>With this hell that is my cold (not just mine; everybody at the Horn Book is taking turns staying home sick, and over on Facebook Elizabeth said she felt like she was three dwarfs at once: Dopey, Sneezy and Grumpy) I’m sorry I haven’t been here for a few days. I did have a bright moment on the subway this morning, where a man reading The Fountainhead gave up his seat to a lady. For those of you who never went through an Objectivist stage, this is kind of like spotting Ralph Nader test-driving a Hummer.
About Roger Sutton
>No, no, there must have been an exchange of value. Your altruism-induced blindness just made you miss it.
>Told you I had a cold.
>Oh, how funny. But it confirms my theory that the people who are attracted to Fountainhead are the ones who are least likely to actually practice Objectivism.
>How about Atlas Shrugged? You really have to be somewhat intrigued by the concepts to force your way through all those speeches. I have to say that you seem to be right in my case; I’m not at all an Objectivist, but I do love her books… and take her philosophy with a huge grain of salt.
>When Random House editor Bennett Cerf tried to get Rand to cut the “This is John Galt speaking” fifty-page speech from the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged, Rand famously replied, “would you cut the Bible?”
>Roger, I’m just glad you didn’t tell the story of the time I had a blind date with an Ayn Rand fanatic. (Member of the Rand society, his second favorite author was Victor Hugo.) I went to the bookstore and read 10 pages of the Fountainhead, then called him and said “I don’t think this is going to work out.”
>As another Jew, Isaac Asimov, once said, “Ï have no false modesty… or any other kind, for that matter.”