Submitted For Your Perusal

“I continued to pursue my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business.” —Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

“The knowledge accumulated in our print culture infinitely surpasses the learning of Socrates. In a survey of reading habits today, Socrates would score low. His scant scholarship and his lack of academic titles, foreign languages, resumé, and published work would prevent him from competing for important posts in the cultural bureaucracy, which would confirm his criticism of the written word: The simulation and credentials of learning have come to carry more weight than learning itself.” —Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

“I try to remind myself that during the last two decades men with PhDs in the humanities and social sciences, many of them working for the Pentagon, have been responsible for killing more people in any given week than the Mafia has managed since its inception.” —Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections

“There are few American artists, or even artists period, whose work is as psychologically haunting as Hopper’s. In paintings such as Automat (1927) or Nighthawks (1942) one see quite clearly the results of American individualism: an isolation and pervasive melancholy that lurks underneath the surface bombast. Americans, I remember thinking, must be the loneliest people on earth; they just don’t know it. Certainly, no one managed to capture the soullessness of a life devoted to power and ‘success’ as well as Hopper did; and if, on an unconscious level, life in the United States was this bleak in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, what would his paintings look like, I wondered, if he were alive today?” —Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed that one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.” —Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“For a scholar to describe a scholarly book as ‘journalistic’ is to say that it lacks hard analysis, complexity, or deep thought. For a journalist to describe a scholarly book as ‘academic’ is to say that it is abstruse, dull, hard to read, and probably not worth the trouble of getting through. Yet in their heart of hearts, scholars long for public and even popular recognition. The Holy Grail of the ‘crossover book,’ one that impresses one’s colleagues but also appeals to the intelligent general reader and perhaps even makes the best-seller list, is a recurring dream in the profession.” —Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts