The Lion In Love - Aesop

The Lion In Love - Aesop

And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

Rob Pattinson Is Cronenberg's New Boy Toy

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Winning the MTV Award 2012 Over Hunger Games

Rob Pattinson says Cronenberg says he doesn't make commercial films. He was ecstatic over this win. Does this pic look like a man who doesn't care?

The Young Beautiful Cronenberg As An Actor - Forget the film

He looks gender ambiguous to me. How about you? Shall we have a little vote on it?

Nolan has been criticized by a number of reviewers for the way he has portrayed Batman's sexual relations and the sexuality of the women in his Batman films. In The Dark Knight Rises they have said that this has been corrected somewhat. Anne Hathaway's Catwoman is confident sexually and Bruce Wayne is displaying seductive sexual interest for the first time in Nolan's Batman series. Interesting. 

So I began to think about Cronenberg. His recent Cosmopolis reviewers have reported that there is a lot of sex in it that is not sexy. eXistenZ? Naked Lunch? A History of Violence? Eastern Promises? Videodrome? Dead Ringers? All of them have sex in them that is not sexy with the exception of A History Of Violence between Viggo and Bello. There is no way Cronenberg is going to tamper with what Viggo wants to do in a scene. Viggo is the dominant one in this pairing of actor and director. 

Crash has lots and lots of sex in it that I do not find sexy but pornographic, but that is the way Ballard wrote it. Cronenberg decidedly has sexual issues. He imposes his arid sexuality on his characters or he chooses material that is already that way. The exception is  A History Of Violence. In Eastern Promises Cronenberg focuses his camera on the body of Viggo using the ploy for showing the viewer his gangster tattoos. It works. Definitely. Viggo is lovely.

Gender ambiguity - James Spader

James Spader was super hot in Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, and playing opposite Susan Sarandon in White Palace in the early 90's. In 1996 Spader plays Ballard in Crash for Cronenberg. Again lots of hot sex that is not hot, but is very physical and pornographic. And the camera focusesing on Spader's body. From the reviews of Cosmopolis he is repeating his sexual problems with women yet one more time. 

Too many instances to brush off now. Once again Rob Pattinson is being castrated. For other times see HERE. His face and body once again used as pornography void of sex. In one trailer we see him asking for the stun gun, the camera on his naked upper body. Again the erotic male body.

Sexy Hot Spader - Cool Cronenberg Sex

Trailer For Crash  - Lots of Sex

And again we have lots of sex without sex. 

Seems to be a trademark of a Cronenberg film eh? 

A repetition compulsion maybe?

In Rob Pattinson he has found a malleable mind to mold and it seems Rob Pattinson, adoring him now instead of Stewart, is his latest Boy Toy.

DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis alternates between the limo (Order of Production) and the outside (Order of Seduction). It is Elise who seduces him on, away from the limo, to let the world will him. Eric Packer is following her all day without searching for her, just finding her as Destiny keeps their paths crossing. At the end is an ecstatic sexual encounter beginning in a naked body sequence being filmed. Cronenberg said in an interview that it was too over the top to be believed so not cinematic. He uses "not cinematic" whenever he wants to get rid of something. Since Spencer Tunick's naked body installations have been performed all over the world, it appears DeLillo has put them in his novel in the Hades scene as a movie set where naked Eric Packer lies down beside his naked wife Elise Shifrin without knowing it is she at first. (Cronenberg has said he cut it out because it was a fantasy.) Is that a fact.  (She is the "woman who keeps disappearing" as Zizek will describe these film women. these Gradivas.) As they leave the naked bodies to get their clothes in some seclusion she shimmies up his body in passion and kisses him in ecstasy and "he knew he loved her" and just at the moment he knows she slithers down his naked body and away like Gradiva. Or Eurydice. It is the woman here in the novel who has hystericized on the male body, Packer's, inverting the process. (Baudrillard The Perfect Crime; Fatal Strategies)

Sarah Gadon has given Cronenberg the rationalization he requires of the character of Elise as cold and asexual. Sarah has used post modern sound bite lingo to say in an interview, "She is not going to let her husband hystericize on her (Gadon's words), so she exits the marriage. She's out of it. Yet another misreading by Cronenberg. 

Alan Sheridan in his 1980 Foucault: The Will To Truth discusses this in the chapter Sexuality, Power and Knowledge. 

Foucault elicits four great strategies that have emerged in Western society since the late eighteenth century.The 'hystericization' of the female body is a process whereby the woman's body is seen as an organism saturated with sexuality.....(p. 187)

The result has been the femme fatale we all know from noir film. At the present time she has almost vanished. There are no men for her says Baudrillard. He proposes the 
solution of the female 


hystericization of the male and his body, and this seems to be going on with Rob Pattinson initiated by his role of Edward Cullen. Meyer has dreamed Edward into existence, and Rob Pattinson has fulfilled the dream. The new sexy male is a type portrayed by Pattinson with all his gender ambiguity David Bowie style refined beauty. So we have the male version of the femme fatale in Rob Pattinson, and Cronenberg appears smitten and willing to pimp his latest Boy Toy, his latest Ken doll. And Rob is complicit.

“I forget who said that films are desires visualized, but for me, at least, film is the visualization of the director’s desire. But the director’s desire doesn’t appear in the film directly. It appears in all kinds of convoluted forms. My fear that my desire will appear in my films has always caused me to be extremely wary of making films, hasn’t it? Haven’t I made films to hide my desires instead? Trying to hide them made them appear even more vividly.”

Nagisa Oshima
March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013

(Source: strangewood)

Blyth

If Elise is out of it instead of DeLillo's drawing of her leading Eric Packer to transcendence, then the film falls apart and becomes just another "hard" Cronenberg film instead of "soft". Blyth has discussed the pairing of the relation fear/hatred in his book on Zen. We fear what we hate and we  hate what we fear.

In avoiding sensuous, ecstatic sex in his films is  out of Cronenberg's personal fear of the erotic sexuality of women, and displaces the erotic by focusing his camera on the body of the male. In this way he can satisfy his urges for the male body without acting out his desires. His Lack is assuaged for awhile until he finds a new Boy Toy to parade around and pimp to sell his movies, to get him financing that he is not able to get otherwise because his films are lacking in some way that he himself cannot see.

It is his denial of sensuous, erotic female sexuality that cripples him.

Rob Pattinson - Eric Packer - Cronenberg to Ring in NYSE Tomorrow

Zizek spoke at Occupy Wall Street and one of the things he said was,

The Holy Spirit is here.

This is what Cronenberg trashed by ringing the bell at the NYSE opening.

Rob Pattinson Betrays DeLillo AND Occupy

What a sick sick sick feeling I have on reading this.

Ringing the bell for the opening of NYSE is a publicity move to DEFANG  Delillo's Cosmopolis. 

SLAVOJ ZIZEK Speaking at OCCUPY - HERE

It is DETERRENCE to detract from the heart of the novel and Rob is complicit because he doesn't see the Game. But The Cronenberg does. He wants fame for his deliberate misreading of DeLillo's novel and for his movie and for his box office. 

Shame on you Rob for getting sucked into this! Shame. Just. Say. No. Evidently you misread the novel yourself and/or just accepted Cronenberg's authorial position on it. 

THIS IS A KNIFE IN THE HEART OF DON DELILLO!

Talk about getting your heart ripped out. I will never forgive you for this. Now this is REAL BETRAYAL!

Just to take the heat off your Break Up Porn Scandal!

Disgusted. Boycott the opening of this movie. Wait until it hits the discount theatres. Or see on DVD at your local library.

What do "30 Pieces of Silver" amount to for Cronenberg in creating this visual "floating mask" of Deterrence for the New York Stock Exchange?

You can bet he 
garnered some future financing that he is always talking about for pimping Rob Pattinson to do this. 

A boy being pimped by a man. 

Does Kristen want a man or a boy?

We know his girlfans want the perpetual, infantilized boy.

A spectacle inducing misperception. It isn't going to work.
____________________________________
David Fincher, attention David Fincher!

Please do a remake of Cosmopolis with Andrew Garfield. It is too important a novel and film to be eviscerated.

Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie

Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"

How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1

If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".

New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin

Nancy Babich: Code For A Smart Gun: Babette Babich Is A Smart Gun

Babette Babich

Babette Babich - what a name. Straight out of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, eh.

Nancy Babich BAM!

Nancy Babich is CODE 


In Cosmopolis Nancy Babich is CODE for a smart gun.


Babette is Jack Gladney's wife in DeLillo's White Noise.


Jack Gladney is THE international specialist in Hitler Studies.


Babette Babich is THE international specialist in Nietzsche.


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Hitler pressed to his bosom. 


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Ayn Rand memorized and read from age 16 until her late 30's. Beyond Good and Evil was her first book in English and she underlined all her favorite passages says Barbara Branden quoting her in her book The Passion of Ayn Rand.


Nancy Babich is CODE for Babette Babich. Babette Babich is CODE for the entire book. 


Babette Babich is the "smart gun" who shoots soft and deadly bullets that shatter masks.


Nietzsche: Words written in blood are not to be read but learnt by heart

Babette Babich wrote Words In Blood, Like Flowers - Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger

The Blogs of Babette Babich - Profile

Click on her pic on the far right for details of her profile and blogs

WORDS IN BLOOD - DeLillo writes a sentence or paragraph on one sheet of paper.He then reads it and edits it.He rewrites it.He keeps doing this until he gets it exactly the way he wants it to be. 
Cosmopolis was WRITTEN IN BLOOD. 
"Words written in blood are not to be read but to be learnt by heart" - Nietzsche
The Cronenberg read Cosmopolis in one sitting, pasted the dialogue into screenplay software in 6 days.Shot the film in 6 weeks.Edited it on the quick.Showed it in Cannes one year later.
Wham bam thank you ma'am!
ROB PATTINSON LEARNED THE WORDS BY HEART. He says they still echo in his inner ear. Rob Pattinson is following Nietzsche's urging. 
Cronenberg probably didn't even know Nietzsche said what he said.

1 day ago

AlteredbyaVampire(ABV Kiri) posted: I always find myself going back to *The Nancy Babich* part of the story.....

1 day ago

Lydia posted:  I've always wondered where Delillo came up with the name.

Cosmopolis Review: DeLillo and Ayn Rand - Eric Packer and Francisco d'Anconia

Eric Packer:

When he died he would not end. The world would end. (C p.6)

Freud is finished. (dead). Einstein is next. (to die) Their worlds are dead.(C p.6)

Ayn Rand liked to say:

"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end,"  It is a favorite quote of hers her fans like so much.

Eric Packer: This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex. (C p. 5 )

Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead has his bedroom at the top of his penthouse where it is glassed all around. 

"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished.(F p. 482)

Recognizing that the movement of the system itself is  irreversible, that there's no possible get-out within the logic of the system. That logic is really global, in the sense that it has absorbed all negativities, including the humanist, universalist,  resistance, etc. Pushing to the limit means acknowledging this irreversibility and pushing it to the limit of its possibilities, to the point of collapse. Bringing it to saturation point, to the point where the system itself  creates the accident. Thought contributes to this acceleration. It anticipates its end.  This is the provocative 'commitment', but giving all it's got to imagining the end. (Baudrillard - Paroxysm p. 23)

There is no outside. - Foucault 

Vija Kinski - "But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside." (C. p. 90)

"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."  (C. p. 90) 

To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. ...For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. (Jean Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death p. 37)

It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard 

My idea was to end this era not over a period of weeks and months as happened, but in one day. - DeLillo /Krasny you tube interview

Here DeLillo is mistaken as he and everyone else regard the 2001 dot.com crash (which did take time) as the stock market catastrophe "predicted" by Cosmopolis. My opinion, and others are either following me or changing on their own are now seeing the derivative crash as the "predicted" catastrophe on Wall Street. That weekend during the 2008 presidential election campaign.

But there's something you know. You know the yen can't go any higher. And if you know something and don't act upon it, then you didn't know it in the first place. There is a piece of Chinese wisdom, she said. To know and not to act is not to know.

...That wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it's all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, .......(C. p85)

“You have to understand.”

He said, “What?”

“The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?”

He said, “What?” (C. p. 91)

“It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. 

Testifying before Congress Greenspan admitted a flaw in his system. The flaw is rational self-interest (Ayn Rand). Why would these financiers destroy their financial empires? 

“How will we know when the global era officially ends?”

He waited.

“When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhatten.... “(C. 90-91)

......It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations - and that the lights of New York had gone out.

She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. (AS p. 1060)

It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they’d been reading the same poetry he’d been reading.”

He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.(C.96-97)

He thought Kinski was right when she said this was a market fantasy. There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it. (Marcuse's apt metaphor of Pac-Man here.)

Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach. (C. pp. 96-98)(Kathy Chang(e) was a performance artist whose outrageous public performances and leftist politics were largely ignored by the University of Pennsylvania students she performed for, until she set herself on fire. Her 1996 self-immolation prompts an inquiry into the effectiveness of public suicide as a mode of political performance.)

This is Eric Packer's Epiphany. The Burning Man is the pivotal point in the novel.

The car was parked outside the hotel and across the street from the Barrymore where a group of smokers gathered at intermission, tucked under the marquee. He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into the mist on several screens. Torval (lav-rot/rat) stood in the rain with arms folded. .....

The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the register of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not.

The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes (and here we have the "near death" experience where your life before and after separate and diverge, growing farther and farther apart. His Double now is more separated in time than it has been, as we will see in the end.)and he'd rolled about on the hotel rug, electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of the faculties of reason. (Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar is echoed here as she writes a first person narrative of suicidal depression, the electro-convulsive experience and its immediate and long term aftermath.)

But he could think now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. He found the humidor and lit a cigar. Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing streams of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger. 

He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. He was also bored and a little dismissive. They were making too much of it. He thought it would end in a day or two .....and looked more closely at one of the women standing there. (C. p. 115-6)
!IMPLOSION! - Baudrillard through Nietzsche

After seeing Elise outside the theater, eating dinner with her.

He knew he was going in. But first he had to lose more money. ...Then he went about losing the money, spreading it systematically in the smoke of rumbling markets. He did this to make certain he could not accept her offer of financial help. …..but it was necessary to resist, of course, or die in his soul....He was making a gesture of his own, a sign of ironic final binding. Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn. This was the individual’s revenge on the mythical couple. ….The number seemed puny....But it was all air anyway. It was air that flows from the mouth when words are spoken. It was lines of code that interact in simulated space.

Great financiers know that money does not exist.Gamblers know that money does not exist.
The Jesuits know that God does not exist.- Baudrillard

Didi Fancher - "Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," she said. "I grew up comfortably. Took me a while to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt intensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C. p. 29)

Vija Kinski - ....Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. (C. p. 77)

He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in English and Finnish.....He knew they would figure it out eventually how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now.(C. p. 140)

Eric Packer will end up in Hell's Kitchen where he grew up, where he goes for a haircut, where he is hunted by his assassin where Gail Wynand was when he was young and prey and where he goes when he caves in to save The Banner, betraying Roark. Eric Packer will die there and Gail Wynand will have Roark build the skyscraper with his name there.

_______________________________________________________________________

But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he’d always known would come clear in time.

Now he could begin the business of living.“(C 107)

___________________________________________________________________

Dagny has gone to the Wayne-Faulkland Hotel to confront Francisco as the San Sebastion Mines have been seized by the People's State of Mexico.

I came here to ask you a question. ...The San Sebastian disaster....You did it consciously, cold-bloodedly and with full intention.

What was it I did with full intention? he said.

The entire San Sebastian swindle.

What was my full intention?

That is what I want to know.

...Don't start telling me that you gained nothing. I know it. I know you lost fifteen million dollars of your own money. Yet it was done on purpose.

You didn't give a damn about that Mexican government,...because you knew they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders.

...That's part of the truth....It was not all I was after. ...They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. All their calculations rested on that premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?

...If you didn't want to make money, what possible motive could you have had?

Any number of them. For instance, to spend it.

To spend money on a certain, total failure?

How was I to know that those mines were a certain, total failure?

How could you help knowing it?

Quite simply. By giving it no thought. 

...Did you intend for me to notice that if you think I did it on purpose, then you still give me credit for having a purpose?

...didn't you enjoy the spectacle of the behavior of the People's State of Mexico in regard to the San Sebastian Mines? Did you read their government's speeches and the editorials in their newspapers? They are saying that I am an unscrupulous cheat who has defrauded them. They expected to have a successful mining company to seize. I had no right to disappoint them like that.....

He laughed lying flat on his back: his arms were thrown wide on the carpet, forming a cross with his body; he seemed disarmed, relaxed and young. 

It was worth whatever it cost me. I could afford the price of that show....

And that's not all they didn't know, he said. They're in for some more knowledge. There's that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastian. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People's State of Mexico. That workers' settlement was also part of their plans. A model example of progressive State Housing. Well, those steel-frame houses are mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac. They won't stand another year. The plumbing pipes - as well as most of our mining equipment - were purchased from dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I'd give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People's State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters; they're cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard.  Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They'll need it.

Francisco, she whispered, did you do it on purpose?

...Whether I did it on purpose, he said, or through neglect, or through stupidity, don't you understand that that doesn't make any difference?


...She looked at him blankly. What are you trying to say?

I am saying that the workers' settlement of San Sebastian cost eight million dollars,...The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastian Mines.

...Is that what you're after?

Yes.

Is that what you find amusing?

Yes.

I was thinking of your name, she said....It was a tradition of your family that a d'Anconia always left a fortune greater than the one he received. (Here's the "gift" and the "counter-gift".) 

Oh yes, my ancestors had a remarkable ability for doing the right thing at the right time - and for making the right investments. Of course, 'investment' is a relative term. It depends on what you wish to accomplish. For instance, look at San Sebastian. It cost me fifteen million dollars, but those fiftteen million wiped out forty million belonging to Taggart Transcontinental, thirty-five million belonging to stockholders such as James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and hundreds of millions which will be lost in secondary consequences. That's not a bad return on an investment, is it, Dagny.?

She was sitting straight. Do you realize what you are saying?

Oh, fully! Shall I beat you to it and name the consequences you were going to reproach me for? First, I don't think that Taggart Transcontinental will recover from its loss on that preposterous San Sebastian Line. You think it will, but it won't. Second, the San Sebastian helped your brother, James, to destroy the Phoenix-Durango, which was about the only good railroad left anywhere. 

..Do you _ ...do you know Ellis Wyatt?

Sure. 

Do you know what this might do to him?

Yes. He's the one who's going to be wiped out next. (AS pp. 115- 121)

There are more resonances for the reader to find if she wishes. After reading this does anyone dare to say that Francisco d'Anconia was a self-destructive loser who lost millions? No? I thought not. And if anyone had dared say that, Rand would have chopped her up in teeny tiny pieces. 

Why then have all the reviewers, all the academics, Cronenberg, and all blogs on Cosmopolis said that Eric Packer is a self-destructive loser? Are there really that many people out there who have misread DeLillo's book?

Yeah. I guess so.