Literary News

[bendk]

A new Lovecraft letter has been discovered.

https://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/new-lovecraft-letter-surfaces/

[bendk]

The grave of Miguel Cervantes has possibly been found.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-10003928.html

[bendk]

Harper Lee to publish second novel.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/...-july-28687808

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird. This should sell well.

[Druidic]

I'm not a Cynic philosopher. They take a certain satisfaction in being proven right. I don't. I'm a materialist and a pragmatist. I hope I'm wrong at the end of the day...but I doubt it.

[miguel1984]

Gee, they are still trying to make us believe Rand is a good writer. These stupid libertarians.

It's like David Simon, the creator of The Wire, said: that libertarians did not like to pay taxes and, in order to hide this fact, they created a "philosophy" to justify themselves.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Well, just for the record I'm not an Objectivist, but for many years I've had an inexplicable interest in Rand's life and work, even though her political stance and worldview is the total opposite of mine. But I think it's good sometimes to read material by people who one disagrees with. Hell, I don't really agree with Ligotti's philosophical views either, but I still find them interesting.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

There's quite a few things I enjoyed about The Fountainhead. I wouldn't recommend it much, there are too many boring bits and quite a few unconvincing parts but I just couldn't call it a plainly bad book.
I think Rand was nuts and there is plenty to dislike about her and her work, but it's unfair that people confuse her with a lot of the type of right wingers she despised. She's so widely mocked that she's become underrated. A very minor injustice though, hardly worth losing sleep over.

[Druidic]

I've never felt a desire to read Rand but I'd check her out before I'd read someone like Hubbard. Rand believed in her philosophy; L. Ron was a cynical opportunist who was probably mentally ill in his last decades. Actually I've gone out of my way to say some nice--and vague--things about her. I figure anyone so despised had to get something right. As Wilhelm Reich said, The truth is so big every system has a little of it.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Robert Adam Gilmour, I would agree with you on The Fountainhead, though I probably rate it a little more highly. Having said that, I've never been able to make it through more than one hundred pages of Atlas Shrugged.

I will admit to admiring her single-minded dedication when it came with writing her novels: she seemed to have the ability to work on something for years without getting distracted by side-projects (would that I could say the same). And unlike many fiction writers who keep writing long after they've exhausted all their ideas, she knew when to stop.

[ChildofOldLeech]

I'm far from an admirer of Elron and his works - I'll always remember when I was in middle school and my father took me and a friend to LA to see Phantom of the Opera and in the course of the looking for a restroom on Hollywood Blvd. we ended up in front of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, where a matron with a glassy-eyed expression and a scottish burr somehow talked us all into taking the full tour which involved watching a disturbing short film ostensibly about drug abuse - and will not hesitate to call Ronnie a manipulative, money-grubbing, mentally disturbed a-hole, but in my mind he's still far less loathsome than the unapologetically sociopathic Aynnie Rand, who tried to make lack of empathy and total self-centeredness into virtues and had a soft spot for a serial killer.

(Of course, the fact that Hubbard was a passable writer of pulp fiction (his Fear is entertaining for what it is) prior to going looney-tunes doesn't hurt either)