Reading DeLillo's Cosmopolis Through Ayn Rand


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She makes me think about Nick Otani.

Oh, Michael, that is terrible. I felt bad when he died -- I thought I had tried to help him in his distress, but when he died I felt such a regret for things I had said in that 'helping.' He was so lonely, so thwarted, so stuck.

Janet is not like that. She has had a happy, engaged and rewarding life so far and enjoys the leisure to indulge her intellectual interests. Sure, she may have misjudged her audience here, and might come off as a bit of a crank, but she is no Otani. Please do not use those kinds of comparisons to suggest another old, failed, demented loser nearing the grave. It is unfair, it is ugly and it demeans your values. It is not correct identification. If Janet got but feeble responses from SOLOists, it is more likely a reflection of their generalized stupefaction and incuriosity. If she is a little oblivious to the room, cross-eyed with purpose, not particularly kind, and perhaps over-stewed in post-modern tea, nail her for that. One thing that was so sad about Otani was his aggression and social illiteracy, his lack of interest, his despair. If anyone should make you think sadly of Otani, it is Mrs Grundy.

But thanks, thanks for that sobering memory of Nick. I shall light a candle. I shall strive to be kinder and more just. Starting tomorrow or the next day.

Below is what I had planned to post to Diana`s Facebook wall. I think I will sit on that for a bit, maybe, either tone it up or tone it down.

"Hi Diana, you certainly have my support in resisting the sectarian wrongheadedness of the Premises site, and its attempt to nail you to the same wall as TheBrandens, Kelley, TAS/TOC, SOLOP, Joe Rowlands. and the other forty-thousand false friends of Objectivism.

It is nasty, it is myopic, its public face is very poorly designed and shows zero imagination. It might splash out further and make Objectivism seem like furiously judgemental toddlers. It brings back the tang of Peikoff shunning McCaskey, the Speichers shunning you, you shunning the Speichers, Objectivism Online shunning Ayn Rand Fans ... and everyone calling for boycottage and '
don't talk to her or you are not my friend
' and higher walls between people. It is pathetic and it is another (albeit minor) version of that vainglorious urge to punish, destroy or vanquish dissenters. It is a grim and unpleasant manifestation of the dangers of fanatical orthodoxy.

Now you know how Sciabarra felt, bitch.

At least he had the grace to shut up completely and let the fools and hysterics take the heat. You succeeded only in reinforcing a reputation as a sectarian thug. And now you experience emotionally what it is like to be scorned and belittled publicly by Objecivish thugs and their also-rans. Did you think you were immune to the destructive power of the tools you use on your enemies and soon-to-be-former friends?"

Edited by william.scherk
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We understand this? Do you? I can understand you're upset but all you need do is regroup. If what you say is of interest to me I'll reply and honestly try to deal with it. But your grand scheme of things I can't get my brain around, nor do I see the need or experience the desire to. It has to do with the trade of things. You offer. I offer. We make a deal. We exchange ideas. But your ideas are all your ideas. No interest in our ideas. Objectivism is crap. This is Objectivist Living. This is where you are. Crap city. Your sword has sundered Rand the novelist from Rand the philosopher except as it's in her novels. You have denied her permission to change and grow long before she stopped changing and growing. As a novelist, not always right. As a philosopher, not always right. As a human being, not always right. But always Ayn Rand. I know this is linear and linear isn't where you are, but to make that work you have not yet really begun. I suggest at least two great novels then shut up. Rand's fault was she kept talking. I take her as she was and I take her as a whole. She had problems, but she had a life. You're not entitled to chop her up.

--Brant

What the problem is is that I am not responding in the Dominating Discourse here. Have you any idea how many decades and studying it took me to figure that one simple little thing out?

If I respond to you in your Discourse, then I have to enter a Discourse that will be ping pong for as many years as I stay here or am allowed to stay.

On my blogs I am trying to say it in a way that anyone, educated or not, knowledgeable or not, can understand post modern thinking. I simply cannot wade through the same stuff all over again here. I cannot. If you want to really know what I am saying, then go read my blogs. If not that's OK too. But I cannot get involved in dialectical argumentation with you here. It's not that I won't, but that I can't.

This medium won't allow me to say what I want to say, the way I want to say it. Unless I would start pasting all my work over here with images, links, etc. It's too huge a task for me to even think about and I wouldn't be able to continue where I am now. Rand is the philosopher she always wanted to be. She is more radical than she even dreamed of being. That's where I am with her.

Her fiction. Her non-fiction is just a rationalization for her neuroses. Why should I pretend differently just so you won't get upset? I'm sorry you can't keep up with me, nor do you want to learn from me. I encounter it all the time. Nothing new here. Fortunately there are some here that do understand me. Happiness.

Is this radical philosophy she wasn't aware of any value beyond thinking about it--does it merely chase its own tail round and round?

--Brant

there's plenty of room for you on OL

you actually are responding to the "Dominating Discourse" here--responding but not engaging; it's implicit

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Janet is not like that. She has had a happy, engaged and rewarding life so far and enjoys the leisure to indulge her intellectual interests. Sure, she may have misjudged her audience here, and might come off as a bit of a crank, but she is no Otani. Please do not use those kinds of comparisons to suggest another old, failed, demented loser nearing the grave. It is unfair, it is ugly and it demeans your values. It is not correct identification.

William,

I'm happy to modify my evaluation. How's this?

Instead of simply, "She makes me think about Nick Otani," let me change it to this:

"From what this person has presented to me and what little else I have seen of her, she makes me sad because she makes me think of Nick Otani."

Better?

Other than your comment about what a fine life she is living, I haven't seen anything else here, on SLOP, or the few other places online I looked (including one of her blogs) to change my opinion.

The overall theme I get from her manifestations is a retreat into a quirky imaginary world--with borrowed jargon--from loneliness. And, like Nick, a facile stubborn capacity for dismissing any perspective but her own based on... er... nothing but facile-ness and stubbornness. Vanity over reality at root. Lots of name-dropping and jargon-term presuppositions (often wrong) about what others think and mean.

The tell is in her constant plea for attention in between the lines and the imaginary howling response she needs to brag about elsewhere. (Just like Nick, but, of course, within his language and demeanor. Same frame. Different details and intensities.)

You say it's different so maybe I'm wrong.

I think our discussion--including my very post right now--is playing into her script and getting her an attention fix she craves.

I seriously doubt she will time-travel out of this particular dialectic. She likes to play ping-pong too much in that dimension. (There, I just gave her a super-duper boost. :smile: )

Michael

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Michael, I find your psychological evaluations valuable, but not respecting whom you are evaluating. People are too complex. It's hard enough to figure oneself out, much less someone else. That goes for mental health professionals, too.

Take attention getting. Everybody who posts on the Internet is after some level and type of attention getting. When it seems to be getting excessive, that's one of several possible red flags. We are not felines. We are mentally interactive social animals. We enjoy putting out and getting back. This seems most powerful for someone on a stage interacting with the audience, especially a live acting performance. It's electric. Here, it's what you can do with just the words.

--Brant

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Brant,

I've got no trouble with wanting attention. That's inherent to humans. (You should see the fMRI scans of our brain's limbic region with social things like status, for just one item.)

I do have an issue with people wanting attention so they can look down on the very folks who give it to them.

The lady came here to look down on everyone. She needed the angry howling mobs so she could brag about her rejection by the stoopid people.

But I'm a stoopid people. So what to do?

Simple.

I say the lady came here to look down on folks.

Want to get into why? Hell, I've got theories up the giggy. They generally don't include any inherent superiority of the person who seeks attention from stoopid people so she can look down on them. On the contrary, I see reflections of lonely self-deficiency like with two mirrors facing each other, where the reflections go on and on forever to nowhere. And we can talk about that all day.

I know the game is played with one-upmanship and bon mot and name-dropping and all the rest, and you're not supposed to say things like I did because you're supposed to feel shame instead, but there it is.

I have a callous where my shame organ should be.

Call me a snoot spoiler.

:smile:

Michael

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Well if she did she's much more into it and sophisticated than Phil because she brought a whole cosmology with her. I suppose the key is she just slapped the whole indigestible thing down on the table.

--Brant

I have taken a dislike to this person because of her social presentation. Maybe it is Nietzscheian to sweep into a party, snub the host, and hold what court is available while cramming the hors d'oeuvres into one's handbag.

As to Baudrillard et cie I know nothing nor do I care to learn. I will observe though that if fifty million Frenchman can't be wrong, four or five still can.

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Is this radical philosophy she wasn't aware of any value beyond thinking about it--does it merely chase its own tail round and round?

No on both counts.

Rand was steeped in Nietzsche, but she was also reading him outside her curriculum and she had an education that few women at that time were privileged to have. Her problem was it stopped when she came to the US except for what she did on her own. I have looked at the book list in her possession, and read what she has said about numerous writers, music, art, etc. Someone who is serious about learning and scholarship keeps doing it all their lives. Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and others were not the intellectual giants of their time. And in Russia she did study with some pretty heavy hitters. But she had to earn her living right away in the Hollywood industry, not known for its intellectual clout. People can't study seriously without some kind of subsistence to allow them to live. If they do anyway, and many autodidacts do, their knowledge is never formalized and this can penalize them if they wish to go public. I read many bloggers like this who are very good but don't know where to go with it and you can sense their ambition. Many of course, are part of academic institutions.

She did know Nietzsche, but never in a semi formalized way. Nietzsche forbids formalism himself, so that makes it doubly difficult. Hannah Arendt in the 60's I believe, gave a series of lectures on Nietzsche that you can find online. Or in a book. So she was both aware and not aware. Heidegger went into Nietzsche and that was how Foucault came onto him. But it was Foucault in the late 1960's and 70's that made Nietzsche mainstream with his use of Nietzsche's genealogical thinking in a much wider aplication, and in greater detail and depth than Nietzsche. Foucult's studies of Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish are rather horrifying openers to the way he works. The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge are excruciatingly detailed analyses of how he came to do it.

Rand could not have done this. She had fiction to write and money to make. Foucault was in a different posiition, His educational achievements gave him a foundation to stand on while he pursued his studies. And he was relentless.

He also was into S/M and he was gay. He died of AIDS.

As to action: Foucault was extremely active while in the dictatorship of Tunisia when he taught there.he wrote numerous papers supporting revolutionary governments, Iran for one which has rained him with stones, with confinement, and with the prison system. He was a major force for action in his lifetime. His statement on power: Where there is power, there is resistance. It is important to resist. He has been a beacon for me when I have battled my local town government.

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> I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with it. Or with the way you expressed it.

Where Michael got outraged is that you didn't even finish it. But that's actually useful information if someone can't even finish your writing, it could be that it doesn't grab you or is turgid, etc. Your reaction was an honest one and you got jumped on for it by MSK. With Brant and Carol piling on. (Not very friendly to a newcomer who you'd normally take more time to 'greet' with contempt, psychologizing, and insults.)

And the worst insult of all: "you're just like Phil."I know you're new here, but the *last thing you want here is to be compared to me*. I'm the resident poster boy for a whining, arrogant baby who just wants attention, who knows nothing about any subject he posts on, who is incredibly self-centered, who is patronizing and superior, who is too lazy to provide encyclopedic backup and - above all - unwilling to learn from the superior knowledge of the patient, well-meaning, wise elder statesmen who post regularly here. -- Did I miss any of my faults???

On top of which, I'm told that it's too often "all about me" when I post and simultaneously that my best posts are when I talk about myself and my past history with school, Objectivist leaders, etc.

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By the way, seymourblogger, part of the "smearing" here, is that once people don't like what you said and begin to resent you for your views, they will go back and scour your record and look for anything they don't like you may have said in the past** or for any inconsistencies or if you worded something more strongly or too loosely anywhere at any time and if it's different, they won't allow that you may have changed your view or been imprecise, they will call you a hypocrite.

**Michael just did that on this thread with your posts on other sites. WSS has done that with me as I recall.

It's sleazy 'emotionalist' behavior because it is a departure from focusing on and trying to understand what someone is saying now. It's very reminiscent of the dirtiest phenomenon in public life - poliitical campaigns and "opposition research" where you look for skeletons in the closet to discredit someone or assassinate their character

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I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that? Rothbard said that Rand was furious when Barbara Branden was criticized in her writing group. Well, maybe if she had listened her book on Rand would have been better.

What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

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I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that? Rothbard said that Rand was furious when Barbara Branden was criticized in her writing group. Well, maybe if she had listened her book on Rand would have been better.

What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

I can only say that if you think BB bio was "full of deep insight and very well written" that you need to read some great bio. This is exactly the message Toohey gave in Fountainhead; Ignore and render obsolete the excellent, reduce the aesthetic taste of the masses to mediocrity and you have destroyed excellence. <b>This is what evil is. This is why Rand brands Toohey as evil. Not because he is a hatchet murderer. </b>

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Subject: Biographical Writing

> I can only say that if you think BB bio was "full of deep insight and very well written" that you need to read some great bio. [sB]

What would be some examples you've read that you would consider better than BB's? What are the greatest ones** you've read?

I'm not asking this skeptically. I would be very interested and especially if you*** could mention what are your standards for what makes a -great- biography. (Bios are one area or genre where I haven't read as much as I should so I'm looking for information*.)

**I hope they are not all political.

***If others are big bio enough readers as well (not all political) to have some basis for comparison....

* My tentative view is that biography is one of the more difficult writing forms.

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Re post #66:

Is there any indication if "Janet Abbey" is "Seymourblogger"s real name?

I'm being reminded of a person who for awhile posted extensively on ATL, and the age given matches. But there could be two such, I suppose, both of whom claim to have been students of Barbara's in 60-61.

Ellen

EDIT, 4:14 p.m.: Scratch the suspicion that "Seymourblogger" is the former ATL-poster, too different in subject matter, and in style, on closer examining.

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> I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with it. Or with the way you expressed it.

Where Michael got outraged is that you didn't even finish it. But that's actually useful information if someone can't even finish your writing, it could be that it doesn't grab you or is turgid, etc. Your reaction was an honest one and you got jumped on for it by MSK. With Brant and Carol piling on. (Not very friendly to a newcomer who you'd normally take more time to 'greet' with contempt, psychologizing, and insults.)

And the worst insult of all: "you're just like Phil."I know you're new here, but the *last thing you want here is to be compared to me*. I'm the resident poster boy for a whining, arrogant baby who just wants attention, who knows nothing about any subject he posts on, who is incredibly self-centered, who is patronizing and superior, who is too lazy to provide encyclopedic backup and - above all - unwilling to learn from the superior knowledge of the patient, well-meaning, wise elder statesmen who post regularly here. -- Did I miss any of my faults???

On top of which, I'm told that it's too often "all about me" when I post and simultaneously that my best posts are when I talk about myself and my past history with school, Objectivist leaders, etc.

Yeah, you're a cantankerous monomaniac, but you're OUR cantankerous monomaniac, gotta love ya because we can't leave ya.

As to piling on I would certainly do it to any newcomer who showed deliberate discourtesy .

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Seymourblogger: "Somehow I don't think you wanted this."

Thanks for taking the time to answer. What I wanted is to see how you reconciled your theories with that passage, since you say Rand's fiction is Nietzschean in nature (versus her non-fiction). (As far as your claims, while I'm not versed in Foucault, Baudrillard, or DeLillo, the ideas I recognize from the crossover of quantum theory into artistic theories, as described in ART AND PHYSICS: PARALLEL VISIONS IN SPACE, TIME, AND LIGHT by Leonard Shlain.The Rand quote about circles and lines goes against the postmodern trends in art of compression and non-linearity, and the book shows how art in general progressed as scientific theories progressed, so, even if one disagrees with postmodernism, the trend itself can't be ignored.

When you say that we are "no longer in linear time," are you speaking of the effect of quantum physics on thought? Is that related to your claims about other's responses to you being of 'the dialectic?" Your writing style and train of thought seems to be similar to the "quantum" influence in art, manifested as "compression", overlaying many trains of thought on top of each other ("read through,"). (Easier to convey in visual art, but harder to translate in writing, since writing is more "linear" by nature...)

Thanks in advance.

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What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

I can only say that if you think BB bio was "full of deep insight and very well written" that you need to read some great bio.

This statement of yours voices a mere personal opinion without replying to what I had asked you: " What exaclty do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand?"

So if you would please be more specific.

This is exactly the message Toohey gave in Fountainhead; Ignore and render obsolete the excellent, reduce the aesthetic taste of the masses to mediocrity and you have destroyed excellence. <b>This is what evil is. This is why Rand brands Toohey as evil. Not because he is a hatchet murderer. </b>

See above. Copying 'Toohey's message' and suggesting that this constitues evidence to support your claim is a thinking error. Its fallacy lies in presenting a mere personal opinion as alleged evidence.

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What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

I can only say that if you think BB bio was "full of deep insight and very well written" that you need to read some great bio.

This statement of yours voices a mere personal opinion without replying to what I had asked you: " What exaclty do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand?"

So if you would please be more specific.

Doubt it. You're just part of the DD dialectic.

--Brant

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By the way, seymourblogger, part of the "smearing" here, is that once people don't like what you said and begin to resent you for your views, they will go back and scour your record and look for anything they don't like you may have said in the past** or for any inconsistencies or if you worded something more strongly or too loosely anywhere at any time and if it's different, they won't allow that you may have changed your view or been imprecise, they will call you a hypocrite.

**Michael just did that on this thread with your posts on other sites. WSS has done that with me as I recall.

It's sleazy 'emotionalist' behavior because it is a departure from focusing on and trying to understand what someone is saying now. It's very reminiscent of the dirtiest phenomenon in public life - poliitical campaigns and "opposition research" where you look for skeletons in the closet to discredit someone or assassinate their character

Yes. But that's exactly what happens when you engage in the Dominating Discourse of the Dialectic. Actually this is the first site I've had a chance to go at this in such intelligent detail. By intelligent I mean the people confronting me on it. Watch and learn. I'm going to slip and make mistakes and they will call me on it. Oh happiness..

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I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that? Rothbard said that Rand was furious when Barbara Branden was criticized in her writing group. Well, maybe if she had listened her book on Rand would have been better.

What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

I answered that. Why isn't my answer here. Who stole it!

Never mind I'll go back to my email file and paste it again. It was important. IMO.

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I'm sorry I don't like your writing. What's wrong with that? Rothbard said that Rand was furious when Barbara Branden was criticized in her writing group. Well, maybe if she had listened her book on Rand would have been better.

What exactly do you criticize about B. Branden's book on Rand? Imo the book is full of deep insight and very well written.

I can only say that if you think BB bio was "full of deep insight and very well written" that you need to read some great bio. This is exactly the message Toohey gave in Fountainhead; Ignore and render obsolete the excellent, reduce the aesthetic taste of the masses to mediocrity and you have destroyed excellence. <b>This is what evil is. This is why Rand brands Toohey as evil. Not because he is a hatchet murderer. </b>

This apparently was your answer and Michael's follows about the posting guidelines on OL.

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