Can someone explain Ayn Rand to me?!

I think we read the Plague instead of the Stranger

it's like, you already think you're the most important person in the world and should be able to do whatever you want, now here's a "grown-up" "philosophy" that says it's OK, go out and have fun!

wait, the invisible man by h.g. wells or am i to understand that you were taught ellison's invisible man in high school, in which case i am super-impressed and kind of awed?

upton sinclair has the advantage of being vv important and influential w/r/t actual issues of his day

again, matter of taste re Hesse. not to mention that there may be translation issues (German --> English, and all that).

Ellison (lol didn't read the Wells one until college for a genre fiction class). I think we spent like a whole quarter on it, it looms large in my memory.

xp

They should introduce The Most Dangerous Game into the schools

I forgot Native Son and Black Boy

there was also a Louise Erdman book but I can't remember what it was because it was super super boring

of course upton sinclair is a better stylist than ayn rand! i realize this stuff is subjective but ayn rand is suuuuuch a shitty writer.

upton sinclair has the advantage of being vv important and influential w/r/t actual issues of his day

^^^this. which is why we read it in US history instead of English, iirc

oh shit yeah we read Native Son too.

Light in August was another one.

am i to understand that you were taught ellison's invisible man in high school, in which case i am super-impressed and kind of awed?

we read the invisible man, wasn't even an AP class

public school in spokane fucking washington, too (redneck central)

sorta figured it was part of the standard american curriculum

no?

it is really not standard! maybe i am naive to be shocked but that is a super-hard book!

light in august is quite a book for hs too

totes. i <3 that one, would have loved to have read it in high school.

do a lot of ppl read 'death in venice' in HS? because that one stands out as far and away the most difficult of those texts, both style-wise and theme-wise.

ayn rand is so bad...i think my mom used to be into her work waaaay back when she was younger but now she finds her pretty reprehensible.

i certainly did not read death in venice in high school

we really just did shakespeare
macbeth
julius caesar
king lear

and also

pride and prejudice
oedipus the king

big focus on poetry in ireland tho

aye thee ould whiskey
and me sheep
make me life
complete

i certainly did not read death in venice in high school

10th grade IIRC

It was kind of an extra credit program concocted by our honors English teacher to combat the extreme boredom of some of us (two of whom now moderate this board, lol)

this horrible English teacher at my high school taught a senior elective called "political lit" only it turns out he was a crazy libertarian. as far as i know, the only female author he ever assigned in that class was ayn rand. >:[

can't even believe all these fancy books y'all read in high school

high school is just plain fucked up

at any rate re: Rand, I still stand by what I wrote upthread; regardless of how terrible we find her in 2010, I have at least one concrete example of how she inspired a dude facing a lot of discrimination and economic hardship growing up to get a PhD and run a lab for a Fortune 100 company and it was all very beneficial to my life as a child, so I am not going to hate

oh yeah we did a bunch of Shakespeare too - Macbeth stands out as the most memorable, cuz we were shown bits of the Polanski version and the Orson Welles version (which is awesome) in its entirety. Also Othello, something else... not Hamlet

oh yeah Midsummer Night's Dream

tbh i was one of the worst students of all time and basically never did homework ever (one of my best friends used to boast about not even owning copybooks for loads of subjects) and i used to just bring my own books to class and read them and wait for school to be over for good. i'm still so glad it is!

a terrible man for the studying

we werent allowed watch the polanski version bc my teacher said "unlike in the ACTUAL PLAY they show duncan being murdered, and i know that most of you wont bother reading this or even paying attn. to me right now or ever. but i cant deal w/ reading any essays where you describe the murder scene"

we did Julius Caesar in 9th grade, no Shakespeare in 10th grade (American lit), King Lear in 11th grade (best ever), and then senior year was electives and some years a Shakespeare elective was offered, but not my senior year.

it's like, you already think you're the most important person in the world and should be able to do whatever you want, now here's a "grown-up" "philosophy" that says it's OK, go out and have fun!

OTM. It's just a philosophy which allows people to put a fancy name on self-serving, self-congratulatory asshole behaviour. No wonder so many celebrities are fans - they have the same sense of entitlement as your average teenager. I fucking hate Ayn Rand.

lol we watched one of the older film versions of Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, which the teacher apparently forgot to prescreen and therefore forgot that in the bedroom scene there is a fantastic moment where naked Juliet leaps out of bed and lunges for something behind the camera, filling the screen with boob

that would be the one with Olivia Hussey. that scene is forever imprinted into my brain.

she is v v pretty

i was one of the worst students of all time and basically never did homework ever ... and i used to just bring my own books to class and read them and wait for school to be over

oh hai me

i remember watching a pretty messed-up film version of edgar allan poe's 'the masque of the red death' in an english lit class, which involved a decent amount of gore and heavy duty incest.

the film involved that, not the class.

Good that we've moved on to Olivia Hussey's boobs though.

my sister did a room w/ a view the movie for her leaving cert (you can do a movie) in an all girls school w/ a nun for a teacher and they watched the dick-flopping-skinnydipping scene loads of times. we watched it as a family at christmas shortly after and my dad was shifting uncomfortably and my sister was all "oh yeah i forgot this used to seem kindof awkward before you see it a million times"

omar the one with vincent price??

I graduated college with a 2.4 simply cuz I have such a procrastinator's attitude that I flat out didn't show up to class and would just show up for tests and would skid by.

I remember we also watched a the end of a filmed stage production of "Oedipus Rex" where the dude playing Oedipus had to deliver his final monologue with hamburger meat in his eyes (because he had gouged them out, see)

we watched apocalypse now as part of heart of darkness study, which was ayokay with me

i still have never read oedipus rex should i y/n?

uhm isn't that bad for your eyes

we watched apocalypse now as part of heart of darkness study, which was ayokay with me

oh we did too, it made me actually appreciate the core story underneath the layer upon layer of distracting racism

uhm isn't that bad for your eyes

We assumed so!

xp you should read it if you feel a lack of greek tragedy in yr life. reading those things is fun but kind of a stilted experience.

it was this one, cad:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097844/

I'm starting to see why I was so bored in school. We read SOME of those books on your list, but only like 35%.

We were taught to write formulaic (re: boring and pedestrian) essays. Senior year, we were given an assignment for our Senior Paper to read one of a list of approved books, and we would do assignments and tests on it.

I chose Les Miserables, then got busy as over winter break I had 10 nights where I was performing so I got 30 pages in. Stupid teacher admits to me she's never read Les Miserables. The test was just us answering vague questions based on our reading of the book.

I used Cliff Notes for some of the answers, and invented the rest. I invented whole plot points that didn't happen and even characters that weren't even in the book. I got an A+.