Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Book Trailer

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, is a philosophical book about Quality, life, existentialism, and general thoughts. It's a very deep book, though somewhat hard to read. And of course, it does have a story behind it, of which I won't go into detail in case anyone decides to read it. But anyway, the main story basically discusses a motorcycling trip across the country that the author takes with his son, Chris, and a couple close friends, John and Sylvia. This video is one I made awhile back for a class, and as I was thinking about what kind of a book trailer I could do, I realized the video I already had was a perfect advertisement, and great for getting into the feel of the book. I obviously don't own the rights to any of the pictures or music, but did remix the songs and layout everything myself. All of the pictures are real pictures from the trip, pictures of the same path traveled by other people, pictures of the people involved, pictures of painting, books covers, parts of nature, diners eaten at, etc, that relate to the book and the trip that was taken. There are pictures of the author as he looked then and in recent times, a recent picture of his son Chris, and paintings by a woman they visited along the way (Gennie DeWeese), and many other things that make the book more enjoyable after you've read it, but that could possibly get you into the feel of WANTING to read it. It took me awhile to truly appreciate this work of literature, but when I finally learned to, it was held near and dear to my heart. When making this video, I wanted to try to do justice to the points of the book. Quotes and such don't work for me when it comes to these things, as I believe that the best quotes can come from reading the book itself, and experiencing it for yourself. I picked songs that relate to the topic of insanity that is avid throughout the entire novel, and tried to get the video to make the audience feel as though they are looking at a scrapbook or were part of these trip, or had known these people personally. I hope you enjoy it and that it will lead you into if not reading the book, at least reading ABOUT it and what it discusses.

A websites that can be helpful to research this topic is MOQ.org, which discusses the Metaphysics of Quality and has message boards devoted to figuring out the meaning and understanding behind Pirsig's story, which is now considered to be the greatest philosophy book of modern times. The constant changing of speaker and pattern tend to make the book confusing, and so reading up on it before actually reading it does work wonders into getting through it more easily and swiftly, though it does remove some of the surprise aspect.