Ayn Rand And The End Of Love

[Wolf DeVoon]

21 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Rather than looking down your nose at this technique

Uh. Not quite that. Characterization matters. For instance in The Maltese Falcon, Joel Cairo's line: "Our conversations in private have been such that I am not anxious to continue them," and Sam Spade confronting Brigid O'Shaughnessey: "Miles hadn't many brains, but, Christ! he had too many years' experience as a detective to be caught like that by the man he was shadowing. Up a blind alley with his gun tucked away on his hip and his overcoat buttoned. Not a chance... But he'd have gone up there with you, angel..."

I think I'm as well versed in macguffin as anyone else, a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock. Notably, Dashiell Hammett's last and best novel, The Thin Man, has none. My own work has evolved to the point where I am much more interested in human ambition, pain, resolve, and triumph, instead of trick situations (Rear Window) or bizarre phenomena (The Birds). You may be entirely correct, that the penalty for escaping King horror (Carrie, Cristine, Creepshow) and Coen barbarity (Fargo) is obscurity, unwanted in today's fantasy first-person shooter zeitgeist.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 minute ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

You may be entirely correct, that the penalty for escaping King crap (Carrie, Cristine, Creepshow) and Coen barbarity (Fargo) is obscurity, unwanted in today's first-person shooter zeitgeist.

Wolf,

Correct about what?

What you just said?

Horse feathers.

I don't believe that, I never said anything close, and I will not be part of your martyr complex. That's your baby, not mine.

Sometimes the good walk alone, sometimes they wallow in self-pity.

Be careful what you hope for since the universe tends to give it to you. Or, hell, flush your talent down the toilet. It's yours to do with what you want. Just try not to leave snot droppings with the trail of tears...

So there.

Michael

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

11 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Uh. Not quite that. Characterization matters.

Jezus H. Keeriiiist.

Who said characterization doesn't matter?

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

35 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I don't believe that, I never said anything close, and I will not be part of your martyr complex.

Okay. You brought up obscurity: "Authors who spend a lot of words (pretty or otherwise, with metaphors or just plain description) writing about a protagonist who wants to drink some milk walking up to a refrigerator, opening the door, getting the carton of milk out, pouring a glass, drinking it, putting the carton back and putting the glass in the sink don't tend to get wide audiences."

Facts are facts. Zero book sales, no movie deal. Nothing complex about it. I think it's a fair deal, honestly. I write what I can.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Okay. You brought up obscurity: "Authors who spend a lot of words (pretty or otherwise, with metaphors or just plain description) writing about a protagonist who wants to drink some milk walking up to a refrigerator, opening the door, getting the carton of milk out, pouring a glass, drinking it, putting the carton back and putting the glass in the sink don't tend to get wide audiences."

Wolf,

And that's the way you write?

Gimmee a break.

I was presenting how to guarantee obscurity by boring the reader to death.

As to your marketing skills, both outwardly and networking-wise, you have none. You never learned this and, at the time you should have, you landed a dream job in a closed-off environment where you didn't have to. Hell, you didn't even have an editor to rag your ass with an eye towards sales. You got too spoiled to even think about marketing or writing to market, much imagine they're important enough to learn. That explains your lack of sales a lot better than the quality of your writing. And it's fixable, but you have to want to fix it through learning it. Another job like the one you had ain't coming along anytime soon unless a miracle hits you.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

2 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

As to your marketing skills, both outwardly and networking-wise, you have none.

Fair statement. It's a division of labor thing. I'm still working on the literature, doing better I think. Dead soon. Then it'll be someone else's call what to do with it.

I don't take it seriously, don't care really. I would be gratified and satisfied to write something beautiful. Pretty funny, that my long-time buddy Tom suggested that my chapters should be illustrated with photos from the period. Yet he worries that the main character commits a felony. Sorry to bore you with this. I rarely speak of it, except at OL.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

11 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Yet he worries that the main character commits a felony.  Sorry to bore you with this.

What's wrong with felonies?

I'm biting my tongue, but I'm not going to say anything else about that quote...

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

Think of it. We The Living panned and the bookstore returns pulped. No one wanted The Fountainhead. No comparison of stature implied.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

23 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

No one wanted The Fountainhead.

Wolf,

That's not accurate history.

Rand had a publisher (Knopf) way before she completed the novel, but she kept missing deadlines. Finally she said she had no idea when she would finish, so they mutually cancelled.

The legend she cultivated was different (12 refusals, etc. etc. etc.) but this Knopf story is on record.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Just now, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Wolf,

That's not accurate history.

Rand had a publisher (Knopf) way before she completed the novel, but she kept missing deadlines. Finally she said she had no idea when she would finish, so they mutually cancelled.

The legend she cultivated was different (12 refusals, etc. etc. etc.) but this Knopf story is on record.

Michael

News to me. Where's the record?

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Just now, Wolf DeVoon said:

Think of it. We The Living panned and the bookstore returns pulped. No one wanted The Fountainhead. No comparison of stature implied.

What's the "pulped" reference?

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

On ‎5‎/‎29‎/‎2018 at 6:22 PM, Wolf DeVoon said:

I certify that it is impossible to know a woman after five minutes, five years, or five decades. They have movable parts.

I guess you know that. Build on it.

--Brant

[Jonathan]

12 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

As to your marketing skills, both outwardly and networking-wise, you have none...

Not only that, but he has negative marketing skills. It's not just zero, but less than zero. Not marketing, but repelling.

That's mostly due to the obvious dishonesty in his attempts. He tries to present himself as an accomplished pro, and thinks that he's going to trick potential customers into believing that lie. He writes of himself in the third person in reviews of his own work. Douchebag marketing. Sales repellant. I think that he probably picked up the mindset from his crush, James Ray Houston, and similar conmen turd associates back in the day.

And then there's the trashy pseudonym. And also the pouting. No one buys my stuff. Jeepers. Poor little me. But I don't care anyway. I don't care 'bout nothin'. Ya can't hurt me!

Pouting is easier than changing.

J

[Jonathan]

Eeesh!

"Inside Wolf DeVoon."

Suggested subtitle: Perpetually Pretending and Practicing Preening.

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

News to me. Where's the record?

Brant,

There are several.

Here's one, from Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and The World She Made (speaking about 1938, when The Fountainhead was still largely unfinished):

Quote

... Watkins had found a publishing company that was enthusiastic about bringing out The Fountainhead but refused to pay the author an advance on royalties until the novel was completed. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., one of New York’s best and most reputable firms. Rand’s editor would be the founder’s stylish wife, Blanche Knopf, whom Rand later came to think of as “a phony.” Even without payment, there was both promise and protection in consigning her unfinished book to a well-regarded publisher. On June 27, 1938, the thirty-three-year-old novelist and playwright signed a contract with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her a year to finish.

. . .

As she left off outlining and began to write, her work proved slow and grueling. Although she had mastered her story line, finding the proper nuances of style and an emotional vocabulary that fit her theme took more time and energy than she expected. As with We the Living, these matters had to be worked out sentence by sentence, almost word by word, in her adopted language. She wrote and rewrote, cut and restored, bending over her handmade walnut desk every day and deep into the night. For inspiration, she gazed at the publicity photograph of an ethereal young O’Connor she had hung above her desk. The portrait of Frank “makes John Barrymore look like an office boy,” a visitor once remarked. By mid-1939 she had only about a third of the novel in first draft.

She missed her deadline with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her an extension of one year, until June 28, 1940. For a number of reasons, she missed that deadline, too, and couldn’t say with certainty when she would finish. By mutual assent, then, her contract with the publisher was canceled.

. . .

When she declared that twelve publishers had rejected The Fountainhead before Bobbs-Merrill had agreed to publish it, her tone contained a note of pride at being a triumphant outsider. She included Knopf in her count, although it hadn’t rejected the book so much as refused to extend her deadline for a second time. She also included two or three publishing houses that had seen only an early, incomplete outline, not the text, and she didn’t mention that her first publisher, Macmillan, had offered her an advance that she turned down. Her disciples would accept and repeat the story of The Fountainhead’s twelve rejections hundreds of times over the years, both as a symbol of the hardships she had endured at the hands of timid or imperceptive editors and as an implicit compliment to her independent-minded readers.

These comments are sourced in the book. Here's the source for the first for you to get an idea of the level of research Anne put in (apropos--she also had use of Barbara's Rand interview tapes). Anne didn't use standard footnote form for her footnotes, though, so quoting sources is clunky. That's why I'm only giving one of the sources (one of the ones for the Knopf contract).

Quote

The contract was officially nullified in October 1940 (unpublished letter from Blanche H. Knopf to Ann Watkins, October 25, 1940 [A. Watkins Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 80]).

Does that do it for you or do you need more?

 

As you were part of the original wave, I know this kind of legend-busting might be painful to you. (Hell, my intent isn't even to bust the legends. It's merely to get the facts right.) After all, you were part of the people who heard the twelve rejections legend told in all earnest by people you respected hundreds of times.

But the truth is, Rand did some righteous hyping and BS to create her public persona. That's a harsh way of saying it, but it's accurate. As with almost all great artists who are successful in their lifetimes, there is a substantial difference between the facts of Rand as a person and the stories of the persona she created of herself for public consumption. Her public persona was not an actual person, but a product. Lots of people have difficulty accepting this concept when their idols are involved, but facts are facts and fiction is fiction. 

As a writer and philosopher, Rand might have had one idea about the nature of truth, but as a marketer, she knew that people buy stories, not truth. And the stories had to be good, otherwise people would not buy them. So she embellished the stories of her life when the truth was not sexy enough to sell well. Voila. Now it's a market-ready product.

I don't blame her for this and I don't consider it giving her "feet of clay" or any of that other crap. It shows she was a good solid professional. I don't even consider it dishonesty if fraud is the standard. It's the way marketing in the entertainment world worked back then (and mostly still works). Entertainers sell stories, not unfiltered reality. That's their product and their audience wants what they sell. And they want a lot of it.

You either play according to those rules or you satisfiy yourself with being unknown. Don't forget, Rand learned how this business works in Hollywood, i.e., Tinseltown.

When Rand defined art as "A selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments," she used that same "selective recreation of reality" process to her public persona. Notice she did not say "selective facts." She said, "selective recreation." As in "selective recreation of history."

A public persona is not a biography although the description of a public persona comes off as one.

Rand knew precisely what she wanted to convey. And when the reality of her actual history didn't conform with that vision, she changed the story of her persona to make things line up. She did it on purpose.

The thing is, it worked. Ayn Rand is now a strong brand that has turned evergreen. But it was also a strong brand in her lifetime.

This is made intentionally, it is not accidental.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

Hard to read what you said, because most of it was covered in a double ad about life insurance for body builders -- but I caught the idea of Rand lying.

I always suspected her of lying about why she tripped Frank on a movie set and married him.

[Wolf DeVoon]

On 1/16/2018 at 3:26 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Following the warped advice you generally find in O-Land about fiction writing is a surefire recipe for failure.

I missed this when it was posted mid-January. What warped advice is generally found in O-Land?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

... but I caught the idea of Rand lying.

Wolf,

You caught wrong.

That is not the idea.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

43 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

I missed this when it was posted mid-January. What warped advice is generally found in O-Land?

Here are a few and they come directly from Rand:

1. The theme of a work is a topic without action. It's the "core of a work's abstract meaning." If can you ever understand what that means, I suppose you can use it as a writing guide. But it's really abstract. Essentially, for Rand, a theme is a concept like the type of concept given in ITOE. So for an aspiring writer, this can mean almost anything. Also, this idea has nothing to do with what people normally mean by theme.

2. But it gets worse. Plot theme: "A conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events." 

Frankly, this sounds like a recipe for a training manual.

The theme is the piano. The conflict is that you are a beginner and want to play Rachmaninoff on the piano but can't. Here is a purposeful progression of events to resolve the conflict. Step 1, Warm up every day with scales. Step 2, Practice arpeggios. Step 3...)

Does that sound like a plot theme based on the examples she gave? (Look them up or I'll quote them later if need be.) Maybe not, but this piano example fits the description Rand gave perfectly.

The point is, Rand could give examples of a plot-theme, including where she got the idea of "the situation" from (Cecil B. DeMille), but she did not show aspiring writers how to make one. (I kinda have an idea where DeMille's idea came from since Polti's 36 dramatic situations was in vogue among the writers and movie makers DeMille learned from and hung around with. Also, I think he jazzed up the idea with dilemma, making sure the core situation was a full-blown dilemma.) And even considering Rand's examples, they are not all that consistent, but at least action enters the scene.

3. For character, Romantic Realism means emulating Rand on fundamentals, and that means making the purpose of one's art the portrayal of the perfect human being. Good luck with that for a beginner...

4. One of the worst: Villains are not important since real drama involves a struggle of the good against the good. This comes directly from Rand's idea that evil has no efficacy. I recall her saying somewhere that the reason the dramatic interest in her own works was a struggle of hero against hero and the villains were minor characters was precisely to illustrate this principle. But I would have to look because I don't remember where. 

This one has probably made for more bad stories in O-Land than any other. Not because it's a bad idea. It's actually quite clever. But because a person needs to learn how to write a decent fight between a hero and villain before they can attempt something like that and pull it off.

I could go on because I have thought through a lot of this stuff. And I can get plenty of Rand quotes to back up what I say.

But wait, there's more!

Then we get off into her progeny and creative writing advice from folks like Tore Boeckmann (at ARI) who claims value is the core of storytelling or something like that (I have to listen to the lecture again, but I remember he forced some ideas way out of shape). I could make a list of bad advice from several of them, but the core error is always the same. They try to prove Rand right against her enemies on some idea or other of hers, then they try to outdo Rand by going even further in their theories and advice than she ever would.

As an aside, Rand herself never discussed Aristotle's catharsis (at least I don't recall anything), probably because the emotions to be purged by the audience were pity and fear. But she had to include Aristotle, so she used his idea of final causation as her method of deriving a sequence of events for plotting. This is not a bad method, either, but it's for an intermediate-level writer. For a beginner, it's a disaster unless the beginner is naturally intuitive.

(As another aside, for me, the best popular Rand-inspired fiction writers are folks like James Clavell, Terry Goodkind and a few others. But they did not write Romantic Realism in her mold. They went their own way, starting with learning how to tell a story correctly. They added the Rand stuff after they learned the basics of drama, suspense, adventure, romance, etc., i.e., the basics of storytelling in general.)

As for comedy, I can't think of a single Romantic Realism author who writes comedy. In general, comedy is looked down on in O-Land when learning how to write. So people simply don't learn it. Hell, they don't even learn elementary stuff like the rule of threes. There's a lecture on Rand and comedy at ARI by Mayhew, if I remember correctly, but it's not very good. More of the same--Rand was right and everyone else was wrong. yawn... Who can learn to write comedy from something like that? Besides, Rand's view on comedy itself was that it was destructive and could be evil. 

If one wanted to look at Hitchcock and other more contemporary story writers she mentioned, who the hell would ever want to write "bootleg romanticism" (Rand's term for them)? So aspiring writers in O-Land just don't study those folks.

All that, to me, is terrible writing advice, especially for aspiring writers.

I went below the surface here, but I didn't cut very deep, either. There's a hell of a lot more I can say about all this.

In short, the conclusion I arrived at after a tonload of study and figuring things out is the following: 

Ayn Rand was a great writer. She was a mediocre fiction writing teacher at best and stifling for beginners. Those who learned fiction writing from her teaching methods are even worse, at least the ones I've seen.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Wolf,

You caught wrong.

That is not the idea.

Michael

Darn it. I must be going stupid. How is twisting and reshaping the facts not lying?

[Wolf DeVoon]

6 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Villains are not important since real drama involves a struggle of the good against the good. This comes directly from Rand's idea that evil has no efficacy. I recall her saying somewhere that the reason the dramatic interest in her own works was a struggle of hero against hero and the villains were minor characters was precisely to illustrate this principle.

That's quite wonderful. Thanks.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Darn it. I must be going stupid. How is twisting and reshaping the facts not lying?

Wolf,

It's storytelling.

Lying is deceit. Hiding the truth. Intentional dishonesty without the complicity of the other. Lying is alway about acknowledging the other is capable of understanding an accurate account of reality, but concealing or altering part of it against the other's will.

Storytelling (in this sense) is building an entity people can value as an end in itself. It's a selective recreation.

I may not be articulating this well, but there is a fundamental difference between the two.

I never got the feeling Rand was intentionally deceiving people to manipulate them. I always got the feeling she was building her legend to hand down to the generations. 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

12 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

It's storytelling.

Lying is deceit.

btw - This isn't a rationalization.

Here's more explanation of where I am coming from.

Ayn Rand was not involved in self-promotion as her driving motor. She was actively engaged in a fight to stop the spread of communism, which she later expanded to all forms of collectivism.

Now consider this. I am at the end of a book called Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans and I am appalled by what the records reveal about how most everything we know about McCarthy is the exact opposite of the Congressional records and other official files. I'm not talking about a few events. It's one after another after another and so on going into the hundreds, if not more.

But McCarthy is still considered as an uninformed lout and bad guy in our culture. How did that happen?

Storytelling. McCarthy's enemies were great story confabulators.

Rand, starting as a young girl, saw storytelling over and over trump facts in swaying public opinion. She saw it, and in her works she gave plenty of indication she saw it, but did not verbalize it the way I do. More often than not, she used terms like propaganda.

Here's how it works. If you are a person who doesn't know much about McCarthy, but know he's a bad guy who persecuted innocent people, so there seems to be something off about my comments here, you are feeling the effect of masterful storytelling. The facts are quite different, and not just in who he targeted. Almost everything we know about McCarthy from the stories (propaganda) is factually wrong.

In fact, that book is a dream-come-true for people who love gotcha epistemology. Evans's main system is to present the public perception of an aspect of McCarthy, give the sources the bios and press used to create that perception, tell the story of what was going on in Congress and elsewhere to establish context, then present what is in the public records, item after item and person after person. One damn gotcha after another, so to speak.  

Yet even nowadays, the legend lives on while Evans's book, so chock full of indisputable facts that his critics do not dispute them, has not replaced the stories in public perception. And the facts are solid. The critics grumble at Evans's opinions, but not his facts.

This means that storytelling about McCarthy is still swaying the public while a total definitive recital of facts debunking the stories has had little effect.

Rand knew this is how it worked. So she built the story of her life in order to fight bad story with good story. She knew that facts alone would not trump the stories created by Soviet master storytellers. If she was to have a chance to help stop the spread of collectivist madness, she needed a story of personal heroism to go along with the stories in her books.

This is why I consider Rand's storytelling to be fundamentally different than lying. She wasn't glossing over her mistakes out of vanity. She was building a weapon of the same nature as the one she had to fight against to protect something she loved dearly (America).

I recall reading a private letter exchange she had with a preacher (in her Letters). I'm going on memory, so I'm paraphrasing. Rand initially had good things to say about Christianity because people practiced the religion to look after the future of their own individual souls in the afterlife. So it's essentially a selfish religion. In her letter to the preacher, she owned up to this, but said she had nothing further to say about it because the nature of her fight would not permit it.

That's a big clue to my point, which is Rand crafted stories that "selectively recreated reality" on purpose to serve up to public perception and thereby sway the public, not just communicate facts.

Thus, noting the difference between storytelling and lying is not fudging to justify lying. There's just no other way to fight evil storylines in the culture and win except by presenting better stories. And there is no way to create such stories when using actual events and people as topic other than by "selectively recreating" the facts to make the stories work and be impactful. The only choice one has is to do it or not. There is no choice to do it differently and win. The reality of human nature does not allow such a choice. So the only alternative to creating stories about people and events that play loose with historical facts in order to make a story that travels well in the culture is to let the bad guys win. And Rand would not do that.

Was she consciously aware of what she was doing when forging her legend with the good, the bad and the ugly? In my opinion, yes.

Michael

[Wolf DeVoon]

11 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Was she consciously aware of what she was doing when forging her legend with the good, the bad and the ugly? In my opinion, yes.

"She carried on an increasingly toxic sexual affair with a married disciple 25 years her junior; when he had his own affair with a younger woman, Rand slapped him, excommunicated him, and falsely accused him of embezzlement."  http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

3 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

"She carried on an increasingly toxic sexual affair with a married disciple 25 years her junior; when he had his own affair with a younger woman, Rand slapped him, excommunicated him, and falsely accused him of embezzlement."  http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html

Wolf,

Since Rand hid her affair with Nathaniel during the time it was happening--and after the split--the affair itself was not part of the legend she was creating. Monogamy and publicly holding Frank up to be a kind of Randian hero were parts of the legend.

Apropos, Frank seems to have been a wonderful person, but not a world-maker-and-shaker. According to the bios, Rand would excuse his modest achievements and ambition to people who managed to probe about it without getting their heads bit off by saying he was "on strike." I even think this is on tape...

Notice that monogamy is a virtue in Rand's fiction, just as much as it is in her legend-making. In her fiction, a virtuous person can have different mates, but only one at a time. Off the top of my head, the only exception, which appears in "The Husband I Bought," " Red Pawn," and We The Living is when a woman sleeps with another man to protect the man she really loves. She carries on with both. It's her supreme sacrifice for her top value and she generally threw in the face of the man she didn't love--it as a supreme sacrifice--at the reveal in the climax.

(It was slightly different in "The Husband I Bought," where she pretended in public to carry on with both without really doing so. But the protagonist still offered her monogamy--her reputation for monogamy--as a supreme sacrifice to the man she really loved.)

The affair with Nathaniel was part of Rand's all-too-human reality. It was not part of her persona for public consumption. So she didn't talk about it except to her intimates (Barbara and Frank), who belonged to her non-legend reality.

Do I think Rand was aware of what she was doing while she was doing it, that is, do I think she purposely crafted her public image--her persona, with all that hiding of Nathaniel and exaggerating the heroic character of Frank?

Yup.

 

Michael