Nick,
That's my truth. Deal with it.
When one is considering how seriously to take
what someone has to say (whether that someone
be me or Joseph Epstein) on a given subject
(whether that subject be the value of Joseph
Epstein's writings or the value of a "literary
education"), it is reasonable to consider other
things that person has said, other things one
knows about that person, and so on. Having
myself come to the conclusion that _The American
Scholar_ was a piece of shit (during at least
part of Epstein's tenure as editor), I have
good reason to conclude that he's not a very
good editor, pretty good reason (I think)
to discount what he has to say about the value
of a "literary education", and very good reason
(independent of such discounting) to conclude
that his taste and mine differ a great deal.
Now, it's fair to ask on what evidence I did
come to the conclusion that the _American Scholar_
is a piece of shit. Actually, I am fairly sure
that anyone on this list--from what I can tell of
them by their writing alone in most cases--who
would go to the trouble of looking up some copies
of _The American Scholar_ from (at least the early
years of) Epstein's editorship would agree with
the opinion I formed of it then. Its content was
variously pretentious, middlebrow maunderings
masquerading as High Intellectuality; *really* bad
poetry; and endless self-adoration and self-promotion
of the Society of Phi Beta Kappa. (_Technology Review_,
the MIT alumni magazine, beat it hands down on every
count; but then it wasn't putting itself forward as
an "intellectual quarterly".)
...It turns out that an example I keep around, of
all that was worst in _The American Scholar_, was
in fact from 1970; so I can't blame Epstein for
its appearance there. Still, it sets the tone of
the magazine.
When, as in our school-taught geometry, the square and the cube
are assumed to be almost exclusively rational, other geometrical
forms are ``interesting'' but awkward because volumetrically
irrational. For when the cube is taken as unity and its volume
is one, the volume of the tetrahedron is .1179~; the octahedron
is .4714~; the rhombic dodecahedron is .7042~; and the vector
equilibrium is 2.3574~. For this reason--despite Plato's
``solids,'' Archimedes' polyhedra, Euler's topology and Coxeter's
comprehensive geometrical inventory--the rationally valued
hierarchy of logically interrelated symmetrical polyhedra based
on the tetrahedron as unity and their intimate role in the
physical world was utterly overlooked until 1917 when I started
exploring in the terms of the vector-edged tetrahedron as being
the simplest structural system. In the same year I concluded
that nature had no separate departments of physics, chemistry,
geology, biology, and mathematics. I decided that she had only
one department and one coordinate system. Then my search for
nature's own most economically integrated, comprehensive,
coordinate system began thirty years ago to disclose the
omnirational relationships I have presented here. I concluded
that I was not important enough to have caused nature to secrete
these elegant omnirational, omniinterrelationships within her
cosmic scheme just to trap me into foolishly thinking them to be
significant and worthy of general adoption by humanity as its
prime mensuration system. In this system, society will have to
learn that n^2 stands for n``triangled'' and not ``squared''; and
that n^3 is n``tetrahedroned'' and not ``cubed''. I call this
comprehensively rational coordinate system ENERGETIC-SYNERGETIC
GEOMETRY.
--R. Buckminster Fuller, "Planetary Planning",
_The American Scholar_, 1970
Especially notable in this passage is the truly mad jump from
"I was not important enough to have caused nature to secrete
these elegant omnirational, omniinterrelationships within her
cosmic scheme just to trap me into foolishly thinking them to be
significant and worthy of general adoption by humanity as its
prime mensuration system" to (implicitly) "therefore, they
are important and TRUE!!!1!!"
Lee
> Lee,
>
> Could you consider your rhetoric and your audience a bit before you hit
> send? Are you trying to convince anybody of anything, or are you just
> mooning the list?
>
> Nick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
> Of [email protected]
> Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:11 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Case for a Literary Education (re 10 Best...)
>
> Re: Joseph Epstein:
>
> >He was the editor of The American
> >Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa, between 1974 and
> >1997.
>
> I read it during the earlier part of that span (also before he became
> editor). It was a piece of shit, as "intellectual quarterlies"
> (or more-frequentlies) go, and I gave up on it long before the end of his
> term. This need not mean that he was a bad editor (maybe it got a lot
> better in the 1990s), but it doesn't speak at all well for him (in my
> opinion).
>
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>
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