Repurposing Ayn Rand

"Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me--it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice--your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know--only that it exists."

What do you think it is?

Tropic of Cancer

"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity--I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles."

Paper 2

This one was for Legal Ethics. We had to pick an outside source (preferably a non-legal one) and use it to comment on a topic we covered in class. I picked David Foster Wallace and exclusion from the legal profession. Not brilliant, but it works.

The Sweet and Sour of American Legal English: How Language and Convention Exclude Non-Lawyers from Legal Practice*

It’s a pretty uncontroversial idea that, in the United States, a person may represent himself in court. The space for laypeople to represent themselves in transactions and litigation is also accepted by the self-regulating legal profession. But formal permission to represent oneself isn’t the whole story: the legal profession uses a language, American Legal English, that informally, but routinely, excludes from practice the people who would exercise their right to self-representation. With David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage (or, ‘Politics and the English Language’ Is Redundant)” as a guide, I present several propositions. One: Some parts of legal practice are inherently complex, and using a shared language as precise as ALE reflects this complexity and so helps mitigate conflict. As an example, I consider complicated business transactions between sophisticated corporate parties. Two: Other parts of legal practice that are not inherently complex (such as simple commercial transactions between individuals) have dispensed with ALE and substituted a different, plainer English that functions well without the interference of lawyers or lawyerly complexity. Three: In a few distinct areas of legal practice, self-representation could be a useful fill for hiring a lawyer, but the litigant is required to forego self-representation because knowledge of ALE is still required by the system. In these situations, it’s unclear whether the cost of excluding some litigants from getting an effective hearing of their claims is outweighed by the benefits of precision that using the shared ALE language provide to the legal system. . . .

*Yes, I know law school papers don't have to follow this title convention. I wrote these very close in time (and for two professors who happen to be married to each other), and the titular mirroring is actually deliberate. The colon is now banished.

What any author's website biography should aspire to be

"Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family and numerous personal demons.

"A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses. He has outlasted almost all of them, and his column still appears on most Sundays in The Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. It may be viewed online at www.miamiherald.com or in the actual printed edition of the newspaper, which, miraculously, is still being published. . . .

"Together, Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. Still, he has reason to believe that all the foreign translations are brilliantly faithful to the original work. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. Hiaasen re-reads those particular reviews no more than eight or nine times a day. . . .

"One of Hiaasen's previous novels, Strip Tease, became a major motion-picture in 1996 starring Demi Moore, and directed by Andrew Bergman. Despite what some critics said, Hiaasen continues to insist that the scene featuring Burt Reynolds slathered from his neck to his toes with Vaseline is one of the high points in modern American cinema."

I thoroughly enjoy this guy's books, in large part because they remind me of the real Florida. (It doesn't hurt that the books are just super-fun to read, too.) As Hiaasen says, "Nothing that happens in my books, no matter how twisted, transcends the reality of South Florida."

On Atlas Shrugged

"I remember it being a good enough novel for me to read through it at a pretty swift pace but I always viewed it as being a surreal work of fiction with comic book characters (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) rather than anything that was supposed to change my life."

That's a comment from this VC post, which I admit I enjoyed.