The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.
Paul LaffoleyWhen I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about [H.P. Lovecraft], but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned on.
Paul LaffoleyYou know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!
Paul Laffoley[Nikola Tesla] was thinking of parts actually moving, like exchanging positions in space through time. This would go over here, then that would go over there, and then something else would happen.
Paul LaffoleyIt's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story [Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft].Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.
Paul LaffoleyThe whole thing that Dante [Alighieri] did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks [H.P.] Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him.
Paul Laffoley