The Rewrite Squad


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A recent announcement from the Ayn Rand Archives seems germane here:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_archives_news

TAPE TRANSCRIPTIONS: The Archives has begun creating transcriptions of Ayn Rand’s and other Objectivists’ works that have long been available only on audiotape. In addition, word-for-word transcriptions will be made of Ayn Rand’s fiction and nonfiction courses, edited versions of which have been published by Penguin Plume. A long-term project is to reformat and review the content of this published material, thus making a closer reading and study of these lectures possible.

If accurately worded, the announcement acknowledges by implication that Ayn Rand's lectures on fiction and nonfiction writing were never fully transcribed. Did Tore Boeckmann and Robert Mayhew edit directly from the recordings, instead of first transcribing and then editing?

One wonders whether these projects will be allowed to proceed to publication while Leonard Peikoff remains in control of the Estate of Ayn Rand.

The announcement does not mention Ayn Rand' spoken answers in particular, and Jeff Britting has not answered my email inquiries about recorded questions and answers that have not been made available to the public. But the Archives folks are surely aware of the need for full and accurate transcriptions to replace Mayhew's rewritten selection.

Robert Campbell

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  • 3 weeks later...

It is being reported that the vacancy on the Anthem Foundation Board that opened up when John McCaskey resigned will now be occupied by...

Robert Mayhew.

If Leonard Peikoff's interests weren't directly represented at the Anthem Foundation before, they will be now.

Robert Campbell

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  • 3 months later...

Sotheby’s is about to auction the manuscript of The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age, the catalog is available here, it starts on page 114 of 162.

According to this, it went for $68,500.

I just saw this post, but I bought this manuscript so if anyone needs any clarification from the original , feel free to ask me here or via a pm. The final hammer price was $55k but 68,500 after a healthy commission !

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  • 3 months later...

I have 20 more posts to edit.

This is the most amazing thread! The transcripts here alone are sufficient to make this a top site for Objectivists.

Does this mean that 20 more were coming? What happened to them?

All of the posts quoting Mayhew have now been edited.

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  • 1 month later...

My article about Bob Mayhew's rewrites is now out in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

http://aynrandstudies.com/jars/v11_n1/11_1toc.asp

Long as the article runs, there still isn't space in it to present all of the examples available here.

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  • 4 months later...

I hope those who are interested in this topic have obtained a copy of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Number 21. :)

Next month (January 2012), the embargo on making articles available separately from the journal will expire.

I will post a link then to a PDF of my article.

Robert Campbell

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  • 2 months later...

There were some last-minute tangles, but Volume 11, number 2 of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is out now.

And here is "The Rewriting of Ayn Rand's Spoken Answers":

http://hubcap.clemso...writingrand.pdf

Robert Campbell

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  • 2 weeks later...

In Ayn Rand Nation, Gary Weiss provides some significant new material relevant to the efforts of ARI’s “powers-that-be” to censor and rewrite Objectivist history.

Two brief examples.

Iris Bell, a former graphic designer for NBI, was asked to contribute to 100 Voices, the anthology of commentaries by those who knew Ayn Rand.

Iris spoke bluntly during her interview with the ARI writer. There was “a level of dishonesty that I thought should be on the record,” she said. . . She wanted to be sure that, years from now, “what I experienced, what I actually saw, conversations I had with people, “ would be preserved for posterity. She gave the ARI writer four hours of interviews in 1999, and she recalled that they were “completely negative.”

But when she saw an advance copy of 100 Voices, she was annoyed to find that her interview had been not just abridged but expurgated. “They had managed to find all these positive things I said,” which had “nothing to do with the whole feel of the conversation I had with them.” Iris said she was in touch with a number of other people quoted in the book, and the same thing was done to them.

p. 40

Weiss also describes some interesting correspondence between Ayn Rand and former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He obtained Rand’s FBI file, and discovered a letter Rand had written to Hoover in 1966 following the publication of some comments he made in The Saturday Evening Post. Hoover was quoting as saying that “he disavows the ultra-conservative political label” and terms himself an “objectivist.” In her letter to him, Rand had asked if he agreed with her philosophy and requested a meeting with him to discuss a “personal-political problem.”

Hoover scribbled on the bottom of her letter “I never said I was an ‘objectivist,’ whatever that is.” He declined to meet with her, citing his busy schedule.

Weiss states:

Rand’s letter and Hoover’s response were, unsurprisingly, omitted from the ARI sanctioned Letters of Ayn Rand.. The nature of that ‘personal-political problem’ has been lost to history. Rand had made two previous attempts to see Hoover, in 1947 and 1957, both without success.

p. 78

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  • 3 months later...

This behemoth of a thread may be due for a refresh; with the first Johnny Carson interview now available are there to be more “hand in the cookie jar” moments? An obvious place for one comes at the end, when Rand mentions Nathaniel Branden. Do you think that made it into the Peter Schwartz edited transcript? If so, it ought to be on page 198 of Objectively Speaking. Does anyone really need me to tell them whether it’s there or not?

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5452&st=20#entry166266

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ND,

Well, now that we have that Johnny Carson interview, maybe we could start a new thread on Schwartz and Podritske's Objectively Speaking?

Robert Campbell

PS. Not that I'm promising to post 200 transcriptions, or anything like that :)

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