He has been directing films at a rate of one every two or three years and is so far sticking to a vow that his onscreen alter ego makes in “Broken Embraces”: no sequels, remakes or biopics. That last category is a tempting one, especially when Mr. Almodóvar expounds on the life of Ernest Hemingway’s transsexual son, Gregory (later Gloria). Bullfighting! Gender-bending! Think of the costumes! Isn’t he at least intrigued? “No biopics,” he said firmly. “No biopics, no prequels, no sequels, no hero movies, no antihero movies, and definitely no superhero movies. Anything else I can handle.

— Holiday Movies - Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar - Cinematic Soulmates - NYTimes.com

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

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Adam Kirsch, Ayn Rand’s Revenge, NYT (via barthel) (via tylercoates)

From the same piece:

Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount. “At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row,” Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.