My dad gave me Zen in the early 70s, the only book he ever recommended to me. Started reading it in the 80s in college but skipped over the zen parts and focused on the bike trip ( I was a long distance rider). I read it again a few years ago but didn't skip the Chautauquas and made sure to understand the free form ramblings. I went up one hat size after getting through all the internal conflict his character endured. A few years later I was moving my sailboat south and went through the Erie barge canal system from lake Ontario to Sandy Hook New Jersey and beyond. My life kind of took a similar path to Roberts minus Lila and the introspection. I don't ride anymore ( cell phone distracted drivers) and sold my boat after getting it back from the Bahamas. Inspirations can come from doing big adventures and enduring miss adventures. I was in a 5 day major wind event at Sandy Hook and got seasick at anchor. I wrote " Dispatches from Blew Jay" that was enjoyed by friends and sisters. Never wrote anything before or since. Thanks for your deep dive into a fascinating writer.
Thanks for showing the presentation, I like the typewriter and the leather jacket(there is a similar jacket hanging in my closet somewhere). Wish the exhibit has the index cards that was used for outlining the themes. Do you think the cards were handwritten or typed out?
I really wanted to see the index cards too. I think the index cards may be in the 'back exhibit', unreleased to the public yet, or somewhere high up in a tower, guarded by Wendy, where all the gold is kept waiting there. I'm almost positive he starts them as handwritten ('pencil is mightier than pen') to keep them as dynamic as possible- writing, drawing, origami, scattered (he was afraid of Lila knocking off his slips by her suitcase, so this thought/experience of picking up knocked off slips probably part of the random access, as this does increase the ability of yourself to randomly access the slips, when they're scattered around and accessed accidentally at a time you can't even predict - he does do this just on a much smaller scale). It's a pretty 'disorganized organized system' as it is tho. He does have a premonition of losing all the slips as they hover above the water above his sinking sailboat- 'would be easier to lose the boat than these slips' and kind of randomly picking up the wet and ruined slips as a nightmare. I don't know why he didn't explain losing slips and finding them as a good thing. But... Even when he can't think of things, during "creating unassimilated" where the cards are being created currently, where more than one card was currently created recently, at a desk or on a boat, he says he just started drawing sometimes which lead him on an important tangent. He probably wrote things down here with a pencil and index card because having a typewriter at hand while your away working on a boat or cruising down a strait would be too heavy to carry with you everywhere. And then when he can't think of anything else, and also can't recognize or capture fleeting hunches or ideas and/or by looking at other neighboring ideas, when at a desk or not, but certainly not creating now anymore, he goes to work on the "processing unassimilated", which is not while working away on a boat or driving down a strait, but is at a desk where the cards must be able to be accessed and are taken one by one from the 'creating unassimilated' by comparing them into groups of 3s, and then those form a line ("processing unassimilated"), earlier and later slips merge about a common topic, and I don't know if this processing part ever involved drawing over an already typed out slip. But this is a really good question because he used the apple II yet "Lila" is written by index cards, and the book is in a dedicated font family, not his own handwriting, yet the book dimensions perfectly match a 4x6 index card, paralleling how it was written. So I presume there were more first-handwritten-down slips and then converted to font family than the other way around, but I like to imagine he has sexy program slips written in some robotic-like font, really any native typewriter font (kind of what those program slips are like- robots- telling other slips and other ideas about how other ideas are combined how to work) but that may make some slips look different than others, and feel different too, and if they are thicker they pop out other slips and make groupings of 3s a little bulkier than normal, it may go against some slips being naturally better/more likable than others, however, discriminating against how ideas are made, if they must be made a certain way, is something pirsig wouldn't like. He already avoids this with his system with Joe as a natural stratagem working all the time to help avoid making decisions based on the 'pre-fittingness' of things. However he does make his own slip trays instead of buying them, so this would support the idea that he creates slips by himself, without the help of a machine, like a typewriter or a computer.
