Customer Reviews

Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale

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Ok, unless the preschooler happens to be Buckminster Fuller's daughter, that might be pushing the envelope a bit, but I do confess, I used to read this to my kids before they got to kindergarten, and while it wasn't nearly the favourite that Jelly Belly was, it made them giggle.

Nonetheless, if you dare think your average Grade One-er is somehow incapable of comprehending the cosmos, then the book you need to get is this collection of tales Bucky would tell Allegra when she was 4, a marvellously presented storybook of which I once found 4 copies in a delete bin in a discount store, snarfed them all with grocery money, gave away three ... and lost the other, and have never seen one again.

There are those who say they have trouble reading Bucky, and while I can imagine their plight, I would have to say that Bucky is far easier to read than James Joyce or Ezra Pound -- the key to understanding Fuller's English can be found in the title of his book "I Seem to Be A Verb" --- Fuller was very careful to avoid most nouns, seeing them as misleading. He also sought to avoid other misleading constructs such as "sunrise" (he preferred to say sun-show and sun-clip, because that is what they truly are).

As for his vocabulary, Goldy says to the Three Bears (in Tetrascroll):

" If you don't understand any of my words, you can find them in the dictionary."

Wee Bear replies,

"Out here we use cosmic thought communications. We don't have to find words in special-language diction-airies. We use a cosmic thinktionary. All your dictionaries express the universal concepts of our thinktionary but only in special, ethnic-language sound-words. The concepts such as mountains or star or nuance are the same experience-engendered concepts in all languages. We understand you perfectly, Goldy."