Ayn Rand's heartwarming advice for the lovelorn: "true love is profoundly selfish"

Contemplate the myriad forms of love: from the always-intriguing website Letters of Note, here's a heartwarming, personal response from Ayn Rand to a lovelorn letter-writer, who wrote asking the meaning of a sentence in The Fountainhead.

And by "heartwarming" I mean obtusely, ideologically, and entirely Objectivist, in the way only someone who took her own ill-formed ideas of "rational self-interest" entirely too much to heart.

By 1948, the former Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum was a successful novelist, screen-writer and (in 1947) had already been a "friendly witness" for the House Un-American Activities Committee. A film version of The Fountainhead, with a screenplay written by her and starring Rand's own choice of Gary Cooper as ideology-driven architect Howard Roark, was in the making. She had a developing circle of friends that included economist Ludwig von Mieses (currently the libertarians' favorite go-to-guy for free-market capitalism), who pointedly called the writer "the most courageous man in America." She loved it.

By the time she published the thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Rand's megalomania was on full display: in one contemporary interview she referred to herself as "the most creative thinker alive." Reminiscent of Alexander the Great who wept because he had no new worlds to conquer, Rand then fell into a severe depression that may have been aggravated by her use of prescription amphetamines.

She recovered her stride. As time went on her admirers surrounded her in cult-like reverence as Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, including literature, music, sexuality, even facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers -- not to mention the scrawling of "Who is John Galt?" in the men's rooms of a thousand college-town bars.

This single-minded adulation badly warped her own wobbly opinions: at one point she remarked that in the history of philosophy she could recommend only "Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand."

But in 1948, all that lay ahead. The Fountainhead, written in 1943, had become a wildly popular fiction of romance, media manipulation ... and blowing up your own compromised building in swooning self-interest to personal vision. Who better to ask for an explanation of romantic love than Ayn Rand?

May 22, 1948

Dear Ms. Rondeau:

You asked me to explain the meaning of my sentence in The Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I."

The meaning of that sentence is contained in the whole of The Fountainhead. And it is stated right in the speech on page 400 from which you took the sentence. The meaning of the "I" is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person.

A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

The usual (and very vicious) nonsense preached on the subject of love claims that love is self-sacrifice. A man's self is his spirit. If one sacrifices his spirit, who or what is left to feel the love? True love is profoundly selfish, in the noblest meaning of the word — it is an expression of one's highest values. When a person is in love, he seeks his own happiness — and not his sacrifice to the loved one. And the loved one would be a monster if she wanted or expected such sacrifice.

Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent "I" is a person who exists for his own sake. Such a person does not make any vicious pretense of self-sacrifice and does not demand it from the person he loves. Which is the only way to be in love and the only form of a self-respecting relationship between two people.

Ayn Rand

"I'll Explain the Breadcrumbs Later" [Meg Cowan]

"I'll Explain the Breadcrumbs Later"

(Meg Cowan)

Out here where the fallen snow smells of anise

and power lines swag in strips of licorice

there is no shame in bettering your chances—

in hoping the birds have already left.  

It’s nearly always a woman lulling you in

with promises of a telephone and warm broth;

a promise to love you in the way only

a decaying tooth can. There is always a trellis,

an unpruned trumpet vine, a couple of lambs

baring sugar-cube teeth at you—their pupils

constricted to a Phillips head setting (telling

you ‘stop’ or ‘pray’ depending on your angle).

They know that under her calico dress

those knees bend back just like theirs.

You’ll be too busy gnawing a ginger shingle

to hear the gas flick on. She knows.

She knows all you want is for someone

to comb your hair into slack braids, fill you

with cabbage and blood pudding while she

renders a mazurka on her squeezebox.  

She’ll join fingertips around your wrist, run

her hand up your arm as far as it can go,

far enough to decide if you’re ready. As you

follow her upstairs like a docile hound, listen

for a slip—for her to wonder aloud if a

dusting of flour precludes the egg wash.

When she stresses the finality of breadcrumbs,

that’s your cue. Be polite, but don’t stop to pick

butterscotch off the doorjamb. By the time

you get to the road, you may find pinch bruises

surfacing on the thickest parts of your arms.

If there’s a spike buck lapping a puddle of

root beer, he won’t believe you were looking

for a phone—the dead giveaway:

your bare feet. Your breath

and hair now heavy with clove.

"I'll Explain the Breadcrumbs Later" by Meg Cowan appeared online in The Pedestal Magazine. 

Meg Cowan in her own words: "In a perfect world, I’d be a writer AND an illustrator while returning to school once again to study ornithology, maybe botany. I’m happy as long as I’m learning new things.  My husband and I are seriously considering moving further north in New England and going 'off the grid' in as many ways as we can.  We hope by this summer, our dreams of an old farmhouse in Vermont surrounded by lots of acreage will be very close to reality.

I’m also the Editor in Chief of Noctua Review, which is the annual art and lit journal published by Southern Connecticut State University, where I’ve received a fellowship for the 2012-2013 year (and will be influencing young minds …. scary).  And I’m an avid reader of current writing.  I can’t stress enough the importance of being a reader before you class yourself as a writer. . . . 

I call people 'dude' a lot.  I bow to the Dalai Lama and Tom Waits only, and in no particular order."

Summer reading: food from Wendell Berry, trippy fiction, and the Beat brotherhood

When the weather outside is hot, cyber-shopping makes more sense than ever -- with a few clicks  all of us can go back to dreaming of iced tea, barbecue, or whatever makes summer the vacation season for each of us. Here are some books reviewed by others that are worth a browse. Order these right here on Bellemeade Books using the Amazon.com search box -- the books will be on their way and you didn't even have to leave the air conditioning.

Wendell Berry

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press, above) If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland, Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generationis unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Ultra Violet and the Warhol set: "You Are Who You Eat"

Ultra Violet is gone, Lou Reed is gone, Nico is gone, Andy Warhol himself is gone, and photographer Billy Name died this year on July 18. Many of the mainstays and scene-makers that entertained a post-Woodstock, club-centric, drug-fueled New York downtown scene are disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Isabelle Collin Dufresene [aka "Ultra Violet"] was a Warhol creation as much as her own -- artist, playwright, and Warhol superstar who in 1980 wrote the autobiographical play "You Are Who You Eat." As early as 1988 she published her memoirs Famous For Fifteen Minutes, My Years With Andy Warhol. It received the Frankfurt Library Award and has been  published in 12 languages.

 

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the mid- to late sixties, Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

 



The Velvet Underground's third album

(photo by Billy Name)

 

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far distance from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

 

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise oral biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou, with Sterling Morrison, Nico, Maureen Tucker,

and John Cale: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

 

Bockris' and Malanga's collection of great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

JSTOR slowly opens the gates of academy research

If you've ever run into the frustrations of discovering an interesting article is out-of-reach behind JSTOR, the gate-keepers of academia, here's some (limited) good news: JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required.

Jennifer Howard at Wired Campus reports that there are some strings attached, and the accessible journals constitute just eighteen percent of JSTOR's annual requests. In the article Howard reports that JSTOR said it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles yearly.

That is a lot of potential paying customers. Here's the fine print of JSTOR's free beta, from Howard's post:

... Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase are American Anthropologist, the American Historical Review, Ecology, Modern Language Review, PMLA, College English, the Journal of Geology, the Journal of Political Economy, Film Quarterly, Representations, and the American Journal of Psychology .

The 70 journals chosen “represent approximately 18 percent of the annual turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the organization said in an announcement previewing Register & Read.

Howard also reports that the relative success of JSTOR's 2011 access-test program, Early Journal Content, has been a prompt to further public access, though likely through some kind of eventual paywall.

....In September 2011, JSTOR also opened up global access to its Early Journal Content. According to Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early Journal Content from September 2011 through December 2011. ...”We absolutely consider this to be a success. In the first four months after launch, we are seeing over 1 million accesses to this content by people who would not have had access previously. This is at the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled with this result. The Register & Read beta is an exciting next step that we are taking, working closely with our publisher partners who own this content.”

The number of annual denied requests has raised questions -- perhaps mostly among frustrated researchers, or the merely curious who like to read beyond their college years -- that JSTOR has been searching for a pay-tier system, as well as waving away scholarly research criticism.

By offering the new program, JSTOR is making some tentative and potentially lucrative steps to its information access, just at the time when web neutrality is at issue. The key is in McGregor's phrase "our publisher partners who own this content": the answer to JSTOR access, it appears, will be in the paying price for information.