what are the things i know and can always believe?

today i read two stories, wrote three letters, and bought four notebooks.

ten days to las vegas.

i've been reading ayn rand's atlas shrugged and it has been giving me anxiety. purpose, yes, i can dig it, but the utter lack of compassion, the world where 'public good' only means one thing and that's pure evil... i understand the true essence, but what a cold world if there's no room for humanity.

plus its so pro-capitalist that half of it feels like propaganda. and she hammers it in so hard... i say cut the fucker in half, whittle it down to the story, and let your reader draw the conclusion. as it stands it seems like she's writing to the idiot she hates so fiercely. and all of her good guys are tall and lean and angular, and her bad guys all squat and pug-nosed and fat. and all her words and points too blatantly, painfully obvious.

she makes a snide reference to a work called 'the heart is a milkman' and if thats to mccullers, because she writes about the losers, then rand can fuck herself.

it's funny because i bought atlas shrugged together with the short stories of mccullers. i'm reading some now to balance it out.. and her emotional intuitiveness, her heartbreaking stories of misunderstandings or misdirected affection... she is a powerful writer.

i much prefer her to rand. matter of fact, i think i'll let the last 400 pages of shrugged go unread.

one story i liked a lot so far was 'court in the mid eighties', about a girl who watches her neighbors out her window. she says she would sit at her typewriter and write what came to her head, such as

what are the things i know and can always believe?

and i've been thinking of those things a lot myself these days.