Category: Ayn Rand

Links: The Book of Jobs

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ayn Rand, Claire Messud, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Sam Lipsyte, William Faulkner

The iPad may force designers of print books to think a little harder about the medium in which they work. Should they do so, the results can be beautiful.

What happens when you read the sex scenes in Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead at an impressionable age.

Sam Lipsyte: “I think I don’t shirk from emotional autobiography. I mean, I stick pretty closely to the feelings. I change a lot of details, just to avoid the court system.”

Granta editor John Freeman is interviewed at ARTicles, the recently revived blog of the National Arts Journalism Program.

Claire Messud is the latest American to sit on the jury for Canada’s Giller Prize.

Harvard Crimson columnist Theodore J. Gioia—who at last report was criticizing books he hadn’t read—has a few thoughtful things to say about William Faulkner and humor, plus a glimpse of James Wood‘s teaching style.

The literary magazine Shenandoah will become an online-only publication next year. Its final print edition, celebrating its 60th anniversary and featuring works on Flannery O’Connor, will come out in June. In advance, the editors of the journal have posted an essay (PDF) by James L. MacLeod describing the sights and smells—oh, the smells!—of life on O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm.

Two stories that Cormac McCarthy wrote in college will be included in the 50th anniversary issue of Phoenix, the University of Tennessee’s literary magazine. This presumably displeases McCarthy, who once said he “hoped to be long buried and mouldering before they were published again.”

Randian Ranting

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ayn Rand

Northwestern English professor Bill Savage, who taught me plenty about noir and Chicago literature (not at the same time) in classes at the Newberry Library, is apparently enduring a steady stream of Ayn Rand enthusiasts walking through his office door. Two years ago, he agitated in the blog of Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger (edited by his sex-columnist brother Dan) that such students require quick correction: “I will teach them that any philosophy which cannot differentiate between Hitler or Stalin and Mother Theresa or Jane Addams is not just a system of thought in need of tweaking and elaboration, it’s objectively in need of ridicule, rejection and righteous anger,” he wrote.

That rant earned Savage a Rand poster for his office, but apparently it’s done little to diminish the number of teaching moments. Last week he returned to the blog to chastise the new batch of undergrad Randians: “The young readers who buy into Rand’s nonsense share two features in common: immense narcissism and utter cluelessness. They see themselves as heroic inviolate individuals, owing nothing to anyone, since everything they’ve achieved is due to their own genius and hard work.”

Fine by me—much like J.D. Salinger, Ayn Rand is rite-of-passage reading, a philosophy to get excited about in your teens and then quickly get over. Though Salinger was more nuanced, and unlike with Rand, nobody is paying universities money to preach Salinger’s gospel to students.

Links: Tidying Up Before The Holidays

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ayn Rand, Edward P. Jones, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon

Edward P. Jones‘ The Known World is now available in Arabic. (Can’t “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” be translated too?)

J.D. Salinger figured that The Catcher in the Rye was unfilmable. He also noticed when somebody needed a new typewriter ribbon.

One man’s effort to rehabilitate the reputation of James T. Farrell.

Ayn Rand‘s fiction “is a sustained effort to create for capitalism a grand mythology that is too solid ever to melt into air.”

The frustrations of reading Barry Hannah backwards.

“We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence, liberal-democratic hegemony, nanotechnology, robotic warfare, the ‘infosphere,’ nuclear proliferation and geoengineering solutions to climate change coexist with the return of powerful autocratic-capitalist states, of a new Great Game in Central Asia, of imperialism in the Middle East, of piracy on the high seas, of rivalry in the Indian Ocean, of a 1929-like market crash, of 1914-style hypernationalism and ethnic conflict in the Balkans, of warlords and failed states, of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and of a new holy war waged by radical Islamists complete with caliphates and beheadings reminiscent of medieval times. In short, we live in a Thomas Pynchon novel. (via)

Links: Rod and Reel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alexander Chee, Anne Tyler, Annie Dillard, Ayn Rand, Don Carpenter, Ethan Canin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, James Crumley, Lionel Shriver, Philip Roth, Ralph Nader, Raymond Chandler, Toni Morrison

In a Philip Roth interview with the Wall Street Journal—that would be the Roth interview that doesn’t address green dildos—he talks about his current reading habits, which mainly includes old favorites. “Mostly what I’m doing is rereading stuff that I read in my 20s, writers who were big in my reading life who I haven’t read in 50 years. I’m talking about Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Turgenev, Conrad. I’m trying to reread the best before… I die.”

“Sometimes you write amazing sentences, she wrote to me, and sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence”—a lovely piece by Alexander Chee about studying writing under Annie Dillard.

Atlas Shrugged and Ralph Nader’s new novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, have more in common than you might think.

Dan Green takes a close, thoughful look at Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road, but determines (rightly, I think) that The Subterraneans is in many ways a superior work.

The American Scholar takes a close, thoughtful look at F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s tax returns.

Ethan Canin on the film adaptations of his work: “Movies are big, exciting, hopeful collaborations, brought down by venality, pandering, and greed.”

Lionel Shriver opens up about using her family as source material for her novel A Perfectly Good Family.

The Nation on the novels of Don Carpenter. (subscription req’d)

A gallery of Tom Adams‘ curious paperback covers for Raymond Chandler novels.

Writers aren’t doing too well in the Baltimore Sun‘s contest to declare the area’s biggest local celebrity, but Anne Tyler‘s still in the running.

In related news, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane speak out on the importance of the late James Crumley.

“The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved.”

Should you wait until you’re 40 before attempting to read Moby-Dick?