Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

  Ayn Rand is a very famous name. Over and over, she is connected to conservatism. I am a liberal. Therefore, I expected not to like this book. Due to it's length of over 900 pages, I thought it would be a particularly painful book to slog through. This first thought, that of being a very long book and therefore a long torture, proved to be false. For the most part, it was not a torture. In fact, I found it to be a real page turner. In many ways, it really is the antithesis of who I am politically. This becomes increasingly clear as I neared the ending. I have even seen the video where that idiot, Jordan Peterson, tears her down. Jordan Peterson is famous today. But I would be surprised if people continue to talk about him 40 years after his death. Jordan Peterson is a kind of joke played on gullible people. Ayn Rand is an excellent writer, regardless of where I lay my viewpoints on this book.
   A computer virus or trojan is an interesting thing. It is like a thought or an idea that a computer shares with another computer. As a result, the computer becomes damaged. Perhaps the information of the user becomes compromised. Regardless, what if this sort of virus was possible for a human being? A human being can cough on another, have sex with another, touch another, or even prick one's skin on some innocuous looking thorn, and pass all kinds of viruses and bacteria into the system which may go on to damage and possibly even kill the victim. But is it possible for a human being to be reprogrammed by a book and become damaged?
   So, for instance, certain books have had their major effects on me. One of these is a poem by Emily Jane Brontë called "Remembrance.""Remembrance" is a poem written to honor the death of someone Brontë loved. The key lines for me are as follows:

 

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,

And even Despair was powerless to destroy,

Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,

Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

In a time when I suffered from severe depression, reading this poem over and over again somehow brought some healing to me and a great deal of thought: what if life could be enjoyed without joy? Or another way to look at it: life can be worth living without happiness. This line of thought eventually lead me to believe that the pursuit of happiness is a kind of blind ambition. It is not that I am unhappy. It's just that I can move on from this idea and not worry too much about it. It had a great deal to do with who I became, and who I am today. In some ways, it was an inoculant against many of the ideas present in this book.
   With all that I have said, there are a number of absurd ideas in this book that are worth discussing. The first is the idea of the ideal woman. Who is she? We are really only presented with three female characters throughout these 900+ pages: Dominique, Catherine, and Mrs. Keating. Dominique is a haughty female. Her first encounter with sex is a rape. It is a rape that ultimately forces her to fall in love with the books main character; its hero, Howard Roark. After falling in love with him, she tries to punish him and to make herself suffer by marrying the wrong kind of inferior men. The first was Peter Keating. The second was Gail Wynand. In both cases, her body was theirs. With Peter Keating, she allows him sexual interaction with her anytime he wants, or never if he wants. She is merely a kind of doll for him. A doll cannot say yes or no. It can only lie on the bed and allow itself to be used. It has no feeling or ability to say no. Of course, for her, it is her choice to be like that. She refuses to allow her personality into Keating's house. She does everything for him professionally: she lines up the customers, hosts dinner parties, makes the right kind of friends. But she herself she denies. It is a kind of punishment. But for what? Perhaps she is some kind of masochist. But she is not the only one. Both Mrs. Keating (the mother) and Catherine both show similar signs of simply being support for the men they are connected to. Feminist critic, Susan Miller, wrote in the 70s that Rand was a traitor to her own gender. Apparently, there are some other ideas, that Dominique had essentially invited Roark to rape her, and therefore it was not a true rape. But Dominique even states later that Roark had raped her, and she becomes self destructive.
   The main antagonist in The Fountainhead is Ellsworth Toohey. He is essentially considered an inferior man. He is inferior physically. He is not strong. He barely survived childhood. But he is intelligent. He is a sponge. Rand says of him that he has nothing original to give. Due to his inferiority, he wants to bring the whole of civilization down to his level. He uses his power and intellect to put the average person with no real abilities at the top and destroy those, like Roark, who are individualists and essentially better than everyone else.
   For me, the most interesting character is Peter Keating. Peter Keating is the foil in this story. He has no real talent of his own, according to Rand. Yet, he manages to get to the top of the heap for years. He is the most celebrated and successful architect of the novel. Yet, his best work is that which has been heavily influenced by Roark's designs. He hates Roark throughout most of the book for being able to live and enjoy life without the approval of others. He is the first to marry Dominique. In the end, though, he loses Dominique and his popularity.
   Most of the characters do not go through any kind of real change. The exception is probably Toohey's niece, whose ego is ultimately destroyed by Toohey. However, while her essence is essentially destroyed, The Fountainhead leaves off when Keating is going through a kind of personal renaissance. He has gone back to his original love for painting. Roark looks at those paintings and declares that it is too late for Keating. But what is too late? Keating, though not as wealthy as before, is still quite rich. He does not need his artwork to sell in order to succeed. He only needs to paint for himself. In fact, when he paints, it's the only time he can really escape his unhappiness. Further, when he goes to trial to speak about Roark, he no longer cares what other people think of him. He is his own man and still evolving.
   Roark is a caricature. He has all the depth of a cardboard figure. He does not change. He does not evolve. He is already basically perfect, from Rand's perspective. But he is fundamentally wrong about the individual being better alone than working together with others. It is true that sometimes when there are too many cooks, the broth is spoiled. But it is also true that a single bad cook can spoil the broth. He has an artistic integrity which he refuses to subordinate to the wants of others. The others end up wanting his work. Society changes, not him.
   He ends up destroying an installation of government housing projects because he did not like what others had done to his original design. The jury ends up letting him go because of a very long speech about how the individual is more important than the collective. It is the perfect anti-communist speech. But his idea that true leaders do not need others is absurd. Roark has to follow the laws of physics. He is a follower of material sciences. He does not learn how to make plastic in order to evolve as an architect. He watches the work of others and creates from the new inspiration. That is as it should be. He depends on the work of engineers before him, and physicists, to let him use the science of structure to make sure that they do not fall down for a lack of strength. He must stand on their shoulders. Rand often makes mention of him shunning the work of the previous architects: where the form and facades of columns become unnecessary to the structure, but still employed for the sake of art. Yet he is as dependent on the laws of nature as any of them, and he is a follower in this regard and has nothing of his own to add.  He is a designer who follows the same laws as everyone else. He is not a scientist who is discovering the laws of the universe.
   Ironically, I can see parts of myself in Roark's character. Perhaps they are flaws, or maybe they're strengths. Perhaps there is a little Roark in everyone, and this is the reason for the appeal. Perhaps it exists as a sort of "I'm the oddball rejected by my society because I'm actually better than everyone else and that's why they hate me." It's a kind of sour grapes approach to one's ego. A way of saying it's the fault of everyone else. I have learned one thing: it is easier to change myself than it is to change the world. Not changing and not adapting is in fact the sign of an absence of intelligence. It is saying "I don't have to change because I'm better than everyone else" rather than "How can I maintain myself, be who I am, and still fit into the culture and expectations of my society?" I wrote to my friend about the concept of common sense that it is 'usually inaccurate and unimaginative.'
   Rand is a great writer. The Fountainhead is a great book. It is fun to read. The philosophy which Rand extols, and to which the book is a vehicle for its oration, is well illustrated even if it is short sighted and foolish. Roark is not the hero. Keating is the hero. But she ends the book before we get to see the rebirth of his character as an independent man who finds his love in art. He is on the verge of becoming his own man. If there is a real hero, it is Peter Keating. But Rand kills the book before that can happen. I can't help but wonder if Rand knew it.

The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories

The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories has an impressive amount of reading matter for the low low price of just 99 cents. I am currently reading story 7 of 26. Already I have forgotten some of them. So, I thought I'd build out my blog post from here with what I remember of what I've already read. What's in The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories? It is a mixture of classic and modern. At least thus far, the longer pieces are classic and in the public domain (for instance, the novella "The Whisperer in the Darkness" by H. P. Lovecraft) while the modern pieces, thus far, are short stories.

I will skip "Midnight at Valdosta's" and "The Case of the Peculiar Safe." I do remember a few things about "Midnight at Valdosta's." But I didn't really get the sense of a story out of it. It was more of an impression of something. Like it's a piece of a story or just the beginning of one.

The Acquisition of Mandrakes and Assistants, Jillian Venters

"The Acquisition of Mandrakes and Assistants" by Jillian Venters was the first remarkable story that I ran into.

The assistant is tired of the tiresome professor, and decides to try on a different occupation: taking care of a child. That child happens to belong to a twisted many who enjoys tormenting children. She rescues the boy, burns down the house with everyone locked inside, and goes back to work as an assistant. I really enjoyed this story.

The Whisperer in Darkness, H. P. Lovecraft

"The Whisperer in Darkness" is, as already mentioned, a novella by H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft is a writer whom I've always wanted to like ever since I heard his name mentioned by one of my favorite pulp fiction writers, Robert E. Howard, famous for his Conan stories. Even when I was younger, I found my eyes very nearly bleeding with effort to maintain attention to his books. I am no different now. I am perhaps more disciplined. But I really had to prop open my eyes to keep going. I have since discovered he was a horrible person as a racist. So, I'm not as motivated as before to like his work. What I like about his work is the mythology that he creates. The ideas about extra terrestrials and old dark magic and science from the cold planet, Pluto, are pretty great. There have been many who have brought to life his ideas through their artwork. But the writing itself is onerous.

Most of the story centers around a character, Albert N. Wilmarth, an assistant professor of English at a university. He's made a penpal of Henry Akeley, who lives in a house on the edge of an area haunted by creatures from this planet of advanced and sinister aliens. He has recordings, photographs, and anecdotes about the creatures sent to him. The sinister aliens repress knowledge of their presence through terror and alliances with humans who assist them. At last, Henry Akeley is compromised. He invites Wilmarth to his abode, but also to bring all of the material he had sent including the audio recording, the photos, and even the letters that had been sent. Clearly, at this point, there is a problem. But Wilmarth follows the instructions and all the materials are lost when he flees the house the first night of his visit. I guess it's not a bad story. But I just cannot get into H. P. Lovecraft's method of telling his tale. It is boring. He is entirely too much 'tell' and not enough 'show' when it comes to storytelling.

Wikipedia writes, "In addition to being a textbook example of Lovecraft's characteristically non-occult brand of horror, in an age when the genre consisted almost entirely of ghosts, vampires, goblins, and similar traditional tales, "Whisperer" is one of the earliest literary appearances of the now-cliché concept of an isolated brain (although the alien brain case is not transparent as with later cinematic examples of this trope).

"The story retains some seemingly supernatural elements, such as its claim that the alien fungi, although visible to the naked eye and physically tangible, do not register on photographic plates and instead produce an image of the background absent the creature (an impossibility by any known laws of optics, though a trait commonly attributed to vampires), although the story does mention that this is possibly due to the creatures' fungoid and alien structure which works differently from any known physical organism. It is stated that the electrons of these fungoid aliens possess a different vibrational frequency that would require the development of a novel technique by a chemist in order to record their image."

So, that's the issue with Lovecraft. His work is of a pioneering nature. So, it is important. The ideas are in fact very good. But as a storyteller, I just have a horrible time with the style of the stories. I ought to point out that the style does seem cliche with his period. But who sets the cliche? Was it really his fault? That story construction of, "Here's an unbelievable story. I'm very smart and educated. I didn't believe it at first. But then..." is so tired and uninteresting. And constantly, "on the verge of terror from ..." isn't much better.

The Brass Goggle Factory Worker, John Leavitt

"The Brass Goggle Factory Worker" by John Leavitt was quite interesting. It is flawed due to some poor editing and proofreading. There are many grammar, spelling, and wrong word errors to this tale throughout. At times it is distracting and outright annoying. But inside the story itself is quite interesting.

This story could have taken place somewhere inside the universe of George Orwell's legendary dystopian masterpiece, 1984. It doesn't have that depth. There isn't quite the cold chill horror or brilliance of Orwell's masterpiece. But it's just a short story.

The Tailed Men, Arthur O Friel

"The Tailed Men" is set in the Amazon Forest. A white man is tortured before being returned to his friends. His friends decide to go back into the forest to get revenge against the race. Quite beyond belief, they are able to find the very tribe responsible for his death and the enact their revenge by dressing up as a monster and slaughtering the men and women and setting the village to fire. In their murderous frenzy, they discover that the tribe possibly mates with the local monkeys, resulting in these crossbreeds of half men half monkeys from which the men with tails are concocted.

I have a hard time understanding the connection between steampunk and this particular story.

The Impossible Mister Lapin, Peter Wordworth

I have no idea who Peter Wordworth is. And, for at least the first few page results from Google, nor does Google. I enjoyed this story.

A man pursues mad science in an effort to learn how to turn himself into a rabbit. By doing his research, he is able to discover the secret. In so doing, learning the secret language of the magical universe, he becomes half rabbit and half man. Why not?

With his newfound expertise in the occult, he becomes a kind of investigator into weird happenings. For awhile, this means uncovering silly attempts or deceptions, until another less successful than himself accidentally transforms himself into a gold statue and brings to life a gold statue into a boar which terrorizes locals. He is able to solve the mystery and stop the boar using symbols.

It was a fun short story. I don't know anything else about Wordworth.

The War Effort, Austin H. Williams

Austin H. Williams gets results on Google. He has a number of stories in these types of anthologies and some kind of fiction magazine called Steampunk Tales. So, he's gotten his work around a bit.

A great warrior, Timo Malthusset, falls in love with a woman in a religious order. He dedicates himself to her and follows her, completely ignorant about the religious order, called the Messengers, to which he is devoting himself.

She leads him to an underground world where he is promptly knocked unconscious and turned into a half man half machine under the control of some kind of crystal embedded in his skull. He discovers that his beloved lady is a cannibal and that the religion is some kind of super advanced super sadistic culture which eats the bodies of the dead and has a small army of half men half machine slaves. He is able to wiggle himself into falling to the ground, smashing the crystals on his head on impact(I guess that no helmet or some kind of protective casing design never occurred to the designer). Now he is a super powerful half man half machine who goes about killing the engineer, Garum, and the woman whom he had dedicated himself before running away.

Ok, it wasn't so bad. But Williams could have done more with the story. Perhaps he is.

Herbert West: Reanimator, H. P. Lovecraft

For the first time, I have found a story by Lovecraft that I enjoyed. It was fairly well written. It's the story of a mad scientist and his sidekick who are on a mission to reanimate a corpse. It isn't terribly unlike Shelley's Frankenstein. Though, instead of reanimating the dead with electricity, a freshly made corpse without too much decay is chemically reanimated.

The mad scientist sub genre is one of endless amusement. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jekyll, are all very interesting characters. Dr. West is nowhere near as famous as those others, but he is definitely within their ranks, albeit less infamous.

Dr. West succeeds in his quest. For the most part, he is able to destroy what he creates. But in the end, those whom he failed to destroy end up forming a small troop who literally tear him to pieces. There really isn't much to this story. But it is enjoyable. As I read the story late at night, I felt entertained from the first to the last page. Finally, a Lovecraft story I enjoyed.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

Mark Twain is definitely among my favorite American writers of that century. I have read at least four of his novels as well as a collection of short stories.

I don't think I would have ever read this novel if not for the fact that it was in this compilation of so called 'steampunk' books. I keep having to go back to the definition of steampunk to see how it fits in. Well, it's a book about late 19th century technology and philosophy going back to around 6th century England. Fortunately, everyone speaks modern English in this story.

Mark Twain's description of the time is a bit of a mix between the impossible and reality. Magic does not exist, though people believe in it. Superstition is ever more powerful in his rendition of the 6th century. People believe in absurd stories quite easily.

The main character, Hank, mysteriously gets whisked to King Arthur's period and is quickly captured by a knight. His knowledge of an imminent total eclipse is enough so that he makes people believe that he has caused the eclipse, and that it is not just a natural phenomenon.

He is also fairly rational, which gives him advantages over the local population. When he has to face off with the magical Merlin, it becomes apparent that Merlin is a fraud. He has no power at all. He only pretends about magic. So, it is easy for Hank, a man of some science and engineering, to make people believe that he is powerful in a magical sense. What is magic but an appearance of the impossible?

Eventually, he manages to manufacture a number of technologies. Everything from gunpowder to laying down some telecommunications. He is able to set up quite a bit. Much of his criticism of Arthur's day I find is relevant today. He talks about how classes are treated differently. While the punitive punishments are certainly not the same today as they were in his America, let alone 6th Century 'England'. For instance, he talks about how a rich or titled lord can basically kill a man or woman without any issue, a poor person so much as scratching a rich man is risking a quick death or a slow lingering death in a horrible prison. These extremes don't exist today, but there are similarities. For instance, scratch a Ferrari on the road, and the cost of the repair will be greater than a  poor person's car. If the man in the Ferrari kills someone and it's their fault, the insurance will pay for it and life will go on for the most part.

There is an interesting tug of war between reason and superstition. Eventually, superstition wins. While Hank is away in France, the whole of England falls apart due to war, and the Dark Ages church takes over. There is a war where many knights die, but it is a war between tens of thousands of knights vs a small band of boys. The battle is largely won, but when Hank goes out to see if he can help some of the dead, he is injured. Further, the sickness which comes with war, of all the decomposing bodies, eventually overwhelms his resistance. The Dark Ages take over the Age of Enlightenment which he tries to ushur in. Surely, there is some similarity between my contemporary society. In these days, there is a huge growth in strength among those who don't believe in science and those who do. Hank believes that once people are educated, it will overwhelm those who cling to ignorance. At some point in our current, recent history, surely we have felt the same way. But the tide is shifting to that of ignorance once again: people don't believe in 5+/- earth, or the round earth, or climate change, or any of these things which are well established by experts. They would rather believe an old book.Will we ever change? Or will this tug of war between reason and superstition always exist?

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal, by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Raven" and a few other of Poe's poems are some of my favorite pieces of writing. While I like some of his short stories, there's nothing to equal "The Raven" in my opinion. Of the stories of his that I've read, this was among my least favorite. I am not even sure if he wrote it. In fact, it seems like someone else wrote it and he's commenting on it. However, it's possible that he wrote it to be a hoax and then treated it as a hoax itself. It's something of an ironic approach.

This isn't the first story of its kind that I've read, nor is it the best. I much preferred Cyrano de Bergerac's story, "Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon," which is similar in many ways.

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It's funny, to look at the cover of this book because in the story, the only white woman is the girlfriend of the narrator, Edward Malone, before he goes off on his adventure to the lost world. Also, there is no T-Rex. The worst creatures they run into are giant toads which hop on their victims with their larger than elephant sized asses, squishing them to death. Way to go book cover illustrator with your horribly inaccurate portrayal!

Edward Malone is in love with a woman who wants a hero for a husband. So, he goes off on this adventure with some professors and an adventurer to see if Professor Challenger's description of this lost world was true and accurate.

The geography is a bit of a puzzle to me. There seems to be a rather significant land barrier between this lost world and the rest of the world. First, they manage to get across due to a tree being close to a rift. Once that tree is gone, they don't know how to build a tree to get back across. Of course, that's quite amazing considering that there are supposed to be two very intelligent academics, one adventurer, and the reporter/narrator. I suppose that they have no engineering ideas among them to help them escape.

Over a period of time, they discover the pterodactyls, a stegosaurus, a gigantic toad, Iguanodon, Allosaurus, and Megalosaurus, and some other prehistoric animals. They get attacked by a tribe of missing link human-like apes, but manage to escape with some red skinned Indians (Native Americans).

Racism: as is often the case, this book has a few moments. The one black character is a 'black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent.' I do believe that he's paying the character compliments in his mind. But it's certainly not at all a compliment.

There are two 'half breeds' which are described. One of whom is said to have 'the vice of curiosity.' However, later on, that same vice is described as 'the bravery of the scientific mind... It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously, so that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations.' That is to say, the curiosity of the 'half breed' is a vice, but in the white men, it's celebrated and makes them brave. Oddly enough, there are not many pages to separate the seemingly obvious contradiction. Later on, the 'red Indians' are also poorly described. Fortunately, the racism in these  descriptions is limited to a few pages only.

I did enjoy the book, despite the silliness and racism.

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

I had wanted to enjoy this story. Surely it is meant to be a comedy. It is about a bunch of policemen who are recruited to infiltrate an anarchists' group. Ironically, the man who recruits all of them is the leader of the group, and all of the members of the anarchists' group are policemen.

I think that the story is meant to be a comedy. Perhaps I did laugh. But I'm not really sure. I was disappointed with the story.