Short Butt Sweet

Okay so between migains, me fucking up my teeth, and recovering from all of that I have had a hard time getting my Ann Rand writting project underway. Last night I was finally able to sit down and concentrate enough to get some reading done on the book, and I am starting to think that an essay every hundred pages might be a little bit to over ambitious, mostly because not a whole fuck of a lot happens in the book. Coming off of something like The Instructions which practically screams "WRITE ABOUT ME ALL THE FUCKING TIME" it is a little bit jarring. Tracing my though process back I realize now that I am doing this project because of the Instructions and I believed that Atlas Shrugged could handle an essay every 100 pages. However, I am starting to have my doubts. I can't tell if it is because I've had the book's superficial message hammered into me by an angry public or because the book itself is superficial but 85 pages in and not a whole lot is going on.

I have a really cool line on the role of the artist in Rand's vision and why her intelectual base is so keen on keeping her alive through her work instead of letting her work speak for itself, and that's good. But I would be hard pressed to figure out what else I would write about that is clever. Then again this is a project that is going to get steadily easier the more I read because I am going to have more material to work with it. After all there is her strange obession with age, and the way she interacts with people on different levels of employment. Both of these things will yield interesting results as I continue to track them over the course of the novel. I think the age thing will bare fruit in 200 pages or so, whereas the different employment levels thing might be ready to go as early as the second essay. All in all I find the subject matter interesting enough to tuff it out with.

The other thing I want to quickly comment on is her use of language. It reads like a romance novel, with swooping airy descriptions of things and lots of time spent on physical bodies and how they move and operate. There is also a complete lack of subtlety in the way the characters approach any given situation which I think it more part of the point rather than a flaw of the writting. I'll decide in a bit. For now my lunch is over and I have to go back to slinging dishes.