Reidy

http://aynrandlexicon.com/about-ayn-rand/faq.html

While the typewriter story can't be true, I can believe that Rand told it to BB among others. She was solicitous of her family's political security in the USSR, and the Remington-Rand explanation would have kept people from prying further and finding out her birth name. The Cyrillic story, while probably true, would have given the secret away.

Rand's recommendation of Hugo paid off handsomely. I struck out on Dostoyevsky and Conrad. The Secret Agent has some amusingly contemporary allusions, but otherwise both authors escaped me.

No, because the money to support these schools was taken from you and others by force. This is not your doing. See Rand's The Question of Scholarships.

My advice is always to read the novels first, then the anthologies - The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal and The Romantic Manifesto - depending on what topics interest you. Then the secondary sources the others have mentioned. One reason to start with the novels is that the non-fiction writings (by Rand and others) refer back to them constantly, revealing their storylines in the process. You won't understand the essays if you haven't read the novels, and you won't enjoy the novels if you already know how they turn out. A reason to read Rand before you move on to Peikoff, Bernstein, etc. is that the secondary literature constantly refers back to Rand's essays. For the New Intellectual, The Early Ayn Rand, the letters and the journals are optional.

A new way to fight the brain drain

This is a quite different statement from the ones she made about Branden. She approved works of Peikoff that she had already seen. By contrast, she said Branden's word was Objectivism and that she approved his future statements in advance. (Come to think of it, "intellectual heir" has a meaning after all, namely this blank-check endorsement that she did not give to Peikoff.)

As far as I know Rand never named anybody but Branden as her intellectual heir. Can you provide a citation about Peikoff? (Not that the phrase means anything anyway)

To get back to the Columbia University tapes, most of them are online. Apparently the ones with Hospers and the Brandens have been memory-holed.

One of Rand's biographers - Heller, I think - talks about her pep pill use and quotes a letter from Isabel Paterson in the late 1940s, warning her strongly to lay off at once.

In Oak Park IL on Thursday the 11th, a rare chance to hear the music that inspired We the Living in the building that inspired Roark's Stoddard Temple: http://www.utrf.org/operetta-in-exile/

I don't see that unfaithfulness requires deception. It simply means having a sexual partner other than one's spouse (or committed partner). She made her marriage the public's business by talking about it. Nor do I see that Peikoff was merely being discreet. Rand and the Brandens had both dishonest by omission in their original explanation. Had Rand merely said, in a sentence or two, that she and the Brandens were going their separate ways, then discretion would have been been due. Instead she denounced him publicly for all manner of depravity, specified or not, while withholding the real reason. By 1986, when BB's biography came out, there was a pent-up demand for the whole story. Rand was a famous and historically important person, and people want to know about her life. If people want to attack you ad hominem, they're going to find a way. What you make public and what you keep private won't change this. For example, some have denounced her for taking Social Security and Medicare in later years, and they didn't need any gossip or personal secrets to do this. I'm not sure. Did Peikoff ever deny on the record that the affair had taken place?

This article, about the anti-revolutionary civil war in the Vendée region of France, might interest a Randian audience, because it was the historical background of Hugo's Ninety-Three, for which she wrote an introduction.

The big shockeroo was the revelation that AR had been unfaithful to her husband. People had gossiped, but this was the first time anybody attested to it on the record. Attendant to that was the revelation that she hadn't come clean to her public about the reasons for her break with NB. Just to speculate, I imagine the book was offensive to Peikoff, implying as it did that either he hadn't known this during Rand's lifetime (despite his claims to have been close to her) or that he had (and had cooperated in the deception). He finally admitted, at one of his Ford Hall Forum appearances, that he'd learned about the affair from her journals shortly after her death. That's the worst of both, if you think about it: she never saw fit to tell her self-appointed "intellectual heir" and he kept it a secret once he found out.

The argument here (identity precludes change) first showed up in Parmenides ca 500 BC. From the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology: On the former path [i.e. of reason] we convince ourselves that the existent neither has come into being, nor is perishable, and is entirely of one sort, without change and limit, neither past nor future, entirely included in the present. For it is as impossible that it can become and grow out of the existent, as that it could do so out of the non-existent; since the latter, non-existence, is absolutely inconceivable, and the former cannot precede itself; and every coming into existence presupposes a non-existence. His writings give us the first example of an explicit premise-and-conclusion argument. Much of Aristotle's metaphysics amounts to an explanation of what's wrong with that argument.