Welcome back to the agoric cafe for more coffee and philosophy in keeping with the randian theme of today's video the background I've got behind me is the city of Ure, Colorado, which was the original inspiration for Gulch Gulch and Atlas structs Look at it there and I've put a link to the The creative commons license for this photo in the description So the The town is spelled. Oh, you the town's name is spelled.  You're a I Can't help it is I want to Hearst would say Anyway, so Various criticisms have been made of iron rant and some of them are merited and some of them aren't But one of the criticisms that I've always found the oddest Is the claim that she's a bad writer There's even a book about rand called how bad writing destroyed the world I confess I haven't read it but by any measure I guess the title at least is guilty of the form of bad writing known as a verbally Uh, it seems to me that you know, whatever you think of the content for ideas It seems obvious to me that she writes beautifully and powerfully Of course rand herself was often unable or unwilling to recognize the literary merits of other authors But that's no excuse for imitating her Now a few specific criticisms are sometimes here. One is the people complain that She gives her characters unrealistic names. So her heroes tend to have Heroic-sounding angular names like Kira Argova Ragnar Doniskeld and Dagny Taggart And her villains have soft and squishy names like Ellsworth Tooie Tinky Holloway and Wesley Moot or mouse. I'm not sure how you pronounce that Uh back in college, I wrote a rand parody in which the hero was named a rip slash goldkwanger And the villain was named a doctor mushy turd uh But you know Charles Dickens also passes judgment on his characters by giving them names like thomas grad grind Eriah heap ebonyster scrooge and mr. Smallweed And sintha lewis who incidentally was a major influence on rand in fact she even Called him The greatest living writer Although he doesn't seem to be a favorite of most of rand's admirers today But sintha lewis signals the disreputable character of some of his uh, at least the trivial character of some of his uh People in his novels by giving their names like pinky parrot it'll bear shoot and brazilian's windriff It turns out there really is an actual person named adelbert shoot. I'm very sorry about that Uh, so it's kind of a you know double standard if uh, you know Dickens and lewis get a get a pass for doing that and hen rand doesn't Uh, another criticism is that the dialogue in rand's novels is unrealistic. Well, yeah, it is often unrealistic It's also unrealistic in musicals that people break into song Uh, it's unrealistic in shakespeare's plays and people suddenly break into iambic pentameter You know in analyzing something you have to understand the kind of genre the person is is trying to write in and rand is writing A stylized version of reality. She always made very clear in her in her in her essays on literature, which are a A mixture of wisdom and folly but uh You know generally she she gives good reasons for liking what she likes but terrible reasons for disliking what she dislikes That applies perhaps more broadly than just to her literary essays, but anyway Um, but she makes clear that she's writing a stylized version of Reality not perhaps to the same extent that uh, that elizabeth and play or broadway musical is a stylized version of reality but still it is um And you know so complaining that the dialogue is unrealistic is in some ways Missing the point now of course she called her approach reform of realism, but she meant something very specific by that and she distinguished it from on naturalism And we can quibble about whether she's chosen exactly the right terminology there, but anyway, she makes clear that she by realism she doesn't mean that You know that her people will talk when people actually talk in everyday life that's you know one of the many sins of the Atlas shrug movie trilogy is that There was an attempt in that trilogy to have people talk more the way people talk in everyday life And they're mixtures of sort of authentic randian dialogue thrown together with uh With stuff that's not um and it's uh, it's Sounds awful. It's um Uh, it's as though In the middle of a shakespeare play the main character suddenly said No No, well, let's let's You know, I'm getting pretty hungry. Let's go out and have a mcdonald's or something. It's just Uh, it doesn't work anyway No, uh Another criticism that people make of her novels is that the characters give long philosophical speeches Well, yes, they do, but it's not as though rand is the only author ever to have her characters give long philosophical speeches Uh Dostoevsky did it, uh, think of the for example the grand inquisitor section and the brother's karmazov D. H. Lawrence does it for example in women in love Thomas mon does it in dr. Faustus and the magic mountain And of course also we've switched from the novels to dramas You have dramatists from Sophocles and rippities to Shakespeare and corny Uh, in which the characters give long philosophical speeches to each other So again, it seems a kind of double standard to think that there's some special something especially objectionable about Characters and rand doing this and of course just tf. Ski is what was a major influence on rand. I'm not sure about uh, you know Who else but uh Yeah, and of course another influence on rand was Nietzsche and particularly Nietzsche's thus spoke Zarathustra, which is Not exactly a novel But it is a long fictional narrative in which the protagonist is constantly making long speeches and uh That's definitely uh an influence on the The very style of the speeches is it's often you know echoing Nietzsche People often think that her The content of her philosophy is more Nietzschean than it is But certainly you know stylistically there was a big influence And in turn two of Nietzsche's models for Zarathustra were the new testament on the one hand and played those dialogues on the other You consider in particular Uh Among plateaus dialogues consider ones like the protagonist the symposium the monex in this the quite upon The timeus and the crittius and of course most obviously the apology Those are all You know, we call them dialogues, but they're all devoted either in whole or in large part to the characters giving long speeches to each other rather than to you know dialogue in any straightforward sense and um And you know socrates, um, I mean plateaus Doing that the play of writing the dialogues that he did That was in turn was reflective of the practice of greek drama escholosophically's Euripides or estophanies they all Uh, they all have the characters give long speeches to each other Or to the audience And likewise it was a practice of greek historiography. I mean look at At lucidities erotides and zenith and their their historical works are filled with these dramatized And clearly at least partly fictionalized Speeches this was which is part of the literary tradition So, you know, you shouldn't expect a Wagnerian opera to resemble a herald pinter play or vice versa iron rand writing a particular kind of thing in some ways it is more like a Wagnerian opera than it is like a a normal novel Have to adjust your ordinary expectations and try and Meet her where she's at Another criticism again, this is criticism of her dialogue and actually i'm going to be mostly talking about her Her style rather than her dialogue, but i want to see a few things about her dialogue People claim that all her good characters sound alike and all her bad characters sound alike and that's not really true I mean, you know Take her good character take her among her heroes I know who's going to confuse the stoic seriousness of howard roark with The sardonic playfulness of francisco danconia Unlikely is among her villains. You're not going to confuse the elegant barbed widacisms of ellsworth tui with the venomous whining of james taggart. I would say that if i had to have Lunch with one of or coffee with one of rand's villains Definitely a tui would be the one to pick you'd have interest in conversation Can't imagine having a conversation with james taggart. I have no idea You know what one would talk about uh Also, it's often claimed that all the characters are black or white That's not true either. They're various intermediate characters. They're characters who get better. They're characters who get worse In particular in the fountain of the four main characters Dominic franken gail winen hard roark and peter keating represent represent Represent respectively four different conceptions of egoism So there's the stoic conception that dominique represents uh Egoism is our as a matter of seeking independence through complete complete withdrawal from attachment to the world Now there's the name sheen which gail winen represents which is the idea of egoism as Conquering and seeking power Uh There's roark's which is sort of It's aerostatelian. Although it's partly stoic inflected. It's partly niccian inflected It's partly classical liberal inflected, but it's you know compared with the others. It's aerostatelian Which is supposed to be a way of seeking strength without Power and Of independence without withdrawal And then finally peter keating represents sort of the everyday conception of selfishness the the guy who just runs roughshod on over people to advance its own career and will You know twist himself into a pretzel to please clients in order to get more money more fame more popularity So there's four different ways of thinking about egoism. Of course Work is the one that rand is Is commending and the other three are all supposed to be failed or confused versions of it But all of them are portrayed to some degree sympathetically even keating to a surprisingly great extent Is portrayed sympathetically um I mean In the novel you you really want him to be saved you You don't you don't really care whether james taggart gets Saved he seems like a lost cause from the start Uh, but in in the felt that you really want keating to be saved you want him to get together with kathar and you Uh, we want him to find his way out from under two his influence Uh, and it seems sort of tragic that he doesn't It was a spoiler alert. There's a bunch of spoilers in this video. I have to warn you um Although if you haven't read the the novel if you have read the novels You already know these things and if we haven't read the novels you probably won't remember Which characters i'm talking about so it's not going to be a big deal So anyway, I mean i'm going to read a bunch of passages to you um I said that I wasn't going to be doing a lot of reading To you in this series and i'm not but but uh, it's just like the best way to illustrate Uh rance merits as a writer is to Read some passages You know attention to any ip hawks out there Oh These passages i'm that i'm using and my use of it was paradigmatically fair use The passages are intended to illustrate the works they're drawn from not to replace them The passages represent a very small portion of the works they're drawn from Uses educational and non-commercial and uh, at least I think that My quotation of these passages is more likely to stimulate sales of the original works than to discourage them. So Uh, it hits, you know, some of the major categories of fair use. I mean uh, so Hey, youtube don't take this down because I've got uh, I'm quoting a bunch of stuff from rand in it. Uh, This is this is fair use rand might not be regarded as fair use but rand's views on intellectual property were more strange even by sort of prevailing standards My point in doing this is that I think a lot of people are So hostile to our ideas that they haven't permitted themselves to appreciate the quality of their writing I'm not here today to defend our ideas. I think some of our ideas are great. I think some of our ideas are terrible I think some of our ideas are in between I've You know I've written about a lot of that in the past and I may talk about it some more in this channel, but um That's not why I'm here for today Today, I just want to say don't let whatever you think of our ideas. Don't let them Blind you to the quality of your writing Now does that mean I think that the content of an author's ideas is Is not relevant to aesthetic assessment I don't actually think that in fact. I'm on record arguing the opposite. So here's a quotation from myself From a 2004 blog post and I'll link to that in the description too Suppose two writers do an equally skillful job of translating their understanding of human nature into novelistic form But one writer's understanding is subtle and profound Whilst the others is superficial and naive Should this difference have no effect on our critical appraisal of the two novels The artistic value of a work of art is not an additive sum but an organic unity Features that have no artistic relevance by themselves may thus acquire artistic relevance And so become subject to critical appraisal by receiving appropriate artistic expression Indeed, there is no such thing as the expression apart from what is expressed Successful expression is not a separable ingredient. They can be hooked up Now with this expressible now with another The successful expression of a profound idea is simply a different animal from the successful expression of an insipid idea It is not a gluing together of two distinct and independently accessible components An idea on the one hand and a content neutral expressive technique on the other And again to read the rest of what I say about that Looking in the description But having said that It doesn't mean that it works. Aesthetic value is completely exhausted by the truth of the ideas that expresses And anyway, a lot of ideas and artworks are a complicated mixture of truth and error of insight and confusion And even ideas that are literally false can be metaphorically true or symbolically true or whatever you want to call it And thus they can be particularly apt for artistic expression, even if they're not right in themselves So for example, do you have to agree with say andre jid or thomas man or dh laurance? Those are three thinkers whose ideas I think are at least as problematic as anything in rand Do you have to agree with them or with the ideas and with their attitudes?  Do you have to agree with well, whatever you think Nietzsche's philosophical ideas are to recognize the beauty of his prose? And of his poetry too And of course Nietzsche is the thread that links vogner jid, man, laurance and rand together. I didn't pick those names at random If I want to sort of course on those six Nietzsche, vogner, jid, man, laurance and rand Nietzsche on modern literature is probably my favorite course I've ever taught Also seems to be one of the ones my students liked Most as well, but I don't know if I'll if I'll get another chance to teach it Uh It was it was a special course and uh, not not one of the regular rotation Anyway, whatever you think of rand's ideas try to put put your opinion aside for that and just try to let the beauty of her writing find you Just as you can let the beauty of vogner's libistote find you the uh, the final aria in Uh, tristan and risolda Even though the point of the aria is to express a Schopenhauerian rejection of life and an embrace of self extinction so You know, not good ideas from my point of view um That's what the aria is about at least that's how I read it. Um but That doesn't make it any less beautiful Uh, maybe I mean some you could argue makes it a little less less beautiful Maybe if it were uh Maybe if it had truer content, it would be more beautiful. I don't know. But anyway, it's pretty damn beautiful It there's no there's no major aesthetic criticism to make of it All right, so I'm going to read a bunch of passages as I threatened Uh, this really needs someone with a better voice and better dramatic skills, but I'm what you've got Uh, I am hoping that the Light will manage to shine through the limitations of my particular Lantern glass Okay, first passage this is from the fountainhead part one chapter 15 From the train he looked back once at the skyline of the city as it flashed into sight And was held for some moments beyond the windows The twilight had washed off the details of the buildings They rose in thin shafts of a soft porcelain blue A color not of real things, but of evening and distance They rose in bare outlines Like empty molds waiting to be filled The distance had flattened the city the single shaft stood immeasurably tall Out of scale to the rest of the earth They were of their own world And they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible They were empty molds But man had come so far he could go farther The city on the edge of the sky held a question and a promise All right, this next one is from we the living part one chapter 15 This is when the main character is returning at night through the streets of soviet pictograd After a grueling compulsory marxist study group Kira walked fast and listened to her own footsteps Listened blankly without thought She could think now but after so many hours of such a tremendous effort not to think not to think to remember only not to think Thought seemed slow to return She knew only that her steps were beating fast firm precise Until the strength and their hope rose to her body to her heart to the throbbing haze in her temples She threw her head back as if she were resting swimming on her back Close under a clear black sky with stars at the tip of her nose And rooftops with snow clean in the frozen starlight like white virgin mountain peaks A lot of rand's most evocative writing is about people on solitary nighttime walks through large cities And I think that was part of what I might call her film noir sensibility Like one of the covers of we the living portrays just such a lonely walk And reveries of the solitary walk are to quote a very different author But actually that cover of the we the living probably souped a lot of scenes in the falton head even better than we the living Anyway, here's here's one of the scenes here's such a scene from the falton head. This is falton head part one chapter nine uh, I'm exciting by parts and chapters rather than by page numbers because page numbers can differ from addition to addition but parts and chapters are the same And so until there are stefanus numbers or becker numbers ryan rand That's the most reliable form of citation we've got He turned into side streets leading to the east river A lonely traffic light hung far ahead A spot of red in a bleak darkness The old houses crouched low to the ground hunched under the weight of the sky The street was empty and hollow Echoing to his footsteps He went on his collar raised his hands in his pockets His shadow rose from under his heels when he passed a light And brushed a wall in a long black arc like the sweep of a windshield wiper niran apparently liked that windshield wiper imagery because she uses it again in at the shrugged in the uh, john galt line, uh train ride scene Which incidentally I think does a really nice job of capturing the phenomenology of the view you get from a train Uh, particularly we've been on a train in the rockies, which I have Uh, and she had um So this is from at the shrugged part one chapter eight The green blue rails ran to meet them like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth The cross ties melted as they approached into a smooth stream rolling down under the wheels A blurred streak clung to the side of the engine low over the ground Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back The green planes stretched past and allegedly flow At the edge of the sky a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train Things streaked past a water tank a tree a shanty a grain silo They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising describing a curve and dropping back The telegraph wires ran a race with the train rising and falling from pole to pole in an even rhythm Like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead And the next instance she would in next instance. She was beside it then passed The town had been left behind the track was rising through a country growing more grimly reluctant to permit approach The rails kept vanishing behind curves and the ridges of hills kept moving closer as if the planes were being folded into pleats The flat stone shelves of colorado were advancing to the edge of the track The distant reaches of the sky were shrinking into waves of bluish mountains Far ahead they saw a mist of smoke over factory chimneys Then the web of a power station and the lone needle of a steel structure They were approaching Denver It was a succession of minutes, but it hit them as a single hole First they saw the lone shapes which were factories rolling across their window panes Then the shapes fused into the blur of streets And a delta rail spread out before them like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the taggert station With nothing to protect them but the small green beads of light scattered over the ground From the height of the cab they saw boxcars on sidings streak past as flat ribbons of rooftops The black hole of the train shed flew at their faces. They hurtled through an explosion of sound The beating of wheels against the glass panes of a vault And the screams of cheering from a mass that swayed like a liquid in the darkness among steel columns They flew toward a glowing arch and the green lights hanging in the open sky beyond The green lights that were like the doorknobs of space throwing door after door open before them Then vanishing behind them went the streets clotted with traffic The open windows bulging with human figures The screaming sirens and from the top of a distant skyscraper A cloud of paper snowflake shimmering on the air Flung by someone who saw the passage of a silver bullet across a city stopped still to watch it Then they were out again on a rocky grade And with shocking suddenness the mountains were before them as if the city had flung them straight to the granite wall And a thin ledge had caught them in time They were clinging to the side of a vertical cliff with the earth rolling down dropping away And giant tears of twisted boulders streaming up and shutting out the sun Leading them to speed through a bluish twilight with no sight of soil or sky The curves of rail became coiling circles among walls that advanced to grind them off their sides But the track cut through at times and the mountains parted Flaring open like two wings at the tip of the rail One winged green made of vertical needles With whole pine serving as the pile of a solid carpet The other reddish brown made of naked rock She looked down through the open window and saw the silver side of the engine hanging over every space Far below the thin thread of a stream went falling from ledge to ledge And the ferns that drooped through the water were the shimmering tops of birch trees She saw the engine's tail of boxcars winding along the face of a granite drop And miles of contorted stone below She saw the coils of green blue rail and winding behind the train A wall of rock shot upward in their path filling the windshield Darkening the cab so close that it seemed as if the remnant of time could not let them escape it But she heard the screech of wheels on curve the light came bursting back And she saw an open stretch of rail on a narrow shelf The shelf ended in space the nose of the engine was aimed straight at the sky There was nothing to stop them but two strips of green blue metal strung in a curve along the shelf Later in the book we have a less happy train journey This is at the shrug part two chapter 10 She sat at the window of the train her head thrown back Not moving wishing she would never have to move again The telegraph poles went racing past the window but the train seemed lost and avoid Between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty green clouds The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset It looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last crops of blood and light The train was going west as if it too were pulled to follow the sinking rays Inquietly to vanish from the earth She sat still feeling no desire to resist it She wished she would not hear the sound of the wheels They knocked in an even rhythm every fourth knock accented And it seemed to her that through the rapid running clatter of some futile stampede to escape The beat of the accented knocks was like the steps of an enemy moving towards some inexorable purpose She had never experienced before this sense of apprehension at the site of her prairie This feeling that the rail was only a fragile thread stretched across an enormous emptiness Like a worn nerve ready to break She had never expected that she Who had felt As if she were the motive power aboard a train Would now wishing like a child or a savage that this train would move that it would not stop It would get her there on time Wishing it not like an act of will but like a plea to a dark unknown She had found reassurance for two days in the site of the city's moving past her window The factories the bridges the electric signs The billboards pressing down upon the roofs of homes The crowded grimy active living conflicts of the industrial east But the cities had been left behind The train was now diving into the prairies of Nebraska The rattle of its couplers sounding as if it were shivering with cold She saw lonely shapes that had been farmhouses in the vacant stretches that didn't fields But the great bruce of energy in the east generations ago Had splattered bright trickles to run through the emptiness Some were gone but some still lived She was startled when the lights of a small town swept across her car and vanishing Left it darker than it had been before She would not move to turn on the light. She stopped still watching the rare towns Whenever an electric beam went flashing briefly at her face. It was like a moment's greeting She saw them as they went by written on the walls of modest structures Oversooted roofs down slender smokestacks on the couriers of tanks Reynolds harvest her Macy cement Quinlan and Jones pressed alfalfa Home of the Crawford mattress Benjamin Wiley grain and feed Words raised like flags to the empty darkness of the sky The motionless forms of movement of effort of courage of hope The monuments to how much have been achieved on the edge of nature's void By men who had once been free to achieve She saw the homes built in scattered privacy The small shops the wide streets with electric lighting Like a few luminous strokes crisscrossed on the black sheet of the wastelands She saw the ghosts between the remnants of towns The skeletons of factories with crumbling smokestacks The corpses of shops with broken panes The slanting poles with shreds of wire She saw a sudden blaze the rare sight of a gas station A glittering white island of glass and metal Under the huge black weight of space and sky She saw an ice cream cone made of radiant tubing Hanging above the corner of a street in a battered carving park below With the young boy at the wheel and the young girl stepping out Her white dress blowing in the summer wind She shuddered for the two of them thinking I can't look at you I who know what it has taken to give you your youth To give you this evening This car and the ice cream cone you're going to buy for a quarter She saw on the edge beyond the town a building glowing with tears of pale blue light The industrial light she loved with the silhouettes of machines in its windows And a billboard in the darkness above its roof And suddenly her head fell on her arm And she sat shaking crying soundlessly to the night to herself To whatever was human in any living living being Don't let it go Don't let it go Okay, this next one is from Wheatley Living Book 1 Chapter 2 This is a very brief description of Kira's cousin Irina I've always been fond of this passage because it reminds me of my first girlfriend Although I don't know whether that's a universally valid aesthetic principle but A door crashed open behind her and something came flying into the ante room Something tall, tense, with a storm of hair and eyes like automobile headlights And Galina Petrovna recognized Irina, her niece A young girl of 18 with the eyes of 28 and the laughter of eight And here's Irina later on when she and her lover are being sent to Siberia This is Wheatley Living Part 2 Chapter 8 Irina and Sasha sat facing each other on hard wooden benches They traveled together part of the way but they were approaching a junction where Irina was to be transferred to another train The car windows were black and lustrous as if sheets of dusty patent leather had been pasted behind the glass panes Only the fluffy wet stars of snow smashing against the glass Showed that there was an earth beyond the panes And wind in the black sky A lantern trembled high into the ceiling As if every knock of the wheels under the floor kicked the yellow flame out And it fluttered and came back again Shivering clutching a little stub of candle A boy in an old green student's cap alone by a window sang softly but notnestly through his teeth And his voice sounded as if you're grinning although his cheeks were emotionless Hey, little at-wall, where are you rolling? Sasha held Irina's hands She was smiling, her chin buried in an old woolen scarf Her hands were cold The wheels greeted under the floor slowing down Oh God, Sasha moaned, is that the station? The car jerked forward and the wheels went on knocking under the floor like a mallet striking faster and faster No, Irina whispered breathlessly, not yet Irina was whispering, listen, here's something we can do We can look at the moon sometimes, and you know it's the same moon everywhere And we would be looking at the same thing together that way, you see Yes, it Sasha, it will be nice A lantern swam past the window Then there was nothing but the silent snowflakes splattering against the glass But they sat frozen, staring at the window Irina whispered, I think we're approaching Sasha sat up, erect, his face the color of brass darker than his hair and said His voice changed firm If they let us write to each other, Irina, will you, every day? Of course, she answered gaily Will you draw things in your letters too? With pleasure, here, she picked a small splinter of coal From a window ledge, here I'll draw something for you right now With a few strokes, swift insurers, a surgeon scalpel She sketched a face in the back of her seat An imb's face that grinned at them with a wide crescent mouth With eyebrows flung up, with one eye winking mischievously, a silly, infectious, irresistible grin That one could not face without grinning an answer Here, said Irina, he'll keep you company after the station At the station, another train was waiting on a parallel track The guard tore her away from him and pushed her out through the door She leaned back for a second for a last look at Sasha She grinned at him, the homely, silly grin of her imp Her nose wrinkled, one eye winking mischievously Then the door closed The two trains started moving at once Pressed tightly to the glass pane, Sasha could see the black outline of Irina's head In the yellow square of a window in the car on the next track The two trains rolled together, iron mallet striking faster and faster under the floor The glow of the station swimming slowly back over the dark floor of the car that Sasha was watching Then the grayish patch of snow between them grew wider He could still touch the other train with its outstretched arm if the window were open, he thought Then he could still touch it if he were to fling his whole body straight to the other train Then he could reach it no longer even if he were to leap out He tore his eyes from that other window and watched the white stretch that was growing between them His fingers on the glass as if he wanted to seize that white stretch and hold it and pull with his whole strength and stop it The tracks were flying farther and farther apart At the level of his eyes, he could now see the bluish steely gleams of wheels whirling down narrow bands in the snow Then he did not look at the snow any longer His glance clung to the tiny yellow square with a black dot that was a human figure far away And as the yellow square shrank swiftly, his eyes would not let it go And he felt his glance being pulled stretched But the pain is excruciating as a wrenched nerve Across an endless waste of snow Two long caterpillars crawled apart two thin silvery threads proceeded each The threads led disappearing into a black void Sasha lost sight of the window, but he could still see a string of yellow spots that still looked square And above them something black moving against the sky that looked like car roofs Then there was only a string of yellow beads dropping into a black well Then there was only the dusty glass pane with patent leather pad. He pasted behind it He was not sure whether he still saw a string of string of sparks somewhere Or there was something burned into his unblinking dilated eyes Then there was only the imp left on the back of the empty seat before him Grinning with a wide crescent mouth when I'm winking My aforementioned girlfriend used to wink and grin exactly that way so again that may be biasing my Appreciation of this passage Though we never we were never set to Siberia Things went badly but not that badly Okay, this next one is from Anthem from part two of Anthem Anthem is a different literary style from her novels and it's even more stylized Than the others well, she officially described it as a novella or a novelette That you could argue it's really a short story and that it's only by By dint of large font and wide margins that ends up filling a book But actually she said in one of her letters to Rosewater Lane. There was a poem which I think is actually fairly accurate It's a poem. It's not in verse, but it's It's much more poetic anyway than her other novels or a novelette Anyway than her other novels or her other than her novels Anyway, so from Anthem part two Where the city ends there's a great road winding off to the north And we speak oh before I start I should say one feature of of anthem if you don't know about it is that it's about a a a society that Doesn't use It's a collectivist society that doesn't use singular pronouns so When he says we he sometimes means we as there's means I and When he says they he sometimes means they as in his means she I mean, so that's what's going on here So, you know, I think you'll figure out from the context Where the city ends there's a great road winding off to the north And we street sweepers must keep this road clean to the first mile post There is a hedge along the road and beyond the hedge lie the fields The fields are black and plowed and they lie like a great fan before us With their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky Spreading forth from that hand opening wide apart as they come toward us like black pleats that sparkle with thin green spangles Women work in the fields and their white tunics in the wind Are like the wings of seagulls beating over the black soil And there it was that we saw liberty five three thousand walking along the furrows Their body was straight and thin as a blade of iron The eyes were dark and hard and glowing with no fear in them No kindness and no guilt Their hair was golden as the sun Their hair flew in the wind shining and wild as if it defied men to restrain it They threw seeds from their hands as if they dained to fling a scornful gift and the earth was a beggar under their feet Okay, this next one is from we the living part one chapter three The Ergunov summer residence stood on a high hill over a river Alone in its spacious gardens on the outskirts of a fashionable summer resort The house turned its back upon the river and faced the grounds Where the hill sloped down gracefully into a garden of lawns drawn with a ruler Bushes clipped into archways and marble fountains made by famous artists The other side of the hill hung over the river like a mass of rock and earth Discouraged by a volcano and frozen in its chaotic tangle Growing downstream people expected a dinosaur to stretch its head out of the black caves overgrown with wild ferns Between trees that grew horizontally into the air huge roots like spiders grasping the rocks For many summers while her parents were visiting nice berets in vienna Kara was left alone to spend her days in the wild freedom of the rocky hill As its sole undisputed sovereign in a torn blue skirt and a white shirt whose sleeves were always missing The sharp sand cut her bare feet She swung from rock to rock grasping a tree branch throwing her body into space The blue skirt flaring like a parachute She made a raft of tree branches and clutching a long pole sailed down the river There were many dangerous rocks and whirlpools on the way The thrill of the struggle rose from her bare feet that felt the stream pulsating under the frail raft Through her body tense to meet the wind The blue skirt beating against her legs like a sail Branch as bending over the river brushed her forehead She swept past leaving threads of hair entwined in the leaves and the leaves leaving wild red berries caught in her hair The first thing that Kara learned about life And the first thing that her elders learned dismayed about Kira Was the joy of being alone By the way, that reference to the dinosaur sticking its head out, I think, is a nod to what was one of her favorite childhood novels, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World Which is one of the original novels about dinosaurs surviving to the present day Not the first one There's Jules Vain's Jules Vain's Journey to the center of the earth Which has, well, not technically dinosaurs, but large extinct prehistoric reptiles of surviving But not dinosaurs in the technical sense, but of course the dinosaurs in the technical sense include birds and you know, we're not going there Anyway, inspired by The Lost World, Rand and her sister Nora used to play at being pterodactyls Which are also not dinosaurs in the strict sense, but you know, science And they called themselves, nicknamed themselves, dact one and dact two. I'll let you guess which one was dact one Anyway, on to the next passage Uh This one This one is from the Fountainhead Part four, chapter 16. This is another nighttime city walk And got another dinosaur reference to Boo. I mean, we should really have a crossover or mashup Jurassic Gulch anyway It's only a bottle cap thought Wynond Looking down at a speck of glitter under his feet A bottle cap ground into the pavement The pavements of new york are full of things like that bottle caps safety pins campaign buttons sink chains Sometimes lost jewels. It's all like now flattened ground in It makes the pavement sparkle at night the fertilizer of a city Someone drank the bottle empty and threw the cap away How many cars have passed over it? Could one retrieve it now? Could one kneel and dig with bare hands and tear it out again? I had no right to hope for escape. I had no right to kneel and seek redemption Millions of years ago When the earth was being born, there were living things like me flies caught in resin that became amber Animals caught in ooze that became rock I am a man of the 20th century and I became a bit of tin in the pavements for the trucks of new york to roll over He walked slowly the collar of his topcoat raised The street stretched before him empty and the buildings ahead were like the backs of books lining a shelf Assembled without order ball sizes The corners he passed led to black channels Street labs gave the city a protective cover But it cracked in spots He turned a corner when he saw a slant of white ahead. It was a goal for three or four blocks The light came from the window of a pawn shop The shop was closed with a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this He stopped and looked at it He thought the most indecent sight on earth the pawn shop window The things which had been sacred to men and the things which had been precious Surrendered to the sight of all to the pawing and the bargaining Trashed to be in different eyes of strangers the equality of a junk heap Typewriters and violins the tools of dreams Old photographs and wedding rings the tags of love Together with soiled trousers coffee pots astray pornographic plaster figures The refuse of despair Pledge not sold not cut off in clean finality, but hawk to a stillborn hope Never to be redeemed Hello gail winen. He says of the things in the window and walked on Stand here. He thought and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs one over another to the sky Under each bulb down to there see that spark over the river, which is not a star There are people whom you will never see and who are your masters At the supper tables in the drawing rooms In their beds and in their cellars in their studies and in their bathrooms Speeding the subways under your feet Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you Jolting past you in every bus your master's gail winen There is a net Longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city Larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water gas and refuse There's another hidden net around you. It is strapped you and the wires lead to every hand in the city They jerk the wires and you moved You were a ruler of men you held a leash A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends He came to a corner He escaped other corners like it, but this one caught him He was a dim corner a slice of sidewalk trapped between the wall of a closed garage and the pillars of an elevated station The street was empty a long corridor filled by the skeleton to be elevated Stone paving blotch walls The interlacing of iron pillars There were lighted windows, but they looked as if no people moved inside the walls A train thundered over his head a long roll of flanger that went shuddering down the pillars into the earth It looked like an aggregation of metal rushing without human driver through the night Okay, this next one is from red pawn part three red pawn is in the early iron ran which In general does not contain her best writing. It is early unpublished stuff, which he didn't publish mostly for a reason Uh, so I wouldn't recommend someone who is starting with ran to begin with the early iron ran Uh, it's not as I said her best writing, but this I quite like So in this passage we're which is a description of a remote island monastery that's been converted to a soviet prison Leonard peekoff says the moral of this passage is to show the essential equivalents of christianity and communism To me the passage suggests more contrast than the equivalents, but I'll let you be the judge It seems to me that he's you know, he's reading this, uh, you know, just as many of ranch critics Uh, read her works through the lens of what they What they believe about her I think he's doing the same thing here because he knows that she believed that christianity and communism were essentially identical therefore He thinks so that must be what's going on in this passage, but you know, listen to the passage. It's seems to me that You know, although clearly neither christianity nor communism is being endorsed in this passage alien to her Her own View of life Seems to me there's kind of tragic grandeur That she's a lot into christianity in this passage that she isn't the communism. I think she's there are other passages but the character of Andrei Tegano through the living I think grants a kind of tragic grandeur to communism as well But the product of this passage in this work Uh, see and also see the passages for christianity does not have tragic grandeur because he was in this passage christianity has tragic grandeur communism does not so I claim anyway so this is a description of the uh The a room in the monastery that's been converted into the the frism library The sacred emblems and icons which could be removed had been taken down But the old paintings on the walls could not be removed Many centuries ago the unknown hand of a great artist had spent a lifetime of dreary days immortalizing his soul on the chapel's walls None could tell what dark secret what sorrow had thrown him out of the world into its last forgotten outpost But all the power and passion All the fire and rebellious agony of his tortured spirit Had been poured into the somber colors on the walls Into majestic figures of a magnificent life Like his eyes had seen and renounced And the bodies of tortured saints silently cried of his ecstasy His doubt his hunger Through three narrow slits of windows a cold haze of light streamed into the library like a gray fog rolling in from the sea It left the shadows of centuries to doze in the dark vaulted corners It threw white blotches on the rough unpainted boards of bookshelves that cut into the angel's snowy wings Into the foreheads of saintly patriarchs On the procession following the cross bearing jesus to the golgotha and above it On the red letters of a strip on a strip of white cotton proletarians of the world unite Tall candles and silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime Their little red flames stood immobile each candle transformed into a chandelier For the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints They burned without motion without noise A silent resigned service in memory of the past Around a picture of linen Above on the vaulted ceiling the unknown artist had placed his last work A figure of jesus floated in the clouds his robe whiter than snow He looked down with a sad wise smile his arms outstretched in silent invitation and blessing The library was the creation of comrade fiodosic who liked to claim of our duty to the new culture The murals did not harmonize with this new culture and comrade fiodosic had tried to improve them He had painted a red flag into the raised hand of st. Vladimir as that first christian ruler converted his people to the new faith He had painted a sickle and hammer on moses' tablets For the ancient glazing that protected the murals Its secret lost with the monks did not take fresh paint well The red flag ran down the wall and peeled off in pieces So comrade fiodosic had given up the idea of artistic alterations He had compromised by tacking over st. Vladimir's stomach a bright red poster bearing a soldier and an airplane An inscription comrades donate to the red air fleet Okay, next faltenhead part four chapter 10 another lonely city walk It had stopped raining But peter keating wished he would start again The pavements glistened there were dark blotches on the walls of buildings And since it did not come from the sky it looked as if the city were bathed in cold sweat The air was heavy with untimely darkness Disquieting like premature old age And there were yellow puddles of light in windows Keating had missed the rain, but he felt wet from his bones out Now he walked slowly through the streets full of rain that would not come He looked up and saw empty space where the towers of familiar buildings had been He did not look like fog or clouds But like a solid spread of gray sky that had worked a gigantic soundless destruction That sight of buildings vanishing through the sky had always made him uneasy He walked on looking down Red evidently liked that image of Buildings vanishing the fog because in atlas shrugged She uses it from the other direction instead of looking up from the streets At it she has uh last beat of kidding is doing the faltenhead. She's got dagmy looking down at it from her penthouse at the shrug part two chapter nine Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below As if the sky were engulfed in the city She could see the whole of Manhattan island the long triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean And look at the prow of a sinking ship A few tall buildings still rose above it like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray blue coils Going down slowly into vapor and space This was how bad gone she thought Atlantis the city that sank into the ocean And all the other kingdoms that vanished leaving the same legend in all the languages of men And the same longing a longing for coffee Rand incidentally has a nice analysis of that passage in Chapter nine of of her book the art of fiction Which is as I said about her her works in literature Mixture of Insight and refusal of insight But I like what she says about The reasons she chose the the wording that she chose in that passage All right, so this next passage is from the faltenhead part four chapter 18 This is at the courtland trial Not only is it nice passage itself But also I think it's a useful corrective to sort of stereotype views about What ran means by egoism people often think she means something very obvious and straightforward and Unpleasant by egoism and Very here that of independence being A stepping stone to the nevelances Is interesting A tree branch hung in the open window The leaves moved against the sky Implying sun and summer and an inexhaustible earth to be used The leaves drooped touching the spires of new york's new york skyline far across the river The skyscrapers stood like shafts of sunlight washed white by distance in summer A crowd filled the county courtroom witnessing the trial of howard work On the chairs on the windowsills in the aisles pressed against the walls The human mass was blended like a monolith Except for the pale ovals of faces The faces stood out separate lonely no to a like Behind each there were the years of a life lived or half over effort Hope in an attempt honest or dishonest but an attempt It left on all a single mark in common on lips smiling with malice on lips loose with renunciation on lips tight with uncertain dignity on all the mark of suffering The people had come to witness a sensational case to see celebrities to get material for conversation To be seen to kill time They would return to unwanted jobs Unloved families unchosen friends To drawing rooms evening clothes cocktail glasses and movies To unadmitted pain Murdered hope Desire left unreached left hanging silently over a path in which no step was taken Today's of effort not to think not to say to forget and give in and give up But each of them had known some unforgotten moment A morning when nothing had happened A piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again A stranger's face seen in the bus A moment when each known a different sense of living And each remembered other moments on a sleepless night On an afternoon of steady rain In a church in an empty street at sunset But each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary But each had known a moment when in lonely naked honesty He had felt the need of an answer Rourke took the oath He stood by the steps of the witness stand The audience looked at him they felt he had no chance they could drop the nameless resentment The sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people And so for the first time they could see him as he was A man totally innocent of fear The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind not a response to a tangible danger But a chronic unconfessed fear in which they all lived They remembered the misery of the moments when in loneliness A man thinks of the bright words he could have said but had not found And hates those who robbed him of his courage The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind The radiant picture never to be made real Dreams, self-delusion Or a murdered reality Unborn killed by that corroding emotion without name fear Need, dependence, hatred Rourke stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind But Rourke stood like that before a hostile crowd And they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him For the flash of an instant they grasped the manner of his consciousness Each asked himself Do I need anyone's approval? Does it matter? Am I tied? And for that instant each man was free Free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room It was only a moment The moment of silence when Rourke was about to speak I actually think that passage is better than the speech that Rourke was on to give But I'm not a good randian Okay, this next one is from Atlas Shrugged Part one chapter five Francisco Domingo Carlos Andrés Sebastián D'Anconia sat on the floor playing marbles The marble spread in the carpet around him were made of the semi-precious stones of his native country Carnelian and rock crystal She was looking at his face. It was the face she had known It bore no mark of the kind of life he had led Nor of what she had seen in their last night together There was no sign of tragedy No bitterness no tension Only the radiant mockery Matured and stressed Look of dangerously unpredictable amusement and the great guiltless serenity of spirit But this she thought was impossible. This was more shocking than all the rest She said I came here to ask you a question Go ahead When you told those reporters that you came to new york to witness the farce Which farce did you have in mind? He laughed aloud like a man who seldom finds a chance to enjoy the unexpected That's what I like about you dagny. There are seven million people in the city of new york at present Out of seven million people you are the only one to whom it could have occurred But I wasn't talking about the veil divorce scandal What were you talking about? What alternative occurred to you? The San Sebastián disaster That's much more amusing than the veil divorce scandal, isn't it? She said in the solemn merciless tone of her prosecutor You did it consciously cold bloodedly and with full intention You'd exhausted every other form of depravity And sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends in order to watch them squirm I don't know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that But that's what you came to new york to see at the right time They certainly provided a spectacle of squirming on the grand scale Your brother James in particular They were rotten fools, but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you They trusted your name and your honor Again she saw the look of earnestness and again knew certainly that it was genuine when he said Yes, they did. I know it And do you find it amusing? No, I don't find it amusing at all He'd continued playing with his marbles Absently and differently taking a shot once in a while She noticed suddenly the faultless accuracy of his aim the skill of his hands He merely flicked his wrist and sent a drop of stone Shooting across the carpet to click sharply against another drop She thought of his childhood and of the predictions that anything he did would be done superlatively No, he said I don't find it amusing Your brother James and his friends knew nothing about the copper industry. They knew nothing about making money They did not think it necessary to learn They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential They observed that there I was in the world and that I made it my honor to know They thought they could trust my honor One does not betray a trust of this kind does one Then you did betray it intentionally That's for you to decide it was you who spoke about their trust and my honor I don't think in such terms any longer. He shrugged adding I don't give a damn about your brother James and his friends Their theory was not new. It's worked for centuries But it wasn't foolproof. There's just one point that they overlooked They thought it was safe to ride on my brain because they assumed that the goal of my journey was well All their calculations rested on the premise that I wanted to make money What if I didn't If you didn't what did you want They never asked me that not to inquire about my aims motives or desires is an essential part of their theory If you didn't want to make money what possible motive could you have had Many number of them for instance to spend it To spend money on a certain total failure How was I to know if those minds were a certain total failure How could you help knowing it? Quite simply by giving it no thought You started that project without giving it any thought No, not exactly but suppose I slipped up I'm only human. I made a mistake. I failed. I made a bad job of it He flipped his wrist A crystal marble shot sparkling across the floor And cracked violently against a brown one at the other end of the room Okay, here's one from we the living part one chapter 12 Historians will write of international is the great anthem of the revolution But the cities of the revolution have their own hymn The days to come the men of petrograd will remember those years of hunger and struggle and hope To the convulsive rhythm of john gray It was called a foxtrot It had a tune and a rhythm such as those of the new dances far across the border abroad Men stood in line at the cooperatives and whistled john gray Workers clubs listened attentively to a lecture on marxism Then relaxed while comrades showed his skill on a piano out of tune playing john gray Its gaiety was sad Its abrupt rhythm was hysterical Its frivolity was a plea a moan for that would which existed somewhere forever out of need reach Through winter nights red flags whistled in the snow drifts And the city prayed hopelessly with a short sharp notes of john gray And here i'll let you hear it You can judge Whether she's accurately described the Convulsive rhythm and the sad gaiety Of This piece A link to in the description so that you can Listen to the rest of it piece i would never have discovered were enough for uh rand and i'm quite fond of it incidentally the um The um The anthology essays on we the living misidentifies Uh Which piece of music it is that rand had in mind there's another piece called john gray, which i think was Was sort of inspired by our riff on this one and they think it's that one, but it's this one By matthew blunter as the There's one whose song that is Descriptions of these are actually kind of a recurring element throughout rand's fiction both both descriptions of actual music cases Everything from Calamans by adera to rachmaninoff to A swing adaptation which was a real thing of The gardener's evening star also fictional imaginary music like the song of broken glass and with the living and To various pieces by richard hally hally and out of the shrug Uh, anyway, here's just one more very short uh description of a piece of music Uh, this is from we the living part one chapter seven Lydia played Chopin the wistful music Delicate as rose petals Falling slough slowly in the darkness of an old park rang softly through the haze of soap fumes And rand doesn't say whether she has a particular Chopin piece in mind It seems like the description would probably fit a number of them But I think that it fits nocturne opus 10 number two as well as it fits any And so we just hear a A smidgen of that yeah, I think that you rose petals falling slowly and Uh, wistfully in the darkness. It's not a bad Image to go with that music I'll put a link also in the in the description to that piece of music To which I did not discover through rand but uh Okay, so final final passage. This will be the longest one, but the final one I've abridged it. I've a number of these ones that I've read. I've abridged. I haven't read the Whole thing.  And again, there's you know, there's no particular reason for me to You know for me to include more than I need to make my point So anyway, this is a slightly abridged but Nevertheless the longest one. This is the the bravura passage at the beginning of Part two of we the living It was st. Petersburg The war made it peter grad The revolution made it lenin grad It is a city of stone and those living in it think not of stone brought upon a green earth and piled block on block to raise a city But of one huge rock carved into streets bridges houses And earth-broughtened handfuls scattered ground into the stone to remind them of that which lies beyond the city Its trees are rare strangers Sickly foreigner isn't a climate of granite forlorn and superfluous Its parks are reluctant concessions In spring a rare dandelion sticks a bright yellow head through the stones of its embankments And men smile at it incredulously and condescendingly as an impudent child Its spring does not rise from the soil its first violets and very red tulips very blue hyacinths Come in the hands of men on street corners Peter grad was not born. It was created The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle An implacable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city Men brought earth to fill a swamp where no living thing existed but mosquitoes And like mosquitoes men died and fell into the grunting mire No willing hands came to build the new capital It arose with the labor of soldiers Thousands of soldiers regiments who took orders and could not refuse to face a deadly foe a gun or a swamp They fell and the earth they brought and their bones made the ground for the city Petra grad its residents say stands on skeletons Petra god is not in a hurry and is not lazy It is gracious and leisurely as befits the freedom of its vast streets It's a city that threw itself down amid the marshes and pine forests luxuriously both arms outflung Its squares are paved fields Its streets are as broad as tributaries to the neva the widest river to cross a great city On the efsky the capital of the capital streets The houses were built by generations past for generations to come They are set and unchangeable like fortresses Their walls are thick and their windows are tiers of deep niches rising over wide sidewalks of reddish brown granite From the statue of alexander the third A huge gray man on a huge gray horse Silver rails stretch tents and straight to the admiralty building far away It's white colonnade and thin golden spire raised like the crown the symbol the trademark of mevsky Over the broken skyline where every turret and balcony and gargoyle bending over the street Are ageless features of a frozen stone face On winter nights strings of large white globes flare up over nevsky And snow sparkles over the white lights like salt crystals And the colored lanterns of tramways red green yellow Wink far away swimming over a soft darkness And through lashes moist with frost The white globes look like crosses of long white searchlights on a black sky Nevsky starts on the shore of the neva at a key as trim and perfect as a drawing room With a red granite parapet in a row of palaces Of straight angles tall windows chaste columns and balustrades Severe harmonious and luxuriously stern in their masculine grace Divided by the river petrograd's greatest mansion The one with the winter palace faces petrograd's greatest prison the peter paul fortress The zars lived in the winter palace When they died they crossed the neva In the cathedral of the fortress White slabs rose over the graves of the zars The prisons stood behind the cathedral The walls of the fortress guarded the dead zars and the zars living enemies In the long silent halls of the palace Tall mirrors reflected the ramparts behind which men were forgotten Alive for decades in lonely stone graves Bridges rise over the river as long humps of steel with tramways Crawling slowly up to the middle and rolling swiftly clattering down to the other shore The right bank beyond the fortress Is a gradual surrender of the city to that earth that countryside it has driven out The Kamianostrovsky a broad quiet endless avenue Is like a stream full of the fragrance of a future sea A street where each step is a forecast of the country to come The avenue and the city and the river end of the islands When the ever breaks among bits of land Held together by delicate bridges Where heavy white cones rise in tears edged with dark green over a deep silence of snow And fur branches and bird foot prints alone break the white desolation And beyond the last island the sky and sea are an unfinished watercolor of pale gray Where the faint greenish bands smeared across to mark a future horizon But Pythagrad also has side streets Pythagrad's side streets are of colorless stone rain washed into the gray of the clouds above and of the mud below They're bare as jail corridors They cut each other in naked corners of square buildings that look like prisons Old gateways are locked at night over mud swollen ruts Little shops frown with faded signs over turbid windows Little parks choke with consumptive grass into mud and dust and mud again have been ground from his entry Iron parapets guard canals of refuse stick and water On dark corners rusty icons of the Madonna are nailed over forgotten tin boxes begging coppers for orphanages And farther up in the ever rise forests of red brick chimneys Spewing a black cloud that hangs over old stooping wooden houses Over an embankment of rotting logs at the placid indifferent river Rain falls slowly through the smoke Rain smoke and stone are the theme song of the city Pythagrad's residents wonder sometimes are the strange bonds that hold them After the long winter they cursed the mud in the stone and cried for pine forests They flee from the city as if from a hated stepmother They flee to green grass and sand into the sparkling capitals of europe And as to an unconquerable mistress they return in the fall Hungry for the wide streets the shrieking tramways and the cobblestones Serene and relieved as of life were beginning again Pythagrad they say is the only city Cities grow like forests like weeds Pythagrad did not grow He was born finished and complete Pythagrad is not acquainted with nature. It was the work of man Nature makes mistakes and takes chances. It mixes its colors and knows little straight lines But Pythagrad is the work of man who knows what he wants Pythagrad's grandeur is unmarred and squalor unrelieved Its facets are cut clearly sharply They are deliberate perfect with a straightforward perfection of man's work Cities grow with the people and fight for the place at the head of cities and rise slowly up the steps of years Pythagrad did not rise It came to be at the height It was commanded to command He was a capital before its first stone was laid. He was a monument to the spirit of man People's know nothing of the spirit of man for people's are only nature and man is a word that has no plural Pythagrad is not of the people. It has no legend. No folklore. It is not glorified in nameless songs down nameless roads It is a stranger aloof incomprehensible forbidding No pilgrims ever traveled to its granite gates The gates had ever been opened in warm compassion to the meek the hurt and the maims like the doors of the kindly Moscow Pythagrad does not need a soul It has a mind And perhaps it is only a coincidence that in the language of the russians Moscow is she or Pythagrad has ever been he And perhaps it is only a coincidence that those who seized on the power in the name of the people Transferred their capital to the meek Moscow from the haughty aristocrat of cities In 1924 a man named Lennon died and the city was ordered to be called Leningrad The revolution also brought posters to the city walls and red banners to its houses And sunflower seed shells to its cobblestones It cut a proletarian poem into the pedestal the statue of alexander the third And put a red rag on a stick in the hand of catheter and the second in the small garden off nevsky It called nevsky prospect of october 25th In south of via across street street of july 3rd In honor of dates it wanted remembered And at the intersection hefty conductor says yell on the crowded tramways Corner of october 25th in july 3rd terminal for yellow tickets new fair citizens In the early summer of 1925 the state textile trust put out new cotton prints And women smiled in the streets of petrograd Women wearing dresses made of new materials for the first time in many years But there were only half a dozen patterns of prints in the city Women in black and white checks passed women in black and white checks Women in red dotted white met women in green dotted white Women with spirals of blue on a gray dress Met women with the same spirals of brown on a tan dress They passed by like inmates of a huge orphanage frowning Selling uncomfortable losing all joy in their new garments On street corners in the sun ragged men sold saccharin and plaster busts of linen Sparrows chirped on telephone wires Lines stood at the doors of cooperatives Women took off their jackets and in short sleeve wrinkled blouses offered flabby white arms to the first heat of the summer sun A poster hung high on a wall On the poster a huge worker swung a hammer toward the sky And the shadow of the hammer fell like a huge black cross over the little buildings of the city under his boots Okay, that was the last passage I haven't offered much in the way of argument that these passages represent good writing I'm willing to have that conversation This stuff to be said I think but for the purposes of this video I'm just really imitating what work did not at the courtland trial where he talked on and on But at the starter trial where he just submitted photos of his own work as his sole defense In the novel is doing this compared to the story of of uh frining or through Nate the greek partisan who supposedly disrobed or Was disrobed by her advocate in front of an Athenian jury On the idea that her polk gratitude would stun them into acquitting her Uh, I forget of what offense probably in piety when in doubt is usually in piety. Um Anyway, although the tactic allegedly worked for a friny it doesn't work for work And I likewise don't know whether these passages from Randall Convince you that whatever else she is she's a good writer But for the present That offense rests so Uh If you want to see More coffee and philosophy from me uh like share subscribe all that good stuff and See you next time


Aloha, and welcome to a Hana Kako on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcasting Network. I'm Joe Kent, filling in for Dr. KDE Akina. We work at the Grasserie Institute of Hawaii, Hawaii's free market think tank. And across the state, farmers and ranchers are wondering what is the future of agriculture in Hawaii. We're here with Paul Brubaker, one of Hawaii's leading economists. Paul was chief economist at the Bank of Hawaii and is now head of TZ Economics or Tropics Zone Economics. He's the director of the Hawaii Economic Association among many other roles. Paul Brubaker recently completed a study called 50 Years of Seed in the 50th State. Welcome Paul. Thank you, Joe. So, well, recently we've seen agriculture in turmoil and a lot of farmers and ranchers are wondering what's going on with agriculture. As the last sugar plantation has just kind of gone belly up in Hawaii, so what is going on with agriculture in Hawaii, especially when it comes to food production? Well, I think you're right. We should, you know, share a moment of silence for the sugar industry, which after 170 years, 180 years, is coming to kind of a sad end. But I think it's also instructive that the problem, if you will, that Alexander and Baldwin will face redeploying 30 or 35,000 acres of prime ag land is a challenge faced by the state as a whole, by agriculture in the state. How do you transition out of this plantation legacy and into the other crops and livestock agricultural activities that will define Hawaii's agricultural future? And speaking of transition, there's a big transition going right now. A lot of people are thinking about, you know, the future of agriculture is in the paper a lot, but how much does agriculture make up of the state's entire economy, would you say? Yeah, it's about 0.6% of GDP. A hundred years ago it was 60% of employment, so a hundred years ago a majority of people in Hawaii worked in agriculture. And that's really a testimony to the amazing productivity of agriculture, because even U.S. agriculture is only about a percentage point of GDP. Now wait a second, you tell me that agriculture is less than 1%, and that's a good thing. Yeah, we feed ourselves, we're overweight, some people obese and diabetic, and we feed the rest of the world, not to mention throwing away too much food, with less than 1% of GDP. So it's a good thing we don't have to do so much to feed ourselves. Productivity in agriculture has allowed labor and other resources to be redeployed in other economic activities. You recently did a study called 50 Years of Seed in the 50th State, and you showed in the study that few agricultural activities in Hawaii's modern history have so profoundly improved human welfare worldwide through contributions to productivity growth, as has Hawaii's corn seed industry. Yeah, few people realized that 50 years ago, plant breeders from across the country were invited out to Hawaii, literally Molokai is where everything started, as Del Monte pineapple plantation closed and those lands became available, and began developing corn breeding programs in the winter months, when up in Iowa and Illinois where a lot of these people were from, it was too cold and they were hiding out in their laboratories. And that's developed into this seed industry today in which the maize genome has been evolved by scientists through R&D in an industry that started out with 200 companies and is now five and maybe three in a year or two, connected globally, that is there isn't a corn grown commercially on the planet that's not related to something that's been done here in Hawaii over the last half century. So the growth in productivity in the maize genome in corn production worldwide is related to what we've done here. So again the same concept of getting more for less work. Yeah, I mean six or seven times more bushels of corn per acre in the United States than 60 years ago using less agricultural chemical input, a couple of the newer modifications have resulted in reductions of corn insecticide use of up to 90% in the last 15 to 20 years. You're saying that we're using less insecticide because of seed crops or the new seed technologies and everything. That's correct. And using safer herbicides, so the insecticides have been, insecticide use has been mitigated by alternative approaches to deterring insect infestation and the use of herbicides with a different genetic application has allowed the industry to forego the use of more dangerous chemicals. There's a history here. You said that this isn't just a new technology, in other words it's been going on for hundreds of years in a way. Well, so since the dawn of evolution, which in the case of corn, we know is about 9,000 years old. Well, how come people think it's a new thing then? I'm not sure. It's kind of like the B science fiction movie version of genetic modification, but when you make a poi dog you're genetically modifying the canine genome. So humans have been doing this for a long time, selecting the attributes that they want to perpetuate in a crop or a livestock product, and thereby influencing the evolution of those crops and livestock products. And then nowadays with the more advanced techniques, taking a more active role in manipulating, you know, at the molecular level, the instruction set to try to cure human diseases and things of that sort. Right. Well, in your report you also say that, well, you said a study that showed the government has poured more money and support into certain agricultural industries, but when it comes to corn research, this has blossomed with minimal support. Yeah. I mean, the foundation was a land grant college system, the University of Hawaii ag researchers there in the extension service that invited the plant breeders to come out from private industry back in the 60s. But from that foundation, which is an appropriate foundation, research and development in basic science, from that foundation has blossomed an industry that's been fully, privately funded and has, you know, kind of taken its own course. Well, what does that say, though? I mean, other industries need more support. This industry of seed technology doesn't need as much support. So what does that say about that industry? So it's always kind of a tough question of how you facilitate economic development. Do you put public resources behind private development or do you create a mechanism or an environment in which private capital or private ideas can thrive on their own? And you know, that's a tension we're always going back and forth on. But a counter example would be with the papaya, is it the ring spot virus, right? These were, there were public investments in R&D that enabled a genetic modification to be developed that, you know, like vaccinating against the virus kept the papaya industry from collapsing. So now we have safer food in that area rather than having a food with a virus. We have a food that can withstand it. Well, in that case, the virus is sort of like the rapid ohio death, right?  And it saved the industry, too. It did save the industry. Wow. And so, but what I'm saying is that the, when the government pours money in research into certain industries, that that's almost like a flag or an indicator of, I guess, future viability or? Well, or not. I mean, very, very often the government is being called upon by special interest groups and so on to pour public resources into an industry to help support it when it's having trouble maintaining its commercial viability. There is that flip side where the government pours resources into developing, say, an infrastructure like the Internet that will allow private capital to flourish. As I say, it's always a tough sort of a tension. I, you know, economists tend to look skeptically on the idea of omniscient governments picking winners. We tend to prefer mechanisms that allow private entrepreneurship and innovation and investment to channel the outcomes into commercially viable, profitable, and socially beneficial outcomes. So, when it comes to agriculture then, the future of agriculture in Hawaii, what can the government do? What should the government do if we want to have a blossoming industry? Here, blossoming, no pun intended.  I liken it to, you know, here we are on Think Tech Hawaii, right? Think of agriculture as the world's original venture capital industry. Private investors place their bets on a crop, put their money literally into the ground, and wait to see if something comes out, blossoms in the future. And it might not. And it might not. And it might get right to the harvest and then here comes the hurricane. So, it's a risky business. And so the kinds of things government can do is help to ensure against some of those risk exposures or provide a mechanism for private insurance to provide coverage. One of the things I would say is create an environment, so to speak, where in ag entrepreneurs and investors are assured that they can grow the crops that they want to grow and not have to get the community's permission all the time. I mean, that's, to me, that's, you know, one of the things that troubles me is this idea that, you know, I have a house on an ag subdivision next to your farm and now I'm going to tell you what you can and can't grow. It's like I moved next to the airport and I'm going to tell the airport not to take planes. When an entrepreneur can actually plan for the future without a lot of variables and is someone going to take my property either through force or through regulation, then they can plan for a business and they can actually, you know. Government can actually do a lot to assure farmers and the community generally that if it's on ag land and it's legitimate agricultural activity, you're good to go. Governor E. Gay recently pledged to double food production in the next 13 years. It's a laudable goal. And I'm just wondering, is this even possible, though, you know, with the losses we've seen in agriculture in Hawaii, a lot of people are scared. So what would the government then have to do to reach that goal? Well, I guess first we should ask, is it possible? It's definitely feasible. I mean, when Oahu sugar, as an example, when Oahu sugar shut down in the 1990s on Oahu, 10,000 acres of prime ag land in the Everlane up in Kunia were released. And two farmers, Larry Jeffs and Alex Sue, went in and ballooned farms and, I can't remember what Larry's farm is called, but they're farming in roughly two 5,000 acre areas successfully. So you never know. But the trick with those guys is here they're on an island with a million people and more tourists, or half million households. So it's possible on Oahu to scale that kind of activity, a little tougher on the neighbor islands, which have smaller markets, maybe 200,000 on Maui and on the big islands. So you have a shot at it there, if you want to scale production, plenty of ag land. And of course, as white commercial sugar closes this year, even more land on Maui. So there's definitely some upside potential there. So with every loss there's an opportunity? There's an opportunity. I think it's important that we think about commercial viability as the guideline by which we measure success rather than some other metric that may be more squishy. So we're going to talk about some of those opportunities after the break. I'm here with economist Paul Brubaker, back in a minute, on a Hanukkah call. For a very healthy summer, watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So Viva Health Coach, Viva la comida saludable. Hi, my name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host, Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m., we host the Hawaii Food and Farmer series. This is the place you can come to for insight on the perspective and history and passions of Hawaii's farmers and all folks involved in Hawaii's local food system. What kind of folks do we have on? So we have everyone from local farmers. We have foodies, chefs. We also have journalists, researchers, anyone who's actually working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So join us every Thursday and tweet in the us and ask us some questions and leave your comments as well. Welcome back to a Hanukkah call. I'm Joe Kent filling in for Dr. Kaylee Iakina. We're here with economist Paul Brubaker. On Maui, we just ended with there's an opportunity for growth. The last sugarcane plantation has now evaporated, it looks like, and winding down. We have a lot of fallow fields there. Some people see fallow fields as a bad thing, others see it as a good thing, depending on your outlook. Half full. Half empty. Exactly. I want to ask you then, when it comes to just the different industries across Hawaii and their economic viability, what do you see as most viable? Sure. If you think about what has been successful as sugar and pineapple, sugarcane and pineapple have wound down over the last 30 years or so. It's been a diverse mix of agricultural activities ranging from livestock and aquaculture, which is up and coming. To some food products, the fresh fruit and vegetable market has always been an active one and import substitution in those areas, an area of opportunity. In addition, it's important to remember that agriculture, not to mention the seed industry, which is now about a quarter of all agriculture in Hawaii, but cut florals and ornamentals. We have a slide on this titled, a global commodity pricing supercycle unwinds. What a great title for a slide. I made it for another purpose, but yes, we've had an unwinding in global commodity prices, including corn, other grains, energy commodities, metals and minerals. That's taken the seed industry, the derived demand for the seed and for the R&D activity downward. Okay, so we can see in that yellow line is the seed industry, and you're saying it went downward recently. It's a big downward adjustment because the price of a bushel of corn went from $7 to $3.50. A reduction in the price of corn means the fewer farmers want to grow it. The reduction in the prices of oil and other energy commodities meant the demand coming from corn as a biofuel came down. Oil is tied to corn, and because the price of sugar went down, the demand for corn sweeteners came down. The demand for corn seed, like the demand for fertilizer or land or labor and whatnot, is derived from the final product. And similarly, the demand for R&D activity in corn is derived from demand. And compared to the seed industry on that global commodity pricing slide, I see aquaculture as well. Yeah, aquaculture is kind of an up and coming area. You can just make it out there at the right end of the trajectory. The backdrop, you can see the great heyday of sugar cane in the 1960s and 70s, and the slow decline in the backdrop. But all of these other... I mean, there's room for everybody. You can run this room for the nuts, there's room for the fruits, there's room for the cattle, there's room... I mean, it's kind of nothing but upside. The amount of cultivated acreage in Hawaii has decreased from about 250, 255,000 acres 30 years ago to only about 55,000 today. So that's... Even if you were just looking at the best land that was already in cultivation 20, 30 years ago, there's hundreds of thousands of acres already available, even before A&B shuts down HC&S. So what's the hold up then? Well, commercial viability. Your competition as a farmer is all the globally sourced food that the miracles of modern transportation logistics and supply chain management make available to us on a daily basis. You can get fresh strawberries on Maui, on every day of the year. Think about that for a second. Imported. Fresh strawberries, yeah, imported on airplanes. So I mean, that's amazing and it's a good thing. It means we have fresh strawberries every day. Now when we talk about food sustainability, some people say that, you know, we grow 10% of the food that's grown here is consumed here and people would like 100% of the food that's grown here to be consumed here. Yeah, but that's a little like saying, I'd like 100% of the smartphones used in Hawaii to be made in Hawaii. I mean, really? In other words... It's part of that because what? In other words, why? Yeah. Why would you do that? I mean... So I'm an economist. So when you learn the economic secret handshake, right, you realize that if something is not commercially viable, it doesn't pay for itself, it's probably not worth doing. If you can come up for another reason for doing it, sort of national defense, does national defense pay for itself? Well, consider the alternative, right? So we engage in some collective activities that are designed to provide us with services that the private sector probably wouldn't do. But food's not one of them and my guess is if we create an environment in which agricultural entrepreneurs and innovators can go out there and take advantage of these released ag lands and the infrastructure that's available, irrigation and whatnot. Nothing wrong with growing food. Nothing wrong with growing food.  But it just seems so sad to think that we've got some of our food leaving the state and instead we're importing food that wasn't grown here.  Yeah, no sadness, that's not what comes to my mind. No, I mean, I'm happy to eat, you know, drink French wine or Australian wine and hopefully someday we can send them some of our papayas. It's a good thing that we can import. It's good both directions, imports and exports, the more the better. And we don't just export food, though, we export tourism in a way, too. Yes, so we specialize in the production of tourism-related goods and services, mostly services, and we earn our external receipts, our foreign income, our export income in that area, which enriches us to the point where we can afford to buy our food from elsewhere. You know, the thing, you mentioned sustainability, that's a slightly different thing, which is about, you know, sort of responsible resource stewardship and that's a good thing. But I think the aspiration to self-sufficiency is probably misdirected. We are an interdependent economy and that's the reason why we have the high standards of living that we do, because of the interdependence. We can share with others and we can- Well, I would have said that a couple of years ago, but now sharing means Uber or some Airbnb. It's not just sharing, it's economy. It's just the economy. That's funny. And speaking of the economy, especially when it comes to agriculture, you have kind of a history in, well, you're an economist, but your family was part of the agriculture community. Yeah, so my grandfather was a plant breeder, got his PhD in genetics in the Cretaceous era in 1926. My dad was a plant breeder and he was active with the seed industry from the beginning. And I got out of it because my cousin became a plant breeder, so I got to be an economist. But it's like a lot of families in Hawaii. Many of us have roots in agriculture, however distant and remote now, a couple generations later, and it is a different world. Even when I was a kid, you knew somebody who grew up on a farm or maybe your parents grew up on a farm, as was the case in my family. Now, most people think that food comes from the supermarket. Well, people want to get back to the farm, though. Their idea is a different idea from getting up at dawn every morning and working out in the field all day. They're thinking of the guy driving in the John Deere tractor with the GPS changing the nutrient admixture as they drive across the field plowing 20 rows at a time. People romanticize. A little bit. We tend to romanticize everything, but yeah, that's, you know, Hanabata day. Wasn't it better back in the day? Some things were, but yeah, starvation wasn't. When it comes to agriculture on Maui, though, all eyes are on Maui right now as we see what's going to be grown in those fallow fields. What would you predict? Or what would you kind of guess would be the best thing for them to try? Oh, I have no presupposition about what's going to work. You know, I'm pretty sure A&B knows what they're doing. And I imagine a fair amount of it will involve ag leasing to people who make a pitch to them. Hey, I think I can grow this and make some money doing it. Can I, you know, can we get a lease to use some of this land? Because coming up with it, look, if they had a brilliant idea, they probably would have come up with it already. It's hard to be optimistic because you can look at West Maui where the plantations closed down a long time ago.  We're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres over the last couple of decades. At the same time, I'm a proponent of preserving ag land for the following reason. You don't know what crops in the future are going to be either commercially viable or make a contribution to the production of it. Nobody could possibly know what kind of crop. But if you pave over that land, you'll never be able to exercise that option.  Except oops, we built a subdivision.  Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have both. And what about, though, the idea that because agriculture is so expensive to try to compete with other places? No question about it. And Hawaii, a part of that cost, is housing. And so, you know, don't we need more houses in Hawaii to try to pay for the labor that's living in those houses to actually work on, someone's got to work on the farm. Look, I don't want to presuppose the outcome on Maui, but let's face it, if 30,000 acres of flat ag land on the edge of the Kauhau-Lui Wailuku conservation can be redeployed in urban uses, I mean, you could only have to carve out a small part of it to satisfy housing need there and still preserve tens of thousands of acres of ag land. Or to try to keep the city city and try to, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different options if we're talking about it. There are many options. And again, I think commercial viability is a good way to sort of organize your thinking about it. But I'll also say that preservation is important because you need to keep your options open. Okay.  What do you see when it comes to talking, you're talking to- Yeah, sure, every, you know, it's kind of like the tourism, right? Every island offers a slightly different destination experience and every island also has a slightly different history, both in terms of success and demise of agriculture and in terms of the, you know, the resource endowment. So Big Island, just say, you know, it's Big Island. All the other islands fit into the Big Island with land leftover. So you can do something like ranching as you can on Maui. But the pattern that you see with a lot of Hawaii crops and livestock activities is something that's really a niche product that can extract value from a particular attribute, a particular characteristic that's unique to a particular island or an island environment, microclimate that may be in one place or another, or in the case of the intellectual property associated with the development of the maize genome and something that literally you've created applying science to, you know, through agronomy to get a better widget and all things are possible. Who knows what's gonna happen with ocean fishing? I mean, these aquaculture fish farms, you know, I keep hearing about this stuff. That thing's taking off right now. Well, and not to mention the made in Hawaii sticker that everybody seems to have. Yeah, well, that's still good to go. You know what I mean? While people still, you know, we can still fake people into thinking that's a good thing. No, I mean, we've got a number of great brands, you know, the Kona Coffee brand, for example. People still associate Hawaii with both pineapple and sugar, C and H, really? Are they gonna change their name? I think so. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and helping to educate us about agriculture in Hawaii. My pleasure, Joe. And thanks, we'll have you on any time here, so.


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Today I'm inside center court and I'm going to show you how to build a delicious and healthy salad a Healthy salad will consist of a couple of different things of course vegetables But we also want to focus on protein and healthy fat These two things are going to help keep us feeling full and energized Examples of proteins on the salad bar include chickpeas barley turkey cubes bacon and nuts and seeds Examples of healthy fats also include nuts and seeds and maybe an olive oil-based dressing Another tip when building a healthy salad is to include as many colors as possible You might have heard eat the rainbow before and it really does hold some science each color of produce gives us a different antioxidant and different nutrients that our body needs