It's been that long?
A lot has happened since my last post here, some not so great, and I'll probably give the books etc stuff a go-by for now, maybe permanently. Who reads that and who cares? Not that I haven't made some interesting additions to the Library. Ah, well...
So today's Houston Chronic had a movie ad and article about something that came right out of nowhere; I had no idea anyone had made what the critic called a low-budget right-wing version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - part one, no less. And part two will be called Shrug Harder, right? The critic did say that the choice of actors was pretty good, about the only good thing about it; the accompanying photo of the actress who played Dagmar Taggart looked a lot like my own idea of her appearance.
I get the idea that the movie is very political, which is to say, a heap of BS. Had I been in charge of making the movie it would be a monster disaster flick. But I'm not, so the opportunity was lost, alas.
Having read AS a few times when I had no other pressing business, and nothing else of Ms Rand's works, my own impression is of an overwritten romance novel that could have used the attention of a competent editor with a big box of black markers. Not long ago I found myself wondering how Ernest Hemingway, that foe of excessive rhetoric, would have handled the story - a much shorter novel or even a short story, perhaps? Rand was a really bad writer whose friends did her no favors by telling her otherwise.
One thesis, as I saw it, could be better summed by the character in The Deer Hunter who, exasperated by the confused thinking and motives of his fellows, holds up a rifle cartridge and says, "You see this? This is this, it's not some other goddam thing." Practically everyone in AS looked at the world they lived in and thought it was some other goddam thing, with some very lively consequences. Feel free to disagree, though.
The world of AS doesn't seem to have much contact with our own, almost like it's an alternate world where the big exciting crazed dictators - Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler - never showed up and instead we got the earnest gray wry-faced socialists of the Fabian type in charge all over the world. With no WWII we miss out on the various developments, scientific and industrial - and social, for the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s came out of war. Oddly, there don't seem to be any blacks or other ethnic groups, an intriguing absence.
There doesn't seem to be much of an airline system and the interstate highway pretty much nonexistant, rail being the main means of transport. There's a hint of nuclear research but no sign of it going very far. The intarwebz came long after Rand coughed out, but I can't imagine it being created in such a place anymore than it would have in Albania, for much the same reason.
Rand did call it pretty much with the Chilean government under Allende nationalizing the copper industry in the 1970s, much as Mexico did the oil industry in the 1930s; too bad in both cases the corporations didn't have the balls to do an Anconia and leave their former property in ruins for the new owners to pick the bones. But now I'm getting grumpy so I'll cut it off here.
So today's Houston Chronic had a movie ad and article about something that came right out of nowhere; I had no idea anyone had made what the critic called a low-budget right-wing version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - part one, no less. And part two will be called Shrug Harder, right? The critic did say that the choice of actors was pretty good, about the only good thing about it; the accompanying photo of the actress who played Dagmar Taggart looked a lot like my own idea of her appearance.
I get the idea that the movie is very political, which is to say, a heap of BS. Had I been in charge of making the movie it would be a monster disaster flick. But I'm not, so the opportunity was lost, alas.
Having read AS a few times when I had no other pressing business, and nothing else of Ms Rand's works, my own impression is of an overwritten romance novel that could have used the attention of a competent editor with a big box of black markers. Not long ago I found myself wondering how Ernest Hemingway, that foe of excessive rhetoric, would have handled the story - a much shorter novel or even a short story, perhaps? Rand was a really bad writer whose friends did her no favors by telling her otherwise.
One thesis, as I saw it, could be better summed by the character in The Deer Hunter who, exasperated by the confused thinking and motives of his fellows, holds up a rifle cartridge and says, "You see this? This is this, it's not some other goddam thing." Practically everyone in AS looked at the world they lived in and thought it was some other goddam thing, with some very lively consequences. Feel free to disagree, though.
The world of AS doesn't seem to have much contact with our own, almost like it's an alternate world where the big exciting crazed dictators - Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler - never showed up and instead we got the earnest gray wry-faced socialists of the Fabian type in charge all over the world. With no WWII we miss out on the various developments, scientific and industrial - and social, for the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s came out of war. Oddly, there don't seem to be any blacks or other ethnic groups, an intriguing absence.
There doesn't seem to be much of an airline system and the interstate highway pretty much nonexistant, rail being the main means of transport. There's a hint of nuclear research but no sign of it going very far. The intarwebz came long after Rand coughed out, but I can't imagine it being created in such a place anymore than it would have in Albania, for much the same reason.
Rand did call it pretty much with the Chilean government under Allende nationalizing the copper industry in the 1970s, much as Mexico did the oil industry in the 1930s; too bad in both cases the corporations didn't have the balls to do an Anconia and leave their former property in ruins for the new owners to pick the bones. But now I'm getting grumpy so I'll cut it off here.