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Happy 100th birthday, Ayn Rand!


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Edward Rothstein considers Ayn Rand on the occasion of her centenary, in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/books/02rand.html

I have always been interested in Ayn Rand. No Objectivist I, but I’ve read the memoirs of Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, and the essays, and the novels. And all this in spite of the fact that I never thought she was a good writer and disagreed with much of what she had to say. I admire her determination, her independence, and her kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island love for the USA.

I do like her first book, “We the Living” for its own sake. It is based on her life in Russia and was written before her views had calcified, and its characters seem like real people – not the abstractions of the later books.

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I once observed a composition class--slightly older students returning to school after some experience in the world outside of school. Over the course of the semester, the youngish teacher had asked two students each week to bring in an example of some writing that they particularly admired. The example was supposed to be a short passage that the class as a whole could read and discuss together.

The week I observed, one student brought in a short article from Business Week or some such (clearly, business articles made up the only reading he did outside of class); the second student brought in a page from one of Rand's later novels--it was an argument of sorts about the evil effects of charity. The teacher, earnest and dedicated, kept up a good front, but I could feel that she was somewhat at a loss. She didn't want to put down the students' choices, but having managed to rush through the fine points of a journalist's paragraph on the Dow Jones--even the student who brought it in had nothing to say about its prose style--she was none too comfortable to find herself leading a long discussion on the fine points of Rand's prose and politics, which she clearly did not admire. (She did venture to ask the class if they didn't find the prose a little "purple.") I have to admit that as an observer of all this, I was very entertained though, not, I promise, unsympathetic.

A shot of democracy can be good in the classroom, but I believe I may have discussed with her afterwards some of the benefits of giving assignments that have stricter guidelines.

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Thanks for the story - I enjoyed that! Rand affects some very bright people very strongly, and they don’t even notice that, uh, she doesn’t write very well. (Although she’s good with machinery – there’s a plane crash in Atlas Shrugged that’s well done.)

Reason Online (www.reason.com) has posted some good articles on Rand for the centenary. I got a kick out of this one in particular:

http://www.reason.com/0503/fe.rand.shtml

Excerpt, from Nora Ephron:

Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect...and his love life….I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed.
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