Hey again Erin:
PIRSIG:
A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No
one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur
almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market....
rick:
Maybe... but I ask you this... If you were going to try and write a
'culture-bearer' deliberately, wouldn't you start with something like the
following.....
PIRSIG (ZMM p.7):
...[B]ecause of these changes the stream of national consciouness moves
faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels
cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing
havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not
to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into the old
ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and
platitudes too often repeated.
rick:
Sure sounds like he set out to write a 'culture bearer'... don't you think?
Whether he succeeded is surely a matter of interpretation and depends
entirely on what one means by 'culture-bearer'. He says it's a Swedish
word; Does anybody here speak Swedish? (Bo is from Norway, that's close to
Sweden, maybe he can help to better define the term).
ZMM was a best seller, but there have been millions of best sellers and
they all couldn't have been culture bearers, so there must be more to it
than that. As far as I know, very few universities teach Pirsig's works (my
internet search yielded info on only 3 schools w/ZMM classes), but culture
is usually independent of what goes on in universities, so that's not really
a helpful measure either. I know very few people, personally, who have read
ZMM (and those that have typically have a very difficult time remembering
what it was about) so my own personal experience doesn't reveal any major
cultural imprint... He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book, which is
an impressive award, but really, who else but one of us would know that...
so it can't be about awards...
It sure would have helped if Pirsig had cited some examples... (what
about the Bible???)
sincerely,
rick the email bearer
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