Posted on 03/07/2009 7:48:34 AM PST by Publius
I’ve not read the entire book, but I now have an educated guess as to who it may be..I won’t tell and I may be completely off base, but it will be interesting to see if I’m correct..
That's the part of the story where Rand loses me. For example, what was up with the bleeding arm? I read the whole book, and I never saw a point to it. Rand herself reportedly had an affair that her husband knew about. As the story goes on, she seems to be trying to justify it. At least, that's what I read into it.
I had the same problem and have found that in some cases it works best to have the story read to me when I find the writing style too ponderous. In the case of Atlas Shrugged, I bought the unabridged version on CD off of ebay. I then listened to it for almost a month on the way to work and back and as I drove around doing chores. It took me almost a month to get through all 50 CD’s, but it was well worth it and extremely enjoyable. I now see what all of the fuss was about.
Once again, thank you very much for taking the time to lead this AS discussion.
Re: the building Dagney chooses to lease an office in and its run down condition (and the other comments through the book describing the physical condition of cities & communities — excepting Galt’s Gulch, of course).
I rode the AMTRAK FRom Newark to WDC in the spring of 1996. I was struck by the rotted and abandoned factories and buildings I saw along the way. Reminded me of AS.
I am reminded of AS now as I see abandoned buildings and For Rent signs in FRont of what had appeared to be triving businesses as recently as January.
Please add me to your PING list!
at least on this thread, the 1st post contains links to all the prior chapters so that should help
I think the sex thing is more than just Dagny’s character. I think a lot of it is Rand herself. If you read The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon has pretty much the same sexual appetite as Dagny and the scene with her and Roark by the quarry is one of the most important of the novel. You say Rearden would have said no, but Roark didn’t, and Rand clearly approved of Roark.
Even We The Living, which is her first novel, and not really as philosophical and more traditional that Atlas and the Fountainhead, has a main female character in Kira who also has hot, rough sex. I even read a book that has a bunch of short stories written by Rand and unpublished stuff and it’s there too.
I think Rand pretty much wrote the main female characters(Dagny, Dominique) with a lot of herself in mind and they’re having wild, animal sex with the male heros and ideal men like Roark and Galt and Rearden represents her desire to the same. Just her own added fun to the book. The rough sex is probably how she liked it and if you read some of what Branden and others wrote, it’s no surprise.
I don’t relaly think the sex is all that important in the overall philosophy. It’s like in spy novels like Bond or a bunch of others where a male author has his hero have hot sex with a bevy of babes. Don’t foregt she also began her career in Hollywood so she probably still retained a touch of the romantic and the show in her later works. It’s like if there’s a movie out about serious things but it also has a nude scene with Angelina Jolie or Kate Winslet, it’ll draw a bigger audience. See The Reader, for example. I mean, she was intimately involved with the film version of The Fountainhead and casting and picked legendary swordsman Gary Cooper as Roark. No coincidence there.
I just finished the book.
One gets an entirely different reading at fifty-three than one did at fifteen, to say the least.
And how she so accurately predicted the political direction of the country before what I consider the pivotal era of the early Sixties (Any of Moynihan’s objective analyses of that era “Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding”, “Miles to Go” contributed to my opinion of same) just astonishes me.
I pledge to restrain myself.
But the roots for it were set in the early Sixties (see my earlier post), when OEO and the first round of anti-poverty programs were initiated using principles like "the people of the areas we intend to help should run the programs intended to help them"- overlooking the fact that in virtually every case, these people lacked the training and skillsets to do so.
And the foundation for "intentions trump results" was laid when the failure of these programs was ignored and yet more programs were developed. Or, as Sowell so eloquently put it in the subtitle for Visions of the Anointed: "Self-congratulation as a basis for social policy".
And anybody who doesn't think *that* can be stamped on about two-thirds of the pages of Atlas Shrugged is clearly not paying attention.
That would be We, The Living.
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