Looking for Dr. Fuller :: Buckminster Fuller Essays

Looking for Dr. Fuller Its the next to next to start twenty-four hours of English 381 The Personal Essay. Were reading Annie Dillards Teaching A rock to Talk and I call at xtion to a blurb on the jacket by Edward Albee. A student notes asks about another consultation from Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller. She doesnt know who Fuller is, and no one else in the class does either, moreover the running speculation is that hes a fundamentalist evangelist, a sort of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.I fumble for an explanation of Fuller--architect, philosopher, voice of a generation same Dr. Spock. I joke that I should bring in my entirely terra firma Catalog so I can illustrate my remarks. I relieve that Fuller invented the geodesic dome and when some in the class arent definite what that is, I scrawl a bad drawing on the board. at last someone saves me by mentioning Epcot Center, and we go off awhile on that. I mention that another dome much closer is in Downs, Illinois, ten miles down the roa d in a one-tavern town. Here is an essay possibility, the friendship between Epcot Center and Downs, Illinois. But thats not the road to travel in this essay.At the library I plug Fullers name into the computer. Twenty books go forth up, their call numbers ranging from C, to H, to P, to T, and I suddenly recognize a call Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, its publication place of Carbondale reminding me that Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University. Theres a picture of his geodesic dome house in Carbondale, by the way, in the plates between pages 96 and 97 of Ideas and Integrities A ad-lib Autobiographical Disclosure. For kicks I also ask the computer to find The Whole Earth Catalog, call number AP2.W5. My book search will offspring me, then, to five different floors.The Whole Earth Catalog is yellowing and brittle. Its publishers, the Portola Institute, probably didnt abide back in 1969 that the they would show up on university library shelves, and so they didnt bother with acid-free paper. When I flip through the pages I remember the day I bought a copy myself, a later edition, at least, in 1975 and, reading, through it, came upon a recipe for baking chou, from the Tassajara Bread Book. It was summer. Breaking bread sounded like a righteous thing for a college freshman to do and so in my mothers kitchen I measure yeast and molasses and water and self-coloured wheat and salt and oil and kneaded out six loaves.