Galt Toys is still going. I think I’ve bought a few of their products over the years.
Yeah, Rushdie is a good teller of fables but his long novels don’t really hang together. He should stick to things like “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, tbh.
As for “Who is John Galt?”, it’s like “Who is Q?” - the answer for both is “A fictional entity promoting a highly delusional and dysfunctional worldview and adored by a lot of petty selfish idiots with fewer critical thinking skills than your average dustmite”.
If ruing is your objective, one of my shipmates gave me The Prince before he left the boat (I would say that I don’t know what he was trying to tell me, but I know exactly what he was trying to tell me). It wasn’t bad, but there was not nearly as much back-stabbing and poisoning as you might hope for from a 16th C Italian political intriguer.
Yet another patrol, I read a collection of early-20th-C LifeHaxx. The only one I remember [*], and which I still use thirty years later, is to never use water or shaving cream when I shave. The theory being that nicks come from dull blades and dull blades come from corrosion and corrosion comes from moisture (the book went on for pages about this in a quaintly serifed font). It’s probably unmitigated BS, but I only change the cartridge in my razor two or three times a year and I absolutely never cut myself anymore. It has been pointed out to me that I’ve had a full beard for most of that time, but if I don’t regularly shave my neck and cheeks, I look like a tumbleweed.
Lest anyone think I’ve lost track of what thread we’re in, I sometimes wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a secret stash of razor blades forged from Rearden Metal. Perhaps these immortal shaving cartridges are the gateway to the hours of tedious speeches and violent, dysfunctional sex that I’ve been pining for.
[*] There was something else in there about bad vision being caused by wearing glasses and that the key to perfect sight was to stare intently at the spaces between words… or at the periods… or something…
Questions of quality aside, I wouldn’t really compare Satanic Verses to Atlas Shrugged. SV isn’t meant to be didactic. It’s not a lecture about Islam disguised as a novel, it’s a novel about a person struggling with schizophrenia and a disconnection with his Indian Muslim heritage, who has frequent hallucinations involving Islamic religious imagery and history, including a lot of parallels to the life of Mohammed. It’s certainly possible to read those parallels as saying that Mohammed, himself, was probably also just a crazy guy, but I don’t think that’s the author’s actual intent. Rushdie is a post-modernist and a magical realist, and ambiguity and subjectivity are major themes in his work, which generally make them poor vehicles for delivering an ideology.
