Psybertron Asks

Big Pirsig event coming up at MSU, first week in December. Sadly, despite efforts, it doesn’t look like I will be able to be there, just too many other work & travel demands this quarter. Good luck to organizer Chas Pinkava and all involved.

Good to hear James Purefoy in the role of Bob / Phaedrus in Peter Flannery’s dramatisation of Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on BBC Radio4′s Saturday Drama. It’s there to listen again in BBC Radio4 iPlayer’s “Most Popular” . [Only available until next Saturday 30th June 2012.] The characterizations, tone and atmosphere were [...]

Robert Pirsig‘s 1974 “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is a special interest of Psybertron, and is the favourite book of Peter Flannery. So, he’s created a dramatization to be be broadcast next Saturday 23rd June at 2:30pm as BBC R4 Saturday Drama. (Mentioned earlier.)

Noticed a few weeks ago that Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soul Craft” had been published in the UK under the title “The Case for Working with your Hands“. Noticed yesterday he was on Andrew Marr’s “Start the Week” on BBC Radio 4 with Martin Rees … billed as the philosopher Matthew Crawford. The listen [...]

Reminded by Marsha reading Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop“, that I never did record the Tabletop (or Theatre of Operations) metaphor for creative analogy … that is analogies that actually create things, things as interesting as humans and minds. I mentioned it twice here and here referring to Hofstadter’s “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies“, [...]

Much debate (here Thinking Allowed) since the recent financial crisis on the future of capitalism and global industrialisation, and the failure of economists to keep their eye on the underlying “systemic risks” in the trading of ever more convoluted financial derivatives. (Watched that excellent dramatisation of the Lehman Brothers demise just a couple of evenings ago [...]

This was an excellent In Our Time … a discussion on William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”. Elevating James to the position of the only philosopher that Wittgenstein looked up to. Telling I feel, how Melvyn struggles when asking the god question, questions within questions, in this religious context. Loved the caricature at the end [...]

I don’t read any more than coincidence into this, but spooky none-the-less, I’ve been in Oslo, around 20 months so far, and have been aware, from mentions by colleagues, of a bar on the other side of town, Grønland on the east side, we live in Majorstua on the west side. The place is Olympen [...]

Very interesting talk from Christof Bartneck at TU/e (Technical University of Eindhoven) explaining Pirsig‘s Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) in simple design and engineering terms. As an engineer I might have used the word engineering as much as he used the word design, (and he says in the Q&A session he doesn’t make a real distinction here) but [...]

Interesting to see Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” published in Europe as “The Case for Working with your Hands”, and reviewed here in The Irish Times. It was the working with your hands lyric from Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that came to mind when I reviewed the US edition just about a year [...]

Here’s one for those Pirsig Pilgrims. I heard today from Montana State University that a commemorative plaque has been installed right outside the President’s office in Montana Hall, where Pirsig taught from ’59 to ’61. Some ceremony is anticipated later in the year.

Ant McWatt has a screening of “On The Road with Robert Pirsig” tomorrow at the second day of the Wirral Film Festival on Merseyside, UK. Good luck Ant.

A page discussing Pirsig at Reddit which I picked up from the del.ici.ous tag on Pirsig which grows all the time – must use del.ici.ous more myself.

Today at last, I had a chance to watch Ant McWatt’s second documentary on the life and work of Robert Pirsig, “On the Road with Robert Pirsig“. (The first installment “Arrive Without Travelling” I reviewed when it came out around a  year ago, and it was a little difficult to disguise my disappointment, though relatively [...]

Being sold on e-Bay, Nancy Pirsig‘s motorcycle jacket. This leather jacket belongs to the ex-wife of author Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), whose married name was Nancy Pirsig. She is selling it because she doesn’t need it, since she now lives in a warm climate and no longer rides a motorcycle. [...]

As I near the end of a period of living & working in the US, in the Tennessee Valley in northern Alabama, I notice a few of my blog posts recently closing circles, mainly in musical connections. One obvious circle for Sylvia and I is that, purely coincidentally, the move from the US, is not [...]

Tom Ashbrook “On Point” on WBUR Boston public radio, interviews Mark Richardson, Ron DiSanto, Jim Landis (and Henry Gurr, calling in) on Zen and the Art, the Guidebook, and Zen and Now. Excellent free-ranging discussion across the appeal of the original book, and more.

Mark Richardson’s Zen And Now web-site is now live in time for his book launch this Tuesday (9th Sept). On the news page you’ll find a list of stops on his promotional tour, where you can drop in and say hello. As someone particularly interested in the biographical side of the Pirsigs, I can safely say there [...]

[Caveat - this review may not do the subject justice, but I didn't really notice how good a read it was until I was well into it, by which point not only did I not have any notes, but I was committed to read on to a conclusion. So from memory ...  is the summary [...]

It was 40 years ago today … Cap’n Bob rode his bike away … So let me introduce to you … The one and only ZMM … On the 8th July 1968 Robert Pirsig set out on the road-trip that became Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The rest as they say, is history.

“Arrive Without Travelling” is the first in a series of documentary films by Anthony McWatt about the work of Robert M Pirsig. Ant is to be congratulated on achieving his debut film-making milestone, the culmination of his own determined journey down a long and winding road, paved with intentions of many kinds. The major content of AWT was filmed at and [...]