More Touchstones of My Youth Revisited

Has anyone ever read Lila, the sequel to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that came out 17 years later? I picked it up recently at a used book sale and finished it on the weekend. ZAMM blew my mind as a teenager, but when I read it again as an adult I found an awful lot of flaws in Pirsig's sloppy logic. So I guess I kind of avoided this one for a couple of decades. But it was cheap, and there wasn't much else of interest at the sale... It turned out to be way more interesting than I'd expected. I'd like to hear what others thought of it.

As in ZAMM, the fictional travel story that serves as a framework for the novel is boring as hell, but the philosophical musings it weakly supports are imaginative and intuitively compelling. He talks about a lot of the themes that I'm always going on about — integrating spiritual, political, and religious understandings of the world; keeping seemingly contradictory discourses on different levels that shouldn't be mixed; expanding the concept of evolution to include not just biology, but also cultural and even individual consciousness — but he comes at it in a slightly different way. It's not at all rigorous, though, and I'm worried his ideas could be used in defense of completely opposite beliefs.

Still... extremely interesting. Oh yeah, there's even some Foucauldian stuff in there, for the continental fans among us, about cultural repression through definitions of madness, and the folly of "objectivity" as a scientific ideal.

My other source of entertainment lately has been the entire first season of The Bionic Woman, which I picked up when someone else finally returned it to the video store. I really liked that show as a kid, much more than The Six Million Dollar Man, and haven't seen it since. Probably didn't need a whole season's worth of episodes, but so far they've been weirdly enjoyable. But check out the opening credits — is this not the weirdest theme music you've ever heard? What a mess!