Blast from the Past

Some of you may remember the short-lived and ill-fated Poetry-Sticker on the Street project I got involved in last winter. I never thought they would re-surface again in any form or shape, except that one of them got immemorialized in a photo that is now on the Spacing website. I vaguely remember pasting this one myself, although I don't take any responsibilities for the inanity of the quote itself.

It made me think of Andrea: professional closet organizer; Queen & Bathurst; blow-torched roses; flower studded bicycles and all that jazz.

Me and Ayn Rand Were Tight Once

It's 12:24, 14 hours before my exam. Studying is going nowhere, and I thought, what the heck, might as well.

A post on Adeel's blog ended up unearthing my earlier flirtation with Ayn Rand and Objectivism. If you click on my profile you can still see Atlas Shrugged listed as one of my favourite books. Truthfully though, it's not; back when I had a lot of zits it was.

I don't know exactly why it's still there, I mean, except for it being a badly written novel that incidentally sheds light on Ayn Rand's intellectual narcissim and her ironically authoritarian approach to political ideologies, I'm also pretty offended, on behalf of Melville, Forster, and even Jane Jacobs et al, that it's consistently ranked number 2 in Library of Congress's survey of America's favourite book. Yet somehow I felt, for some inarticulat-able reason, that it should be there: it was what I lived by, if only for a brief year-and-a-half during which I didn't know better.

I actually met my current roommate during Frosh week, when I was lying face-down on a sofa in a boozy stupor while we talked about Objectivism. Later that week we somehow found and signed up for the Objectivist club of UofT, and two weeks after that we went to a lecture given by the club on Objectivism in art.

The lecturer was a self-proclaimed trailer-park boy who found his higher calling. The ensuing two hours was nothing short of a disaster, as he tried, through theatrical imitations of ancient Egyptian gestures, to demonstrate the evolution of the Objectivist idea in ancient Egyptian and Greek art.

I took it rather well under the circumstances. We walked out before the lecture ended, shrugged to each other a little embarrassedly; I felt a little empty, but in a rather cathartic way. We went for pizza instead.

I've never lived by any philosophy since.
p.s. that being said, I do like the cover design of these Rand books and very much appreciate the Deco motifs. My copy, the whole fucking 1000 pages of it, was (I believe) left in Niagara Falls bus terminal by accident. I hypothesize that it ended in one of the following ways: 1) it went to the garbage dump, 2) it spontaneously self-combusted, or 3) it got picked up by an angsty pimply teenager from Hamilton who skipped class for the day and converted him/her. 1) is by far most likely, but I hope it ended up with a teenager. Ah those bittersweet years. Tears.