Lee, I have no quibble with your truth, only with your rhetoric.
' That's my truth. Deal with it. ' is what freshman writers want to say when you tell them that their bared soul is incomprehensible. To which the only answer is, "That's fine, if you don't care to be read or understood." If you don't care about your audience, then keep it in your diary. Nick -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 11:31 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Case for a Literary Education (re 10 Best...) 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). > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, > unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
