Why Nobody Takes PARC Seriously Anymore

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I tried to avoid it, but I couldn't resist.

Valliant arguing that misquoting is not really misquoting, that concern with quote accuracy is a subterfuge by academics (who were all Rand-haters anyway), etc., is just too funny. It reminds me of this:

There's nothing left really but to laugh.

I swear, after Valliant CONCEDED that he doesn't find verbatim quotes to be a proper standard of scholarship, I honestly don't think he realizes how bad it's going to get for him when the dust settles. It won't be from me or anyone in this discussion, either.

James Valliant is a bonehead.

Bonehead.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

The discovery that Valliant is unaware of correct citation procedures casts a new light on all his complaints of irrelevancy directed against the large amount of documenting of his misuse of sources.

By his views, enunciated in his recent posts, none of his misquoting would matter to his point -- which, as best I can tell, is arguing against "the idea of a 'tyrant' in Rand," a description he used in a recent post characterizing the supposed opposition:

[Here]

But, outside of her occasionally harsh answers to questioners, the idea of a "tyrant" in Rand is unsupported.

BUT...where does that description even come from except through his misreading, misrendering of sources?

Where in either of the Brandens' accounts is Rand described as having been a "tyrant"? Is that exact word used by either? Even if it is (I don't recall an instance, if there is one), was it used with the sort of meaning Valliant gives it, evoking images of Saddam Hussein, or of "Ozymandias, King of Kings" (see)?

His "point" thus seems to be an argument against a misreading!!!

(I'm having troubles processing that someone writing a supposedly scholarly investigation is so ignorant of the ropes of such investigations. I'm not, however, of the suspicion which some have expressed above that he exercised his creative shuffling of phrases in quotes from AR's diaries. Those sound to me like her writing. I'm sometimes suspicious about what he elided with his inserted ellipses, and I'm suspicious as to the tone of the last month's entries, which he didn't include at all on supposed grounds of their being repetitive. However, I think that what he quoted is what she wrote, in the word order in which she wrote it. I acknowledge, though, that the only way, at this point, to feel confident that he didn't do word-order re-arranging would be for an independent reader to check the original against his report.)

Ellen

[The edit is just for a typo: I wrote "months'" but meant "month's."

___

Edited July 2, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

With Rand's writing, it would be more about what Valliant strategically left out. That's the butchering I mentioned.

I agree about a consistency of tone in Rand's journal entries that rings true. Her tone against his is quite discernible (like a famous opera singer on stage compared to a tone deaf person singing in the shower). Also, Valliant does not have the writing talent to imitate her, so any direct rearranging or rewording he did on purpose would probably stand out like a sore thumb.

BUT... He had to type all that out and I am not so sure he is competent enough to get the order of the phrases right if he thought he had the gist of it. He obviously did not proofread very much.

Michael

[Alfonso Jones]

(snip)

(I'm having troubles processing that someone writing a supposedly scholarly investigation is so ignorant of the ropes of such investigations. I'm not, however, of the suspicion which some have expressed above that he exercised his creative shuffling of phrases in quotes from AR's diaries. Those sound to me like her writing. I'm sometimes suspicious about what he elided with his inserted ellipses, and I'm suspicious as to the tone of the last months' entries, which he didn't include at all on supposed grounds of their being repetitive. However, I think that what he quoted is what she wrote, in the word order in which she wrote it. I acknowledge, though, that the only way, at this point, to feel confident that he didn't do word-order re-arranging would be for an independent reader to check the original against his report.)

Ellen

___

Yes. The argument for the opening of the archives to independent examination continues to grow stronger. It is irresponsible for LP to continue do as he does in preventing independent examination of the archives. While he has the legal right to do so, it is highly disrespectful to Rand, who he certainly professes to respect at the highest level, to permit her to be paraphrased and excerpted by those whose primary interest is seen to be at best a desire to defend a particular view of Rand and the events of the 1960s, and at worst a desire to promulgate a false view of reality. In either case - the evidence coming out of the eventual public and independent examination will be a positive thing - though it probably must await a changing of the guard.

I wonder what if any instructions LP was given by Rand re opening up the archives.

Bill P (Alfonso)

Edited July 2, 2008 by Bill P

[Ellen Stuttle]

Posted by me on SOLO -- Here.

I don't have facility at using the response features on this site, and don't want to spend the time acquiring that facility. This is a once-only reply here to James Valliant. I hope the post will show without garbling. I'll repost it on OL in case it doesn't appear correctly here.

There has been no "sharpening" whatever of the language. It says the same thing. Quite reverse of a "sharpening" has taken place -- the response has added "merely" all on his own, outside of the quotation marks. (And notice how I have used the word "sharpening" not "sharpened," Scherk's original form of the word, and still felt obliged to put it in quotation marks. I will, no doubt, presently be accused of "misquoting" Mr. Scherk.)

Whether you're accused of misquoting by Mr. Scherk or not: You DID misquote. To have correctly quoted, you would have written "sharpen[ing]," the brackets indicating that you had changed what you were quoting.

I recommend serious studying of a manual of style.

As to the difference in meaning between:

Hospers says: "[A] commentator... must say things, if not openly critical, at least challengingly exegetical. I did this..."

The response: "Hospers said that he was merely being 'challengingly exegetical, if not openly critical.'"

The second -- your rendering -- indicates that he bordered into being "openly critical." His original wording indicates that he stayed short of the line of bordering into that. You have changed the meaning of what the man wrote.

Nor is it an "argument from authority" to inform you that your quoting procedures don't cut it by any scholarly -- or even general publishing -- standards. People's careers get ruined over the sort of thing you're doing, and trying to defend.

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

I wonder what if any instructions LP was given by Rand re opening up the archives.

The archives were supposed to have been bequeathed to The Library of Congress. Insofar as I'm aware, she didn't change that instruction.

Ellen

___

[Alfonso Jones]

I wonder what if any instructions LP was given by Rand re opening up the archives.

The archives were supposed to have been bequeathed to The Library of Congress. Insofar as I'm aware, she didn't change that instruction.

Ellen

___

Ellen -

Thanks. Were these instructions, to the best of your knowledge, ever committed to writing by Rand?

Bill P (Alfonso)

[Ellen Stuttle]

I wonder what if any instructions LP was given by Rand re opening up the archives.

The archives were supposed to have been bequeathed to The Library of Congress. Insofar as I'm aware, she didn't change that instruction.

Ellen

___

Ellen -

Thanks. Were these instructions, to the best of your knowledge, ever committed to writing by Rand?

Bill P (Alfonso)

Yes, as best I recall. There was a whole lot of stuff about it at one point in listland. I'm sorry to say I can't remember the details. Maybe someone else can fill in with specifics.

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Not the full archives. Just the novels.

Here is the story from Peikfoff's side:

Peikoff's Experience with the Library of Congress

If I understand his story correctly, he got a million dollar tax write-off, or whatever tax credit amount is stipulated by the IRS for a million dollar gift.

He kept and framed two pages from The Fountainhead for sentimental reasons, but did not properly document it. Then he shot his mouth off to the press and Uncle Sam was not amused.

There's even a video (shot by Andrew Lewis) of a government curator coming to Peikoff's home and removing the two pages from the wall.

Michael

[Alfonso Jones]

Not the full archives. Just the novels.

Here is the story from Peikfoff's side:

Peikoff's Experience with the Library of Congress

If I understand his story correctly, he got a million dollar tax write-off, or whatever tax credit amount is stipulated by the IRS for a million dollar gift.

He kept and framed two pages from The Fountainhead for sentimental reasons, but did not properly document it. Then he shot his mouth off to the press and Uncle Sam was not amused.

There's even a video (shot by Andrew Lewis) of a government curator coming to Peikoff's home and removing two pages from the wall.

Michael

That story I'm very familiar with. (Library of Congress and the two pages from The Fountainhead.) Was Rand's designation of intent to donate the novel manuscripts documented in her will, or elsewhere?

Bill P (Alfonso)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

From Peikoff's article:

Some time in the 1960s, I believe, the Library of Congress invited Ayn Rand to will the manuscripts of her novels to them. She replied that she was happy to do so. Subsequently, they sent her a form to fill out, in order to make her intention legally binding upon her death. She refused to fill it out, then or later, expressing various doubts about the Library, which she had since come to entertain. When she died in 1982, she willed all of her papers to me, having told me to "do with them whatever you want."

I have not seen the will, but I have no reason to doubt Peikoff's word.

Michael

[Neil Parille]

There is also this additional misquote:

Professor John Hospers, according to the Brandens, was taken to task for certain “sarcastic” and “professorial” criticisms of Rand in a classroom setting, although, once again, neither of the Brandens chooses to relate any of the specifics.

Nathaniel said Hospers "challenge[d] her viewpoint with the kind of gentle sarcasm professors take for granted and Ayn found appalling."

Valliant tries to defend the claim that he hasn't misquoted Nathaniel Branden here. "Professorial" may be an accurate paraphrase, but "sarcastic" isn't.

And perhaps Valliant will tell us what principles of citation permit him to say "the Brandens" when it's only Nathaniel who is being quoted.

Edited July 2, 2008 by Neil Parille

[Reidy]

My understanding is that whatever formal or informal arrangement Rand had with the Library of Congress covered only the manuscripts to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The article and speech manuscripts from the Branden/Hessen auction also ended up there; I don't know who the donor was.

This story has a couple of interesting footnotes. The Librarian of Congress who wrote Rand in the 60s to make the request was L. Q. Mumford, who was one of her sources for Ellsworth Toohey. Mumford a a longtime friend of Frank Ll. Wright, who was one of her sources for Roark.

[Jonathan]

Until everyone, including Rand's harshest critics, has unfettered access to all of Rand's original journal pages and other documents, I see no reason to trust that an accurate or complete portrayal of Rand, or of what her documents contain, has been presented by those who are apparently thought of as being serious enough scholars to be given access to the Rand archives despite their willingness to misquote, edit words, rearrange phrases, and even construct entire new sentences.

I'm now to the point where I wouldn't even trust some of these people to scan Rand's original documents and post them online unmolested. I could see them using something like Photoshop's cloning stamp tool to eliminate what they don't want seen, or to otherwise digitally rearrange things to make Rand look better.

As far as I'm concerned, they now have zero credibility.

J

[Robert Campbell]

Judging from those two Q&A items from Ayn Rand that we've examined lately, Bob Mayhew is fairly proficient at writing things that she didn't say while making it sound as though she said them.

Jim Valliant, I agree, has too much of a tin ear for that. He and his sidekick Mr. Fahy are most likely to have tampered with the diary entries by cutting out stuff that they thought would be too unflattering.

Robert Campbell

PS. In his review of Dr. Mayhew's book on Ayn Rand's testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Stephen Cox noted that when Dr. Mayhew quoted from that wretched movie, Song of Russia, he almost always got something wrong.

See http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_4/19_4_7.pdf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I can't stop laughing.

Valliant is more the Black Night than even I intended.

See here in his answer to Ellen's post to him, especially this part:

I recommend serious studying of a manual of style.

As to the difference in meaning between:

Hospers says: "[A] commentator... must say things, if not openly critical, at least challengingly exegetical. I did this..."

The response: "Hospers said that he was merely being 'challengingly exegetical, if not openly critical.'"

The second -- your rendering -- indicates that he bordered into being "openly critical." His original wording indicates that he stayed short of the line of bordering into that. You have changed the meaning of what the man wrote.

The Black Night responds:

The two phrases, "if not openly critical, at least challengingly exegetical," and "merely being 'challengingly exegetical, if not openly critical,'" both say the same thing. Reversing the order of the two clauses does not alter the meaning one little bit -- neither yet suggest that he was being "openly critical" -- both overtly deny it to the same extent.

Plain English: The first says that he was "at least" challengingly exegetical -- the second, in fact, says that he was "merely" challengingly exegetical. Both equally say "if not openly critical" to precisely the same extent, denotatively. Connotatively, the second is the softer.

If anything, PARC's version is suggests "open criticism" less than the original, not more "sharply."

. . .

In any event, the sentence is mine and the placement of quotation marks was merely to indicate the language used. Thus, he "said that," rather than "he said..."

But, absent the two words, they say the same thing.

I guess, if he says so. At least I believe he believes it. He literally has an understanding disability.

Also, correct professional style usage now has to change according to the bonehead Valliant's whim.

Dayaamm!

Ellen, can you see the cognitive impairment? What's worse, he did this to himself on purpose. He used Objectivism to do this to himself. Others are doing the same. This aberration has to be correctly identified and exposed so it can stop.

Objectivist ideas are generally good. But not that crap (which is not Objectivist, anyway).

Michael

EDIT: Valliant just now edited the above quote, which I copy/pasted verbatim. Here is the change:

In any event, the sentence is mine and the placement of quotation marks was merely to indicate the language used. Thus, he "said that," rather than "he said..."

But, absent the two words, they say the same thing

Within a sentence, a quotation, of course, may be changed -- the use of brackets indicates an addition, and the use of ellipses indicates an omission -- and the rule is simply to stay as close the original when reproducing language within a sentence of your own. If neither an omission nor an addition has taken place, then neither indication is appropriate. However, the most important rule is to attribute language which is not the product of the author's own devising. Merely reversing the order of clauses without attribution would be plagiarism.

In our case, absent the two terms, "merely" (not placed in quotes) and "at least," they say the same thing.

But all that did was just make it worse. Valliant is saying that it's OK to change the order of a verbatim quote, but you have to say that these are the author's words to avoid plagiarism.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

[Robert Campbell]

Does Black Knight Valliant understand that making up cock-and-bull stories about quotation practices, in order to avoid admitting how he screwed up, is doing him more harm than ... admitting how he screwed up?

His invention of valliantquoating ™ is going to cost him what little remained of his reputation as a writer.

Robert Campbell

[Ellen Stuttle]

My understanding is that whatever formal or informal arrangement Rand had with the Library of Congress covered only the manuscripts to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Peter,

My understanding -- which is vague -- is that originally it was supposed to be all her papers but then she never got around to formally signing the agreement and Peikoff held back and there was a dispute. Peikoff somewhere tells a story about his retaining a few of the manuscript pages and the Library of Congress representatives breaking into his place -- or words to that effect (his wording describing the scene was dramatic) -- and taking the pages he'd kept.

Darn. I suppose the story will have to be tracked down now. I was rather hoping that you, for instance, would have the details immediately to hand. ;-)

Ellen

Edit: I was reading posts in backward order, starting with the most recent and going up the queue. I hadn't yet seen the links MSK provided to the story as Peikoff told it. If I recall correctly there was dispute about the accuracy of his report of what happened re Ayn's delaying signing. It's possible I'm not recalling correctly. I might be mixing up the Library of Congress issue with the dispute over the BB/Hessen auction, on which I know there was dispute.

___

Edited July 2, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

Judging from those two Q&A items from Ayn Rand that we've examined lately, Bob Mayhew is fairly proficient at writing things that she didn't say while making it sound as though she said them.

Jim Valliant, I agree, has too much of a tin ear for that. He and his sidekick Mr. Fahy are most likely to have tampered with the diary entries by cutting out stuff that they thought would be too unflattering.

Fortunately -- one bright spot in the gloom -- their combined ear is fairly tin to what's unflattering; thus quite a bit is included which someone with "perfect pitch" for the tune would have left out.

My belief is that they treated her words as sacred text and only altered by eliding, not by re-wording. Also, I examined details of grammar and punctuation and sentence structure minutely, as is my wont. All are executed by an expert at the niceties of writing, which Valliant certainly isn't and Fahy isn't either to the extent he seems to believe he is. They weren't improving on her grammar, punctuation, and structure; they wouldn't have known how to do the writing job as proficiently as she did it.

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is the story from Peikfoff's side:

Peikoff's Experience with the Library of Congress

Peikoff somewhere tells a story about his retaining a few of the manuscript pages and the Library of Congress representatives breaking into his place -- or words to that effect (his wording describing the scene was dramatic) -- and taking the pages he'd kept.

Darn. I suppose the story will have to be tracked down now.

Hmmmmmm...

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Michael,

See the "Edit" I added to the post. I was reading in reverse order and hadn't yet seen your link to the Peikoff stuff.

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Whatever "cognitive impairment" results in what Valliant is doing, Valliant is, simply put, a fool.

He's digging his grave so deep, he's losing any hope of climbing out.

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Whatever "cognitive impairment" results in what Valliant is doing, Valliant is, simply put, a fool.

Ellen,

Well...

I would say bonehead.

But that's probably a matter of taste, not substance.

Michael

[Alfonso Jones]

Whatever "cognitive impairment" results in what Valliant is doing, Valliant is, simply put, a fool.

Ellen,

Well...

I would say bonehead.

But that's probably a matter of taste, not substance.

Michael

By his established practice, Valliant would surely think that if you said "I say he is a fool" and Ellen then said "I would say bonehead," the second was just a quote of what you said.

Bill P

[emb021]

FWIW-

I find the discussion from the last few days regarding Valiant's inability to understand the basics of quoting, etc, some what amusing.

Myself, I was taught the basics of quoting, citing sources, etc, when I was in high school. When I went to college (and grad school), it was expected I would understand these concepts, with the only changes being in how I would cite sources (footnotes vs MLA style vs APA style, etc).

I had a bothersome episode a few years back with an older individual in an org I'm in that didn't seem to understand the basics of doing research. He made claims of a historical nature that were untrue, when I passed along information from people more knowledgeable then he was (after he claimed to have 'extensively researched the topic'), he was a little embarresed. And then proceeded to try to paint me as the 'bad guy' for daring to point out his error. (sorry, but my view as a researcher is that getting to the truth of the matter is more important then 'saving face'). And I was less then pleased when I saw his self-published work on the subject that he included verbatim several paragraphs of material I had written and been posted to a website, all without giving any citation as to the source, giving the impression he had written the materials.

(edited)

Edited July 3, 2008 by Michael Brown