I started reading The Fountainhead yesterday. And no, I'm not mentioning it just because I want to look literate, being that today I discovered that someone quite high up on the food chain here at the job stumbled across my blog, which resulted in an impromptu meeting. We had a nice chat about it, and it was an interesting way to finally meet one of my bosses - through my blog - and share ideas. I've met other people at MTV Networks through this thing too. It's a rather surreal and definitely not anticipated result of deciding to experiment with this a few months ago. Imagine working at a giant company in the 1950's (being a woman, no internet) - My God? How would you ever get noticed? FYI bloggers, if you think that your co-workers aren't reading your blog, you have been warned. Being aware that the world is getting tinier by the second, my most incriminating thoughts are pretty much reserved for a journal buried somewhere in my duvet cover ;) That said, I still read my former boss's blog on windsailing, my other boss's blog about his music career and other interesting things, my coworker's blog on NYC culture and music, etc. etc. It's an incestuous blogosphere, that's for sure. But back to The Fountainhead. I am not into movements of any sort, or prescribe to any kind of philosophy, but having said that I am going to say that this book is really rocking my socks off. I started it last night around 10pm and at 3am realized I felt like throwing up, because I was so exhausted. That is how quickly and how deep I was consumed by this ginormous tome of a tale. I am Roark. Or, I would like to believe that I am. I also see myself in Ignatius P Riley, Jane Eyre, Jim Casy, José Arcadio Buendía, and Pip. All of these characters came from crazy long books that I devoured - for the most part - in single sittings and that have lived on within me since. Ayn Rand makes a really good point in her intro to The Fountainhead: "Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year. That most of them do, today, that they are written and published as if they were magazines, to fade rapidly, is one of the sorries aspects of today's literature, and one of the clearest indictments of its dominant esthetic philosophy: concrete-bound, journalistic Naturalism which has now reached its dead end in the inarticulate sounds of panic." ..."Let me state for the record and for the benefit of those college students who have never been allowed to discover it - only that Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned - in the words of Aristotle - not with things as they are, but with things as they might and ought to be." Far too often the minutia of my day, the little stresses that in the grand scheme of it all don't mean a thing, prevent me from dreaming. I'll go days, and at my worst, weeks without imagining something beautiful that I could create. Throughout my life, books have been my guidepost back to my treasure trove that is my imagination. They have been my friends when I had none, my inspiration when there was none to be found in the world around me, and have been a constant reminder of the simple, eternal power of words. Music does the same thing for me too, but in a different way: Inspires me to see beyond what is around me to a place where anything can happen. Thank you, Souls of Mischief! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZSZ6RvKE70]