[MD] Why William James?

[Krimel]

[dmb]
As far as I can tell, Marsha is the only one who has a problem with William
James. Apparently, nobody else needs an apology from me for employing
James's as a way to illuminate the MOQ - which is what Pirsig himself does
in Lila. 
But just for the record let me dispense with her latest straw man (i.e.
silly fabrication) and then I'll add some thoughts of my own about James and
my reasons for using his work. Marsha has accused me of ignoring the
following quote, which isn't true. 

[Krimel]
At thread or two over you suggested I am Marsha's lapdog. 

...her latest straw man???
...silly fabrication???

Right there I started to growl. 
I started highlighting raw insults; instances of naked aggression.
This post was going to look something like this:

"Apparently, Marsha is too oblivious to have noticed that."
"In a contest between Pirsig and Marsha, I'm definitely putting my money on
the author and not on the incoherent troll." 

While I was highlighting
My hair stood on end.
My growl became a snarl.
I bared my teeth...

Let me say this about the lady whose lap you'd have me lying in:
She can be fierce and feisty; enigmatic. 
She's been known to spam and act contrary. 
I've had to urge to bite her leg.

But she is an artist.
She loves to watch her own mind wander. 
She is incurably curious.
She loves her grandchild as I love mine
She is one of those free spirits, the active nihilists, who wants to stomp
on your intellectual tinker toy and join in Nietzsche's "pandemonium of all
free spirits". 

To such a one as this you say:
"That's just a reflection of Marsha's anti-intellectualism, resentment,
jealous and the like. It's pure bullshit. And it's merely personal too. She
just can't stand the idea that I could correct her misunderstanding. It's
empty, irrational, ego-driven nonsense. She turned it into a trivial contest
of wills wherein she thinks she can win the argument through sheer
repetition, as if posting her contradictory drivel over and over again will
somehow make it coherent. It won't. Static patterns are static and they're
patterned no matter how many times she uses the phrase "ever-changing static
patterns". In a hundred years, that will still be a stupid thing to say." 

That is no way to talk to people.

Then, I actually started reading what you were saying...
...that was when this post took a turn toward the ugly. 
You should thank me for sparing you the play-by-play. 
As much fun as it might have been, I haven't the time.
The short version went like this:

The problem, I see and perhaps Marsha senses, is that you seem to be engaged
in something even worse than philosophology.
I would call it bibliomancy. 
You say: "If Pirsig had studied and then intended to simply join that club,
the similarities would not be astonishing at all. In that case, we'd rightly
condemn the MOQ as unoriginal and derivative." 
But you approach James searching for signs and similarities and... Surprise!
You find them. You seem to say that when Pirsig wrote ZMM, he was
unacquainted with foundational texts in a field where he craved acceptance.
In the media of coincidental overlap, you paint him as an accidental
pragmatist. How is this helping? I suspect there are no two conceptual
entities, on any horizon, so dissimilar, one could not spend considerable
time counting up their points of convergence. A person could devote her life
to showing the connections between a petunia and a sperm whale. Doing that
with texts is bibliomancy; hermeneutic augury.
Worse, I can't decide whether you are trying to put Pirsig in a crowd of
people pointing toward something or whether you are trying to gather a crowd
to point at Pirsig. Rather than finding him a niche in the philosophical
landscape, you just seem to be digging a hole.

...speaking of which, I think I know where to find a bone...
...coming, Mistress...