In my few spare moments of late, I've been making notes towards some more of my Rand essays. The Rand centenary will occur on Feb. 2, 2005, and I'd really like to be done with all of my Rand-writing by then. Not that I've met such writing deadlines in the past, but one can hope. The essays I've touched most recently are Rand's Descriptive Style, Toward a Gnostic Objectivism, and Anarchy, State, and Objectivism. I just requested The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels from the Denver Public Library, so I'll be re-reading that soon for further research into gnosticism. And how, you might ask, can such an esoteric religion provide a model for approaching a world-view as overtly secular as Objectivism? Hint: gnosticism was pro-individual, pro-woman, anti-hierarchy, anti-church. Besides, bringing up gnosticism allows me to talk about Blake, Whitman, and the medieval troubadours (the Albigensian Crusades not only put an effective end to troubadour culture but also wiped out the heretical Cathars, whose views seem to have been heavily influenced by gnostic teachings, as were the Manichaeans before them).