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Ada Huxt. in the NYT:  The world of tomorrow is here today. Mr. Fuller's space frames and enclosures represent the greatest advance in building since the invention of the arch.” She hailed the revolutionary construction methods and the geometrical breakthrough: instead of posts and beams making the rectilinear boxes “that have been the accepted basis of architecture since the beginning of shelter,” the visionary Fuller used tetrahedrons and octahedrons, shapes inspired by crystals and atoms, to create “lacy frameworks of the widest versatility.” These unconventional forms could grow in any direction, she said. They enabled structures lighter and stronger than any before: “The horizons opened stagger belief.” (Huxtable’s colleague John Canaday struck a more skeptical tone: “Frequently he has been thought of as a mildly eccentric doodler with an oversize Erector set.... “R. Buckminster Fuller’ itself sounds like a name made up by Evelyn Waugh.”) 

At sixty-four, Fuller was on the brink of astonishing fame. He was not actually an architect—he had neither the training nor the license. What was he? People called him a poet, a philosopher, a mathematician...

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Fuller himself meanwhile was circling the world, enchanting the rich and famous with his paradoxical scientific mysticism. He charmed Indira Gandhi and David Rockefeller, watched the moon landing in the company of Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut, and somehow managed to impress Samuel Beckett (though the master of bleakness admitted to “slightly quailing at the optimism”). In 1983 Ronald Reagan awarded Fuller the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

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I found myself in a sort of sparkling kind of sphere,” Fuller recalled. “And I heard a voice, such as I had never heard, ever before, saying, ‘From now on, you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth.” And then, “From now on, write down everything you think.” He told this story many times in many ways. In one version, in case the point isn’t clear enough, the voice says, “Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on earth.” In his diary he wrote, “After much philosophical thought while walking about, worked out theory of spheres.” 

At this point, according to his official story, Fuller took a vow of silence and withdrew into himself for two years: “I didn’t want to say anything, make any sounds, until I was pretty sure what those sounds meant and why I wanted to use them.” This was more blarney. “If anything, after his epiphany, Fuller never stopped talking,’ says Nevala-Lee. Fuller also sent away to a correspondence schoo! for a booklet titled How to Work Wonders with Words. Whatever else he may have been trying to invent, he was inventing a persona. His ambition was prodigious. 

 Fuller loved parties and had a string of affairs with young women. He met Albert Einstein soon after the physicist’s arrival at the Institute for Advanced Study and eagerly mailed him a synopsis of his ideas. “In all humility,’ he wrote, “I state that I seem to have articulated aright the ‘open-sesame’ to a comprehensive system of sublime commensurability.” Every prominent scientist gets letters like that. 

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It was the geodesic dome, of course, that made Fuller really famous. “The dome is his emblem,” Fuller loved tetrahedrons. Also spheres. The “theory of spheres” that came to him in his Chicago epiphany was an ersatz physics based on a vision of bubbles: “All matter in unforced state 1s spheroidal not cubistic, and these spheres are expanding for the life of their existence at a fixed rate.” This was nonsense, but it turns out that if you assemble rods in rigid triangles and arrange them to approximate the surface of a sphere, you really have something: a lightweight structural network that distributes load without any need for supporting columns. Fuller arrived at this in 1948. First he called it the “Atomic Buckalow.” Later he borrowed the word geodesic from geometry: a geodesic line is a segment of a great circle on a sphere, the shortest distance between any two points on the sphere’s surface. 

Decades earlier a German engineer, Walther Bauersfeld, had designed just such a dome, and it served as the roof of the Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin. Fuller apparently didn’t know about Bauersfeld, and he patented the geodesic dome. 

We can see now that the Fuller dome was the hula hoop of twentieth-century architecture. They were everywhere, and then they were a bit silly. Housing lots are mainly rectilinear for good reason, and circles don’t use space efficiently. Fuller himself built a geodesic house—a shell of sixty plywood sections, mostly triangles, enclosing 1,400 square feet—and tried to live in it for a while. The slantwise walls frustrated Anne when she tried to hang pictures, “just sort of dangling out from the curve.” Rain leaked through the seams. Neighborhood children liked to climb on the roof, and Fuller chased them away by throwing pebbles. 

The joints of geodesic domes always created trouble. The problems of windows and ventilation were unsolvable. Architects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid found more imaginative and free-flowing ways to break from boxy traditions. Ultimately, what gave geodesic domes their initial charm-the simple, patterned, repetitious geometry—made them boring. They're all the same. 

Buckminster Fuller can be remembered as a crank and a charlatan and a prophet and a visionary. He was an American type—self-invented, overflowing with ideas and theories, eager to see the universe whole, and born to evangelize. 

The domes are mostly gone. There’s one called Spaceship Earth at the Epcot theme park in Florida, in which visitors can take a sixteen-minute ride. We don’t live in Fuller houses or drive Dymaxion cars, and we wouldn't want to. Even Stewart Brand has come to regret touting Fuller in the Whole Earth Catalog. “Domes couldn’t grow or adapt,’ he says. “When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.” 

-Gleick in the NYRB

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Quite aside from wanting to understand how the children had manage to foretell their own deaths, Barker felt obliged to consider whether collecting and publicizing premonitions’ might be a way of forestalling the next Aberfan. He envisaged assembling a data bank for the nation’s prophetic visions that could eventually be uploaded to a computer database (this concept was itself hard to grasp in 1966), from which early warnings of coming disasters would emerge. Barker saw this service as something like a long-range weather forecast, with air disasters and train crashes replacing downpours and droughts. 

The next step was to enlist Peter Fairley, the science editor at London’s Evening Standard, to ask readers to write in if they had experienced “a genuine premonition before the coal tip fell on Aberfan.” From the seventysix responses received, Fairley identified twenty-two that appeared to offer evidence of genuine precognition. These doleful seers would become the first “percipients” (Barker's word) in what Fairley and Barker dubbed “the Premonitions Bureau.” Despite sounding as if it might have government backing, or even be part of the secret service, the Premonitions Bureau consisted of the kinetic Fairley, often absent from the office on his foldaway motorbike chasing other stories, and his deft assistant, Jennifer Preston. She would log every letter that came in, making a note of its headline contents—‘Royalty,” “Racing,” “Nonspecified disasters’—and, together with her boss, award points for such qualities as unusualness, accuracy, and timing. 

While Fairley was not above wondering whether the Premonitions Bureau might help him win a fortune on the horses, Barker’s ambitions aimed higher. He hoped both to normalize precognition, thinking it might turn out to be as common as left-handedness, and harness it for the public good. There remained, however, one conceptual fault line that neither man ever managed to bridge: If a calamity were averted, then how could it generate a vision to precede it? And, if such a vision did still appear, then surely that would mean having to demote it to the status of a misfire, which would in turn undermine the validity of the entire enterprise. Or to put it another way: by intervening to avert a crisis, Barker and Fairley would be creating a glitch in the Matrix, something that neither Fleet Street journalists nor Cambridge-educated psychiatrists were really supposed to do. 

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Merve Emre

The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do. 

What makes essays that tell stories about people bad? For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, one of the essayists Adorno most admired, essays about people betray the true object of essayistic criticism: the private individual. 

The private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre that story may be. The private individual is not a proper name—not “Virginia Woolf” or “Elizabeth Hardwick,” not “Joan Didion” or “Zadie Smith” or whoever it is you consider your favorite personal essayist to be. Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity. 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they  say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,’ a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and " whose being it registers. Yet having  marveled at its aesthetic flexibility h and freedom, few critics put this claim “through its paces. What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks?  What if stressing the artifice of the first i person were, as Louis Althusser argued, ‘ a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject?  What if no performance of stylish  confession or sly concealment could  Shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

According to Benjamin, the private individual was conceived sometime between 1830 and 1848, during the reign of Louis Philippe, often known as the first “bourgeois monarch.” Under his rule, the European ruling class and the middle class came together to realize their defining goal: the separation of the public domain from the private, where, as Karl Marx observes, the bourgeoisie could rejoice in “Property, the Family, Religion, and Order.” Once labor had been cordoned off from life, once the productive activity of work had been extricated from the supposedly unproductive experience of dwelling, the private individual was born. He was, quite naturally, blind to his own history as a derivative creature, an artifact of political and economic processes that he had little incentive to question. The domestic sphere was his incubator, his sanctuary from commercial and social considerations. There he could retreat, wide-eyed and mewling, to probe what he believed to be his thoughts, lodged in his self, his mind, his body, and his home. “The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions,” Benjamin wrote, explaining how the ownership of property mirrored the ownership of subjectivity. He continued, “From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe.” 

For Benjamin, the best representative of the private individual was the collector of decorative objects, “the true resident of the interior” as an architectural and an existential space. For us, it might be the personal essay collection, which props up the same ideology. The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie.

 The lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language.. Art and education as Adorno explains. The personal essay appears as the purest most unflinching esthetic expression of the lie for the simple reason that for an essay to qualify as personal in the 1st place the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed "implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity" Adorno wrote.

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 In the year before rilka's birth his mother had lost a week old girl. As often in those days the little boy who survived was burdened with the female sounding names Renee Maria and dressed in skirts. For the rest of his life he felt strongly the pressure of the anima side of his nature, sometimes resenting it, sometimes prizing it and always using it as a spur to poetry

 Not for nothing did WH Auden with cruel wit describe him as the greatest lesbian poet since Sappho.

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And then there were the girls. Let it simply be said that there were very many of them, and that he treated them all, without exception, abomnably. Even the last serious love of his life, the artist Baladine Klossowska, mother of the painter Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowski, and midwife to the later Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), was at the close dumped like a still-twitching sacrifice on the altar of his art. And it was an altar, and it was a sacrifice. The fact that his calling to the priesthood of poetry released him from many of the encumbrances of everyday life was to his eye incidental.