Author's Reply
Nollson, Jonh
"Author's Reply" activity within that society. Others, not so fooled, may pack up their bags in disgust and leave the Church. Either way, something is clearly amiss, for which the Church's highest authorities, its...
...Trisexuality is a logical possibility...
...Surely not seven...
...In fact, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology already has an artificial intelligence laboratory...
...Religion, after all, does have something to do with human involvement in the world, and American life—itspolitics, its economy, its culture—is hardly above criticism...
...It is the worst form of libel to link me with a group of dull Protestants who have failed to produce a single literary autobiography of any merit...
...Grubell's review of my book is laced with spite, envy, jealousy, resentment, bile, venom, gall, phlegm, vulgarity, gelatin, rancor, obduracy, stinginess, and escarole: He is neither sure-witted nor sure-handed nor sure-footed but, like a lumbering podiatrist, he tramples on every canon of intellectual decency...
...And that is precisely why I had to invent the notion of truberance, the means whereby the plastic arts, the literary arts,the cinematic arts, and the purely technological arts like laser-light shows will surely become mirror images of themselves when seen from the other side of a black hole...
...In fact, I have a letter from the titular head of the Modalists—his thoroughly conventional name escapes me —wherein he asserts that I have nothing to do with them, nor they with me...
...It is a reflection on Grubell's lack of intellectual potency that he can, by his own admission, comprehend the existence of no more than five sexes...
...But Grubell is so dense that he cannot make the simplest distinction between an argument and its own refutation...
...The point is that there really is no place for publications of this sort within the Church, or at least by Church authorities...
...social criticism, irresponsible and perverse...
...The Milwaukee Modalists, as they have come to be called, were nothing but a splinter group, intellectually irrelevant and analytically trivial...
...I argue, further, that one of the central benefits of truberance, both as a real fact and as an analytic convention, is its prediction that the aesthetic world of the Nth Dimension will be characterized not merely by a unity of the arts, but by a new companionability among artists themselves...
...In the fourth dimension, tetrasexuality appears, followed by penta-, hexa-, septa-, octo-, nova-, and decasexuality as we move on out the old space warp...
...Is this not the tip-off that the book will get no fair hearing from such a low-grade wiseacre...
...But let us suppose, just for a moment, that I am wrong and that Grubell is right...
...Naturally, there is a place for the religiously-motivated criticism of modern society...
...Hence the essay on the output of the Franklin Mint...
...True, advanced computers will be required to keep track of the N sexes, their permutations, combinations, and possibilities, but we are well enough prepared for that...
...Just consider his bigoted blast at the genre...
...But I do not see why he cannot cope with this problem without venting his spleen on decent and diligent scholars who are just trying to earn an honest living...
...Not Topeka, as he claims...
...What else does he have to hide...
...And why does he claim that my essay "Who Buys Those Little Pewter Statues From the Franklin Mint Anyway...
...skirts the real issue...
...18.98), makes so many errors of fact that I have to wonder whether he bothered to read the book...
...John Nollson Author's Reply hile I know it is bad form to respond to a review of one's work, Thatcher Grubell, in his review of my new collection of short pieces (The Cultural Milieux in the Space-Time Continuum: Essays on the Emerging Aesthetic of the Nth Dimension, Oral Roberts University Press, xvii + 679 pp...
...It is therefore inevitable that the Nth Dimension will be characterized by Nsexuality, or anti-sexuality, precisely the opposite of the way things are now...
...However amusing we may find these publications at times, they nevertheless tend to wreak havoc upon the traditions, religious and otherwise, which have• shaped our world...
...He slaps his tail against the tide of learning, like a baleen whale protesting the inevitability of his own extinction...
...Indeed, so numerous are his blunders, his misinterpretations, his misconstruals, his misconstructions that a complete listing of them would take me more time than I have available...
...Grubell should know better...
...The basic antagonism will vanish...
...Perhaps we are on to something...
...I maintain throughout that the aesthetic of the Nth Dimension will almost certainly be characterized by what I choose to call truberance...
...This is a wholly new and original concept, not just a seventh kind of irony...
...Struggling With the System, The Witness, Integrity, and their counterparts in other churches—pick your own house of worship—only make a mockery of religious activity...
...Grubell writes: "Nollson's work is proof-positive: short pieces got no reason to live...
...How much longer will it take before intellectual life in this country is finally rid of the McCarthyist tactic of guilt by association...
...If it were otherwise, they would have moved to New York, or at least Chicago, where they would have become a school and not a forgotten sect...
...Yet when publications like these choose to court muddled thinking and puerile crusading, as has become their wont, religious activity becomes distorted...
...If I believed that the aesthetic of the various dimensions, beginning with the first and running right on through infinity to the Nth, could be comprehended by kinds of irony—or at least dissonance—I would have so numbered the ironies, so that in the Nth Dimension, there would be N kinds of irony...
...He is, in sum, a typically unrepentant Dreyfusard—or so he would have us think...
...If he had read the footnotes, he would have seen my reference to the presence of the Franklin Mint in Philadelphia...
...32 The American Spectator June/ July 1978...
...But these are petty details...
...If bishops or priests have private dreams of being "little Lenins," they would do wellto keep their dialectical confessions to the psychiatrist's couch...
...Even this charitable assumption cannot explain his perverse insistence that my work ought to be grouped with an earlier school of rhetoricians whose theories took hold in suburban Milwaukee in the late 1930s...
...As I write on p. 419: "Our life in the world of three dimensions allows us to imagine the existence of, at the most, three sexes: homosexuality, bisexuality, and unisexuality...
...Fistfights, backbiting, lovers' quarrels, and the like will disappear...
...Beyond that, hestarts to have trouble with his roommates...
...Either way, something is clearly amiss, for which the Church's highest authorities, its bishops, are at least partly responsible...
...Anti-sculpture will not appear, accordingly, until it can be fabricated from antimatter, not pewter...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
