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shalannaSo what did I do all day, if I didn't save the world and fix the world's boo-boos with a motherly smooch?
I re-read Robert Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ today and yesterday. If you haven't read it--well, I don't know whether you'll connect with the book or not, but you should give it a chance. It isn't really about Zen, nor is it literally about motorcycle maintenance, although there are a number of passages describing what the author does to keep his motorcycle running during the road trip he takes with his son over the course of the narrative. It used to be considered a modern classic, a must-read, but who knows whether it is seen as a hippie thing or still a must-read now.
If you haven't read the book, this musing may be lost on you. But basically the book is a road trip that mirrors the author's inner journey. (*Gee, Universe, I wonder why I plucked it off the shelf today just at random?!*) As you read, you discover that in the recent past, the author "went insane" and experienced a "personality annihilation" as done by court order, via electroconvulsive therapy as practiced back in the 1970s (they still do it, but not the way they used to, I am told), and had "woken up" with a "new personality." He was no longer the person he had been, and he was pronounced "cured." However, he needed to reconnect the fragments of his memory and wanted to go on this road trip with his son to help him do so (as well as reconnect with the boy). By the end of the trip, his original memories and knowledge began coming back, and he started hoping that he could integrate "himself" again. (This tells me that memory and knowledge is not stored as electrical impulses or "cores" set to ones and zeroes, but is stored chemically somehow, and that there are several copies of important bits of knowledge. These patients slowly rebuild their knowledge bases and often remember most, if not all, of their prior lives, although they're profoundly affected by the change. I suspect that memory in the brain works kind of like "bubble memory" in early TI computer technology, but if not, it's more like an analog storage method than it is like the digital method that works so well in computing. Just my theory.)
As I said, this book's not really about Zen _per se_, but the author does discuss philosophy. He talks about Hume (and how we can never know anything because we can only know what we know through our senses, and can we trust them? That's an extended exploration of the Cogito ["Cogito, ergo sum"] from the Greeks, in a way) and leads into Kant (basically a refutation, of sorts, of Hume), and then about the ancient Greeks and their way of thinking. The talk of motorcycle maintenance is also a metaphor for keeping himself tuned up, repairing himself and relationships, etc. Some people don't ever get that far into the book, as they read the beginning and think it's all going to be about keeping your bike in tune and so forth. But anyhow, if the book is for you, you'll end up reading it all, so the book's fans kind of self-select.
The pre-zap author was a college prof teaching rhetoric who noticed that when he tried to teach by showing the students various essays and then telling them to imitate the rhetorical devices in those essays, it didn't work well. He experimented with various ideas such as withholding grades and having students write entire essays about small details such as one side of a coin, and then he asked them to define quality; the class always said they couldn't define it, but that they knew it when they saw it--that things of quality always stood out and you could tell which ones they were. It's the same argument as a judge once used with pornography--"I know it when I see it." But he wasn't satisfied with this conclusion.
At any rate . . . what caused this college professor to melt down at last was the search for a definition for Quality. Not the "quality" that businesses say they're after or the "quality" that has checklists to see whether your product has fulfilled its list of requirements, but a Quality that would be inherent in items or beliefs that are True and Proper. It's all very esoteric, and he experienced a breakdown during an intense search for truth that came out of his philosophical musings.
It occurs to me that the 1990s' answer to Phaedrus was to say that there is no way to measure quality except subjectively, that there IS no objective right or wrong, good or bad ("nothing's good or bad except thinking makes it so"), and that you can't rank (say) the world's greatest symphonies in order, or the great books, or whatever, because it all comes down to your personal opinion. The same school of thought (mostly accepted and taught in educational establishments now, as far as I can tell) says further that YOUR opinion is as worthy and "good" as an expert's, that no English lit scholar or critic can make up a list of the Western Canon's Top 100 that would be any more creditable than your own personal list. This school of post-post modernist thinking says that YOU are the ultimate arbiter of Quality. It says that the old idea of "whatever has lasted has passed the test of time and must embody Quality, meaning that the classics that are still read and honored are of greater quality than other writings (for example)" is wrong and must be forgotten. It advocates the belief that whatever YOUR personal opinion is should override others' because "it's all just YOUR opinion, and mine is as good as the teacher's, or the expert's, or the sage's."
I don't agree with this entirely. Sure, your personal list is the best one for you. But is it the best one for everybody? Is there not a place for a list made by experts of the "don't miss" building blocks for passing along Western culture? I like to see what has endured over the centuries, and hear what people who have devoted their lives to studying literature or music or art believe are the great works that are worthy of our continued attention. You can entertain yourself for weeks arguing this with people who like to debate, but eventually you'll come down on whichever side appeals most to you.
All I know is that this book is one of the models of a "road trip for self-discovery" that I must have had in the back of my mind when I was writing Camille's story.
This is probably not good in today's market. I'm not very market-driven, it turns out.
# # #
The reason I'm up so early and can't go back to sleep is that while carrying the dog back to bed (after he went tinkles), I banged my bad knee into a dang TV tray that Somebody Else had folded and stuck on top of a storage box in the hall such that the edge of the table stuck out . . . and I didn't see it because I was carrying the dog. Ouch! But anyhow, it has quit hurting. Maybe it won't be a problem. I didn't hit it that hard, but when something's already messed up, it likes to complain. That metaphor could be extended to cover me in general, but let's not go there at 4:43 AM.
(f/x: sparkler-stars coming out of knee as in comic strips)
My cousin J. has gone back to school for his Master's in architecture. Sunday he called for help with an engineering math problem. He says there's a heat wave out there on the East coast, and it was tough to study because he lives across from Fraternity Row. His math problems are due at 8 AM today (Monday), and he called at 3 PM Sunday. This time it was easy, but I warned him that next time he'd better call a day or so in advance, just in case it's a line or surface integral or some such mess. This one was just about slabs of concrete and how heavy/dense they are. Dang, those things are HEAVY.
Inner child whispers: "Dirty, dirty unwashed. You're gonna stay down because we'll KEEP you down. We got enough Anointed Ones." Yeah, thanks. Have a cookie. (No wonder I can't lose weight very quickly.)
Here's a joke that is for hardcore math nerds only.
Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: N, for some positive integer N. Also, you have to get their minds off of math first.
*snrrrk* Okay, it's not funny unless you've done a lot of proofs.
I re-read Robert Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ today and yesterday. If you haven't read it--well, I don't know whether you'll connect with the book or not, but you should give it a chance. It isn't really about Zen, nor is it literally about motorcycle maintenance, although there are a number of passages describing what the author does to keep his motorcycle running during the road trip he takes with his son over the course of the narrative. It used to be considered a modern classic, a must-read, but who knows whether it is seen as a hippie thing or still a must-read now.
If you haven't read the book, this musing may be lost on you. But basically the book is a road trip that mirrors the author's inner journey. (*Gee, Universe, I wonder why I plucked it off the shelf today just at random?!*) As you read, you discover that in the recent past, the author "went insane" and experienced a "personality annihilation" as done by court order, via electroconvulsive therapy as practiced back in the 1970s (they still do it, but not the way they used to, I am told), and had "woken up" with a "new personality." He was no longer the person he had been, and he was pronounced "cured." However, he needed to reconnect the fragments of his memory and wanted to go on this road trip with his son to help him do so (as well as reconnect with the boy). By the end of the trip, his original memories and knowledge began coming back, and he started hoping that he could integrate "himself" again. (This tells me that memory and knowledge is not stored as electrical impulses or "cores" set to ones and zeroes, but is stored chemically somehow, and that there are several copies of important bits of knowledge. These patients slowly rebuild their knowledge bases and often remember most, if not all, of their prior lives, although they're profoundly affected by the change. I suspect that memory in the brain works kind of like "bubble memory" in early TI computer technology, but if not, it's more like an analog storage method than it is like the digital method that works so well in computing. Just my theory.)
As I said, this book's not really about Zen _per se_, but the author does discuss philosophy. He talks about Hume (and how we can never know anything because we can only know what we know through our senses, and can we trust them? That's an extended exploration of the Cogito ["Cogito, ergo sum"] from the Greeks, in a way) and leads into Kant (basically a refutation, of sorts, of Hume), and then about the ancient Greeks and their way of thinking. The talk of motorcycle maintenance is also a metaphor for keeping himself tuned up, repairing himself and relationships, etc. Some people don't ever get that far into the book, as they read the beginning and think it's all going to be about keeping your bike in tune and so forth. But anyhow, if the book is for you, you'll end up reading it all, so the book's fans kind of self-select.
The pre-zap author was a college prof teaching rhetoric who noticed that when he tried to teach by showing the students various essays and then telling them to imitate the rhetorical devices in those essays, it didn't work well. He experimented with various ideas such as withholding grades and having students write entire essays about small details such as one side of a coin, and then he asked them to define quality; the class always said they couldn't define it, but that they knew it when they saw it--that things of quality always stood out and you could tell which ones they were. It's the same argument as a judge once used with pornography--"I know it when I see it." But he wasn't satisfied with this conclusion.
At any rate . . . what caused this college professor to melt down at last was the search for a definition for Quality. Not the "quality" that businesses say they're after or the "quality" that has checklists to see whether your product has fulfilled its list of requirements, but a Quality that would be inherent in items or beliefs that are True and Proper. It's all very esoteric, and he experienced a breakdown during an intense search for truth that came out of his philosophical musings.
It occurs to me that the 1990s' answer to Phaedrus was to say that there is no way to measure quality except subjectively, that there IS no objective right or wrong, good or bad ("nothing's good or bad except thinking makes it so"), and that you can't rank (say) the world's greatest symphonies in order, or the great books, or whatever, because it all comes down to your personal opinion. The same school of thought (mostly accepted and taught in educational establishments now, as far as I can tell) says further that YOUR opinion is as worthy and "good" as an expert's, that no English lit scholar or critic can make up a list of the Western Canon's Top 100 that would be any more creditable than your own personal list. This school of post-post modernist thinking says that YOU are the ultimate arbiter of Quality. It says that the old idea of "whatever has lasted has passed the test of time and must embody Quality, meaning that the classics that are still read and honored are of greater quality than other writings (for example)" is wrong and must be forgotten. It advocates the belief that whatever YOUR personal opinion is should override others' because "it's all just YOUR opinion, and mine is as good as the teacher's, or the expert's, or the sage's."
I don't agree with this entirely. Sure, your personal list is the best one for you. But is it the best one for everybody? Is there not a place for a list made by experts of the "don't miss" building blocks for passing along Western culture? I like to see what has endured over the centuries, and hear what people who have devoted their lives to studying literature or music or art believe are the great works that are worthy of our continued attention. You can entertain yourself for weeks arguing this with people who like to debate, but eventually you'll come down on whichever side appeals most to you.
All I know is that this book is one of the models of a "road trip for self-discovery" that I must have had in the back of my mind when I was writing Camille's story.
This is probably not good in today's market. I'm not very market-driven, it turns out.
The reason I'm up so early and can't go back to sleep is that while carrying the dog back to bed (after he went tinkles), I banged my bad knee into a dang TV tray that Somebody Else had folded and stuck on top of a storage box in the hall such that the edge of the table stuck out . . . and I didn't see it because I was carrying the dog. Ouch! But anyhow, it has quit hurting. Maybe it won't be a problem. I didn't hit it that hard, but when something's already messed up, it likes to complain. That metaphor could be extended to cover me in general, but let's not go there at 4:43 AM.
(f/x: sparkler-stars coming out of knee as in comic strips)
My cousin J. has gone back to school for his Master's in architecture. Sunday he called for help with an engineering math problem. He says there's a heat wave out there on the East coast, and it was tough to study because he lives across from Fraternity Row. His math problems are due at 8 AM today (Monday), and he called at 3 PM Sunday. This time it was easy, but I warned him that next time he'd better call a day or so in advance, just in case it's a line or surface integral or some such mess. This one was just about slabs of concrete and how heavy/dense they are. Dang, those things are HEAVY.
Inner child whispers: "Dirty, dirty unwashed. You're gonna stay down because we'll KEEP you down. We got enough Anointed Ones." Yeah, thanks. Have a cookie. (No wonder I can't lose weight very quickly.)
Here's a joke that is for hardcore math nerds only.
Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: N, for some positive integer N. Also, you have to get their minds off of math first.
*snrrrk* Okay, it's not funny unless you've done a lot of proofs.
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Zen and those Middle-of-the-Night Musings
Date: 2007-10-01 03:22 pm (UTC)ON THE ROAD--Jack Kerouac. What better outsider's view of the Fifties could there have been than this? He could only do it once; when, very late in his life, he tried recreating what he had done as an angry young man, he got as far as New Jersey (from New York), where a rainstorm--a RAINSTORM!!!--soaked his resolve and ended all thoughts of completing, or even continuing, a second journey.
Yankees!
California-born John Steinbeck (1902-1968) wrote two candidates for the Great American Novel, THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1937 or thereabouts) and EAST OF EDEN (1951). They were both very large forms of our old friend, the discover-through-travel novel. (One could argue that J.S.'s best efforst in this genre was his 1936 IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, and one might be right.)
But it wasn't until 1960 that Steinbeck did the trip pretty much on his own, with his standard poodle Charley for company, and finally achieved that epiphany of self-discovery on a _personal_ level, not through the migration of dispossessed farmers during the Dust Bowl, or the settlement of California in the 19th Century. TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY has nothing of the epic in it. But Steinbeck bared his soul in it, and as filled with Biblical parallels and social justice-seeking as his two "biggest" books are, "CHARLEY" lets you get to know the J.S. you would have gotten to know if you'd been riding in the back of that customized pre-RV, Rocinante. He even, at a moment of some personal danger up in the Pacific Northwest, turns FUNNY on us: "perhaps some kindly bird will come along and cover us with leaves."
On to other eras. The Sixties probably had more travel/self-discovery books than any other decade, because they had more of everything. But, y'know, the Sixties really started up in late 1963, with tha assassination of President Kennedy, followed by 1964 and the U.S. arrival of the Beatles. And they really didn't end until we got out of Vietnam in 1975.
Enough twaddle! CAMILLE'S TRAVELS sorta fits into the mold, but such books are usually first-person works, for obvious reasons. COLOR RADIO teaches you a lot about running and programming a radio station, just as ZEN does provide the basics of keepin' your bike running. Ask yourself--is BAD HEIR DAY self-revalatory? We're all spiritual children of those writers who brought us those wrought-out-of-their-loneliness travel gems, be it Steinbeck trying to prove to himself that he was still man enough, or Kerouac discovering he wasn't. If we take up the challenge, we owe them our best efforts.
Re: Zen and those Middle-of-the-Night Musings
Date: 2007-10-01 04:11 pm (UTC)(and, of course, you know that the subtitle of my book is an allusion to his title. _Camille's Travels: or Travels Without Charley_. The editor at the workshop jumped on that like a lizard on a cricket; she didn't think the allusion worked, and she hated the entire title because it's not science-fictional. I said that I knew editors generally changed your title and that I didn't worry about it too much for that reason, but she said I ought to worry about it because editors take it so seriously. Matrice (Mary-Theresa) Hussey of Harlequin/LUNA told me ages ago on GEnie that nobody even thought twice about your working title, and if it fit, that was fine. I think this editor the other day just thought it was Uppity and Snooty and Too Literary Doncha Know. That helped me realize that this book is not category at all, but more of a coming-of-age road trip novel. For which there ain't no market unless you is a crook or a politician!)
>the back of that customized pre-RV, Rocinante.
Which is (you probably know) named after Don Quixote's horse! He was a fan of the Man of La Mancha, like me--here I named Dulcinea after the windmill-tilter's unknowing sweetheart in Cervantes' work.
>>is BHD self-revelatory?
Unfortunately and unavoidably, my books seem to be. Even if it's just a paragraph musing about the character's childhood or some crazy obsession that he or she has. This is probably not such a Good Thing.
I'm certainly not the writer that Pirsig was at the time he wrote his masterwork, and thank God and all the saints that I didn't have the experience he had which brought on the musings. Still, I do think there are readers who'd like the book.
_MacArthur Park_ is Jimmy Webb's masterpiece. He said it was a cantata. When I heard that interview with him, something clicked. It *is* closer to the Coffee Cantata with singing than it is to any pop song. It was used as one of the leitmotifs of an old novel titled _She Lives_ that my best friend got for her birthday when she turned fifteen, and we both read the novel and became fans of the song. I'm sure the novel is absolutely not re-readable today (and has been OOP a while), but because her sister had given it to her in hardcover (no less), it became one of our A-List books. I've never seen a copy since, and it's just as well, because it's probably baaaad. Thank goodness we had no idea!
Re: Zen and those Middle-of-the-Night Musings
Date: 2007-10-02 03:21 pm (UTC)Jimmy Webb wrote an anthem for our Centennial -- y'all probably don't hear it very much on the south banks of the Red River, but it's called "Oklahoma Rising," written in partnership with Vince Gill, whom I suspect limited himself to working on the lyrics. It has that incredible Webb quality, a soaring, optimistic melody. Jimmy obviously has an abundance of good feelings for his home state, and he was generous, transmuting them into an absolutely marvelous song.
I've got to track down the two albums of Jimmy Webb songs (including the original "Mac Arthur Park") that Richard Harris did in 1969 and 1970. Surely they've been released on CD! iTunes would probably be the easiest way to get copies of the many Webb tunes recorded by everyone from Glen Campbell to Thelma Houston.
Man, have we digressed! Steinbeck good. Sneak "Don Quixote" metaphors into TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY much fine. Shalanna good too, pays tribute to both M.C. and J.S. with subtitled work about Camille.
Why am I suddenly writing in caveman stereotype? Because Mike Sherwood is doing the music for the new TV sitcom, based on the Geico commercials, no doubt. Maybe I should download "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles; it's almost old enough to have been made by Neanderthals.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-01 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-02 05:57 pm (UTC)Oh, my . . . electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Bad, bad juju. I worked at IRS with an old Jewish fellow, extremely nice guy, and full of stories, but also full of sadness at the havoc wrought on his life by a period of mental difficulty and the horrific effects of ECT. After having gone through nursing school, I wasn't so sure that ECT was really necessary in Julius's case, bless his soul.
As a nursing student in 1979, I witnessed a session of it, and it was for all the world like something out of the Twilight Zone of some grade-B 30s horror flick.
Anyone who suggests I would ever need such better be ready to deal with a metaphorical buzz saw. Nobody will ever do that to me, I don't care how "refined" they say the technique is.
Next . . .
Ah, yes, the autobiogaphical road trip. As a teenager, I read everything I could get my hands on by Steinbeck (and Faulkner and a few others), and devoured The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Travels With Charley. I wanted to go, too. (grin) The observation that each era produces one such that stands out is spot on.
Next . . .
Hey, Shalanna -- if I decide to go for a master's degree (number two), and decide to go the thesis track, will you help me with statistics? The prospect of having to take that scares the hell out of me. But it's handy having a daughter who works in the department of mathematics and statistics at the university. She handed me a teacher's edition of the beginning statistics textbook! (grin)
What really is baffling to me is what someone writing a thesis on a 16th-Century Spanish official and explorer needs with statistics! (sigh)
Even I can appreciate the joke about mathematicians and light bulbs, but only because I live among math nerds. I wonder why none of that seems to have rubbed off on me like the computer-nerd stuff has?
Next . . .
Dennis! "Alley Oop?" I hadn't thought of that in years! Back when it was popular on the radio, my aunt confessed to having caught a snippet of it when browsing the radio dial, and was astounded. I sang the whole thing for her, and she was totally incredulous. Heeheehee. Ah, it was a wonderful thing.