Submitted by Mike Boehm, Feb 21, 2008 04:14

1. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance." -- Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way" (intended mainly satirically, given that Proust was a voracious reader of newspapers, and Charles Swann, the character speaking this sentence, is being sent up as an extreme aesthete; still, there's a point meant to be taken about separating wheat and chaff).

2. "A good critic is someone who doesn't know what he or she thinks before the experience but who has an idea about it afterward, and is able to explain that idea to someone else. Going in with an open mind is as difficult as coming out with a formed opinion; neither is as difficult as expressing the whole experience in clear and compelling language. People who can do this successfully, over and over, occasion after occasion, are as rare as people who can create poems and paintings worth explaining in the first place, and there tend not to be a lot of them around at any given time." - Louis Menand.

3. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our microprocessors, but in ourselves." Or something like that. Or, as Shakespeare would more likely have put it, pithily if less eloquently and originally, had he emerged in the 1990s instead of the 1590s, and therefore missed his best chance of being imbued with an instinct for graceful language: "Garbage in, garbage out."

4. "It's in the way that you use it." - Eric Clapton.

5. What I'll remember most about this review is that the writer had Siegel becoming "exorcized" when the correct word, meaning more or less the opposite in this context, was "exercized." Another example of speed and convenience elbowing aside quality and standards (and the Internet makes it pretty speedy and convenient for writers and editors to check the dictionary, so allowing such mistakes into print means they must be awfully rushed, awfully understaffed, awfully green, awfully unconcerned about words -- voters for Hillary, maybe? -- or awfully all of the above). In any case, the reviewer and the NY Sun should be at least slightly mortified, but probably merely think I'm a pedant for caring about language and making a fuss.

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