book

i sat down just now to write about stuff i've read of recent. i don't want to just forget this stuff, because while i like reading just to do it, i despair to think how little i retain afterwards. k just had to remind me that i spent like a month trudging through the fountainhead. it's incredibly didactic and repetitive. it's like words as corporal punishment for bad students, with all the finesse of bart simpson writing his sins on a blackboard. 

i wanted to read the damn thing to see what right wingers dream of. howard roark's the dreamboat. he's an architect. he is completely unaffected by literally everything. he's going to be an architect so he does it, and that is all. he grew up dirt poor, like all the noble doers in this story, unsullied by inheritance. i mean, rand's pretty down with getting rich and rich people, but she's keen on saying that people who're worth it will triumph NO MATTER WHAT. nothing external matters, so just get out of the way. people rise and fall or fall perpetually in wretched gutters because of the completely transcendent fact of what they are. 

the fountainhead's super atheistic and condemning of anything that isn't of a single person. everything from communism to corporations is damned because it lacks the infinite glory of the individual, responsible for their actions and pure of vision. kind of dubious about democracy, implicitly, but it doesn't go there. virtually everyone is just "the mob" and that is all, led arbitrarily by trashy newspapers. 

she writes beautifully about architecture and excellently about the self abasement, shame, and guilt religion demands. her notions about individualism are staggeringly simple and stupid. she thinks The Market is the best way to suss out what's worthy; it'll serve up a sufficient number of very rich people who can stand alone to select the next worthy crop that'll make life worth living. turgid sermons on the evils of altruism, glory of egotism.