“I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate.”
I recently re-read Ayn Rand’s 1943 classic, The Fountainhead. The novel is a story about perseverance and exceptionalism set in 1920s and 30s New York City.
The protagonist is Howard Roark, an architect who refuses to compromise the principles behind his work.
There are a host of characters determined to thwart Roark’s career, from Peter Keating, a second-rate architect who achieves fame by copying the work of others, to Ellsworth Toohey, a critic who promotes mediocrity in order to destroy society’s ability to appreciate truly great work.
Major themes in the novel include competence, individualism, and preoccupation with the opinions of others.
Peter Keating is one of the most fascinating characters in the novel:
“Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but thought great. He didn’t want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others.”
Keating is representative of a certain type of person that I encounter everywhere.
Tader and I went to see the film “Tree of Life” yesterday. It was so terrible that I suspected that we were part of some experiment to see how bad a movie can be before the entire audience walks out.
Now the trailer makes the movie looks halfway decent:
RyRy and I went to see Sex and the City II tonight. I spent the entire week listening to horrible reviews for the movie on the radio, but I knew that the movie was fabulous when one review called it “a gay man’s fantasy about how women act.”
Sign me up!
The theater packed with screaming girls in stilettos was worth the price of admission. The Minneapolis girls pretended to be from Miami for one night and the crowd was rowdy, fun, and responsive to the movie.
