It Begins

It's on.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is not a small book in any way. It's hefty. It's a veritable tome. My version has nearly 1100 pages, and each page is packed with chunky paragraphs in 8 point font. Additionally, the themes of Shrugged are pretty weighty themselves. It took me the better part of a year to get through this volume, and that's more because of the second fact than it is the first. The book's messages about free will and independence are delved into with incredible depth, and nearly every page demands that the reader sit back and reflect on its contents. At its base, though, lies a simple Good Vs. Evil conflict, where the heroes overcome enormous obstacles to save the world from disaster. There is mystery, intrigue, and foreshadowing. But the good guys are industrialists and the bad guys are lazy freeloaders and bureaucrats. It's an economics epic where the author pushes its philosophical message so far that it cannot be received as Just A Story. The book centers around its title metaphor, that of the great minds of the country going on strike and shrugging off the weight of a world that takes advantage of their successes and punishes them for their virtues. It's heady stuff, and it demands a heady response. While Shrugged's metaphor is poignant, especially during a time when the government is bailing out banks, owning car companies and firing executives, I still have some problems with how it's used in this book. Examples follow.

Atlas Skipped Sunday School
Rand goes out of her way to denounce the "mystics" of religion. Sharing, giving, and charity are all denounced strongly, on any level of interaction. But it goes further than that. Some basic immoral acts such as adultery are lifted up as triumphs of Rand's philosophy. The man who commits it feels guilt, and that guilt is considered, by the text, to be his great flaw. The woman he commits adultery with, Dagny Taggart, the main character of the book, has sexual relations with three different men--all considered to be exemplars of Rand's philosophy. Examples of sexual promiscuity and infidelity are tied uncomfortably to the rest of Rand's philosophy, and she goes out of her way to make those connections, and to justify them.

Atlas Didn't Know When To Shut Up
A lot of this book is abstraction. Probably 1247 pages of this 1100 page book are devoted to describing every philosophical nuance of a look or a stance or a thought. Adjectives aren't good enough for Rand. People look like extensive metaphors and feelings--everybody embodies some kind of philosophy, whether it's the way they drink their coffee or the way they cook food. It adds depth. It can also grate my freaking nerves after awhile. Like after an entire page. The worst, though, is a 60 page monologue given by the fictional champion of Rand's philosophy. This is given near the 900 page mark, after all of the events of the plot have illustrated Rand's theme. But that's not enough. She needs 60 pages straight of dialogue, all from one single character, to punctuate it. It's the single greatest example of breaking the Show versus Tell rule I've encountered. Not only does this guy outright state what's already been shown, he's also outright stating what many characters have already outright stated. Even worse, he outright repeats himself nearly the entirety of the monologue. We get it. The book's long enough already.

Atlas Ruled Candyland
One of the reasons that Rand's philosophy comes forward so strongly and clearly in Shrugged is the fact that the entire setting is devised to do so. The antagonists of the novel, the bureaucrats, politicians, and lazy people, are clumsily crafted caricatures. While it's true that the things they do and the things they believe are all too often represented in our real world, these characters are almost insultingly flat. They are better suited to warding off fowl than they are to representing human beings.

Rand works hard to condemn the existence of gray in her black-and-white view of life, but she does so through a novel which presents a black-and-white reality. Obviously, this is a problem intrinsic to her medium--we cannot comprehensively prove anything about reality through fiction, but that is especially true when that fiction is pointed towards proving a specific thing. So while Rand's allegory is intelligent and poignant, it still suffers from the fact that it is, after all, just an allegory.

Final Thoughts
In the end, this is a must-read. The only reason that I needed to summarize my criticisms of the book is because the book forced me to. Shrugged is so well thought out that, in order to really read the book, you have to digest what it's saying, page by page, and look at what you really think. I don't agree with it all. But the victory of Shrugged is that I have to make that decision. The book takes itself so seriously that you have to, too. You have to decide when it takes itself too seriously, and when it's speaking truth. By the end, I found myself considering a lot of my own philosophies. I didn't buy it all, and while Rand may say that I failed her book, I still think that Atlas Shrugged wins a victory.

Science joke

Okay, so I just came up with this, and I'm really proud of it. That will probably only continue for the next five minutes, so I'll hurry up and tell it:

So Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr all end up in this weird alternate universe where famous people (dead and living) get together for the sake of being material for great jokes. After years of walking into different bars and crossing that famous road, they finally all run into each other.

Upon meeting each other, they are all suddenly beset by an impulsive urge to engage in a footrace. For the sake of impartiality, they enlist Sir Isaac Newton as the official. Sir Newton spends two minutes jamming ball and powder into his 1700s pistol, and then he fires it in the air, signaling the beginning of the race.

Stephen Hawking wheels into a black hole and pops out at the finish line.

Albert Einstein grabs an anvil and yells that because E=Mc^2, he just performed the equivalent of beating everybody in the footrace.

Niels Bohr...it's hard to tell what happened with Bohr. Witnesses of the race say that he lost by a mile, but Bohr contends that he won while nobody was watching.

In order to settle the dispute, the three famous physicists all come up to Sir Newton to see what he says, being the father of physics and everything.

Sir Newton opens his mouth to answer, but only blood comes out. He had been suddenly struck by the ball he had fired into the air minutes earlier, because as we all know, what goes up must come down.

Everything You Need To Know

Over the last eight months, I’ve seen a...healthy amount of teenage chick flicks. They are...thoughtful, inspired, intelligent exposés of teenage life, and, obviously, of life in general. Here is the wisdom I’ve been taught:

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED BY WATCHING TONS OF TEENAGE CHICK FLICKS:


1. It’s not your looks that are important, but who you are on the inside, especially when you’re being played by Lindsey Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Anne Hathaway, Hilary Duff, or Mandi Moore.

2. When life gets hard, you just need to power on through it by having a fairy godmother/rich royal relative/understanding father/presidential father/sensitive boyfriend.

3. The best way to resolve every complication in your life at once is by making a heartfelt speech in a large public setting, to everyone, including random strangers who have no idea who you are but who will still nod their heads in understanding as you talk vainly about yourself.

4. Popularity doesn’t mean anything—except that you’re a jerk.

5. Never feel like you need to change yourself. Unless you do. In that case, a radical wardrobe switch will do the trick (see number 2).

6. Someone always has a crush on you.

7. While looks aren’t important (see number 1), your true love will always be good-looking, anyway. Not that that’s important.

8. You shouldn’t judge others and fit them into stereotypes.

9. Cheerleaders are always freaking jerks, unless you’re a cheerleader.

10. When you make a mistake, everyone will eventually forgive you and you’ll come to a greater understanding of your true self (which was pretty awesome in the first place, anyway). This will all happen at the same time (see number 3).

Well, I have to go now. I’m off to find a fairy godmother/rich royal relative who’s willing to buy me a new wardrobe so that I can better understand that it’s my inside which is important, giving me enough maturity to have a sexy significant other.

New Blog

I've always been wary of "second blogs." I'm more especially wary of third and fourth blogs, but they don't have the same ominous slippery-slope feeling of the second. I feel like the division of people's online personalities into several different blogs does not translate very well to real life. You don't have a political self, a casual social self, a religious self, and a funny-comics-that-I-happen-to-like self that you direct your friends to in real life. They're all the same self.

I think this is why people don't have more than one facebook page. (Well, most people don't.) So, I hope that my desire to start a second blog doesn't irreversibly fracture some vital part of my Actual Personality. I feel like there are now Two Of Me online, involved in some kind of less antagonistic Gollum/Smeagol relationship. I don't know why I don't just merge all of this hypothetical content I suddenly aspire to write with the content of this blog. Either way, for now I have two blogs, and the Gollum to my * is Short Stories That Don't Suck.

Short Stories That Don't Suck is inspired by my curiosity with the short story genre as a writer. I love to write short stories, and from what I can tell, a lot of writers do. But according to a lot of people, the genre's passed the point of no return, received orange pips in the mail, forgot to wipe the blood of a lamb on their doorpost, etc. But I hypothesize that during such a period of history when all we want are shorter and quicker things (see: text messaging, Twitter, commercials), short stories should not be sucking. If anything, there should already be some kind of iTunes-like service where you can purchase a single short story for 99 cents instead of having to buy the entire collection from a bookstore.

Stephen King suggested that short stories are becoming a little too elitist and literary. He might have a point, though I love my literary fiction. I want to find the stories that are good whether you're an English major or not, the kind of story you'd recommend to both Uncle Archibald and Uncle Bill. What I've opted to do with SSTDS is post, three times a week, a different short story you can read for free online. (Not the same story three times.) They'll be, in my estimation, short stories worth reading and worth remembering. I hope the blog turns out to simultaneously be some form of defense for the genre as well as a successful exercise in articulating my aesthetics.

Meanwhile, * will probably remain a forum for me posting short, random crap with intermittent and inconsistent intervals. Meanwhile, go read a good short story every now and then. Email me (cduzett@gmail.com) a list of what you think some of the best short stories you've ever read are; that'd be enormously helpful.

Papers

In a period of seven days, running from Monday, April 6 through Monday, April 13, I wrote five papers, including and limited to:

- A paper on how Agamben's critique of Heidegger's "animal" and Bill Brown's thing theory relates to Heidegger's "things," and then how that applies to the Scottish crime fiction novel Laidlaw. One full page, single-spaced.

- A paper on how Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Maynard Dixon's Depression-era painting "Forgotten Man" both exhibit Existential alienation and isolation. Three pages, double-spaced.

- A paper on how Samuel Beckett's play Endgame demolishes traditional narratives, especially Aristotelian beginning-middle-end constructs. Seven full pages, double-spaced.

- A paper on how Nuyorican poetry now ironically has a set of rules that its poets must conform to despite how the genre was originally formed around the idea of resisting rules and creating raw, new expression. Six full pages, single-spaced.

- A paper on how, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael's quest to understand the whale bears many similarities to Kant's sublime (as outlined by Paul De Man), while Ahab and the Pequod's quest to kill the whale bears many similarities to Wordsworth's sublime. Nine full pages, single-spaced.

This was all accomplished within that seven day period, i.e., I idiotically didn't even start any of them beforehand.

It's finishing weeks like that that make me A) grateful for the interesting things I get to write about, while also B) glad that Spring term will be my last in the English major.

Truth.

This comes from Bill Simmons, heralded sports columnist for ESPN:

"The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter."

What say ye?