Tuesday, October 27, 2009
From Rand to The Road
Quick heads-up: I've posted a list of quotations from The Fountainhead which I will be linking to last week's post about the book as a whole. I enjoyed the book a lot and I found myself taking notes as I read, so I decided to type up those quotes which grabbed my attention and share them with you. I'm probably not the first person to put Ayn Rand quotes on the internet but what the hell, right? It's not like this site couldn't use a bit more class.
There's no spoilers, so if you haven't read the book feel free to read the list and consider whether or not it makes the characters and philosophy sound like something worth exploring. Oh, and the Howard Roark quote from page 602 was one I saw on a T-shirt a few weeks back while walking in Umeda. The wearer looked an awful lot like me, actually. I took it as a sign that I needed to finish reading the book.
I think Atlas Shrugged is going to have to wait for at least a month or two. Hopefully I can finish it before BioShock 2 comes out, not that those two things are necessarily going to be connected. In the meantime, I picked up The Road on a semi-whim this weekend after reading this piece about gaming connecting with other media. It was a paperback so it was pretty affordable. Once I got home I looked it up properly and discovered it has an almost hyperbolic-level of praise. It's also been made into a movie that comes out in the US next month, so this is a good time to read it before the internet start plastering spoilers all over the place.
I also still have a cold from the weekend but it should be gone by Halloween. At the very least, my busiest days of the week are behind me.
つづく...(Click here to read more)
There's no spoilers, so if you haven't read the book feel free to read the list and consider whether or not it makes the characters and philosophy sound like something worth exploring. Oh, and the Howard Roark quote from page 602 was one I saw on a T-shirt a few weeks back while walking in Umeda. The wearer looked an awful lot like me, actually. I took it as a sign that I needed to finish reading the book.
I think Atlas Shrugged is going to have to wait for at least a month or two. Hopefully I can finish it before BioShock 2 comes out, not that those two things are necessarily going to be connected. In the meantime, I picked up The Road on a semi-whim this weekend after reading this piece about gaming connecting with other media. It was a paperback so it was pretty affordable. Once I got home I looked it up properly and discovered it has an almost hyperbolic-level of praise. It's also been made into a movie that comes out in the US next month, so this is a good time to read it before the internet start plastering spoilers all over the place.
I also still have a cold from the weekend but it should be gone by Halloween. At the very least, my busiest days of the week are behind me.
Labels: books, The Fountainhead, The Road
つづく...(Click here to read more)
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Changing Tastes, Burning Rubber
I've fallen ill again. No big deal, it's clearly just a cold (and a mild one at that) but a stuffy head is a stuffy head so I've been feeling pretty tired the last twenty-four hours or so. Mako took Go to her parents' house, giving me a little peace and quiet which is nice. I know the baby has to get a cold someday but there's no need to rush things.
Unfortunately, my cold arrived at the same time as Alex's friend Darren arrived from the UK. Alex had talked to me about a variety of activities with his friend/podcast partner so I was really looking forward to the visit even though (or maybe because) I've never actually met or spoken to Darren myself. Since I wasn't feeling so bad yesterday and I really had an errand to run in Osaka anyway, I put on a surgical mask (when in Japan...) and went into the city to meet them.
I won't get into what exactly we did because I know Alex has plans to make audio/video materials out of it for his website, but I will say that at his house there was a kind of rapid-fire session featuring a number of video games, some that I knew but many that I never played before. Alex keeps himself very busy on the gaming front and he had a number of brand new shrink wrapped titles just ready to be played, yet he still bought Halo ODST while we were in Den Den Town. It was only 3000 Yen - a bargain for a new game, especially in Japan - but I am envious of the amount of material he has at his fingertips.
Once thing I will talk about is Burnout Paradise, a game that has kept itself in the mass gaming conversation for nearly two years now. At first I ignored it because, quite frankly, I loathe racing games. It's a genre that I've never accepted at home or in the arcades because the experience never feels right to me. Even when there's a steering wheel to play with (which helps in the "feel" department) there's this gigantic gap between what I do and what the car does on screen. It doesn't help that most racing games are as shallow as possible, consisting of nothing but roaring engines and turns turns turns. Of course, I've never been much of a "car guy" which makes most of what happens in the game completely uninteresting to me.
And yet Burnout Paradise blew me away. Darren did most of the playing but as I sat and watched I found myself actually getting excited. The big difference, as I see it, is Burnout Paradise gives you an entire city to play around in. Yes, there are races you can run, but there are other events for the choosing like "road rage," an impromptu demolition derby that has you crashing into sports cars on the streets rather than inside an arena.
More importantly, the city is just there for you to explore. Most of the time we weren't doing anything but screeching around corners and looking for things to smash into. Crashing in normal racing games is a drag, a failure, something that forces you to go back and redo the whole race from the start. In Burnout Paradise you are constantly wrecking your car in awesome slow-motion and all that happens is you "respawn" with your car somewhat restored to working order.
Alex made the comparison to the Grand Theft Auto series with the caveat that you never leave your car (though you can change vehicles in designated locations). I would posit that, based on the brief experience I've had so far, Burnout Paradise is better than GTA because it strips away the drama and violence while still offering an open world for vehicular mischief. There are no people in this city, only vehicles. It's like living inside a Hot Wheels track only the toy cars move a lot faster and can easily be replaced no matter how many times you crash them into a wall at high speeds.
The best news about Burnout Paradise is that Alex gave me a copy of the game for free. Somehow he ended up with two versions of the game (one on PlayStation, one on Xbox) so he handed me the Xbox one and told me to keep it. The downside is that there's no way for the two of us to play together now but the upside is that I have something new to enjoy that smashes my own assumptions about the genre. Few things are as exciting in life as discovering something that you thought you hated but is actually really cool. I haven't been this surprised by my own tastes since I learned to enjoy green vegetables.
Oh one last thing on the subjects of games and Alex. After I wrote about The Fountainhead last week, I uploaded a slightly different version of the piece to Bitmob, adding a few paragraphs to discuss the connections between the book and BioShock. Today I learned that my work was featured in a Spotlight post alongside an item that Alex had written. Small world!
つづく...(Click here to read more)
Unfortunately, my cold arrived at the same time as Alex's friend Darren arrived from the UK. Alex had talked to me about a variety of activities with his friend/podcast partner so I was really looking forward to the visit even though (or maybe because) I've never actually met or spoken to Darren myself. Since I wasn't feeling so bad yesterday and I really had an errand to run in Osaka anyway, I put on a surgical mask (when in Japan...) and went into the city to meet them.
I won't get into what exactly we did because I know Alex has plans to make audio/video materials out of it for his website, but I will say that at his house there was a kind of rapid-fire session featuring a number of video games, some that I knew but many that I never played before. Alex keeps himself very busy on the gaming front and he had a number of brand new shrink wrapped titles just ready to be played, yet he still bought Halo ODST while we were in Den Den Town. It was only 3000 Yen - a bargain for a new game, especially in Japan - but I am envious of the amount of material he has at his fingertips.
Once thing I will talk about is Burnout Paradise, a game that has kept itself in the mass gaming conversation for nearly two years now. At first I ignored it because, quite frankly, I loathe racing games. It's a genre that I've never accepted at home or in the arcades because the experience never feels right to me. Even when there's a steering wheel to play with (which helps in the "feel" department) there's this gigantic gap between what I do and what the car does on screen. It doesn't help that most racing games are as shallow as possible, consisting of nothing but roaring engines and turns turns turns. Of course, I've never been much of a "car guy" which makes most of what happens in the game completely uninteresting to me.
And yet Burnout Paradise blew me away. Darren did most of the playing but as I sat and watched I found myself actually getting excited. The big difference, as I see it, is Burnout Paradise gives you an entire city to play around in. Yes, there are races you can run, but there are other events for the choosing like "road rage," an impromptu demolition derby that has you crashing into sports cars on the streets rather than inside an arena.
More importantly, the city is just there for you to explore. Most of the time we weren't doing anything but screeching around corners and looking for things to smash into. Crashing in normal racing games is a drag, a failure, something that forces you to go back and redo the whole race from the start. In Burnout Paradise you are constantly wrecking your car in awesome slow-motion and all that happens is you "respawn" with your car somewhat restored to working order.
Alex made the comparison to the Grand Theft Auto series with the caveat that you never leave your car (though you can change vehicles in designated locations). I would posit that, based on the brief experience I've had so far, Burnout Paradise is better than GTA because it strips away the drama and violence while still offering an open world for vehicular mischief. There are no people in this city, only vehicles. It's like living inside a Hot Wheels track only the toy cars move a lot faster and can easily be replaced no matter how many times you crash them into a wall at high speeds.
The best news about Burnout Paradise is that Alex gave me a copy of the game for free. Somehow he ended up with two versions of the game (one on PlayStation, one on Xbox) so he handed me the Xbox one and told me to keep it. The downside is that there's no way for the two of us to play together now but the upside is that I have something new to enjoy that smashes my own assumptions about the genre. Few things are as exciting in life as discovering something that you thought you hated but is actually really cool. I haven't been this surprised by my own tastes since I learned to enjoy green vegetables.
Oh one last thing on the subjects of games and Alex. After I wrote about The Fountainhead last week, I uploaded a slightly different version of the piece to Bitmob, adding a few paragraphs to discuss the connections between the book and BioShock. Today I learned that my work was featured in a Spotlight post alongside an item that Alex had written. Small world!
Labels: Alex, BioShock, Bitmob, Burnout Paradise, Den Den Town, friends, GTA, Osaka, The Fountainhead, video games, writing, Xbox
つづく...(Click here to read more)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Throwing My Two Cents in The Fountainhead
The Fountainhead is a novel that I've heard great things about for my entire life without ever learning what the book was actually about. Had I not suffered an academic meltdown in high school I'm sure it would have been assigned reading, which means this might be the very first good thing to come out of that whole crisis. If I had read this book when I was seventeen I would have thrown it across the room out of frustration. I can just picture my miserable teenage self asking aloud: What do I know about architecture? Why should I care?
Let's face it, The Fountainhead looks dreadful when summarized in any fashion and to a suburban kid with no interest in books that asked him to think about the world, the opening chapters about two architects engaging in a sort of professional rivalry just isn't compelling unto itself. Of course I'm being unfair here. The Fountainhead is no more about architecture than Fight Club is about fighting. Just because something is there doesn't make it central to the message of the story.
The real story is about man's greatness, at least as perceived by author Ayn Rand. All of the protagonists share key philosophical ideals and habits that make them stand out above the rest of the characters, some of whom are actively portrayed as villains while others are merely weak and mediocre in the face of real, creative people. I found it kind of amazing that the characters the reader is supposed to care about all completely agree with each other throughout the book. Even when certain folks get divorced, there's an amicability that is hard to believe.
More disturbingly, there's a rape and the only consequence is that the victim falls completely and totally in love with her rapist. I guess I'm supposed to write this off as the product of another era where people had very different views of sexuality and women's rights, but as a reader in 2009 it was a little hard for me to gloss over. At first I thought it was just rough consensual sex (she was certainly giving him looks before he made his move) but she later speaks of it as a rape. Again, maybe this is just semantics and in the 1930s "rape" simply didn't carry the weight it does today. At that point women hadn't even been voting for twenty years.
Aside from that unpleasantness, I found the story to be quite compelling. The story covers more than a decade of these characters' lives yet Howard Roark, the central figure, remains virtually unchanged throughout. He's introduced as a brilliant architectural student whose talents are dwarfed only by his stubbornness and the knowledge that he is right. His refusal to compromise or accept anyone else's terms gets him thrown out of college and loses him countless jobs as an architect. As the book progresses, his fortunes rise and sink but he never does anything different. This impressed me immensely and kept me reading to see whether he would ever be accepted as a genius.
I don't know a thing about buildings or construction but I got a strong impression of greatness from the descriptions of his work and I understood his disdain for paying homage to styles of the past simply because they are revered. I suppose this is an area where my philosophy and Ayn Rand's converge. I've never been one to accept tradition alone as a valid reason to do something. It's probably the single most irritating thing about living in Japan. All day long I am bombarded with empty words and habits that are tied to Japanese tradition. Most days I tune it out, but sometimes I wish I could just make them stop.
Other things that rang true to me was the notion that people surround themselves with "mirrors" with which they can reflect their own opinions rather than discussing things honestly and the idea of the press controlling public discourse rather than reporting it. Some of the concepts in the book were ones I never considered but found curiously appealing, such as Wynand's remarks about the magnificence of nature reminding him of man's achievements. Rather than feel overwhelmed by the sea or the vastness of space, he thinks of the men who built ships to cross the ocean or found ways to dig through the mountains.
On the other hand, some of Ayn Rand's ideas felt very, very wrong to me. Late in the book there is a collective dismissal of the idea of public housing because it somehow punishes those who are not poor enough to benefit from welfare. I can see the reasoning behind her argument but I feel it's entirely built on the faulty premise that poverty is a personal failing that can simply be overcome with a little hard work. I also don't understand the notion that beauty or magnificence can be lessened by allowing others to experience it. Does great art become tarnished because it is shown in a museum? I don't think my untrained eyes damage a Jackson Pollock even if I am incapable of appreciating it.
I was very surprised that the book ended as it did with Roark being vilified rather than condemned simply because he gave an impassioned speech in court. I know the author wrote in her introduction that the book is not meant to be realistic, instead presenting the world as it "could or ought to be," but given the savagery of the criticism that the public lays upon Roark throughout the story I was scratching my head when they suddenly embraced him. Of course I wanted him to succeed but I never expected him to wave his magic genius wand and walk out of that courtroom a free man.
Reading The Fountainhead was quite thrilling at times and I occasionally struggled to put the book down. Even when I disagreed with the philosophy or felt the language was a little self-indulgent, I wanted to press on and hear more about the world the book contained. I can't say this novel has sold me on objectivism as a concept but I am certain I want to continue reading Ayn Rand. I've already purchased Atlas Shrugged and will crack it open in the near future. I'll probably read something else first though, because at over 1000 pages it looks to be a another marathon read and I'd prefer not to run two marathons in a row.
UPDATE: I've created a page of quotes from The Fountainhead that I enjoyed. You may enjoy them as well.
つづく...(Click here to read more)
Let's face it, The Fountainhead looks dreadful when summarized in any fashion and to a suburban kid with no interest in books that asked him to think about the world, the opening chapters about two architects engaging in a sort of professional rivalry just isn't compelling unto itself. Of course I'm being unfair here. The Fountainhead is no more about architecture than Fight Club is about fighting. Just because something is there doesn't make it central to the message of the story.
The real story is about man's greatness, at least as perceived by author Ayn Rand. All of the protagonists share key philosophical ideals and habits that make them stand out above the rest of the characters, some of whom are actively portrayed as villains while others are merely weak and mediocre in the face of real, creative people. I found it kind of amazing that the characters the reader is supposed to care about all completely agree with each other throughout the book. Even when certain folks get divorced, there's an amicability that is hard to believe.
More disturbingly, there's a rape and the only consequence is that the victim falls completely and totally in love with her rapist. I guess I'm supposed to write this off as the product of another era where people had very different views of sexuality and women's rights, but as a reader in 2009 it was a little hard for me to gloss over. At first I thought it was just rough consensual sex (she was certainly giving him looks before he made his move) but she later speaks of it as a rape. Again, maybe this is just semantics and in the 1930s "rape" simply didn't carry the weight it does today. At that point women hadn't even been voting for twenty years.
Aside from that unpleasantness, I found the story to be quite compelling. The story covers more than a decade of these characters' lives yet Howard Roark, the central figure, remains virtually unchanged throughout. He's introduced as a brilliant architectural student whose talents are dwarfed only by his stubbornness and the knowledge that he is right. His refusal to compromise or accept anyone else's terms gets him thrown out of college and loses him countless jobs as an architect. As the book progresses, his fortunes rise and sink but he never does anything different. This impressed me immensely and kept me reading to see whether he would ever be accepted as a genius.
I don't know a thing about buildings or construction but I got a strong impression of greatness from the descriptions of his work and I understood his disdain for paying homage to styles of the past simply because they are revered. I suppose this is an area where my philosophy and Ayn Rand's converge. I've never been one to accept tradition alone as a valid reason to do something. It's probably the single most irritating thing about living in Japan. All day long I am bombarded with empty words and habits that are tied to Japanese tradition. Most days I tune it out, but sometimes I wish I could just make them stop.
Other things that rang true to me was the notion that people surround themselves with "mirrors" with which they can reflect their own opinions rather than discussing things honestly and the idea of the press controlling public discourse rather than reporting it. Some of the concepts in the book were ones I never considered but found curiously appealing, such as Wynand's remarks about the magnificence of nature reminding him of man's achievements. Rather than feel overwhelmed by the sea or the vastness of space, he thinks of the men who built ships to cross the ocean or found ways to dig through the mountains.
On the other hand, some of Ayn Rand's ideas felt very, very wrong to me. Late in the book there is a collective dismissal of the idea of public housing because it somehow punishes those who are not poor enough to benefit from welfare. I can see the reasoning behind her argument but I feel it's entirely built on the faulty premise that poverty is a personal failing that can simply be overcome with a little hard work. I also don't understand the notion that beauty or magnificence can be lessened by allowing others to experience it. Does great art become tarnished because it is shown in a museum? I don't think my untrained eyes damage a Jackson Pollock even if I am incapable of appreciating it.
I was very surprised that the book ended as it did with Roark being vilified rather than condemned simply because he gave an impassioned speech in court. I know the author wrote in her introduction that the book is not meant to be realistic, instead presenting the world as it "could or ought to be," but given the savagery of the criticism that the public lays upon Roark throughout the story I was scratching my head when they suddenly embraced him. Of course I wanted him to succeed but I never expected him to wave his magic genius wand and walk out of that courtroom a free man.
Reading The Fountainhead was quite thrilling at times and I occasionally struggled to put the book down. Even when I disagreed with the philosophy or felt the language was a little self-indulgent, I wanted to press on and hear more about the world the book contained. I can't say this novel has sold me on objectivism as a concept but I am certain I want to continue reading Ayn Rand. I've already purchased Atlas Shrugged and will crack it open in the near future. I'll probably read something else first though, because at over 1000 pages it looks to be a another marathon read and I'd prefer not to run two marathons in a row.
UPDATE: I've created a page of quotes from The Fountainhead that I enjoyed. You may enjoy them as well.
Labels: Ayn Rand, books, The Fountainhead
つづく...(Click here to read more)
