Filming Headache of Atlas Shrugged


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Filming Headache of Atlas Shrugged

It's a little late to talk about this, seeing as how all three parts to the Atlas Shrugged movie are complete and running in the market, but there is one fascinating filming headache I came across.

I don't know how to resolve it.

The problem is the setting.

These last few years, I have been studying writing and I am now doing some righteous introspecting on what I call 'larger entities.' These are things like societies, corporations, families, etc. Basically, they are collections of humans, but they can sometimes be inanimate like the island in the TV series Lost, or a spaceship. Part of great storytelling is to portray these larger entities in believable terms.

Also, I have been reading and rereading some stuff on Rand. Lots of stuff. I came across a passage that nails this larger entity problem in filming Atlas Shrugged (without saying it) and throws away the hammer. It is from Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party (a rewrite of The Ideas of Ayn Rand) by Ronald Merrill (original author) and Marcia Enright (later editor and rewriter) - p. 102:

Stylistically, it [Atlas Shrugged] represents a considerable change from We the Living and The Fountainhead. Building on the techniques with which she had experimented in Anthem, Rand made Atlas Shrugged a more abstract, conceptual, and symbolic work than her earlier novels; it might best be described as a work of Romantic Surrealism. The cover painting done by George Salter for one of the editions accurately conveys the mood and style of the novel.

Atlas Shrugged takes place in the United States, and cities such as New York and Philadelphia are recognizable. But Rand goes to considerable pains to create an ambience that is far from realistic. The United States of the novel has no President, but a "Head of State"; no Congress, but a "National Legislature." Most of the world is Communist, but this word does not appear in the book at all; instead, Communist countries are referred to as "People's States."

The story takes place in no particular time, and in 'realistic' terms is a tissue of anachronisms. The American economy seems, structurally, to be in the late nineteenth century, with large industrial concerns being sole proprietorships run by their founders. The general tone is however that of the 1930s, a depression with the streets full of panhandlers. The technological level, and the social customs, are those of the 1950s. And the political environment, especially the level of regulation and the total corruption, seems to anticipate the 1970s. We are simultaneously in a future in which most of the world has gone Communist, and the past in which England has the world's greatest navy.

That makes sense, but it also makes a salad.

Romantic Surrealism.

Yeah...

I like it.

I agree that the book cover by George Salter is in the ballpark:

AS-Cover-Salter.jpg

Now here's the problem I see with filming a "tissue of anachronisms": audience time.

In a novel as long as Atlas Shrugged, there is a major time commitment by readers and they can get used to the different anachronisms one by one. These are hard anachronisms to swallow side by side because they are all extremely familiar to the general audience and in much too close proximity in time for comfort. But as people read, the drip drip drip of details moves slowly and they gradually get indoctrinated into this seemingly familiar reality. They begin to live there without too much fuss. Maybe some readers feel a vague sense that something is off, but overall it works.

A movie is only about an hour and a half long. There is no time for stealth acclimation, not even for a three-part movie. The anachronisms have to come all in one whack if they are to play at all in the viewer's mind. But the differences in Rand's anachronisms are like watching Westerns where the cowboys talk about booze (a 1920s word), wear fancy wristwatches, and shoot 36 bullets out of a Colt 45 without reloading. A whole cottage industry has grown around collecting, discussing and mocking these slip-ups.

At the time I saw the first Atlas Shrugged movie, I thought the settings were a bit eerie. (I didn't think that about the second and third.) I believe the director was trying to capture a mythological feel to the background to make room for anachronisms. But it did not come off well for me. Also, he started with an oil crisis. Still, I don't think this problem was the director's fault. It was (and is) inherent in Rand's story.

This is a hard one to crack open. Any new versions of the movie will have to deal with it better.

But I don't know how to portray a world like that convincingly on screen. Maybe instead of trying to cover over and blend the anachronistic parts, a better approach would be to emphasise them even more than is present in the book. After an initial shock, the audience just might swallow it.

But, frankly, the anachronistic background problem in Atlas Shrugged is much harder to solve than alien and cowboy films, including the TV series, Firefly. And that one is a doozy to me. I still have a hard time grokking it when I see it. :smile:

Romantic Surrealism indeed.

Michael

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If anachronisms are a problem you remove or modify or replace them. Rand's surrealism gets replaced by the director's and is mostly done with the visuals. Nothing on the screen should say you can go outside and see and experience this stuff. In fact, it might be done without any real actors, just anime. Or, do it with anime then pull the anime and replace with actors.

--Brant

when AS finally goes into the public domain a lot of people will have fun with it (2038?)

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Disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the movies.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with my son. He asked about television when I was a little girl, and I took a very long rambling nostalgic trip down memory lane revolving around the fact that my childhood home had an outdoor television antenna. Someone had to go outside to manually turn it when we changed channels. After I finished laughing over my brothers, sister, and I keeping a detailed account of whose turn it was and how we often would totally miss a show we intended to watch as we haggled over who would do whose chores for a week if only they'd go out in the snow to turn the antenna, my son grew very quiet for about a minute. Then he asked, "What's an antenna?"

The salad of anachronisms are irrelevant if the audience can't grok the most basic elements. "What's a passenger train?"

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Great story didelancey.

Michael wrote:

In a novel as long as Atlas Shrugged, there is a major time commitment by readers and they can get used to the different anachronisms one by one. These are hard anachronisms to swallow side by side because they are all extremely familiar to the general audience and in much too close proximity in time for comfort.

end quote

The Scifi devices in the movie version of Dune seemed to be anachronisms and a bit laughable too. Yet it is a shame if predictive devices must come down to things that are most likely never to happen because they do not agree with Science. That way an advanced Iphone in a movie of today won't look ridiculous in 2020 if we have already gone past that. Someone gave a brief list on TV of plot devices that later came true as with Arthur C. Clark's novels.

As an aside I think the two Hunger Games movies may clue young people into the Obama regime's lies and distortions as does the government run by Donald Sutherland in those movies.

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The second film version of 1984 handled it well. It was a story of the future and yet it had all the distinguishing features of a society of the late 1940's: radio tubes, heavy wires, oversize speakers, clunky machinery. It was simultaneously familiar and yet out of time, the very thing you'd expect if technology had come to a standstill.

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It's funny how you get into wormholes on the Internet when following snippets of information and end up at places you like to be. I started out looking through the reviews of Ayn Rand Explained by Merrill/Enright since I just finished reading it carefully. I often do this with books I read because some readers are quite perceptive and this adds to my understanding.

But I'm only human. When a reviewer references this or that, or I see some relevant ad pop up, I go there. Pure clock-tick-eating trance-inducing distraction most of the time. Sometimes, though...

One thing led to another and I ended up at a book called Who Is John Galt?: A Navigational Guide to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged by Timothy Curry and Anthony Trifiletti.

Thinking this was going to be yet one more mediocre attempt to exploit the buzz from the recent Atlas Shrugged movies, I opened the preview and was delighted to see an expansion of the problem in Atlas Shrugged of presenting a mythological world based on the recent real one. The authors did not use words like Romantic Surrealism like Merrill did, but the concept is practically the same for the setting.

I like what I saw so much, I am quoting from the Introduction below:

The Strange World of Atlas Shrugged

Rand's book was written between 1945 and 1956 and published in 1957. During the postwar years, America saw massive changes in society and technology, and the shape of world politics underwent a major sea change. For the purposes of fiction the real-world narrative was frozen somewhere before the Second World War, and Rand allowed it to grow in a different direction, isolating the real-world political continuum to the confines of a single country, the United States. This fictional America was intended to resemble the real one enough to contain a warning of what might yet be. In brief, it contained the following:

• There was no Cold War. Nation after nation accepted some form of socialism without argument and took the title of "People's State". America drifted more slowly into socialism, and the book can be viewed as the story of how a group of brave entrepreneurs fought the final plunge into the abyss.

• America was frozen in time with respect to culture and technology. Television did not replace radio as an influential popular medium. Live classical music was still played on network radio.

• The Interstate Highway System, proposed by Eisenhower in 1956, was never built. In the book, America was connected by a network of decaying two-lane roads and a network of vital railways.

• Commercial air travel did not come to fruition. There is a hint that airlines were operating their own separate airports just as railroads operated their own separate stations before the concept of "union stations" came along in the Twenties. An executive who needed to fly elsewhere got a pilot's license and flew his own private plane.

• Railroads were still the primary form of transportation, and passenger rail was thriving. The conversion from steam to diesel locomotives, a major event in railroading in the Fifties in our time line, went much more slowly in the book. Coal and even wood fired steam locomotives still plied the rails. Radio was not used in communication, instead relying on the older technology of telegraphs and phone boxes.

• Outside the cities, it was difficult to find a place to make a long distance telephone call.

• American heavy industry did not flee the country to escape high labor costs because the rest of the world had preceded it into communism.

• Good industrialists branded their companies with their own names, such as Wyatt Oil, Rearden Steel, d'Anconia Copper and Mulligan Bank. Bad industrialists hid behind corporate names such as Associated Steel.

• Congress was now called the National Legislature, and the President was now called the Head of State. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment was even less operative than in our own time. The Constitution is scarcely mentioned in the novel, and its provisions that we still take for granted had apparently been discarded. All real power was vested in bureaucrats.

• The can-do spirit of America was being deliberately and systematically crushed. The ubiquitous cry of frustration was, "Who is John Gait?" To nearly everyone using it, it was a nonsense question with no answer, an acceptance of futility.

How might this scenario might have resulted from what Rand saw before her in 1945 makes for interesting speculation. Here is one possible alternate timeline:

The Alternate History of Atlas Shrugged

One might start with the four way election of 1948. In this alternate universe, Henry Wallace won the race, defeating Truman, Dewey and Thurmond, and established a Labor government on the British model in America. The warning voices of Martin Dies, John Bricker, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon were stilled.

Wallace wanted no cold war with the Soviets, and with the quick withdrawal of American forces from Europe, Germany was reunified under a communist People's State government. The Soviet Union, now the People's State of Russia, never geared up for war, settling instead for passive mediocrity. Britain never rejected Clement Atlee, and with the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a written constitution on the German model, the People's State of England replaced the United Kingdom. In France, De Gaulle never came to power, and the Fourth Republic morphed into the People's State of France.

In the Western Hemisphere, figures similar to Fidel Castro established the People's State of Mexico and other communist countries in Central and South America.

America did not go all the way to People's State status, however, although intellectuals worked hard toward that end, their final efforts comprising the bulk of Atlas Shrugged. Americans accepted that things were hopeless and that nothing could be done, settling into a gray, decaying society that dimmed slowly, irresistibly, until at last it went dark altogether. Feelings replaced facts. The very nature of reality was questioned. Rand describes the decade of economic stasis, misguided politics and cultural pollution that served the final descent into hell.


Excellent continuation of our little thread. Who knew these dudes would write this for us here on OL? :)

This looks like a very good book, even though I am sure I will disagree with parts of it. I'm putting it on my Wish List.

Michael

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But the differences in Rand's anachronisms are like watching Westerns where the cowboys talk about booze (a 1920s word), wear fancy wristwatches, and shoot 36 bullets out of a Colt 45 without reloading.

:smile: Another thing that tickles me is characters in movies -- Rambo and many more -- carrying a belt-fed machine gun and firing hundreds of rounds on automatic with the belt wrapped around their body. It's only fiction. The belt must move freely to continue firing. See here. Firing up to, say, 100 rounds on a short belt is doable. But a much longer belt, with the belt wrapped around the body, is not. Also, firing many hundreds of rounds on automatic can make enough heat to ruin the barrel.

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But the differences in Rand's anachronisms are like watching Westerns where the cowboys talk about booze (a 1920s word), wear fancy wristwatches, and shoot 36 bullets out of a Colt 45 without reloading.

:smile: Another thing that tickles me is characters in movies -- Rambo and many more -- carrying a belt-fed machine gun and firing hundreds of rounds on automatic with the belt wrapped around their body. It's only fiction. The belt must move freely to continue firing. See

. Firing up to, say, 100 rounds on a short belt is doable. But a much longer belt, with the belt wrapped around the body, is not. Also, firing many hundreds of rounds on automatic can make enough heat ruining the barrel.

I agree that it's hilarious when actors shoot with the weapon's active ammo belt wrapped around them, but you're misremembering Rambo as having done so. He shoots with his right hand while feeding the belt with his left. There may be some scenes in which he carries a belt wrapped around his body, but not in which he fires a weapon being fed by a wrapped belt.

J

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:smile: Another thing that tickles me is characters in movies -- Rambo and many more -- carrying a belt-fed machine gun and firing hundreds of rounds on automatic with the belt wrapped around their body. It's only fiction. The belt must move freely to continue firing. See

. Firing up to, say, 100 rounds on a short belt is doable. But a much longer belt, with the belt wrapped around the body, is not. Also, firing many hundreds of rounds on automatic can make enough heat ruining the barrel.

I agree that it's hilarious when actors shoot with the weapon's active ammo belt wrapped around them, but you're misremembering Rambo as having done so. He shoots with his right hand while feeding the belt with his left. There may be some scenes in which he carries a belt wrapped around his body, but not in which he fires a weapon being fed by a wrapped belt.

You might be correct about my misremembering. I don't have the interest to watch all four Rambo movies to defend myself. Anyway, if he shoots with his right hand and feeds the belt with his left hand, and the gun isn't mounted to help control the barrel's direction, that hampers his aim. :smile:

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You know, Michael, this type of discussion puts Atlas Shrugged very much in the genre of speculative fiction, which I love. But it had never once occurred to me to think of it in that way. If there's anything that could ever make me want to slog through reading it again, that would be it, just to convince myself one way or another if Rand did it well. Many of my favorite authors have done it well (Margaret Atwood, for instance, and Michael Chabon), so I'm not sure if it would serve me, or Rand, well to put her in a position of having to compete with them. I think what those authors were able to accomplish was done so by 1) NOT overly explaining themselves and 2) NOT having an obvious agenda beyond telling a good story. I think Rand probably succeeded at 1, but not at 2. Then again, she didn't set out to make her agenda transparent or ambiguous.

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:smile: Another thing that tickles me is characters in movies -- Rambo and many more -- carrying a belt-fed machine gun and firing hundreds of rounds on automatic with the belt wrapped around their body. It's only fiction. The belt must move freely to continue firing. See

. Firing up to, say, 100 rounds on a short belt is doable. But a much longer belt, with the belt wrapped around the body, is not. Also, firing many hundreds of rounds on automatic can make enough heat ruining the barrel.

I agree that it's hilarious when actors shoot with the weapon's active ammo belt wrapped around them, but you're misremembering Rambo as having done so. He shoots with his right hand while feeding the belt with his left. There may be some scenes in which he carries a belt wrapped around his body, but not in which he fires a weapon being fed by a wrapped belt.

You might be correct about my misremembering. I don't have the interest to watch all four Rambo movies to defend myself. Anyway, if he shoots with his right hand and feeds the belt with his left hand, and the gun isn't mounted to help control the barrel's direction, that hampers his aim. :smile:

Based on my Vietnam experience, back pressure on the ammo feed jams the .30 cal gun: we had that problem on our airboats solved by the time one ran over a rice paddy dike in Cambodia in November 1966 and Captain George Marecek* fired a continuous burst killing 18 Vietnamese communist soldiers lined up on the other side--18 of the 56 we killed that day using airboats, hovercraft and helicopter insertion of South Vietnamese soldiers (the airboats were Special Forces Mike Force manned by Chinese Nung mercenaries under American command)

*later convicted of murdering his Cambodian wife in North Carolina, seemingly to marry his cousin and run for the presidency of the Czech Republic (it took three trials to nail him because of one juror and a technical reversal)

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Deanna,

I'm putting together a bunch of observations on Rand's fiction writing techniques. One of the few techniques of hers I really don't resonate is when she does overly explain her metaphors. For a quick example, think about Ragnar Danneskjold explaining his version of Robin Hood to Hand Rearden, or Francisco explaining the meaning of Atlas shrugging.

Fortunately, Rand used a wealth of metaphors she did not explain and she used them in specific manners. I will be writing on this in the future.

Apropos, here is a big honking black eye on Rand's image from the zealots.

Active participant in the informal fiction-writing course given by Ayn Rand in 1958 in her living room.

The Art of Fiction (Audio CD; 23-CD set; 23 hrs., 3 min. of an informal fiction-writing course given in 1958 in the living room of Ayn Rand.)
- The voices of Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden are erased, replaced by a voice-over of a person who did not attend the course, stating: "At this point in the lecture, a student asked Miss Rand the following question..." Also, the original 48 hours of tapes were edited down to 23 hours and 3 minutes.

I have been looking all over for this set of CDs. They are not available anywhere so far. I have little doubt the zealots have gone around and gotten them from wherever they may be found to once again rewrite history. Recording over the voices of people present at a series of lectures when they asked questions is just a little too icky even for run-of-the-mill fundamentalists.

But I believe the issue lies deeper. I believe there is stuff on those CD's that would embarrass the crap out of Tore Boeckmann, who edited Rand's lectures to arrive at the book, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers.

I have been listening to a few of his audio lectures sold by ARI. His theory of drama is not very good. I might go into this later, although, from what I can tell, his theory has not made much of a splash anywhere so it is not really worth a lot of time to debate. If anyone is interested, see here: The Principle of Drama. Boeckmann even has to say that other Objectivists (meaning ARI Objectivists) disagree with him. He does that on the recording near the beginning.

What's worse, I am not interested in debunking the ARI folks. Their actions speak for themselves and I'm tired of pointing to the obvious and saying, "Look what they did."

What I really want to do is listen to Rand's fiction writing lectures from her own mouth so I can do a good job on my own project.

Michael

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:smile: Another thing that tickles me is characters in movies -- Rambo and many more -- carrying a belt-fed machine gun and firing hundreds of rounds on automatic with the belt wrapped around their body. It's only fiction. The belt must move freely to continue firing. See

. Firing up to, say, 100 rounds on a short belt is doable. But a much longer belt, with the belt wrapped around the body, is not. Also, firing many hundreds of rounds on automatic can make enough heat ruining the barrel.

I agree that it's hilarious when actors shoot with the weapon's active ammo belt wrapped around them, but you're misremembering Rambo as having done so. He shoots with his right hand while feeding the belt with his left. There may be some scenes in which he carries a belt wrapped around his body, but not in which he fires a weapon being fed by a wrapped belt.

You might be correct about my misremembering. I don't have the interest to watch all four Rambo movies to defend myself. Anyway, if he shoots with his right hand and feeds the belt with his left hand, and the gun isn't mounted to help control the barrel's direction, that hampers his aim. :smile:

I think the idea was to show that Rambo was so bad-ass and strong that he could hold with one hand a weapon which was meant to be mounted. Plus, when he's firing like that, it's in situations where accuracy isn't important, such as chewing up a cop shop, a jungle shanty, or the interior of a quonset hut filled with computer equipment.

J

rambo-sylvester-stallone-says-rambo-v-is

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But, frankly, the anachronistic background problem in Atlas Shrugged is much harder to solve than alien and cowboy films, including the TV series, Firefly. And that one is a doozy to me. I still have a hard time grokking it when I see it. :smile:

Romantic Surrealism indeed.

Michael

I think that it would be pretty easy to solve. Just take Marotta's advice and give the film the visual feeling of something like Sky Captain/SteamPunk/DieselPunk/ClockPunk.

J

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I think the idea was to show that Rambo was so bad-ass and strong that he could hold with one hand a weapon which was meant to be mounted. Plus, when he's firing like that, it's in situations where accuracy isn't important, such as chewing up a cop shop, a jungle shanty, or the interior of a quonset hut filled with computer equipment.

I agree.

It appears that the video of Rambo you embedded runs on and on. But this video shows what really happens. The barrel starts glowing at about 1:10. The gun catches fire at about 2:25. At the end it says the barrel is bent down and to the right.

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Disclaimer: I haven't seen any of the movies.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with my son. He asked about television when I was a little girl, and I took a very long rambling nostalgic trip down memory lane revolving around the fact that my childhood home had an outdoor television antenna. Someone had to go outside to manually turn it when we changed channels. After I finished laughing over my brothers, sister, and I keeping a detailed account of whose turn it was and how we often would totally miss a show we intended to watch as we haggled over who would do whose chores for a week if only they'd go out in the snow to turn the antenna, my son grew very quiet for about a minute. Then he asked, "What's an antenna?"

The salad of anachronisms are irrelevant if the audience can't grok the most basic elements. "What's a passenger train?"

When I was in second grade, my dad took us into the world of super-freaking-high-tech by buying a motorized antenna rotator. We'd finish watching Popeye out of La Crosse, twist the indoor dial to west, and thirty seconds later, ba-bam, Bart's Clubhouse clear as a bell out of Iowa!

J

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The gun catches fire at about 2:25. At the end it says the barrel is bent down and to the right.

Yikes!

WWI machine guns were cooled by a water jacket around the barrel. This was obsolete by WWII. In a demo of the M-60 at night the sergeant lit his cigarette on one. Of course, he wouldn't be allowed to light a cigarette today. The young impressionable troops might take up smoking as a masculine expression of trained killerhood and die of heart attacks before the age of 60. (We can't blame the chow, now, or getting shot and blown up.)

--Brant

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Michael,

What I meant by "not explaining themselves" was that those authors never overtly or even covertly point out the speculative part of their fiction. They tell a story, and it is what it is. Likewise, Rand did not explicitly state any of those divergent points from your post #6 about the universe of Atlas Shrugged.

For instance, in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon imagines a world in which the Slattery Report was implemented, creating an independent Jewish state in Alaska and saving millions of Jews from the Holocaust. He unobtrusively tells a story of how that might have happened, but there's never anything in your face spelling it out. Relative to the rest of the plot and character development (in which Alaska itself is practically a character), that very significant divergence from actual history is a non-event.

That's what I see in Atlas Shrugged as well. Those points of divergence are significant and yet subtle.

Although, now that I've put this in writing, I see that I'm muddling "speculative fiction" with "alternative history fiction" but that's a nit-pick, so whatever. Point remains. :smile:

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Nothing is weirder in my mind than Jews in Alaska.

--Brant

there aren't many Jews in Alaska for the same reason there aren't very many Jews in jail relative to their numbers in the general American population

There may not be many Jews (7,000) in Alaska, but the Jews have been in Alaska since Russian times. See an informative chronicle about Alaskan Jews and their roots and accomplishments at the Alaska Dispatch News, excerpt below.

Your cryptic explanation for the number of Jews in Alaska and jails -- are you going to spell it out? They are too smart for jail and too smart for Alaska? Alaska, like jail, is not attractive to Jews? The icy conditions of The North prevent Jews from being Jewish?

-- if the latter, I'd have to introduce you to the Jews of Canada, one of whom was premier here in British Columbia. We even have Jewish ice hockey players!

(if Jews made it to China, and only died out/assimilated in the 20th century, if Jews were in Yemen, Ethiopia, India, Kurdistan and Edinburgh, you surely can have more 'weird' things in mind ...)

Soon, the streets of Sitka were lined with shops with Jewish names, and the small Jewish community thrived. One traveler, Emil Teichmann, describes how Sitkas Jewish men prayed together in a warehouse on Friday night. I had never heard a sound there in the evenings, but on that night my curiosity was aroused by the murmur of several voices in the adjoining room, he writes in his published diary, "A Journey to Alaska in the Year 1868." Looking through a crevice I saw quite an assembly of some twenty men all of the Jewish persuasion, who were holding their Sabbath services and reading their prayers under the leadership of the oldest man present. It was a memorable thing to see this religious gathering in so strange a setting and it said a great deal for the persistence with which the Jews everywhere, even in the most remote countries, practice their emotional exercises.

The Gold Rush brought even more Jews to Alaska. In 1899, when gold was discovered on the beaches of Nome -- about half way up the west coast -- would-be-miners headed north on paddlewheel boats. Nineteen-year-old Max Hirschberg, a hotel clerk in Canadas Yukon, decided to make his way overland. But an encounter with a rusty nail hospitalized Hirschberg with blood poisoning, delaying his journey until the spring thaw, when dogsledding was too hazardous. Instead, he mounted a bike.

Edited by william.scherk
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Comparing the fiction of Atlas Shrugged to reality, sales and advertizing as a full-time, or as part of one's, job appears once, arguably twice, in AS. (I used Amazon's "look inside" feature to search.) "Traveling salesmen" appears once to portray people in a corner saloon. "Salesman" appears once to describe antagonist Floyd Ferris's tone. "Sale" and "sales" appear several times, but not referring to a job. "Advertise" and "advertising" appear once each, neither as a job. Cherryl Brooks/Taggart is described as a dime store shopgirl, presumably something like a sales clerk at a perfume counter or a cashier. All of these portrayals strongly suggest a very negative view of salespeople. Who sells Rearden steel, Wyatt oil, etc.? No answer. Do Hank and Ellis do all selling themselves?

I don't claim that sales and advertizing jobs are necessary features of capitalism or free enterprise, but they certainly are prominent ones. Moreover, I find it hard to imagine capitalism or free enterprise without them.

Incidentally, "marketing" appears once - the marketing division of the publisher of AS.

******************************************

While watching the Giants-Cardinals NLCS game last night, I saw what seems to me like a new mode of advertising. While the game was being aired, the picture showing the game shrank to about 2/3rds its usual size diagonal-wise. In the freed-up space "T-Mobile" and some diagonal stripes like on the woman's dress here appeared. The tv screen stayed that way only 2-3 seconds and I did not see it again.

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