Tag: Robert Pirsig

Jan 03 2010

Quantity vs Quality — is one metric “Better” than the Other?

Quantity vs Quality — is one metric “Better” than the Other?

Back in the day, during my “formative college years”, I was given an assignment, that definitely changed the way I looked at the world ever since.

The lessons I learned in that Creative Writing class, I still carry with me, to this very day.

The assignment:  Read the American Classic:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig

And then, Write an Essay on “What does it means to write a Quality Essay?”

(ie. Why is one Essay, better than another? … How can you tell?)

Is it the count of the words that matters … or their depth, when taken as a whole?

May 01 2008

On crap detection and the media

You’ve read, of course, the New York Times story from last week, yes? The one about how retired military officers were paid by the Pentagon to sell the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by spewing administration propaganda to the “news” media?

It was a breathtaking and horrifying account of the lengths this administration will go to to lie to the American public so that certain people (not you and me) can get richer, and the level of disgrace that certain members of the military are willing to bring upon the uniform by prostituting themselves for an illegal war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

As I read the article, I thought of a snippet from a book I had read and re-read in high school:


[I]n the early 1960s, an interviewer was trying to get Ernest Hemingway to identify the characteristics required for a person to be a ‘great writer’. As the interviewer offered a list of various possibilities, Hemingway disparaged each in sequence. Finally, frustrated, the interviewer asked, ‘Isn’t there any one essential ingredient that you can identify?’ Hemingway replied, ‘Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.’

                   – Teaching as a Subversive Activity,

                     by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

                     (excerpt; PDF file)