{"id":22607,"date":"2015-09-15T07:40:15","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T14:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=22607"},"modified":"2015-09-15T07:40:15","modified_gmt":"2015-09-15T14:40:15","slug":"at-random","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/15\/at-random\/","title":{"rendered":"At random"},"content":{"rendered":"

Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn’t get that job I applied for<\/a>. Not even an interview.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Got the word yesterday via a polite thank you note, but I already knew it on Saturday, when I was in the place and the manager (who was legitimately busy, but) clearly went out of her way not to make eye contact with me.<\/p>\n

Oh well.<\/p>\n

Poly-ticks and decline<\/strong><\/p>\n

It surely a sign of something gone wrong with a country’s culture and political system when showing honest grief<\/a> for your dead son is considered an important qualification for president.<\/p>\n

This, too,<\/a> speaks of not only a political but a cultural abyss. It’s not just the election of Jeremey Corbyn as Labour leader (there were apparently some perfectly normal shenaniganesque reasons<\/a> behind that). It’s as columnist Bret Stephens says:<\/p>\n

The response to this political highhandedness on both sides of the Atlantic is rage: the rage of people who sense that they aren\u2019t even being paid lip service by a political class that is as indifferent to public opinion as it is unaccountable to the law. …<\/p>\n

All this ought to unsettle anyone who cares seriously about the health of the West (if that quaint term is still allowed). A single bad election or even primary result in Britain, France, Italy, Spain or the U.S. could tip us into an unmoored\u2014and unhinged\u2014reality. What happens when President Trump meets Prime Minister Corbyn?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the rage is merited, the awakening of We the Hoi Palloi overdue. It’s just that when millions (or billions) start opening their sleepy eyes, rationality isn’t the first thing that happens. Generally the last<\/i> thing, unfortunately.<\/p>\n

Books: An Ideal embarrassment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of rationality, the library recently delivered Ayn Rand’s newly published Ideal<\/a>. The slender volume includes both the play (published but never performed during Rand’s lifetime) and the novelette (never published until now).<\/p>\n

Like millions of others, I owe a huge debt to Rand. If I hadn’t discovered Atlas Shrugged<\/i> as a lost-and-seeking 19-year-old life wouldn’t have been the same.<\/p>\n

But damn, her critics are right when they say she could be a ludicrously bad writer. Not only is Ideal<\/i> a philosophy lecture rather than a real story. Not only does it foreshadow all the absurd exaggerations and caricatures of her later work. But it’s loaded with phrasings that would get one laughed out of Creative Writing 101.<\/p>\n

She stood, her head thrown back, her arms limp at her sides, palms up, helpless and frail, surrendering herself and imploring something far away, high over the blank marquee and over the roofs, as a flame held straight for an insight in an unknown wind, as a last plea rising from every roof, and every shop window, and every weary heart far under her feet.<\/i> …<\/p>\n

He stood leaning against the wall, shaking hands, nodding, smiling to an eager crowd that came streaming past him, pausing for a few minutes in a tight whirlpool around him; he stood like a rock in its path, a lonely, bewildered rock, cornered against the wall.<\/i><\/p>\n

The book’s protagonist is actress Kay Gonda (Dagny Taggart with frizzy hair). She is suspected of murder and seeks refuge with a series of unprepossessing fans who swiftly, unsuprisingly betray her. The would-be hero is Johnnie Dawes (John Galt who hasn’t invented anything yet), who (spoiler) nobly and foolishly sacrifices himself for her (but it’s actually no sacrifice because the very act of living in a world so full of human dross and philosophical impurity is fatally enervating for superior beings like Kay and Johnnie, you know). <\/p>\n

All the standard Randian tropes are there: everyday life is 100 percent icky, and lived by icky people; all children are little pigs; ordinary adults aren’t any better; “superior” people have no friends and make everybody around them uncomfortable (and these traits are sure signs of their wonderfulness). But Rand was in a bad place when she wrote Ideal<\/i> in 1934, so Kay-Dagny and Johnnie-John don’t triumph in this one.<\/p>\n

It may not be fair to criticize the novelette. Rand never took it beyond a second draft and (wisely) chose not to publish it. Her laughable “intellectual heir” Leonard Peikoff is only putting it out it now to make a buck<\/del> complete Rand’s literary legacy. The play is slightly better, dramatically, but otherwise more of the same.<\/p>\n

Gawdawful stuff. From another writer, a flawed early work like this might serve to show her creative and intellectual development. To me, it shows that Rand didn’t<\/i> develop much — just built on the same collection of snobberies and pathetic personal resentments over the years. Reading Ideal<\/i> left me feeling sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Work I didn’t get that job I applied for. Not even an interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-and-movies","category-poly-ticks","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}