the Father of Punditry!

What profession is the smartest? Well, it’s not “rocket scientists!”

Like “up-close” interviews? Here’s “Ask the Jihadist.”

 

Believing Prince Caspian

As I’ve said before, I’m not a reader nor fan of fantasy preferring MY fiction to be rooted in reality. 

Hmmm . . .

Allegory, like the Narnia series,  majors on plot: it’s a representative fiction with the story employing symbolic events and characters along the way.  Prince Caspian, like the others, is specifically and unabashedly Christian — it’s all there — good v. evil, moral struggles, choices, human strength and weakness, Divine superiority with intervention and rescue.

Lewis believed in the importance of imagination and its part in believing the truth of Christianity. After all, as a faith there are some issues that do require, well, faith. Is there a cosmic struggle between good and evil? Is the end predetermined? Who are the players? Who wins? Why? Does Good triumph as events on earth and beyond play out?  Why do bad things happen? Why good?  Will God arrive on the scene at a designated time to right all wrongs and avenge his name defeating his emenes and fully redeeming mankind?

Some kind of faith is needed for all that. I’ve not seen “proof” beyond the metaphysical. And still . . . reason to believe. That’s what kept coming to me as I watched this film tonight. With ugly inter- and intra-kingdom battles and power struggles, murder and deception, violence and hatred in a dark world that has forgotten the “faith of its fathers,” represented by ruins and kingless, beseiged doubting creatures, there are true warriors -believers, the English wardrobe children, previously weighed and found worthy. They unite with Prince Caspian, who has what it takes, goodness, faith, character, courage, and proves himself able to lead the Narnians when the children return to England and Aslan is not physically present. 

I don’t care for fantasy. (Christianity is fantastic in some ways, but not fantasy. ) I couldn’t finish the Chronicles though I appreciate Lewis’s work. The film for me serves as an enjoyable reminder that, in Emily Dickinson’s words

“This world is not conclusion
A sequel stands beyond
Invisible as music
But positive as sound.” 

and in Shakespeare’s (Hamlet):

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Fantastic but not fantasy.

This is not a textbook review, so here are the Disney offical site with video and the review from today’s NYT.

Also, this week I picked up a DVD of “Beyond Narnia,”  a dramatization of C. S. Lewis’s life and transition from atheist to Christian. It’s good (cheap) background for children (or adults) reading the series, plus it was shot on location in Oxford, England.

First attempts by Ayn Rand

  I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy.  He was one of those invited into the salon circle of disciples where Rand discussed her views.

For one thing, what the unpublished writings offer is her early struggle with the English language. She had emigrated to America from Russia in 1926 at 21 and had to learn everything from scratch. But the stories show the maturing of a great writer. In “The Husband I Bought” the language usage is rough, and the diction is imprecise.  The plotting is immature with more telling than showing. But the men and women, her characters, are predictive of the giants of fiction that Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are today — people of strength and integrity and self reliance.

Having read Buckley’s Getting it Right, an enjoyable and fairly accurate fictional account of the formation of the conservative movement, I know that Rand didn’t support Buckley or The National Review. She thought it “the most dangerous” publlication in America since she felt that Buckley wanted to merge conservatism with religion. He didn’t favor some of her views, which were conservative, but Godless. The novel is just plain good reading.

I reject Rand’s views of religion and some of her views on man. I thoroughly relish her postulations that show man as heroic, purposeful, determined, the ruler of the world, capable of anything for his own self interest and thereby the good of others. It’s a vision that lauds man’s creativity and ability to produce and to derive from his efforts a deeply abiding satisfaction, confidence, and love of life — capitalism. (Some of the works in this anthology are vehemently anti-Communist.)

In her fiction, the evil characters are the lazy, inferior men who resent and envy those who do produce and are successful. Her fictional situations show people who are despised for their want of vision and talent — characters who function best in at atmosphere of regulation and bureacracy enforcing status quo operations and considering anyone who is not content with that and cannot abide mediocrity a threat. The bad guy is a jealous, petty man.

Peikoff recommends reading the novels first and then trying the early work. I agree that this makes a fascinating study.

You might enjoy these articles:

From The Atlasphere, bio and some good articles on social and political topics, mostly conservative

On Rand  — http://txpayervoice.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayn-rands-birthday.html

Manybooks.net has only Anthem available free online and as an audiobook here.

 

Rejection

Who faces rejection more than would-be writers and others who attempt to market their creative produce? You go to work on the text, hands trembling over the cold keyboard. You criticize yourself after every keystroke: immature, trivial, repetitive, boring, banal. Then the seed germinates. It grows. Oh yeah, you’re humming now — for about 250 words — then — nothing.

Strretch. Walk to the frig. Nothing there either. You know eating and drinking are only distractions. Back to it.

If you finish something, there’s the whole agent/editor/publisher routine if we’re fortunate enough to get that far. Most writers don’t. Most labor away unnoticed, unread, unpublished. But take comfort! Fitzgerald had a stack of rejection slips a few inches high. More recently, Jasper Fforde received 76 rejection letters from publishers before his first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2001 J.K. Rowlings (Harry Potter) was rejected 12 times! There’s a lesson here. Maybe.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf keeps an archive of its rejection files at the University of Texas. While the publisher has published some 47 Pulitzer winners, it has also said “No, thanks” to many that went on to fame.  In a review of these files in the NYT Sunday Books page, David Oshinsky says that reader reports that he encountered were fair, that rejections were most often deserved. Wanna-be’s should keep a balanced view.

That said, George Orwell was told. “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA” when he submitted Animal Farm.

Discouraged about rejection? I wouldn’t mind joining the ranks of these “rejects:”

Dr. Seuss
Upton Sinclair
Vladimir Nabokov
Stephen King for Carrie — “negative utopia stuff won’t sell”
Ayn Rand
Anne Frank — 15 rejections before Doubleday took Diary of a Young Girl
Isaac Singer
Jack Kerouac
Sylvia Plath
Rudyard Kipling
H.G. Wells
Margaret Mitchell — rejected 38 times for GONE WITH THE WIND!

This site lists rejections of famous writers and some of the now-rued excerpts from publishers’ prematurely poor assessments. I like to read these. “Someday they’ll be sorry! “
http://www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm