Chris Grieb

I guess that means at some point there will be a Final Jeopardy question about Little Streets". See the tread "I knew this would come back."

Robert,

That's more than fair.

Let me be public right now in case anyone is doubting.

You have 100% support from me for your research here (no more and no less).

For whatever may come.

btw - That "Objectivist Calendar" thing is weird. I had presumed it was the "Objectivist Calendar" section in The Objectivist and I had put on my list for looking up stuff. I haven't read The Objectivist from cover to cover. (I have the bound version giving volumes 5-10 and the bound version of The Objectivist Newsletter.) I have skimmed it all, though, several times and I do not recall seeing Q&A responses in it. But I was going to check just to make sure.

The way this new "Objectivist Calendar" thing came out feels like a Get Out of Jail card from the board game, Monopoly.

Michael

The Objectivist Calendar came out after the Ayn Rand Letter closed. My memory is that it was put out by Barbara Weiss. I think it published only intermittenly. It stopped when the Objectivist Forum started. The Objectivist Calendar in the Objectivist and Objectivist Newsletter did not have items from Rand's q&a's at Ford Hall Forum.

Jeff; Thanks for the recommendation of the book Intruder in the Dust.

George,

Diana Hsieh likes to bully people by threatening them with meritless copyright litigation.

Even when her bullying seems to working against her own interests...

She went after Mike Renzulli a couple of years ago when he proposed to play her Introduction to Objectivism lectures that she had given at The Atlas Society at meetings of his local organization.

The target of her wrath in that case was apparently The Atlas Society.

You lose track of the double-think after a while.

Robert Campbell

I didn't know anything about Hsieh until I heard about her despicable campaign against Chris Sciabarra, during which she published excerpts from his private correspondence. There is little doubt in my mind that she did that to gain favor with the ARI crowd. What a bi...uh... what an unpleasant person she is.

Ghs

Apparently she succeeded she lecturing at this year's ARI conference.

In 1936 Spencer Tracy stared in Fury, a Fritz Lang film, about a man who narrowly escapes lynching and incineration and seeks revenge. The mob attacking the jail and it going up in flames with Tracy inside is still extremely strong and raw. (Lynch mobs were also depicted in other films including the 1950s Night of the Hunter. Lynching of blacks was a leitmotif of the pre-WWII South and continued, essentially, into the 1960s, if not with actual hanging other forms of murder.) John Hospers told Ayn Rand Fury was one of his favorite films and this helped bond them. People really were much more bigoted and ignorant and subsequently stupider back then.

--Brant

gives Ayn Rand a pass on this one

Brant; I have only seen Fury two or three times but I have found it a very good movie.

There is a funny story on the Reason blog "Hit & Run" about the environmental minister of British Columbia setting his cat on fire during Earth Hour by having candles near where the cat could rub against. The minister wouldn't turn a fan to get the stench out from the cat's burned hair.

George,

The two new biographies by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller are must-reads. Burns is most interested in Rand as a political thinker and intellectual activist; Heller in Rand as a literary figure. Neither is terribly concerned with Rand's efforts to build a philosophical system, who else might have contributed to it, etc. Still lots of work to be done on that score.

On the philosophical side, Allan Gotthelf's On Ayn Rand is a concise presentation of Peikovian Objectivism minus the superheated sermonizing (also much more scholarly than Peikoff, but it does practice a certain amount of strategic non-citation). Tibor Machan's short book Ayn Rand from 2001 is much more inquisitive than Gotthelf's (for instance, in identifying unanswered questions) but uneven in its coverage.

Tara Smith's 2006 book on Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics is solid and workmanlike (a much safer recommendation for academics unfamiliar with Rand's ideas than anything by Peikoff) but there is little that would be new to you and in a book of its length the strategic non-citation (and correlative pumping up of ARians who have scarcely contributed to moral philosophy, such as Harry Binswanger) become obtrusive.

All four of Bob Mayhew's collections on Rand's novels are worth reading. All benefit from the contributors being allowed into the Ayn Rand Archives; all are somewhat impaired by the Ayn Rand Institute's surfeit of philosophers and shortage of historians and Lit Crit types. Mayhew's book on Rand's HUAC testimony was given a thorough review by Stephen Cox a while back; it looks to be of specialist interest only (and Cox dinged Mayhew for having trouble exactly quoting dialogue from the movie).

The posthumous collections of Rand's lectures, interviews, and question and answer periods are better than nothing but all have suffered from heavy-handed editing that crosses the line into rewriting. My comparisons between Rand's question and answer periods and Bob Mayhew's renditions of them are still ongoing, but I've seen enough to conclude that Ayn Rand Answers should be allowed to go out of print and replaced with a minimally edited transcript of Rand's actual words.

Robert Campbell

This is precisely the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks very much.

I used to collect books that had any significant mention of Rand (including Peikoff's doctoral dissertation and other oddities). Those were part of a library of around 13,000 volumes, which I sold off a long time ago.

An especially interesting treatment is by the philosopher by Hazel Barnes in An Existentialist Ethics (1967). Barnes devotes an entire chapter to Rand's ethics, and though I don't recall the specifics, I do recall that it is a pretty sympathetic treatment. Barnes points out a number of similarities between Rand's ethics and existentialism. When I first read that chapter in college, I dutifully rejected the thesis, but that might not be my reaction now.

The historian and editor Hiram Haydn, author of a superb book on the Counter-Renaissance, once said that Rand had constructed the most impressive philosophical system since Thomas Aquinas. (This is close to an exact quote.) For the life of me, I can't remember where I read that many years ago, though I think it was in a book that Haydn himself wrote. Does it ring a bell with anyone?

I also have a vague recollection that Haydn was the editor for one of Rand's books, but I'm not sure about that.

Ghs

GHS; The book by Hiram Haydn is titled "Words and Faces". It is about the writers he worked with including Ayn Rand. It can be gotten from Amazon.

This coming Saturday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., will be the Authors-Meet-Critics session of Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The Meeting is at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. The critics will be Christine Swanton, Lester Hunt, and William Glod. The responding authors will be Onkar Ghate, Allan Gotthelf, and Gregory Salmieri.

You can attend this session (GXIII-A) even if you are not a member of the American Philosophical Association. Go to the Mezzanine level of the Westin St. Francis, and tell them you want to purchase a special $10 ticket to attend a single session of the APA Meeting. They will let you know the room in which the Ayn Rand Society session will take place.

Registration will be open these hours:

Saturday 8:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.

Friday 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Thursday 8:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m.

Wednesday 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.

(Expect long line on Wed., the first day of the APA Meeting)

For $90 one not a member of the American Philosophical Association can register and receive a book with sessions and their locations, admission to any number of sessions, and discounts from many of the book vendors.

Thanks for posting this information. It does sound interesting.

Haven't these lectures been transcribed to be available as a book? I seem to remember some postings by Roger Bissell about that topic.

Ayn Rand appeared at answered questions at the Basic Principles course in New York City for several years until 1967. I don't think she was in attendance at Nathaniel Branden's first lecture which was in 1958 but I think she started attending the lectures fairly early in NBI's history. Barbara Branden has reported that all of the tapes of these answers were lost when NBI closed.

Ayn Rand did not think in conventional ways. I think she wanted to attack convention morality in more than one way.

It's already been done in North Korea.

--Brant

now all they have to do is move there.

Well put, Brant. Many of the advocates of these "lights out" events would find an ideologically friendly environment (in so many ways) in North Korea.

Bill P

One of the best comments I ever heard about North Korea was made by a regular attendee at TAS Summer Seminar who had actually visited that country. He referred to returning to Peking as returning to freedom.

I won't weep if McCain loses either but I noticed that one of Hayward's supporters is Sheriff Joe Apiro who is probably one of the worst drug warriors in the country.

"Some of you guys need to lighten up on Rand." GHS: I agree completely. Thanks!

This is not surprising. Disgusting but not surprising. He sounds like a villian in Atlas.

[....] (for example Taggart Terminal obviously is the Grand Central Station in disguise).

I don't know if I've ever thought of this before, but it occurred to me yesterday: Although the maze of tunnels and the office building towering above the terminal mirror Grand Central, the location can't be where Grand Central factually is -- pretty much at the center of Manhattan. The Taggart railroad system is transcontinental. The transcontinental trains leaving New York City depart from Penn Station.

Ellen

I think it possible Ayn Rand was using both locations. Atlas is a work of fiction.

Peikoff is one of the best examples of a dogmatist Objectivist but so are Bienswanger, Schwartz, and Bernstein.

Perhaps dogmatic Objectivist would be better? Or maybe a Dogbectivist?

GS; Dogmatic Objectivist is the better phase.

I know, it was a joke!

It might be a joke for you, but I prefer "faux Objectivist" -- just as I prefer "faux libertarian" for people who fancy themselves libertarians, but disagree with NIOF on some issue or other.

What does NIOF stand for?

The GOP is only legislative opposition in the country.

I am delighted that OL is not giving in.

Peikoff is one of the best examples of a dogmatist Objectivist but so are Bienswanger, Schwartz, and Bernstein.

Perhaps dogmatic Objectivist would be better? Or maybe a Dogbectivist?

GS; Dogmatic Objectivist is the better phase.

Step one is to identify the problem (Medicare, Medicaid the FDA all raise costs of health care) and to propose an alternative very strongly and adamantly: Pure laissez fairer capitalism.

Even to suggest that one of these programs should’t have been created is political suicide. Yes, Ron Paul gets away with it, but then look how he was marginalized in 2008.

More and more people are recognizing that the entitlement problem is not going away. A recent survey shows that most people know that social security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the best cost drivers in our spending but lets not forget the old Vulcan proverb: "Only Nixon can go to China". In other word the reform may come from someone on the Left.

As Churchill said at a another very dark time. "Never give in, Never, Never give in."

Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand's sole legal heir. Intellectual heir as a title can only be given by the intellectual and Miss Rand did use the title herself after Nathaniel Branden had the title taken away.

I understand deeming has been abandoned.