Casting Couch

[caroljane]

isn't this the Practice thread ?

Double post, Zod forgive me!

Edited April 22, 2011 by daunce lynam

[Ellen Stuttle]

I only actually read a few Newsletters in 1968 and then the strange announcement and the mysterious name of Peikoff. Nobody in Toronto had the faintest clue of what had happened, or if they did they did not tell anybody. I never did know until I reconnected with my Objectivist friend about three years ago and read The Passion of Ayn Rand. What an installment that turned out to be.

Carol, first, I didn't think your comment was "too flippant." I was amused by it. I was just explaining that there was a thrill of anticipation.

I'm confused about your background with Objectivists. Please forgive if I'm intruding on painful territory, but I had the impression you were married to an Objectivist. Is the impression wrong?

As is obvious I was never an Objectivist, as I have mentioned before, I lack the Eureka receptor. My experience was I think opposite to yours; I infer that you discovered Rand by reading her and found Objectivists through pursuing your interest. I was introduced to the philosophy by dear friends, and basically a fellow-traveller. I read, I reasoned, but it never felt like a "fit" with me and nothing resonated with what I had previously felt and thought, or subsequently did.

I've never considered myself an Objectivist -- a Rand admirer, a fellow traveler. Basically I found Objectivists by accident. When I first read Atlas, I didn't realize that Rand took herself seriously as a philosopher. My main interest in the book was literary.

After I found out about and subscribed to the newsletter, I also took some of the taped courses, but I didn't pursue trying to get to know anyone at those. I once met an Objectivst (she saw me reading a newsletter) on the Chicago El while I was still a student at Northwestern and was invited by her to a party. But I didn't like the atmosphere and, again, didn't pursue the acquaintance.

I arrived in NYC just after the split -- my reason for moving there was because I was futzing around delaying graduate school (in the end I went into publishing instead) and I thought it would be fun to live in NYC for awhile.

I sort of doubt I'd ever have gotten to know Objectivists if I hadn't chanced one day to go for lunch at a restaurant near where I was working. That was in the Murray Hill area. The restaurant was on the ground floor of the building to which the O'ist publication office had relocated after the split.

I overheard a black girl at the counter -- she was one of the few black Objectivists -- talking with the counterman and occasionally using the term "sense of life."

So I inquired....

She and I hit it off and she invited me to a meeting that weekend, first post-split meeting of a group called "The Stamford [Connecticut] New Intellectuals." I went. Among those at the meeting was Larry Gould. And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Larry doesn't think of himself as "an Objectivist" either, but back then he'd have accepted the designation.)

Ellen

Edited April 22, 2011 by Ellen Stuttle

[caroljane]

I only actually read a few Newsletters in 1968 and then the strange announcement and the mysterious name of Peikoff. Nobody in Toronto had the faintest clue of what had happened, or if they did they did not tell anybody. I never did know until I reconnected with my Objectivist friend about three years ago and read The Passion of Ayn Rand. What an installment that turned out to be.

Carol, first, I didn't think your comment was "too flippant." I was amused by it. I was just explaining that there was a thrill of anticipation.

I'm confused about your background with Objectivists. Please forgive if I'm intruding on painful territory, but I had the impression you were married to an Objectivist. Is the impression wrong?

Of course it isn't.. but I have only been married once, to a definite non-Objectivist. But yes, a lovely guy I met when I was 18 and there is nothing painful at all, except the alternate history pain if we had ever got married!

[9thdoctor]

Double post, Zod forgive me!

[jriggenbach]

I overheard a black girl at the counter -- she was one of the few black Objectivists -- talking with the counterman and occasionally using the term "sense of life."

Was it Anne Wortham, by any chance?

JR

Edited April 22, 2011 by Jeff Riggenbach

[caroljane]

Double post, Zod forgive me!

Oh wow, I did not know what Brant looked like, I am becoming less Respectable by the minute,

[Selene]

(Larry doesn't think of himself as "an Objectivist" either, but back then he'd have accepted the designation.)

Ellen

Ellen:

That is very well phrased. Back then, I gladly called myself an "Objectivist," but within a few years of the split, my intellectual integrity would no longer permit it.

Adam

[Ellen Stuttle]

I overheard a black girl at the counter -- she was one of the few black Objectivists -- talking with the counterman and occasionally using the term "sense of life."

Was it Anne Wortham, by any chance?

JR

No. I've never met Anne Wortham, although I almost feel as if I had, since I know several people who know her. She seemed to me someone I'd like a lot from her Full Context interview.

I don't want to say the person's name online (I'll PM you). Last I heard, which was many years ago, she'd become disaffected with Objectivism and distanced herself and might not want to have her name come up on search engines in connection with an Objectivist site.

Ellen

Edited April 23, 2011 by Ellen Stuttle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Last I heard, which was many years ago, she'd become disaffected with Objectivism and distanced herself and might not want to have her name come up on search engines in connection with an Objectivist site.

Ellen,

You mean like here on OL from May 2009?

"No He Can't" by author Anne Wortham

on Just Americans Making Ethical Statements Weblog

I received this link by email. The blog post is dated January 276, 2009, but Ms. Wortham's article was first published on November 6, 2008 (shortly after the election) on LewRockwell from what I have been able to find, and it keeps making the rounds in the blogosphere—deservedly so. It is quite prophetic.

This article has been so widely reprinted on the web, I feel no problem with giving the whole thing:

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival–all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician.

I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend.

I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them. I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration–political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago, irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers, and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead–and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over–and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like.

The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to–"Do Something!" You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine–what little there is left–for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

Amen.

Please go to the link to see Ms. Wortham's bio. She teaches out here in Obama-land (Illinois).

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

MSK,

Huh?

Something got lost in translation there. The person whom I met in New York City in late 1968 through whose invitation to attend a meeting I then met Larry was NOT Anne Wortham.

Ellen

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen.

My mistake.

I thought your "she" referred to Ms. Wortham. You didn't give the sex of the "person," but the sex of Ms. Wortham is known. So my subconscious automatically assumed your "she" meant the same as the last time you used "she" in close proximity, which was in reference to Ms. Wortham.

Michael

[caroljane]

Ellen.

My mistake.

I thought your "she" referred to Ms. Wortham. You didn't give the sex of the "person," but the sex of Ms. Wortham is known. So my subconscious automatically assumed your "she" meant the same as the last time you used "she" in close proximity, which was in reference to Ms. Wortham.

Michael

Now this is funny. With no evidence at all I had up to now thought that Ellen's husband was Larry Sechrest - and I don't know who Sechrest is except vaguely or why I made the association.

Your mixup is understandable at least!

[jriggenbach]

Ellen.

My mistake.

I thought your "she" referred to Ms. Wortham. You didn't give the sex of the "person," but the sex of Ms. Wortham is known. So my subconscious automatically assumed your "she" meant the same as the last time you used "she" in close proximity, which was in reference to Ms. Wortham.

Michael

Now this is funny. With no evidence at all I had up to now thought that Ellen's husband was Larry Sechrest - and I don't know who Sechrest is except vaguely or why I made the association.

Your mixup is understandable at least!

Larry Sechrest died nearly three years ago. He was a libertarian economics professor at Sul Ross State University in West Texas.

JR

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen.

My mistake.

I thought your "she" referred to Ms. Wortham. You didn't give the sex of the "person," but the sex of Ms. Wortham is known. So my subconscious automatically assumed your "she" meant the same as the last time you used "she" in close proximity, which was in reference to Ms. Wortham.

Michael

Now this is funny. With no evidence at all I had up to now thought that Ellen's husband was Larry Sechrest - and I don't know who Sechrest is except vaguely or why I made the association.

Your mixup is understandable at least!

I submit that MSK's mixup is understandable only on the basis of haste , considering that in the post -- #33 -- he quoted was included my initial comment in which "girl" (actually "young woman" -- late '20s seems like "girl" to me these days) and "she" were specified, and considering that, in the same post #33, I explicitly said, answering JR, "No. I've never met Anne Wortham[.]"

Glad to have your assumption that my guy Larry is (was) Larry Sechrest corrected. Larry Sechrest was a nice guy, but, no.

My user profile on SOLO - see -- has a photo of me and my Larry. The photo, which is severely cropped, was taken at the entrance to the Hearst castle in California in 2004. Larry and I spent an afternoon there while on the drive from Pasadena to San Francisco. He'd been doing some summer work at Cal Tech, in the Einstein archives -- he's a physicist. I joined him for the last few days of his stay. Then we headed to San Fran. That was the year we attended one of JR's Beer Busts.

Ellen

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I submit that MSK's mixup is understandable only on the basis of haste...

Ellen,

I respectifully submit that it can equally be understandable on the basis of hasty writing.

Sort of like the following (the continuation of your sentence):

... considering that in the post -- #33 -- he quoted was included my initial comment...

Ya gotta do a double and triple take to get the meaning of that one sorted out.

I'm still thinking about how that grammar works...

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

I'm still thinking about how that grammar works...

Michael

Well, when you get it figured out (clicking the link might have helped), you might also ponder why I would have declined to name Anne Wortham, whom I'd just named in saying I'd never met her, and why I'd first say, of Anne Wortham, that "I know several people who know her" and then only two sentences later say, "Last I heard, which was many years ago," in speaking of "the person."

Now, if only Phil were here to deliver a lecture at this point, we might continue for 80 posts.

Cheers, Michael.

Ellen

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Subject...

Predicate...

Conjugation...

Hmmm...

Still can't get my mind wrapped around it.

Coming from hillbillies is a bitch. Gotta speak slow to people like us...