Reidy

I Gotta Be Me and The Greatest Love of All, both available on YouTube, come to mind.

Three for me, too (for autobiographical reasons that need not concern us here): The third is not a song strictly speaking, though the melody that emerges on top of the accompaniment is a hymn (making it relevant to the current religious music thread):

Music's special power is that it goes straight to the emotions, not mediated by concrete imagery as literature and the visual arts are. Any didactic message in the lyrics or in the program notes is even further from its artistic effect. (What about non-representational painting? someone will ask. A Randian answer I think would be that this is not the way our sense of sight works. It needs images of entities, not sense qualities, as our hearing does not.) On top of this, the power of great art in any medium is that it can sell us, at least temporarily, on its sense of life. I don't really feel about the world the way Aeschylus did, but he's had me convinced when I've read him.

If the lyrics bother you, go for some language you don't understand. Most of the very greatest sacred music is in Latin or German. That is no help with The Messiah, though. I was at the burial in Arlington. Still have the photos.

What's the problem? I found the Telegraph article an informative and even-handed account of Paul's presidential prospects.

What Boydstun tells us about privacy lying in #52 (that Rand approved of it when Peikoff lectured on the topic in 1976) is interesting in that NB's Basic Principles course had insisted some years earlier that honesty precludes the practice and in that Rand had endorsed these lectures. The difference may be that by the later date she was doing this herself.

Burns, as I recall, thinks that Rand got much of her philosophical knowledge (presumably including Kant) from Peikoff when he was in grad school. This would have started some time in the 1950s. She mentions Kant in "Faith and Force" (1960). Does anyone know of earlier mentions?

Forget it. The recent failure of Atlas Shrugged has iced the possibility of another Rand adaptation for at least thirty years.

Maybe she hit on it herself. Somebody has to do this if we're to avoid infinite regress. If she did get it from Marx or from Smith, show us the evidence. As Lennox pointed out in his review of Sciabarra (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/rad/PubRadReviews/ioslennox.htm - see the part about Darwin and Malthus), hard documentation is the standard when you impute influences or borrowngs. This might be a public statement, a draft or journal, a letter or a well-corroborated eyewitness account (not an exhaustive list); coulda/mighta/musta isn't up to the standard.

Though I'm not familiar with Gordon or Marx, I doubt this, since she didn't start thinking systematically about economics until she started to work on Atlas Shrugged in the 1940s.

Not being an author, I'll take Rand's word on #3. Just the same, authors, Rand included, pick particular people to do their abstracting from. We had a brief thread on this at RoR some years ago: http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0627.shtml.

Not all jurisdictions allowed women on juries in Roark's day. I don't know about New York, but I once looked up Penthouse Legend (later The Night of January 16th) in the LA Times. A letter to the editor ca. 1934 complained that the production accepted women as jurors but the local courts did not.

About Objectivist U, mentioned in #295: The Objectivist, August 67 said "Reports have reached us of rumors to the effect that NATHANIEL BRANDEN INSTITUTE is planning to establish a college or university. NBI has no such plans, nor is it in any way connected with any such undertaking."

Interesting sidelight to the Rabwin discussion: she (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcella_Rabwin) was fairly well-known in her own right. Her husband was the doctor who delivered Judy Garland. According to one biography, he had some months earlier talked her mother out of having an abortion.

In most cases (all but silver and movies, I'd estimate) you get a better product today.

The Starnes headquarters, after the heirs took over, had a shower with a nude-mermaid glass etching.

No producer is going to go near Rand for another fifty years. The good news is that in the notices people have cited here, nobody is blaming Rand or her novel as they did with the earlier installments.

Movie reviews show up on the day the movie opens (usually Friday) if the distributors held a critics' preview. if not, the reviewers see the movie the way the rest of us do. Give it a few days.

Yes, but this time it's true.

Do we have any evidence that the movies helped - or, for that matter, hurt - sales of the book? Barbara Branden points out that the (dreadful) adaptation of The Fountainhead put the book back on the bestseller list. Did anything like that happen in this case? If people had gone to see the movies and on that basis made up their minds about the book, it would have gone out of print two weeks after part 1 hit the screen.

Silly at best. In the unlikely worst case (i.e. if anyone takes your insinuations seriously) you could be risking legal action. Whether or not that succeeds would be up to the jury. This wouldn't be the first time movie backers took a loss for some favored cause. They must know by now that politically preachy movies usually lose money, yet Elysium, Promised Land, Valley of Elah, Lions and Lambs and Rendition, to name a very few, got financing.

You're making some serious, possibly criminal accusations. The burden is on you to make good on them or, at best, to look silly. If the movies had outside lenders or shareholders, I suspect that the participants got in as a labor of love rather than as a money-expecting investment. When Frank Ll Wright was going broke in the 1920s, he incorporated his practice and sold stock to Clarence Darrow among others. None of the buyers could have expected to make any money, and none of them did, but Wright kept his country estate (where Rand and her husband houseguested some twenty years later).

I remember it mostly from ATL: ca. 1998. The conversation seems to have gone on elsewhere as well, spawning Eric Mack's immortal "even if you could, why would you want to?"

Why do you use snide, bitchy ad hominems?