For some reason i never picked up The Fountainhead or any of Rand’s works at school. I avoid them to this day.

I find that most hominids who refer too often to Rand, don mantles of “Rationalist,” and/or cite, “The Fountainhead,” more than once per decade tend to be largely full of both themselves and crap. One half step up from revealers of The Black Helicopters. One full step down from Grassy Knollers.

The Randians at my backwater school were the gnurds (archaic spelling disclosing my age) too socially dyslexic for the Chess Club, dope-smoking or inter-gender dating.

i had a high school boyfriend who read Rand’s ‘Anthem’. He saw himself as the hero of the book…and i was his ‘Golden One’. He got very offended when i objected to being his ‘Golden One’ because she was such a goddammed twit. i knew then that Ayn Rand didn’t much like women. I don’t understand how any women can support a school of thought that denies them a place. But then again i don’t understand fundamentalist christian women, fundamentalist ubber orthodox Jewish women, ultra fundamentalist Muslim women, so i’m clearly a slow learner, though not as slow as Ms. Jane Galt.

in arch school i had to read ‘The Fountainhead’. it was a crock of shit and it pretty much identified who the assholes in my studio were – if i hadn’t already figured THAT out already. i’m usually pretty mellow about stupid reading assignments, but i blasted my professor on this requirement. Not only did i not identify with the arogant Howard Roark who i thought was pretty unpleasant and whose ‘ills’ mostly seemed self inflicted, but the only female character gets RAPED by Howard Roark and loves him for it. There was nothing in it for me to identify with as a person or an architect.

of course ‘everyone’ -i.e. my predominantly male classmates and my male professor thought i was ‘overreacting’.

ARGH

The Randy ideal of a great individual building, designed according to the needs of it’s genius architect, has destroyed urban fabric throughout America. If you wonder why we don’t build cities like we used to, Rand is guilty (with nods to Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Gary Cooper)

–Officer Barbrady
“Chicken Lover”
South Park

Sid58 @ 24

Yep: about 50 yrs. ago I found The Fountainhead meant “be yourself”: I even changed my signature to the angularity of Howard Roarks’. There is something of his idealism in me still.

No, no, no. The central message of all Ayn Rand’s work is “Be Ayn Rand.” You heretic, you.

The central message of Ayn Rand is “Greed is good.” Entrepreneurs are killers, of the planet and sometimes of people who oppose them.

Probably illiteracy or inbreeding or something.

Still, it has been on my mind (logged somewhere well behind the 200 books urgently demanding attention!) to read Shrugged or Fountainhead or some other Rand tract if only in the interests of self-defense.

Any suggestions on which of the “ouevre” is most approachable?

“I’m very fond of America’s policy towards immigrants, which is to say, we don’t have one. No one will try to force you to assimilate, but no one’s going to help you keep from assimilating either. This policy of benign neglect considerably alleviates both sorts of Muslim/Christian tension found in Europe: the populations that have been positively encouraged not to see themselves as part of the larger culture, and the populations that feel their traditions are under attack. Obviously, it’s not as if America is some sort of perfect paradise where no Muslim kid ever feels either excluded, or forced to assimilate. But the sharp group-on-group rage never seems to have gotten a foothold here. And of course, America in general has much more experience assimilating strangers than Europe.”

TRex, thank you for demystifying Ayn Rand, my least favorite writer. Besides her poor writing style (style missing altogether) is her illogic. Add to that a lack of character development and a confused premise (which she cannot reconcile so she turns John Galt into a “god”) and you have a third rate novel. Personally, a teen would get much more out of Jane Eyre and Whithering Heights.

Writers self-reveal. Her self-promotion as a philosopher and Aristotelian, is attached to her as fact by her followers. Silly fools. I suggest they read To Kill a Mocking Bird.

Will that work for me if I make up a list of characteristics and qualifications for myself? Will you print it as fact on FDL?

masaccio @ 71

I read Fountainhead when I was 17 or so; Rand writes so badly that the sex scene failed to arouse a highly testosterone-poisoned guy. McArdle is worse.

Ayn Rand, like L. Ron Hubbard, is dead. Unlike Hubbard, she stopped writing at that time.

Though there is still The Floating Head of Ayn Rand! (Don’t be afraid; it’s actually pretty funny.)