Ayn Rand Dating Site, Ayn-Rand Bash
Hilarious NYT article about how people use the bookshelves of others as gauges of: their intelligence, sex-worthiness, compatiability as friend or boy/girl-friend. Lots of really funny lines. Initially dug the article because it contained a funny cut-up of Ayn Rand fans and a link to an Ayn Rand dating site (I wonder what the binaries.pictures-style fora have in them), but the whole article is a gas:
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,� said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.� (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged� and “The Fountainhead,� might disagree.)
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,� beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,� Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences� are a “tedious conversational topic at best.�
Great lines throughout: a woman who pretty much knows she’s not getting naked with a guy who reads life lessons from dog books, a “you knew what you were getting into” blow-off to an Alice Munro fun who dates a Da Vinci Code reader, the asymmetry of male and female reading habits, and, my favorite, the guy who fell for a woman who had Unbearable Lightness of Being on her nightstand — not because he loves Kundera, but because he had vague synaptic connections between the book, bowler hats, Lena Olin, and nudity. Fun read.