Thursday, October 29, 2009

Todd in GQ -- and YOU in a Debate!

subcomandante-marcos.jpg

Well, I STILL NEED A DEBATER-VOLUNTEER willing to defend the Latin American left (or some aspect of it) on Wednesday night (Nov. 1, at 8pm, at Lolita Bar) and will e-mail the world to announce who that is by Monday at the latest (just e-mail me, the host, at ToddSeavey[at]earthlink.net).

For now, let us think of this hypothetical debate volunteer as “Comandante Plus-One,” if you will, a metaphorical ski mask disguising battle-hardened left-wing features.

And do not be frightened away from volunteering by the fact that I am quoted (twice) in an article about Ayn Rand on GQ.com (which will also appear in their December issue).

I partially defend Rand — and will have far more to say about that in tomorrow’s climactic, utopian entry — but there’s one more thing I could have said in defense of her much-loved, much-mocked Atlas Shrugged, it occurs to me: that in addition to being more about philosophy than about realistic character portraits, it actually does work fairly well as a “Russian novel” (unsurprising, given where she emigrated from), in the sense that it aims, through a plethora of characters, to capture their whole social milieu and political circumstances more than their individual psyches.  In that way, she’s very capitalist but not merely bourgeois-individualist.


2 comments:

Gerard said...

Bah!

That doesn’t compare to my sound bite being the lead story in a local, little-watched newscast, which is broadcast on Fox Five’s sister network.

The snippet involved me denouncing a Spanish-speaking truck driver who was ticketed for the offense.

Corsello said...

All I want to say is that there are only three things I’ve ever wanted to do in life: 1) drive at Indy 2) make love to Marie Osmond 3) publicly and continually embarrass Todd Seavey (by way of association) with my ignorance of all things economic. I’ve never driven at Indy, but two out of three ain’t bad.