Category: Books

Day 2: On page 182 of Atlas Shrugged, I fig­ured out who John Galt was.

Major Objec­tion: 18% of the way through the book. The sto­ry only holds my inter­est because of the char­ac­ters’ inter­nal dia­logues. Char­ac­ter devel­op­ment does not seem to be Ayn Rand’s strong point and her use of nar­ra­tive device only seems clich?. I AM, how­ev­er, enjoy­ing the book. She deals in extremes, the Prime Movers, Rear­den, Dag­ny Tag­gert, and d’An­co­nia are demigods, and all oth­ers are syco­phants and whin­ers. An appro­pri­ate use for her since the Prime Movers are also the Prime Exam­ples of Objec­tivism and its extreme ratio­nal­i­ty, while all oth­ers mere­ly toss out infan­tile rant­i­ngs and tem­per tantrums. This ploy would be effec­tive if it weren’t so obvi­ous. Ayn Rand’s schiz­o­phrenic use of straight­for­ward decla­ma­tion with unso­phis­ti­cat­ed attempts at sub­tle­ty makes me feel that she is des­per­ate­ly try­ing to get some­one to agree with her. An atten­tion get­ting inse­cu­ri­ty.

I am one hyper­crit­i­cal mutha­fuc­ka. They are just opin­ions but I feel the great­est hon­or I can do to an art­work is to do my best at ana­lyz­ing it. For that shows that I take its exis­tence seri­ous­ly. If I am not crit­i­cal of some­thing it is because I think it is friv­o­lous and there­fore not wor­thy of dis­sec­tion. There isn’t any­thing wrong with that is there?