Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

5.26.02 EXT. MOD QUAD. 6:03pm DAY

i think the extreme con­ser­vatism here at Notre Dame has made more of a lib­er­al out of me. the hypocrisy, bureau­cra­cy, and oppres­sive nature of ‘tra­di­tion’ that i am con­stant­ly faced with has slow­ly forced me from my rather apo­lit­i­cal fence­sit­ting into a slight­ly more rad­i­cal stance where i wel­come effec­tive change and rebel­lion against blind, stag­nant, patron­iz­ing author­i­ty. per­haps i am wrong and my lib­er­al arts (even though it isn’t called that here) edu­ca­tion has changed me…

Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance was a good read. i was­n’t expect­ing to be con­front­ed with the exten­sive philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion that it con­tains, but it was much eas­i­er to under­stand than say, Descartes “Dis­course on Method.” The sto­ry­line is very good and i could have used more of it, but i under­stand that it mere­ly func­tions as a frame to con­tain and direct the inquiry into val­ues. i would def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend that you read it, but be pre­pared to have your ways of thought chal­lenged on a fun­da­men­tal lev­el.

there is a new link in ‘peo­ple’ to some rat­bas­tard and anoth­er one in the ‘oth­er’ sec­tion to all my poet­ry (which sucks and you’ve already read before).