Reidy

Ellen - I hope your husband is feeling better and will soon be well enough to photograph. Peter

[Possibly a duplicate post] On the other hand, Jolie could use that image to advantage, playing against our expectations to build up tension, then letting her sexuality explode at just the right moment. Garbo and Kate Hepburn and their contemporaries used to do this. We'll see. Peter

I admire the way you combine physical description with emotional scene-setting, getting across the layout of the place and its down-at-heels, hopeless atmosphere with the same details, though I agree with Barbara that you don't need so many. The opening sentence made me wonder what "it" is until you told us several paragraphs later. Maybe I should have figured this out from the title, but I didn't, and maybe other readers won't either. If Cruikshank's Driving School is the name of the business, that's what the sentence should say. "Strip mall" has shabby connotations already, so you don't need to say that it's small and decrepit: "Cruikshank's Driving School had been in a strip mall on a busy street for twenty-five years." We know it's a dump. Another editorial point is about verb tenses. You use the present to describe the place and switch somewhat jarringly to the past when Jane enters. It would read more smoothly if you put it all in the past. Count me as another who wants to know what happens next. Peter

Marsha Enright and her allies are heading up a similar effort. See http://www.collegeunitedstates.org/. Does this mean another instance of the orthodox / apostate split? Peter

In addition to what Grieb has said, Keating's clients were a government agency, not a corporation. The movie is, puzzlingly, unclear on this, but the book lays this out at length. In any case, Roark didn't take money for the job, so he wasn't, stricly speaking, working for anybody. Peter

The observation that reviews didn't stop the book, so they can't stop the movie, cuts both ways. The bad news is that, while a book can take time to find its audience (at least until the first printing sells out and maybe longer), the first weekend makes or breaks a movie. The good news is that reviews have very little effect on the commercial fortunes of a movie (by contrast to books, restaurants and theatrical productions). Peter

You could make a good movie of Atlas Shrugged, but, good or bad, it's commercially risky. The first people to see it are going to be the hardcore fans, and they are bound to dislike it because it isn't scene-for-scene and word-for-word like the book, with characters and settings that look exactly like what each individual reader had in mind. These viewers will dominate the initial word-of-mouth, and this will be hard to overcome. Concerning Johathan's #21, I've said before that I'd like to see a movie in the ca. 1940 streamline-moderne period of the book. Whoever did the current cover art seems to agree. This might include shooting it in black and white. Peter

I agree that this is an embarrassingly bad movie. A point I noticed the last time I saw it is that the script steers deliberately away from expressly political points, to the point of making the story positively harder to follow. One example is the scene between Keating and Toohey, where Keating, trying to get the Cortlandt job, says something like "you know people in this game" without ever mentioning that it's a government housing project. Another is when Roark finally sees what they've done to his design, and one of the actors says, dismissively, "you can't sue us." For all the viewer knows, they are private real estate developers counting on Roark's unwillingness to put time and money into a lawsuit. This was probably a way of compressing the story and getting immediately to the essential ethical message. Peter

Yes, but he would have said that Roark had eudaimonia in the quarry. It's a lot like what people here are calling "serenity." Peter

To all this I'd add: go to a library and ask a librarian. It's their job, and they're good at it. Peter

Special request: The Academic Associates Book News at one time published a statement from Nathaniel Branden's lawyer after Holzer had denounced Branden's sale of his recorded NBI lectures. If you have the text of this statement it would be a valuable document in the ongoing wrangles over who "owns" Objectivism. Peter

Atlas is a familiar image. The one in St. Petersburg is one possibility. The more famous one in Rockefeller Center is another. In fact the NYT Book Review alluded to this in a cartoon shortly after the book came out. Rand credited the title to her husband. A play by the name of Jupiter Laughed ran on Broadway in 1940, when they both lived in New York. I've wondered if this was somewhere in the background. Peter

I'd think that shorter, Anglo-Saxon words would be easier for an audience to follow. You might prefer longer classical derivatives for special effect, e.g. in order to make someone seem like a hard-to-understand obfuscator. Try looking at some playwrights you like and see what they do. Noel Coward is my favorite. Tennessee Williams writes beautiful dialogue, whether you like his content or not. Peter

Tibor Machan has accused Phillippa Foot, one of the most eminent modern ethical philosophers, not of plagiarism (she beat Rand to it by a few years) but of snobbishness in refusing to acknowledge that an academic outsider has had something important to say on the subject. In any case I recommend her Natural Goodness. I'm not up on the field, but my impression is that non-Objectivist philosophers came to any Rand-like positions they may have independently of her, often before she took these positions herself and in any case before she started getting academic respect. Peter

Her article "The Money-Making Personality" ran in Cosmopolitan in 62 or 63. Madamoiselle ran an interview sometime around then, too. Her comments on the 72 campaign were in a symposium in the Saturday Review during the election season (pretty much a rehash of what she was saying in the Letter), and in 1970 the LA Times (perhaps among others) published an op-ed piece in which she distinguished between a revolution and a putsch, saying that the left in those days was going for the latter. Peter

I think it's a much better movie than The Fountainhead, with some beautiful dialogue that only Rand could have written. Incidental intelligence: the only time Noel Coward (a favorite of Rand's and the subject of a couple of allusions in her fiction) mentioned her was to say in his diary that he hated this movie. Peter

Historical question for Barbara Branden: who came up with the term "psycho-epistemology"? I recently saw the claim that Rand coined it, but the evidence I'm aware of is inconclusive. I believe the first public use was in your Efficient Thinking lectures (1960?) and the first use in print was in the lead essay in For the New Intellectual (1961). Peter

Chianti goes with anything? Oysters? Ice cream? That would wake up flavors better left asleep. I'd as soon eat the two together and skip the Chianti. Peter

Looks fishy to me. The message of the FoxNews story is that the authors are partisans out to establish a preconceived conclusion, politically motivated at that. This doesn't prove that they're wrong, but it raises a warning. These people don't care what damage they do to their credibility by tipping us off to their class prejudices. Another suspicious item is the statement "The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005." I.e. they didn't do their own research. This doesn't prove that they're wrong, either, but it raises questions about the consistency of the research methods that the different surveys used (one question being: were the questions identically phrased in all the surveys?). Not too many years ago we read that more people believe that flying saucers visit the earth than that Social Security will be around for their retirement. The story eventually disappeared when somebody pointed out that the claim combined the results of two different surveys and was thus not statistically respectable. The conclusion I'd draw from the chart, if it's reliable, is that beliefs about evolution don't tell you much about a country; it shows no correlation I can see between such beliefs and anything you'd want to know about these countries' cultures, political systems, scientific eminence, technological importance or economic productivity. The statement "we're screwed", if it means anything (big if), is a testable prediction, and a reliable commentator would have been more explicit about what that is. My guess is that it predicts the US is going to lose its scientific, technological and economic lead because so many of its citizens reject evolution. I recall similar predictions from my childhood during the post-Sputnik era. Back then, America's failure to teach foreign languages to everyone, from grade school on, or its failure to adopt the metric system were going to do it in. These prophecies failed the test of time, and I predict a similar fate for this one. My rule is to discount, by about 98%, scientific or scholarly stories I come across in the news. What you see there are the findings of showboaters, the kind of academics who cultivate the media while most of their colleagues are at work doing science. Give it a few months and see if anyone remembers it. Peter

To find more of Rand and other Objectivists, go to www.objectivismstore.com or www.aynrandbookstore.com and search on "video" or "audio". (Were you talking about Rand herself on tape? I've found her English hard to follow sometimes. On the other hand, French for me is easy to follow when somebody is speaking it with a foreign accent but impossible from native speakers.) Peter

If you're looking for an introduction, Rand recommended Randall's Aristotle. I recommend Bambrough's Aristotle the Philosopher. His writings are more difficult than Rand's, so you'd be wise to start with a book such as these. I don't know if they're available in translation. Peter

You seem to think that, because Rand depicts the suicide, she approves of it. This doesn't follow, any more than it follows for what the overtly evil characters do. Cherryl is intellectually half-formed and in over her head, the victim of malice she doesn't understand. This isn't a state Rand recommends. The best evidence is her treatment of the more intellectually sophisticated characters. If she believed what you think she does, they'd be the ones killing themselves. Peter

PS to previous: "Category" is a technical term in Aristotle; "element" wouldn't be an example. Categories are the broadest possible classes. Entity is the primary category; action, state, attribute and number are some of the others. One explanation I've seen is that these are the end points of any chain of "what's that?" questions. Point to somebody and keep repeating the question: My neighbor Betty A woman A person An animal ... and so on up to An entity Or: Cerulean blue A shade of blue A color... An attribute Peter

Here's a translation I found at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphys...ysics.5.v.html: Element means (1) the primary component immanent in a thing, and indivisible in kind into other kinds; e.g. the elements of speech are the parts of which speech consists and into which it is ultimately divided, while they are no longer divided into other forms of speech different in kind from them. If they are divided, their parts are of the same kind, as a part of water is water (while a part of the syllable is not a syllable). Similarly those who speak of the elements of bodies mean the things into which bodies are ultimately divided, while they are no longer divided into other things differing in kind; and whether the things of this sort are one or more, they call these elements. The so-called elements of geometrical proofs, and in general the elements of demonstrations, have a similar character; for the primary demonstrations, each of which is implied in many demonstrations, are called elements of demonstrations; and the primary syllogisms, which have three terms and proceed by means of one middle, are of this nature. What do you mean by "equivocate?" The word is equivocal (it has more than one meaning, in Greek as in English), so he gives more than one; the quote above covers only the first of the senses he lists. Nobody defends Aristotle's mechanics, chemistry or cosmology these days, but you can abstract his point (an element is an irreducible part) from the examples he gives. Peter

Allan Gotthelf points out that the merger that created the Remington-Rand brand didn't happen until several years after Rand came to the US. (Maybe there was just a "Rand"?) He speculates that the origin of the name was that, if you spell her original name out in Cyrillic characters, it looks like "Ayn Rand" in English. (Got that?) Barbara Branden replies that the Remington-Rand story was AR's own account. Peter