“[M]y daughter, who has been studying Boethius, the great systematizer of the quadrivium, explained to me the connections between the arts of the quadrivium, in a way that also helped me see the way mathematics really does provide a unifying model for the order and design that underlies all existence.
arithmetic = numbers
geometry = numbers in space
music = numbers in time
astronomy = numbers in space and time”
— Gene Veith on the mathematical part of classical education.
“[David] Brooks is turning out to be like Big Bird to Obama’s Snuffaluffagus! He’s the only one who can see the real Obama and nobody believes him.”
— Jonah Goldberg , dropping a spot-on, but very dated , Sesame Street reference.
“Nonfiction has long been treated as the lutefisk on the literary menu, unlikely to be the special of the day. The genre emits a whiff of the déclassé, served (especially in literature departments) with a garnish of condescension. The problem starts with the word: Like “childless” (why not “child-free”?), “nonfiction” packs a lot of social judgment. Nonfiction may be real, but in matters of creativity, it’s not quite the real thing.”
— Rob Nixon , a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who adds that of the 200 books he had to master for his M.A. prelim exam, exactly two ( Walden and Black Boy ) were nonfictional.
“I think of [Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses ] as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies. He gives men a romanticized view of manliness. McCarthy wraps his characters in half-truths and idealized anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star State, the border, and its cowboy myths.”
— Christine Granados , slandering one of my favorite novels (by telling an uncomfortable truth), in American Book Reviews list of “Top 40 Bad Books.”
“We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity . . . . We pay a steep price to maintain our premier financial strength. The $20 billion-plus of cash-equivalent assets that we customarily hold is earning a pittance at present. But we sleep well.”
— Warren Buffett in his always readable annual report to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders.
“I had the idea a while ago of making my bid for literary greatness by simply getting a Mills & Boon romance novel from a railway station bookshop and plagiarising it more or less word for word, except that I would cunningly transpose the setting to a concentration camp.”
— Daniel Davies with an idea that can also win him an Oscar for “Best Adapted Screenplay.”
Additional sources: The Browser ; Kottke .
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