Reidy

Concerning #7: In some cases observation wasn't an option, so Aristotle had nothing to test against. One example is his argument that action at a distance is impossible. Today we know about electricity, radio waves and gravity, but nobody did back then. Another is the impossibility of atoms. The evidence didn't come along for another 2000 years. (Where did he formulate modus tollens?)

Re #1: All these years I've thought Aristotle was the one who got rid of Aristotle's Platonism, primarily by moving past the theory of forms. What are some examples, first, of his Platonism and, second, of Rand's patching it up? Re #4: He actually gives extensive and rigorous logical arguments for his now-disproven physical and cosmological notions, primarily in the Physics. You're going to have to get to him on his logic (i.e. his reasons for believing these falsehoods), not just his fieldwork, if you want to challenge him on natural science. Where does he say that the cosmos is alive? I've seen assertions like this about Aristotle but not in his writings. The examples I've seen people give have turned out to be problems in the translations.

The gist of the De Voon quotes is that Atlas Shrugged ought not to be selling these days or attracting attention (like for instance movie projects). It is, so any argument that entails otherwise fails. Whether or not to adapt the novel "in period" is a decision for the moviemakers if they ever get around to it. The claim that people won't go to a movie with a historical setting, though, is easily refuted. The Black Book, in roughly the same period, and 300, in a much more remote one, are both in the theaters, the latter at least doing very well commercially. The Jane Austen adaptations of recent years and the miniseries Rome are also counterexamples.

A lifetime of following entertainment news has taught me that these people are obsessive self-promoters whose word doesn't mean much. "Done deal" means a couple of phone calls. "In development" means one phone call. Anything else means the idea crossed somebody's mind. You'll know the production is underway when and only when the movie opens. If you start seeing stories to the effect that the project is in trouble, brace yourself. It means that the movie is going to be a critical and commercial failure - "Heaven's Gate," "Cleopatra," "A Chorus Line" and "Milagro Beanfield War" are all cases in point.

Whether or not "love" is the right word, Rand believed you could take people's measure at first sight, or at least before meeting them. Some other examples are Hank R's first sight of Dagny Taggart, Galt's recollection of his first sight of Rearden and the Anthem narrator's first sight of the beloved. Galt may not have fallen in love with Dagny at first sight, but he falls years before he meets her. Dominique is hot to trot before she even finds out the quarry worker's name. Kin to this is her preoccupation with "disappointment" with people who turned out not to be what she expected. I think this is, in some TBD way, a part of the appeal of her novels, well worth literary study.

Sciabarra doesn't try to make Rand out as a flower child, a Christian, etc., but others have. The point was that I've always found such attempts unconvincing, and this is another. They remind me of the story of the blind men and the elephant. Fred Weiss is the expert on what Fred Weiss believed at any given time, but Rand freely acknowledged her Soviet schooling nearly 50 years ago in her intro to We the Living, her interviews with Barbara Branden and her Madamoiselle interview (which would be very interesting to revive today; it ran in 62 or thereabouts), or 70 years ago in the novel itself. New information is always welcome, but Sciabarra's biographical findings don't contradict Rand. Objectivists weren't talking about Valliant 10 years ago, but we were talking about ARRR. That's why I said "pretty much."

Not necessarily a problem. I read somewhere (Barbara Branden's biography?) that licensing laws, then and now, allow a tradeoff between formal schooling and work experience. Rand researched this and determined that Roark was eligible for licensure by the time he went into private practice.

I read it when it first came out. The historical stuff went over my head, and what didn't struck me as yet another attempt to rationalize Rand into something she patently wasn't - postmodernist leftist in this case, Christian, Jew, Taoist (not making that up), flower child, 60s radical, Limbaugh/Buchanan social conservative or Manhattan/LA westside establishment liberal in others. Looking back, I see that the expected surge of interest in Rand on the part of the academic left didn't happen, "mainstream" academic Objectivists haven't followed up, and rank-and-file Objectivists spend more time these days talking about Valliant (pretty much as I predicted ten years ago on the old ATL list). Sciabarra is enormously intelligent, hard-working and sincere, but that doesn't make him right. Proof has come to light since he wrote his book and Lennox wrote his review, that Rand was enrolled as a student of Lossky. This is not sufficent to establish an intellectual relationship - an influence of Lossky's thought on hers. Lennox is not "a proponent of strict Peikovian orthodoxy." The review I linked to is at the Atlas Society / TOC / IOS website, and he was once on the organization's board.

Current and worth missing: Avenue Montaigne, Perfect Stranger. The latter probably won't be around much longer, so miss it now or you'll lose your chance.

I find Ciro's assertions about movies and books bizarre. Another martini is just what I wouldn't recommend. Rand did not write the book in Hollywood. She moved to New York before she started it and back to California the year after it was published.

To sum up Sciabarra's reply, he doesn't agree with Lennox and he would have liked a more favorable review. This is easy to believe, but so what? The fact that Rand was a student of Lossky's has been public record since Barbara Branden's 1962 biography in Who is Ayn Rand? and no one has denied it. This doesn't prove an influence on her later thinking. Sciabarra doesn't address the most important point Lennox makes, which is that the book's hand-waving, coulda/mighta/musta biographical inferences aren't convincing.

In what I think is the best review of Ayn Rand, the Russian Radical, James Lennox points out that Rand emphasizes a number of two-way oppositions in her theory, contrary to Sciabarra's thesis that she wants to transcend them all and unify everything. By enumerating 3-way distinctions as well, you help to strengthen Lennox's point. She made whatever distinctions and classifications she thought right. I don't see that we're going to accomplish much by concentrating on the ones, the twos or the threes to the exclusion of the rest.

Thus, etymologically, the word could mean either "cutting in three" or "haircut."

And did you know that Albert Einstein Middle School in Chatsworth CA is directly across the street from the site of AR's former home? I think she would have liked that. The house is long gone, and it was out in the country, with no near neighbors, when she lived there.

In the Q&A book Rand expresses mixed fellings about Ninotchka, praising it artistically but finding its treatment of communism inappropriate. This conversation has brought up my two favorite names in movies, Garbo and Lubitsch, and I recommend that movie-lovers follow up on both. The all-time Garbo is Queen Christina, in which she portrays the greatest character I've ever seen on the screen (though, at the same time, I'll go along with the consensus that Camille was her best performance). The final shot of QC is justly legendary, but the most beautiful footage she ever shot is the last few minutes of Mata Hari, an otherwise idiotic movie. Along with Ninotchka, my fave Lubitsch is Trouble in Paradise. It doesn't have Garbo or the political satire, but it may be a better piece of moviemaking all around. Among the musicals (the screen musical was pretty much his invention) the best is Monte Carlo. This audience will love the Beyond the Blue Horizon sequence. An interesting sidelight is that both these people show up as characters in Rand - Gonda in Ideal and Ludlow in Atlas Shrugged in one case, the comically tyrannical director in Her Second Career in the other.

This looks to me a bit like Hobbes, who held the doctrine that Branden takes up in "Isn't Everyone Selfish?". One question comes to mind. Did Rand use just this phrase "rational egoism"? She used "rational self-interest" a lot, but I don't recall this one in her writings. If she did, you'd need to know Russian to answer your question fully. If the phrase is a plausible translation and if she used it, you'd still have to bring evidence that she was aware of this earlier usage. The fact that she meant something incompatible and entirely different is strong evidence that she wasn't. Maybe she just thought it expressed her meaning correctly. She wasn't the first to use "objectivism," but it's still a good name for her theories.

Among her published letters is one from the early 60s to the editors of the "Saturday Evening Post" in which she threatened to sue over a profile they'd done of her. It wasn't serious, as nothing in it was remotely libelous, even in pre-public figure days. In a recent thread here at OL was a list of contents of documents from the Branden-Hessen auction. It contained mention of a suit some movie-industry communist had filed against Rand. I doubt that anything came of that, either. More distantly, she was involved in a legal action in the late 50s that had to do with a fraudulent gold-mining company. The name was Cornucopia Gold Mines. According to a story or two that the NY Times ran, she made a deposition with the SEC. Cornucopia asked her to be on the board, apparently wanting the gold-related prestige and celebrity value of "Atlas Shrugged." She told them she'd think about it and not to proceed in the meantime. They proceeded anyway to publish a prospectus with her name, collected from investors and collapsed. Part of Holzer's job in the old days was to write official-looking but legally toothless cease-and-desist letters to campus Objectivist organizations. One famous incident concerned Jarret Wollstein at the U of Maryland. Another letter, published in "The Objectivist," concerned a club at the U of Houston.

Just want to second all the praise this movie has been getting on the O-web. When people started recommending it I feared it was another boring political lesson that Objectivists don't need to learn anyway. It is in fact a masterpiece of dramatic art, fully worthy of its critical and commercial success.

Following up on #12: I agree that you'll find more similarities in these authors' essays than in their novels. Compare "On the Use and Abuse of Language" with "'Extremism' or The Art of Smearing," which are both about how political corruption stems from cognitive corruption, though I think Rand goes deeper. They seem simply to have thought along similar lines; I doubt that either influenced the other intellectually (though Orwell might have read Anthem; it came out in England in 1938, and We the Living had done much better there than in the US. Both are books in line with his interests. Anything beyond this is speculation.) Following up on #8: Democratic socialism was not "always" at loggerheads with communism. To the contrary, Orwell, Sidney Hook and a very few others were rare exceptions. For the most part, from the 1920s on, anywhere in the world, they couldn't get enough of communism and repudiated viciously against enyone who tried to get the truth out. If by "intellectually" you mean "in principle if not always in practice," Objectivists shouldn't have to be told that this is just where they had the most in common.

Everyone is citing novels. I've been off and on for about 10 years, currently on, with a book about Gothic cathedrals. I try to make allowances for the difficult subject matter, but I think with the best will I can muster that the author is a dull stylist addressing scholarly readers who think this is normal. Have to finish it now so that I can check out his subject matter onsite later this year. One of the characters in Boys in the Band says "I've been trying to read Atlas Shrugged since about 1910."

That's all I remember. You could try writing to Jeff Britting, the ARI archivist.

I don't know for sure, but apparently they did. The information they gave suggested that they were in touch with Nora or her family.

ARI announced a few years ago that Rand's sister Nora had died without talking to any biographers and that the heirs (if that's the word) hadn't saved any documents.

Missing Vermeers: according to the FBI, one was stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and is still out.

(In another thread I mentioned that in the We The Living outtake Long quotes, Rand was talking about decorative art [book design], while in her later denunciations of non-representational painting she was talking about fine art. These are different undertakings with different sets of rules, so Rand didn't necessarily change her mind or contradict herself.) Too often in discussions like this one people talk as if art were, by definition, what they like to look at or what they find emotionally affecting or what expresses a sense of life. Whether or not any of these is an adequate definition of art, they aren't, singly or together, Rand's definition, and to say that you like Mondrian or Pollock is not to say that they are art or to dispute anything she said. Somewhat like Long, I've wondered if she would have liked Coward had she discovered him in her intellectual maturity.