Michelle

Ooo Another book to get when I have money.

Tends to favor links with a "liberal" slant. How's that? Something written into the algorithm?

TS Eliot and Milton are my favorites. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is easily my favorite poem. I almost have it memorized I've read it so many times. The words roll off my tongue smoothly. He seduces me with his language.

How is Google politically skewed, Judith?

Objectivist ideas can easily find application in literature. Hell, Objectivism was first formulated in fictional stories. But there aren't a whole lot of ways for surgeons to express Objectivist principles in their work. Christianity is a religion and Existentialism is a school of philosophy, but there is still Christian and Existentialist fiction. Terry Goodkind's books suck. His Objectivism starts showing in Faith of the Fallen, which reads like an inane fantasy parody of The Fountainhead. Of course Shakespeare is brilliant. Best writer in the English language by far. Rand's personal distaste for some of the fatalism in his stories doesn't really comment upon his capacity as a writer. Another good writer Rand disliked: Leo Tolstoy. Although Dostoyevsky is easily the greatest of the Russian novelists (The Brothers Karamazov is still in my top five favorite books of all time). Hugo is another great writer. Les Miserables would be a perfect book if Hugo didn't interrupt the flow of the narrative a couple hundred pages in to introduce a 50 page dramatization of the battle of waterloo. Melville - boring and confusing in turns. Conrad - Heart of Darkness is a real drag. Took no joy in reading it. Liked nothing about it. I've avoided his other works. I want to like Voltaire's stuff, but I just don't. Heinlein is fun. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in particular. I imagine Objectivists might enjoy all of the nods to Rand in that book. I really liked Mellville's Benito Cerino. Have read Moby Dick twice on my own initiative. Of course it is slow, like just about all 19th century lit, but still very good. Am glad you validate my scorn for goodkind, thought maybe I was missing something. Biggest problem with Hugo ajnd the Russians is finding a good translation. Conrad is simply an incredible craftsman of English, almost poetyic in stlyle and always uses the perfect word, incredible as a second language writer. I enjoyed some of his short stories and the Secret Sharer. My favorite Shakespeare adaptations are: Ian McKellen's Richard III Laurence Olivier's King Lear Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Juliet Fiona Shaw's Richard II Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet Roman Polanski's MacBeth Pacino's Merchant of Venice Have you read Name of the Rose, Canticle for Leibowitz, or The White Plague? For Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky are popular (and exceptional) translators. For Karamazov, though, I have a soft spot in my heart for Andrew MacAndrew's translation, unwieldy though it is. For Les Miz, I'm perfectly happy with the translation by Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. Name of the Rose would be decent if it integrated the history lesson better. Foucault's Pendulum is way better. A Canticle for Leibowitz is interesting, if overrated. The second section almost killed the book for me, though. Have not read The White Plague. What is it about?

My problem with those three is that they overemphasize the danger of religion. Reading their works, you get the sense they think that if Christians and Muslims were to be eradicated there'd be world peace.

Like Anthem? Try reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was written several years before Anthem, and the two books have several similarities. In fact, I have a hard time believing Rand's book wasn't a response of sorts to "We."

I have the temptation to make a somewhat lewd comment, but I'll control myself, and merely say "hello."

I'm assuming this is in response to me? In which case, no, it isn't necessary. But you did make the statement, so I was curious how you were going to go about qualifying it.

Those are the best ones if you are interested in writing. Trapped on a desert island stuff. As I have a pretty adequate understanding of Objectivism, I've never bothered reading For the New Intellectual/Philosophy, Who Needs It?/Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal/The Virtue of Selfishness/The Return of the Primitive/etc. I might start reading her other nonfiction, though. I enjoy the arrogant tone of Rand's writing.

The Romantic Manifesto, The Art of Fiction, and The Art of Nonfiction are the only nonfiction books by Ayn Rand that I own.

Objectivist ideas can easily find application in literature. Hell, Objectivism was first formulated in fictional stories. But there aren't a whole lot of ways for surgeons to express Objectivist principles in their work. Christianity is a religion and Existentialism is a school of philosophy, but there is still Christian and Existentialist fiction. Terry Goodkind's books suck. His Objectivism starts showing in Faith of the Fallen, which reads like an inane fantasy parody of The Fountainhead. Of course Shakespeare is brilliant. Best writer in the English language by far. Rand's personal distaste for some of the fatalism in his stories doesn't really comment upon his capacity as a writer. Another good writer Rand disliked: Leo Tolstoy. Although Dostoyevsky is easily the greatest of the Russian novelists (The Brothers Karamazov is still in my top five favorite books of all time). Hugo is another great writer. Les Miserables would be a perfect book if Hugo didn't interrupt the flow of the narrative a couple hundred pages in to introduce a 50 page dramatization of the battle of waterloo. Melville - boring and confusing in turns. Conrad - Heart of Darkness is a real drag. Took no joy in reading it. Liked nothing about it. I've avoided his other works. I want to like Voltaire's stuff, but I just don't. Heinlein is fun. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in particular. I imagine Objectivists might enjoy all of the nods to Rand in that book.

I had to read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in senior High School English. For those who have not suffered this torture, the openning lines include "goo goo ga ga, when you wet the bed first it is warm then it is cold." And this guy ranks among critics as the best author of the 20th century. James Joyce got progressively less coherent as time went on. Dubliners, if boring, is perfectly comprehensible. Portrait of the Artist gets a bit muddy, but, with minimal effort, the narrative can be followed. Now, Ulysses was just an random mess of words with no seeming rhyme or reason to them. They describe events, supposedly, but the reader has to go to quite a bit of trouble to figure out what is going on. If Ulysses seemed impossible to cap, well...have you ever flipped through Finnegans Wake?...Joyce went from writing a barely comprehensible mess of a book in Ulysses to writing a book that is literally impossible to comprehend. You can start reading from any point in the novel and it won't make any less sense. To give you a sense of the magnitude of how bad Finnegans Wake gets, I'll post an excerpt, randomly selected. I'll open to a random page and post the first paragraph my eyes come across. "Bisships, bevel to rock's rite! Sarver bouy, extinguish! Nuotabene. The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about." This is only a few line out of a paragraph that goes on for a page and a half. I only needed to post a few lines. Because the ENTIRE BOOK is written just like this. Actually, that's a lie. This passage is actually not as bad as most of the others. But I'll leave that to your imagination. Because no matter how bad you imagine it to be, it still won't be as bad as what is actually in this book. I actually had to correct myself. I automatically corrected some of the spelling errors when I first transcribed it here, and had to go back and misspell the word because the misspelling is actually what is printed in the book. Yes, I have paged thru Dubliners and Finnegans' Wake. I see you have majored in English with a minor in Masochism. It comes with reading a lot, and tending to stay away from most genre fiction (although I have a peculiar weakness for science-fiction and JD Robb's 'In Death' series). As fiction writing is my business (or is going to be when I get published), I've read a LOT of fiction.

Neat. I'll check those authors out, Reidy. I would think Objectivism would make for good fiction (outside of Rand's, I mean). Like modern atheistic Existentialism, its development was advanced in works of fiction, and its themes can be expressed artistically very well.

I had to read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in senior High School English. For those who have not suffered this torture, the openning lines include "goo goo ga ga, when you wet the bed first it is warm then it is cold." And this guy ranks among critics as the best author of the 20th century. James Joyce got progressively less coherent as time went on. Dubliners, if boring, is perfectly comprehensible. Portrait of the Artist gets a bit muddy, but, with minimal effort, the narrative can be followed. Now, Ulysses was just an random mess of words with no seeming rhyme or reason to them. They describe events, supposedly, but the reader has to go to quite a bit of trouble to figure out what is going on. If Ulysses seemed impossible to cap, well...have you ever flipped through Finnegans Wake?...Joyce went from writing a barely comprehensible mess of a book in Ulysses to writing a book that is literally impossible to comprehend. You can start reading from any point in the novel and it won't make any less sense. To give you a sense of the magnitude of how bad Finnegans Wake gets, I'll post an excerpt, randomly selected. I'll open to a random page and post the first paragraph my eyes come across. "Bisships, bevel to rock's rite! Sarver bouy, extinguish! Nuotabene. The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about." This is only a few line out of a paragraph that goes on for a page and a half. I only needed to post a few lines. Because the ENTIRE BOOK is written just like this. Actually, that's a lie. This passage is actually not as bad as most of the others. But I'll leave that to your imagination. Because no matter how bad you imagine it to be, it still won't be as bad as what is actually in this book. I actually had to correct myself. I automatically corrected some of the spelling errors when I first transcribed it here, and had to go back and misspell the word because the misspelling is actually what is printed in the book.

Fine. Who should I be avoiding?

http://personal.dougshaw.com/ReviewsTop100/review01.html I don't know if this will be so funny to a person who hasn't actually spent months struggling through this incoherent brick of a book. I was eating while reading this and literally almost choked to death. This is the first time I've laughed so hard I actually teared up. This is partly a tribute to the reviewer - this guy is very funny - but mostly it is out of a sense of sheer sympathy. Reading Ulysses is an exercise in masochism.

I've heard of it, but don't really know who writes it beyond Terry Goodkind. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Ignore the science in ATLAS SHRUGGED. You'll fry your brain trying to think about how Galt got his physics-defying motor to work. The point isn't the motor. The point is the force behind the motor. It's meant to be an idealistic demonstration of the role of reason in a modern society by depicting what happens when rational people are removed from it.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (very quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books) The Experience of Nothingness by Michael Novak (a quasi-religious meditation on experiencing aimlessness and internal emptiness - in short, a kind of nihilist awareness) What are you reading?

It's too broad a statement. I would agree that 'some children have a sense of mysticism' (although as far as I know it is unknown just how much of this is due to social suggestiveness, being that children are very impressionable creatures and most parents will tell them fantastic stories from early life on), but how exactly can you justify turning this into a general statement?

Of course. It's a kind of short-hand. The problem is that there are two aspects to this one of identity: Am I an Objectivist or an individual who has adopted Objectivism? and one of knowledge: Is objectivism an open-or-closed system - method or revealed truth?

I loved this the moment I read about this two weeks ago. It's a great idea. Now, here's what would be really neat: promoting this campaign to keep ATLAS SHRUGGED in public prominence, and then using this to boost the excitement over a movie, which could be released around the next election season when Obama will undoubtedly be running again. This couldn't have come at a better time. We're approaching a time when Ayn Rand will start being laughed at and dismissed more viciously than usual because of the fever that is taking over the country. If it keeps up like this, we could see this country turning into Venezuela after a few decades of erosion. That's not something I'll allow.

Do you mean Ed Harris, the actor? I had never read anything by Sam Harris indicating a belief in reincarnation. Not clearly or consistently. In interviews, he states that there is evidence for it. He downplays the Eastern mysticism/ESP stuff on his website: "My position on the paranormal is this: While there have been many frauds in the history of parapsychology, I believe that this field of study has been unfairly stigmatized. If some experimental psychologists want to spend their days studying telepathy, or the effects of prayer, I will be interested to know what they find out. And if it is true that toddlers occasionally start speaking in ancient languages (as Ian Stevenson alleges), I would like to know about it. However, I have not spent any time attempting to authenticate the data put forward in books like Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe or Ian Stevenson’s 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The fact that I have not spent any time on this should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists. (Here, I am making a point about gradations of certainty: can I say for certain that a century of experimentation proves that telepathy doesn’t exist? No. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree about the data." No surprise, though. Haven't you read The End of Faith, and the section where he talks about the superiority of Eastern religion?

Love at first sight does exist. It is a combination of sight, smell and first impression. (Of course you may fall in love with someone at first sight and quickly fall out if they don't live up to the first impression. I have done that a couple times.) But I have had three such loves, the first ending with physical separation but continued friendship and the second only when my love was murdered. I still remember the exact moment I set eyes on my third, still my love today. I didn't have my first love until I was 20. I wouldn't be so certain that you won't. My advicce, just don't push it, and don't pooh-pooh it either when it comes. That sounds like initial infatuation turning into love. Is a love that can be created and fall apart in the space of a day really love? Then again, I've not experienced it, so I wouldn't know. My idea is based only on conjecture, but yours on actual experience. (As to your second love: I'm sorry. I've had a friend who was murdered. The whole aftermath of the murder felt very unreal, except for the unexpected bursts of emotion I had. I don't cry too often, but when I start, I'll be damned if I can stop. I can't imagine how much worse it is to lose a love.) Oh, I'm sure it'll come some time. I'm just not actively seeking it out. I have my hands full enough dealing with my own life at the moment, anyhow. Well, it is if it lasts 15 years. Oh, and as for the crying, I have found it is a good thing to embrace the mourning. (I deeon't mean wallow in it.) When you cry don't fight it or be embarrassed, but realize that it is a tributr to the value of the loved one. If we didn't love, didn't value, we wouldn't mourn. Tears of grief are a good thing. 15 years, huh? Good for you! I enjoy seeing nice and happy couples together. I think I'm too selfish to maintain a healthy relationship, however. I might have to settle for being a mistress or something. Thanks. I do embrace them when they come at the right time, but when I'm trying to talk and I'm sobbing hysterically it grates on me.