Is Jabba the Hutt a role-model to you? Do your personal fantasies run to inter-species sexual exploitation? A Nevada entrepreneur named Dennis Hof (best known for publicizing a brothel he owns via a reality tv program on HBO) plans to open the “Area 51 Alien Travel Center,” a Sci Fi-themed bordello 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas on Highway 95. Hof has announced that he is hiring Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss to dream up female alien costumes, make up, and decor.
Ernest Hemingway was not only the generally recognized greatest American writer of fiction of his time, Hemingway seemed to have deliberately crafted his life to parallel and underline his art, emphasizing and exemplifying the same themes of manliness and confronting the same life and death questions. Hemingway became thusly, not only the great novelist, but a code hero, the equivalent of Achilleus or Beowulf as well as Nick Adams, in his own right.
When the great man, at 7 AM one July morning fifty years ago, crept out of bed, found the key to the closet where his wife Mary had locked away his firearms, took out his Boss best-grade double-barreled 12 gauge, inserted two rounds of high brass number 6s, braced the gun butt on the floor of his house’s foyer, placed his forehead against the barrels, and reached down and fired both barrels, Hemingway’s vast audience of readers and admirers experienced an international catharsis as the epic suddenly concluded and the curtain came down the tragedy.
Paul Hendrickson takes Hemingway’s 38-foot Wheeler cabin cruiser, the Pilar, built for him in 1934, as the metonymic focus and symbol of the final 27-year 3-month trajectory of the author’s literary career and life.
Few great writers have received such a tribute, featuring massive and intensely focused research (Hendrickson can lovingly describe the details of the room where Hemingway used to stay in the Ambus Mundos Hotel as well as tell you which models of Vom Hofe and Hardy reels he fished); ground-breaking criticism (Hendrickson argues very persuasively that it was Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa (1935), who invented the non-fiction novel, not Capote or Mailer thirty years later); or anything like this sympathetic and deeply personal tribute in finely crafted prose worthy of its own subject.
In the final analysis, Hendrickson is writing to explain and to defend Hemingway’s crack-up, all the famous outrageous incidents of egotism, bullying, and vainglory, all the drink and all the damnation. His prologue’s title, “Amid So Much Ruin, Still the Beauty,” could have been the title of the whole book.
Hendrickson writes:
I have come to believe deeply that Ernest Hemingway, however unpost-modern it may sound, was on a lifelong quest for sainthood, and not just literary sainthood, and that at nearly every turn, he defeated himself. How? “By betrayals of himself, and what he believed in,” as the dying writer, with the gangrene going up his leg, says so bitterly in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” one of Hemingway’s greatest short stories. Why the self-defeating betrayal of high humanistic aspirations? The seductions of celebrity and the sin of pridefulness and the curses of megalomania and the wastings of booze and, not least, the onslaughts of bipolarism must amount to a large part of the answer. Hemingway once said in a letter to his closest friend in the last two decades of his life, General Buck Lanham, whom he had come to know on the battlefield as a correspondent in World War II: “I have always had the illusion it was more important, or as important, to be a good man as to be a great writer. May turn out to be neither. But would like to be both.”
I also believe there was so much more fear inside Hemingway than he ever let on, that it was almost always present, by day and more so by night, and that his living with it for so long was ennobling. The thought of self-destruction trailed Hemingway for nearly his entire life, like the tiny wakes a child’s hand will make when it is trailed behind a rowboat in calm water—say, up in Michigan.
Many years ago, Norman Mailer wrote a sentence about Hemingway that has always struck me as profound: “It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” The great twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, a contemporary of Hemingway’s, who admired him early and had contempt for him late, wrote in his journals of the 1960s: “He had a high sense of honor, which he was always violating; he evidently had a permanent bad conscience.”
I repeat: best book of 2011, and best Hemingway biography/appreciation out there.
A nice Xmas present for sportsmen from Ron Black: his “The Mardale Hunt: A History,” a 166-page downloadable electronic text of the history of the oldest, and most famous, of the Lakeland Fell Shepherds’ Meets. This is the kind of simple, hard-bitten North Country hunting associated with John Peel: foot-following foxhounds on the often pretty vertical landscape of the Lakeland Fells.
Hunting in Mardale is a fundamental and immemorial feature of the season.
[T]he shepherds’ meeting at Mardale ” wasn’t founded in’t memory of man.” That the shepherds gave up a week to ’ raking ’ the fells and bringing down to the Dun Bull the sheep that were not their own. That though there is a Shepherds’ Guide with all the lug-marks and smit marks of the various flocks in it, it is very seldom referred to, for all the shepherds ken the marks as well as they ken their own bairns. From the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, a hunt succeeded by a good dinner ushers in the shepherds’ ceremony of ’ swortn ’ the sheep; and after the sorting a hound trail and pigeon shooting at clay pigeons affords diversion till daylight fades; then tea is served and the shepherds who determine ‘to remain on spree,’ as they call it, instead of driving their sheep home, make a night of it. I gathered from the old farmers that they thought ’ nowt ’ to the hound-trail and pigeon shooting. They wur new-fanglements and mud varra weel be dispensed wid.’
By the early years of the last century, the fame of the Mardale Shepherds Meet had spread and visiting sportsman often attended and participated.
For years the Mardale Meet’s popularity relied on the reputation of Joe Bowman (Hunty or Auld Joe) and his Ullswater Foxhounds. Visitors travelled to the meet from all parts of the country and some the world, they travelled in a variety of ways-“Rolls-Royces, carriages, horseback and on foot walking over the high mountain passes sometimes in bad weather (snow was not uncommon) and my Great Uncle Brait and Trimmer his hound actually got lost on the tops in bad weather. Trimmer subsequently won his trail. Expensive furs, kid gloves and silver mounted walking sticks mingled at the meet with woollen clothing, hand made walking sticks and fustian jackets. Most people walked and the general view was summed up by Tommy Fishwick who was once heard to say to a friend “Yan wants nowt wi’ riding as lang as yan legs ‘ell carry yan.”
Hinchcliffe quotes that after a good days sport, huntsmen, shepherds, visitors, sheep dogs and terriers (hounds were not admitted) all turn towards the Dun Bull for a meal.
In the evening, a smoking contest took place. Skelton records “ the main portion of the pack, cast off in the large dining room and every room in the house filled with overflow meetings-or rather concerts”
The big room was the focal point, a tray was sent round and money subscribed for the evening’s refreshment. Each individual orders his choice of drink and the chairman pays out of the general pool. Toast’s and song follow in quick succession. The chairman selects the singer and everyone is supposed to sing at least one song and there was an element of pride in singing one that had not already been sung that evening. If the song had a good swing or chorus the men got particularly enthusiastic, the shepherds beating the tables with their sticks in time to the tune and the sheep-dogs and terriers howling either in enthusiasm or execration, no man knows which.
One song often sung paid tribute to the renowned local huntsman.
JOE BOWMAN
Down at Howtown we met with Joe Bowman at dawn,
The grey hills echoed back the glad sound of his horn,
And the charm of it’s note sent the mist far away
And the fox to his lair at the dawn of the day.
Chorus
When the fire’s on the hearth and good cheer abounds
We’ll drink to Joe Bowman and his Ullswater hounds,
For we’ll never forget how he woke us at dawn
With the crack of his whip and the sound of his horn.
Then with steps that were light and with hearts that were gay
To a right smickle spot we all hasten away,
The voice of Joe Bowman, how it rings like a bell
As he cast off his hounds by the side of Swarth Fell.
The shout of the hunters it startled the stag
As the fox came to view on the lofty Brook crag,
“Tally-Ho” cried Joe Bowman, “the hounds are away,
O’er the hills let us follow their musical bay”.
Master Reynard was anxious his brush for to keep,
So he followed the wind oe’r the high mountain steep,
Past the deep silent tarn to the bright running beck,
Where he hoped by his cunning to give us a check.
Though he took us oe’r Kidsey we held to his track,
For we hunted my lads with the Ullswater Pack
Who caught the fox and effected a kill,
By the silvery stream of the bonny Ramps Gill.
Now his head’s on the crook and the bowl is below,
And we‘re gathered around by the fire’s warming glow,
Our songs they are merry, our choruses high,
As we drink to the hunters who joined in the cry.
When this song is sung at Ullswater, the third verse should be given as follows:
The shout of the hunters it startled the stag,
As the fox came to view on the lofty Brook Crag,
“Tally-Ho” We’re away, o’er the rise and the fell,
Joe Bowman, Kit Farrar, Will Milcrest and all.
When Patrick Stewart (formerly Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise) is a university’s chancellor, recruiting videos seem to become a bit more imaginative.
Robert Krulwich, at an NPR blog, offers a translation of Leonardo’s personal To-Do list from some point early in the 1490s.
It’s an interesting list, testifying to its author’s remarkably broad range of practical and abstract interests, and as Maggie Koerth-Baker notes admiringly, to his recognition of superior expertise in the possession of others.
I think it’s pretty interesting that of the nine tasks shown, six involve consulting and learning from other people. Leonardo da Vinci needs to find a book. Leonardo da Vinci needs to get in touch with local merchants, monks, and accountants who he hopes can help him better understand concepts within their areas of expertise.
Leonardo da Vinci knows he doesn’t know everything.
I think that’s a big deal.
The fact that questions Leonardo intends to address so commonly include notes of just how he intends to obtain the necessary information is, I think, likely to make many of us with experience in research smile in recognition of a kindred spirit.
Here is an intriguing plot line for an alternative history series along the lines of the Eric Flint’s 1632
Prufrock451 took us somewhat cursorily through the first week of the 35th MEU’s adventures in Ancient Rome. He has a series franchise here if he continues.
The Marines aren’t going to have any problems dealing with local military forces, as long as they still have ammunition and fuel. But when they inevitably run out of cartridges, what then? One detail I’d suggest to assist in plotting is to be sure to bring along a Navy support ship with an on-board machine shop.
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Wikipedia tells us that a typical Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU, pronounced “Myuu”) has approximately 2,200 Marines and sailors. It is equipped with:
Ground
4 M1A1 main battle tank
7 to 16 Light Armored Vehicle
15 Amphibious Assault Vehicle
6 155mm howitzer: M198 or M777
8 M252 81mm mortar
8 BGM-71 Tube Launched, Optically Tracked, Wire Guided (TOW) missile weapon system
8 FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile
Aviation
4 to 6 AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopters
3 UH-1N Twin Huey utility helicopter
12 CH-46E Sea Knight medium lift assault helicopter
4 CH-53E Super Stallion heavy lift assault helicopter
6 AV-8B Harrier jet
2 KC-130 Hercules re-fueler/transport aircraft
Note: usually maintained in the continental United States
Logistics
2 Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit
1 LMT 3000 water purification unit
4 Tractor, Rubber Tire, Articulated Steering
2 TX51-19M Rough Terrain Forklift
3 D7 bulldozer
1 Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement dump truck
4 Mk48 Logistics Vehicle System
Multiple
7 500 gallon water containers
63 Humvee
30 Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement trucks
A Marine Infantry Battalion constitutes essentially the ground portion of an MEU, and may contain 2–5 companies, with a total of 500 to 1,200 Marines in the battalion.
The British Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) is clearly determined to raise a great deal of money. The Jesuits have arranged to sell to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m) the oldest surviving European book, the Stonyhurst Gospel, St. Cuthbert’s own copy of the Gospel of St. John, a 7th century manuscript originally buried with the saint on the island of Lindisfarne in 687.
Lindisfarne was depopulated of its monks when the Danes sacked the island in 875. The saint’s relics were carried away and moved from one location in the north of England to another over the course of the next century. St. Cuthbert was finally reburied in the “White Church” built in 995 as the predecessor to Durham Cathedral.
The manuscript was discovered in 1104 when St. Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in the course of transporting his remains to a shrine behind the altar of the newly built cathedral.
St. Cuthbert’s shrine was destroyed in the time of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and the gospel manuscript at that point passed into private hands. George Lee, the third Earl of Lichfield (d. 1772) is the first recorded modern owner. Lichfield gave the manuscript to Reverend Thomas Phillips (d. 1774) who donated it to the English Jesuit College at Liège on 20 June 1769. The manuscript has been owned since 1769 by the Society of Jesus (British Province) and was formerly in the library of Stonyhurst College. The manuscript has been on loan to the British Library since the 1970s.
Christie’s negotiated the sale, as a result of which the manuscript will continue to be displayed half the time at the British Library and the other half at Durham Cathedral, referred to in the news articles as (God help us!) a UNESCO world heritage site in Durham.
Twelfth century painting of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral.
St. Cuthbert (feast day: March 20) is the patron saint of the North of England and was England’s most popular saint in the period before the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170. His banner was carried into battle against the Scots up to the time of the Reformation, and in the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the Palatinate of Durham were referred to as haliwerfolc “the saint’s people.”
The Codex Calixtinus, reported stolen last Wednesday, is a 12th century manuscript, the earliest known version of a text constituting a guide and reference book for pilgrims to the Cathedral of the Apostle St. James the Great . The book, known also as Liber Sancti Jacobi, or the Book of Saint James, contains sermons, accounts of miracles, liturgical texts connected with devotions to Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, and some very important pieces of polyphonic music. The pilgrim’s guide contains descriptions of the route, advice on sights to be seen along the way, and descriptions of local customs.
The manuscript is believed to have been taken by professional thieves from a safe in the cathedral’s archives the previous Sunday (July 3) night.
Guardian story.
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Congaudeant catholici [Rejoice together, Catholics], the first known polyphonic chant for three voices, composed by Magister Albertus Parisiensis [Albert of Paris, cantor of Notre Dame Cathedral, in the 12th century, from the missing Codex Calixtinus.
Who would have imagined that Knife Collecting guru Bernard Levine is a Harvard ‘69 dropout, who became an expert on knives as a way of surviving in the city on the Bay back in the era of the Summer of Love?
In February 1969, Levine headed west, looking to connect with a love interest in San Francisco—who promptly returned east to enroll in college. He knocked about the city for a couple of years, working as a stevedore and in construction. His first job, hanging sheetrock, had five other Harvard students on the site. “I realized that I wasn’t strong enough to do this kind of work,” he says, “and that it wasn’t getting me far enough away from Harvard!”
He tried a small business gathering wild yarrow stalks in the hills near San Francisco, which natural food stores sold in bundles of 50 because dividing piles of yarrow is a classical method of consulting the I Ching. “Then they found a lower-priced source,” Levine says. “That was my first lesson in business.”
In September 1971, a couple at the house Levine lived in invited him to come to a flea market; they were moving and had some items to sell. He went to a Goodwill store to find something he might sell at the flea market, and purchased a box of old knives for $3.00—30 knives, as it turned out, at a dime each. “I knew less than nothing about knives,” he says. “The little I knew was wrong. But I spread my knives out on a cloth and was overwhelmed by people.”
Levine learned that there were knife collectors, and the brand names that were collectible. “It was a revelation,” he admits. He continued selling knives at flea markets on weekends. “It turned out to be much longer hours than any job,” he says. “I’d spend all week scrounging up knives and on Friday bring them to a cutlery shop in North Beach where they’d restore them for me. The grandfather there—born in Romania in 1885—taught me a lot about the European cutlery business in the early twentieth century.
“My great love in school had been history,” he says. “Old knives are a good window into history, and a window that looks out in every direction.” From the very first day, Levine recorded every knife he sold, including brand markings and a description, eventually logging 13,000 entries.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (center) with other officers of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, 1864
The loquacious yet always gnomic Mencius Moldbug today served up a series of summer reading recommendations apparently intended to put the reader in a Mid-19th Century frame of mind.
Moldbug’s enticing reading list features political thought, travel accounts of Antebellum America, and some selections sympathetic to the perspective of the Confederacy.
I immediately perused (former Union officer) Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s 1902 defense of Robert E. Lee, Shall Cromwell Have a Statue? with much enjoyment.
Readers would be well-advised to try reading some (or all) of Moldbug’s selections.
Noomi Rapace played Salander in Män som hatar kvinnor (2009)
Israeli critic Benjamin Kerstein, at PJM, relishes the delicious political ironies of the internationally-bestselling Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy.
One of the strangest publishing phenomena in recent memory is the extraordinary international success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. A semi-famous left-wing Swedish journalist who died young and relatively uncelebrated, the three mystery novels Larsson wrote before his death, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have sold millions of copies worldwide, gained a dedicated cult of adoring fans, spawned a hugely popular Swedish film series, and set in motion a Hollywood remake directed by celebrated filmmaker David Fincher.
There is really only one reason for the massive success of Larsson’s trilogy: a fascinating, unique, and entirely fictional young woman named Lisbeth Salander. While the books’ Swedish setting, their overtones of political and social criticism, and their main character, the plodding journalist and obvious Larsson alter ego Michael Blomquist, are interesting variations on the conventional mystery, it is Salander who elevates the proceedings into something entirely new in crime fiction.
Larsson’s personal political views are not in doubt. He was a longtime member of the Swedish radical left, and his magazine Expo was famous for exposing the dark underbelly of the Swedish right wing. In an early and now invalidated will, he went so far as to leave all his assets to the local communist party. At first glance, the novels seem to follow Larsson’s ideology fairly closely. Blomquist, Larsson’s alter ego, is an aging libertine who carries on a longtime affair with another man’s wife — with her husband’s knowledge — and spends his time bedding numerous women while congratulating himself for not bowing to conventional social expectations. The Expo-like magazine he runs is all but identical to Larsson’s own. The books themselves deal with subjects like rampant violence against women, trafficking in prostitutes, and the crimes, conspiracies, and cover-ups engineered by the collusion between government and big business. Indeed, there are moments when the books seem to stop dead in their tracks so that one of Larsson’s characters can deliver an NPR-style bromide on a subject dear to the liberal heart.
In the midst of all of this, Lisbeth Salander explodes like a grenade tossed into an ammunition dump. Ferociously individualist, incorruptible, disdainful, and suspicious of all forms of social organization, and dedicated to her own personal moral code, Salander often seems to have stepped into Larsson’s world from out of an Ayn Rand novel. She despises all institutions, whether they are business corporations, government agencies, or the Stockholm police. Rejecting all forms of ideology, she is dedicated only to her own individual sense of justice. Relentlessly cerebral, she trusts only what she can ascertain with her own mind and her own formidable talents. She considers Blomquist a naïve fool because of his belief that social conditions cause people to commit the horrible crimes he investigates. At one point, as Blomquist ponders the motivations of a brutal serial killer, Salander erupts, “He’s just a pig who hates women!” Salander believes there are no excuses, everyone is responsible for their own actions, including herself, and must answer for them accordingly.
In short, Salander is as close to an avenging angel libertarianism is ever likely to get, and her presence in the novels throws the books’ politics into a bizarre contradiction. Far from the left-wing bromide in favor of democratic socialism it appears to be, the Millennium trilogy, as Ian MacDougall has pointed out in the leftist journal n+1, often appears on second glance like a calculated and relentless evisceration of the Swedish welfare state. Indeed, not only is Salander a walking rebuke to the myths of Scandinavian socialism, but she is usually portrayed by Larsson as being absolutely correct in her attitude toward it. “In this Sweden,” MacDougall writes:
The country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked.
In Larsson’s world, it is only the individual — usually Salander — with their own personal sense of right and wrong and the courage to act on it, who can save the day.
Rogier van der Weyden. Philippe de Croy’s Coat of Arms, the reverse side of the Portrait of Philippe de Croy. c.1460. Oil on panel. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium.
The Cröys are one of the oldest families in Europe, and are ebenbürtig (“born on an equality”) with all the German Royalties. They therefore show no signs of respect to Archdukes and Archduchesses when they meet them. Although I cannot vouch personally for them, never having myself seen them, I am told that there are two pictures in the Cröy Palace at Brussels which reach the apogee of family pride. The first depicts Noah embarking on his ark. Although presumably anxious about the comfort of the extensive live-stock he has on board, Noah finds time to give a few parting instructions to his sons. On what is technically called a “bladder” issuing from his mouth are the words, “And whatever you do, don’t forget to bring with you the family papers of the Cröys.” (“Et surtout ayez soin de ne pas oublier les papiers de la Maison de Cröy!”) The other picture represents the Madonna and Child, with the then Duke of Cröy kneeling in adoration before them. Out of the Virgin Mary’s mouth comes a “bladder” with the words “But please put on your hat, dear cousin.” (“Mais couvrez vous donc, cher cousin.”)
—Lord Frederic Hamilton, The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday: Being Some Random Reminiscences of a British Diplomat (1921), p. 53.
The reference to cousinship with the Holy Family presumably alludes to a marriage of one of the Cröys with a female member of the Bagrationi dynasty of Georgia during the period of the Crusades. A number of such marriages to prominent Frankish crusaders are known to have occurred, and the royal family of Georgia traditionally did claim descent from the Biblical House of David.
David Ross was recently moved to re-read Atlas Shrugged.
In an experience shared by many, he found the novel much better, and far more worthy of respect as a work of literature, than he had remembered.
The Obama era was, for me as for so many others, an open invitation to reread Rand, so thoroughly does she seem to diagnose the psychology of our present slide into statism (Obama’s constant rhetoric about sibling-keeping might as well be plucked from the mouth of Wesley Mouch). News that Atlas Shrugged is finally being filmed also helped inch the book to the top of my pile. ...
I was trepidacious, however, not sure to what extent I might have outgrown Rand. I was not concerned about the palatability of her philosophy, to which I have never specifically subscribed, but about her prose and her craftsmanship, which self-congratulatory journalist types constantly deride as second-rate, the kind of thing that only a teenager or cultist could fail to smirk at. This passing reference in a December article in the Weekly Standard is typical:
Atlas Shrugged, while a perennial bestseller and an important artifact of 20th-century culture, is not exactly great literature (stilted dialogue and cardboard characters have ranked among the defects pointed out by critics).
I have now reread the first half of Atlas Shrugged, and I can offer my very educated opinion that it is great literature, not necessarily at the sentence level, but in the unstoppable propulsion of its narrative (has a philosophical novel ever been so engrossing?), in the massive, dauntless sweep of its ideas, and in its enormous imaginative feat of creating a myth of our entire world (Dante and Milton are Rand’s compeers in this limited, formal respect).
Even more, Atlas Shrugged is a great work of literature in its comprehensive taxonomy of modern men, in its comprehension of all their hidden springs and insecurities and frustrations and ambitions. Rand fancied herself a political theorist and metaphysician, but she misunderstood herself; she was a psychologist foremost, and Atlas Shrugged is a formidable system of psychology to contraindicate that of Freud. Eschewing the usual bedroom and bathroom preoccupations, Rand grasps that behavior is driven by what she calls ideals, conscious or unconscious structures of value that provide the context for everything we do and everything we are. Freud tends to reduce these structures to underlying psychosexual dynamics, but Rand insists on their primacy and irreducibility, and she illustrates their role as the ceaseless motive forces of life. She is also a particularly shrewd diagnostician of a certain kind of resentment and leveling instinct – James Taggart is the obvious embodiment – and she is nearly alone in realizing that this mindset is no trivial phenomenon but the rotting core of our world, explaining everything from the Soviet world-blight to our failing schools and lousy art.
Rand’s characters are ‘cardboard’ in the sense that they speak for philosophical positions and represent certain types, but each character embodies something slightly different; there is no overlap or redundancy. In the aggregate, they form a spectrum of humanity – a human comedy – that is convincing and powerfully explanatory. Rand is accused of engaging in moral black and white, but this is not entirely fair; while her scheme is moral in logic and purpose, many of her characters – Dr. Stadler for example – represent subtle, equivocal positions. They are not gray, but an intricate admixture of black and white.
Rand sketches her characters in only a few clean strokes, but these strokes are rendered so deeply and forcefully as to be ineffaceable. Who can forget Hank Reardon or Dagny Taggart? Who can forget their triumphant inauguration of the John Galt Line? Who can forget their strange, violent lovemaking? What character drafted by Henry James, by contrast, does anything but deliquesce and drift imperceptibly from consciousness, becoming a vague haze of inflection and velleity?
Atlas Shrugged is a great novel, finally, in its astonishing originality. It has no precedent in terms of style, tone, mood, or philosophy, as far as I know. Victor Hugo may account for its sweep and social engagement, and someone like Zamyatin may have influenced its anti-totalitarianiasm and latent dystopianism, but nothing accounts for its strangeness, for everything powerfully eccentric and not infrequently repellent that Rand herself brings to it, everything rooted in the passionate kinks and quirks of her personality. In the end, it belongs in the category of the sui generis along with modern masterpieces like Ulysses, The Castle, and Pale Fire.
I suppose I would say that Atlas Shrugged needs to be viewed as a fantasy mystery story operating as an extended exercise in political argument and moral instruction, different from, but fundamentally akin to such non-realistic, and intrinsically polemical, works of literature as the Divine Comedy, Pilgrim’s Progress, Utopia, Hudibras, or Gulliver’s Travels.
Rand’s characters are not so much one-dimensional cardboard figures as they are what Erich Auerbach in Mimesis refers to as figura, characters serving as rhetorical illustrations of the operation of virtues, vices, and political ideas in social, business, and civic interaction. The wonder is not that Rand’s characters do not completely plausibly resemble ordinary real world human beings, but that her walking, talking illustrations of virtues, character flaws, rationality, and corrupting delusion are as successfully animated as they are.
Rand’s really conspicuous failures, far more than in characterization, lay in her Bohemian intellectual’s lack of understanding of the normal attitudes and perspectives of businessmen and her glaringly atrocious apprehension of the state and direction of technology. Ayn Rand living in the American 1950s sees the Count of Monte Cristo commuting to the office instead of the Organization Man. George Babbitt, in her mind, becomes transformed into Zarathustra. Rand is also disastrous as a prophet of the direction of business opportunities. One pictures her taking those whopping royalty checks and purchasing bundles of stock certificates in such cutting edge industries of the future as railroads, coal mines, and steel mills. Rand was oblivious to a post-industrial reality which was just around the corner. There are no data processing engineers, chip designers, or programmers in her cast of technologists. Hank Reardon has a lighter new metal alloy. John Galt is monkeying around with cosmic rays. Nobody is building personal computers, cell phones, or the Internet.
.
(1935), who invented the 
(to be published February 7 of next year), the author explains that Leonardo da Vinci carried a notebook on his belt in which he constantly sketched or left memoranda to himself.
is a key reference in any collector’s library and Bernard Levine’s earlier 
is a classic book on a very special subject.
, 
, and 
, have sold millions of copies worldwide, gained a dedicated cult of adoring fans, spawned a hugely popular Swedish film series, and set in motion a Hollywood remake directed by celebrated filmmaker David Fincher.
