The Fable of the Horse
“Weary of liberty, he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.” Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.
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Literature
Skwire versus Ghate on Rand’s fiction
Rounds one and two, I hope, of a good discussion of Rand’s philosophical fiction. Sarah Skwire: “Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, and Fiction with a ‘Message’: The Problems with Didactic Fiction.” Onkar Ghate: “Is Ayn Rand a Writer of Didactic Fiction?” One interesting sub-issue to me arises from the fact that many readers do experience Rand’s
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Will the real Scrooge please stand up?
[Re-pinning for this season’s festivities.] We all know the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge. Or do we? Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has generated an astonishing variety of interpretations, and as with most rich tales the interpretations often tell us as much about the interpreter as the original story. The legend of Robin Hood is a
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Bertrand Russell’s “How I Write” — text
How I Write by Bertrand Russell I cannot pretend to know how writing ought to be done, or what a wise critic would advise me to do with a view to improving my own writing. The most that I can do is to relate some things about my own attempts. Until I was twenty-one, I
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The Fountainhead (Introduction to Philosophy this week)
In my Introduction to Philosophy course this week we are reading and discussing The Fountainhead, a great novel on the themes of independence and integrity. In Part One, Rand’s primary purpose is to contrast the characters Howard Roark and Peter Keating. Here is a table (click to enlarge) summarizing the main events in each young
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Aristotle at Pixar Animation Studios
A striking quotation about Aristotle’s Poetics and its contemporary relevance. Pixar Animation Studios is one the great technical and financial successes in the movie industry. Early in its development, two individuals who were to be instrumental to that success, John Lasseter and Pete Docter, knew that story-telling and not just techical wizardry was essential to
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Zero-sum economics? J. K. Rowling edition
Here is a clear example of zero-sum thinking, this time in literature. Author Lynn Shepherd laments J. K. Rowling’s publishing another book, on the grounds that the successful writer crowds out the less successful. In Shepherd’s words: “It wasn’t just that the hype was drearily excessive, or that (by all accounts) the novel was no
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Shooting Shakespeare–novelist William Burroughs
I have only two questions: 1. Would Shakespeare feel the need to shoot a portrait of Burroughs? 2. Would he find it amusing? Defacing others’ work is a recurring theme in modern and postmodern art: “Picasso took one of Matisse’s portraits of his daughter—and used it as a dartboard, encouraging his friends to do the
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