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I Seem to Be a Verb

Fuller's experimental 1970 Bantam book, made with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, whose title encapsulates his view of the human being as a process rather than a static thing. The in-repo source is a page-image scan with no extracted text.

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I Seem to Be a Verb

I Seem to Be a Verb is R. Buckminster Fuller's experimental 1970 book — credited to Fuller with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore (Bantam Books, 1970). Its title captures Fuller's core conviction that a human being is not a static noun-like "thing" but an ongoing process: a verb.

[!note] Limited source The repo-local source for this title is a scan of the book's pages (image-1 through image-98) with no machine-readable text extracted, plus front matter and the bibliography. The summary below therefore rests on the book's bibliographic identity and title rather than on a full text transcription. Compile a richer article only after the page images are OCR'd or the text is otherwise transcribed.

What the source contains

The in-repo project is built from the published edition and provides: cover and title pages; the copyright statement (Copyright ©1970, all rights reserved); and a bibliography entry — "R. Buckminster Fuller, Jerome Agel, and Quentin Fiore. I seem to be a verb. New York: Bantam Books, 1970." The body itself is preserved only as roughly ninety-eight page images, so the book's collage-style layout and text are present visually but not as transcribed prose.

The collaborators and the form

The collaboration is notable: Quentin Fiore and producer Jerome Agel were the same team behind Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massage, and the book shares that lineage of typographically inventive, montage-driven "inventory" books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The title phrase — "I seem to be a verb" — is among Fuller's most cited self-descriptions, asserting that identity is dynamic activity rather than fixed substance, consistent with the process-thinking that runs through his other works (man as a "pattern integrity," universe as a complex of nonsimultaneous events).

See Also

Sources

  • i_seem_to_be_a_verb/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
  • i_seem_to_be_a_verb/i_seem_to_be_a_verb.md — page-image scan and bibliography
  • i_seem_to_be_a_verb/index.md — project index

buckminster-fullerphilosophyprocess-thinkingpoetry