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Robert M. Pirsig, whose "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," a dense and discursive novel of ideas, became an unlikely publishing phenomenon in the mid-1970s and a touchstone in the waning days of the counterculture, died on Monday at his home in South Berwick, Me. He was 88.
According to the New York Times.
This was one of those books that more or less defined an era. I would recommend it, but I know from experience that it does not resonate the way it did in the '70's. A philosophy professor I knew said he used to use the novel to introduce philosophy, but one year, in the early '80's it just stopped working. Nonetheless, it is worth a read, even though,
In a foreword to the book, Mr. Pirsig told readers that despite its title, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" should "in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice."
He added, "It's not very factual on motorcycles either."
But it does have a rather long discussion of Plato's Phaedrus and quite a lot about a certain motorcycle shop in Miles City, Montana. And the novel is much better than the movie, which of course was never made. Open roads, and may your handlebars never come loose, Robert!
(Score: 5, Informative) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:39PM (18 children)
Definitely one of those books that I feel had a very influential and profound effect upon me when I first read it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who like to read things.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:40PM (8 children)
Q: What did the washed-up hippie say while reading Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance after his drugs wore off?
A: "This book sucks."
(Score: 5, Touché) by bart9h on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:58PM (1 child)
Q: What one would think of a book that Ethanol-fueled said it sucks?
A: It must be great, then!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:15PM
I think the bigger question is why is EH reading philosophy books?
I'm sure that he hasn't read it, and that it is just another attack on the people he hates.
Remember, EH gets his reading material from people in pointy hoods.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:10PM
And lo! does Ethanol's lack of aptitude for philosophy influence his perception of the quality a book on such a thing.
Such revelations never beheld for all to see! Never I say! Oh, how genuinely novel.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:30PM (3 children)
Q: Why is Ethanol-fueled so salty?
A: His drugs wore off.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:35PM (2 children)
That's why? I thought it was the improbable, nay, incredible amount of RWNJ dicks he's got crammed into every orifice, pocket, and pore...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:57PM
... wow so I thought those were blackheads but as it turns out they're micronigger cocks!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:24PM
Without a doubt suffering from depression and possibly some form of mild autism. And I'm not trying to be insulting either. I have similar issues myself and can relate to his outbursts, not the content but the desire to do it in the first place. His outbursts are his form of relief. I don't like it (his outbursts) but I get it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:58AM
I was going to mod you flamebait, then I noticed it was you and didn't bother as "ethanol-fueled" and "troll"/"flamebait" are synonymous terms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by migz on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)
I've read it 3 times about 10 years apart. It reads very differently as you get older.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:45AM
Agree. First 2 times were the best tho.
(Score: 2) by lx on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:16PM (2 children)
I read it when I was 19, had forgotten most of it twenty years later, but when reading it again last year, I noticed that I had absorbed many of the ideas in the book. It's a shame that the second half drags on and on.
Still haven't gotten around to read Lila.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:30PM (1 child)
Sounds kinda like me. Read in in my late teens. I had taken it on a trip and didn't have anything else to read. The second have was a bit dull. But it ended nice enough, with a nice revelation about his driving companion.
I bought Lila as soon as I got home. Haven't opened that up yet. But, hey, it's only been on my shelf for 30 years...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:47AM
Lila is not good. Reads like ad copy. It's like Pirsig had a point to prove how he solved everything. Maybe will try again in a few years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:30PM (3 children)
I never read it, but that was always one of those books that struck me as being on a top ten list of books that most people claim to have read but never did.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:47PM (2 children)
Ya know, I could actually see that. It's just famous enough, and yet old and obscure enough that dropping it seems impressive, and no one is probably going to call you out on it, having likely not read it themselves. Kinda like all the dweebs with their Hitchhiker's references (OMG 42, right? It's the ANSWER!) that don't know who Douglas Adams is. Or all the people who haven't read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is to say, virtually all of the people who reference it.
_I_ have read it though. I actually enjoy books with a philosophical slant. Philosophy was my second major in college before I dropped out.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:49AM (1 child)
Philosophy would have been my major if I had done philosophy. Can haz cred 2?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:48PM
You're coming off petulant about that 50k you spent on your gender studies degree, brah.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:40PM
A philosophy text which remained relevant during that one magical decade between the invention of Unix and the invention of AIDS.
What a failure.
It's such a shame Robert M Penising didn't die of the gay cancer. Now that would have been poetic justice.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:46PM (3 children)
... one of those books that more or less defined an era..... does not resonate the way it did in the '70's..... one year, in the early '80's it just stopped working...
That in itself is an interesting topic.
Anyway I nominate this 1979 classic: "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter" I remember hearing nothing but praise for it in the 80s and obtained a copy in the 90s and was underwhelmed, like I'd gotten bigger kicks off the back of cereal boxes.
Now up for discussion, is 2002 classic "A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram" up for nomination or not to that list? I like the hell out of it, but a lot of people are WTF. I mean I'm used to people WTF me about politics (now go away and read some Evola or moldbug...) , not so much CS/IT/EE stuff. I still think ANKOS is a good book he dindu nuthin wrong. Its a friggin popular science book not a journal article....
I've been told William Craddock's autobio is in this set of non-resonators yet I read it a couple years ago and it was pretty interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:51PM
You ought to read eckhart tolles - the power of now
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:44AM (1 child)
I was amazed by GEB in High School and bring it up mostly nowadays as trivia, with it being the first item sold on Amazon and all.
For Zen Buddhism, you have to read books by Zen Buddhists. Happiness by Mattieu Ricard is a secular exploration of the Buddhist philosophy on happiness - how it functions, why it functions, how to cultivate your psyche for health and wellness benefits.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:52AM
For some Zen literature, you could always read Zen in the Art of Archery which preceded the motorcycle maintenance book.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:17PM
I really enjoyed The Illuminatus! but got the distinct impression I would've gotten a lot more out of it if I'd been born a couple decades earlier. There were a looooot of political references I had to look up.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:21AM
...or did he reach that speed and travel in time?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:23AM (4 children)
To explain my last line, there are two things from "Zen and the Art" that have stayed with me. The first is the consideration of "stuckness" that Pirsig gives: what do you do if, when working on your motorcycle, you snap off the head of the screw you need to remove? This is an analogy for all kinds of problem solving, where the question is, what to do when you cannot see anything to do? The kicker is that solutions are usually obvious, after the fact, but impossible before they are discovered.
The other memorable part was the scene where the accompanying bike develops loose handlebars, despite the clamps being fully tightened. Prisig suggests that what they need are some shims! Looking around in the borrow pit on the side of the highway somewhere like South Dakota, he finds a beer can, cuts two strips out of it with his pocket knife, and presents them to his fellow biker: "Handlebar shims!". Unfortunately, the fellow biker was an Artiste, and the bike was a BMW, so he replied, "You are going to put pieces of beer can, into my B-M-W? I don't think so!" Prisig recognized his mistake. He should have scrapped all the paint off the strips of aluminum, and pretended to extract them from his saddlebags and said, "I just happen to have a pair of official BMW Motorcycle handlebar shims with me!"
But, alas, it was too late, and the Artist rode for quite some time with loose handlebars. Stuckness. (And warning, my memory of the book could be incorrect!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:08AM
You've got the shim story correct (according to my memory...where it also stuck). The friend/artist looked to BMW and their genuine parts as the source of perfection. Whereas the author was a perfectly good troubleshooter and mechanic, just not anointed by the almighty German firm. The other fix for this problem requires a file to take a little material off the mating face of the clamps, to reduce the bore of the clamp--but the artist probably wouldn't have allowed this either (although it's likely what the dealer would do, out of sight in the back shop).
I only read it twice and have to agree with others that the second time was not like the first. Maybe it's time to blow the dust off and try for a third. On the other hand, I've greatly enjoyed reading Nevil Shute, "Round the Bend" three times in the last 20 years, another novel with a large heaping of philosophy in it.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:25AM (2 children)
In my memory, he offers up the empty can of a beer he had been drinking as a source of shims, but as you say, _my_ memory may also be incorrect -- it's been decades since I read it.
Two parts stuck with me the most: First, was the thread interwoven throughout the story about the beauty of function. The shims parable is an example, John (the Artiste) chose to suffer an unsafe and uncomfortable condition because he was not attuned to the beauty of functionality and instead, focused on surface qualities. He chose a BMW precisely because he hoped its reputation for reliability would obviate the need to focus any attention on function, and of course, there is the fact that it is an expensive BMW which sort of screams "surface". (I say this as the own of 1978 BMW R80 on which I've done a lot of work myself)
The other little story I remember quite clearly, was about being in Sylvia's (the Artiste's wife) kitchen while the sink went drip, drip, drip. A simple fix with a washer costing pennies but rather than deal with the technology, they chose to reject learning about all that stuff -- they referred to such technology derisively as some kind of evil of the modern world (while at once enjoying fresh running water and of course, riding motorcycles). They were both smart enough to master it and doing so would improve their quality of life, but for some strange reason, they rejected technology while at the same time relying on it.
So the main lessons I picked up were: 1) function over form (there is beauty in the efficient operation of a thing that transcends its outward appearance), and 2) learn how do stuff for yourself and you can make your life better.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:42AM (1 child)
You know, posting this has made me dig out my copy! And as you might imagine, the library of a 2400 year old philosopher can be rather large. Fortunately I have moved several times recently. But I seem to be missing the back cover of the paperback edition, and although there is an ad at the bottom of the page, I am not sure I have the entire book! So, last page is 406, last line, "You can sort of tell these things". Also, there are some stains on the face of the page-ends (there is a term for this), and it appears to be grease of some kind. Motorcycle grease? Could be.
Now, even I may have to give it another read. But never again Carlos Castaneda, the fake!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:15AM
I read it twice. It hit me differently each time. I suspect you're also a quick reader. It flew by like a summer ride for me both times. I liked that instead of proof, it offered arguments in favour; showing, in doing so, that the subjectiveness of quality is what makes strong positions akin to tasty dishes. Different in nutrition and flavour, and often the flavours might mix poorly, yet each can be good to consider or taste.
Similarly, I find myself really appreciating the literary suggestions of the Soylentils. Many thanks. Curated "worth reading" lists from mind with good taste are an incredibly valuable gift.