"And yet, here I am. Fifty years old, irredeemably a bookseller, and more happy than if I’d…if I’d what? Well, than if I’d just about anything, I suppose. I’ll put it this way – if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, the only thing that would change would be the quality of my inventory. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Even in those moments of blankest regret, when all the bills come due at once and my stock looks like it could have been chosen at random by a blind, crack-addicted three-year-old; when the office hasn’t been cleaned in a month and the coffee jitters set in because I forgot to eat my breakfast which is still sitting cold on the kitchen counter six hours later; when the phone rings and it’s some flea-market guy asking to “pick my brain” about a “real old book” he found buried in cowshit in his granddaddy’s barn; even when I get home after a house buy and realize that every book I just overpaid for smells irretrievably of cat piss…even then, I can only imagine one way forward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books."

"Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears."

'…But Arum doesn’t place the blame only on the grads. Based on his research with Josipa Roksa, he concludes that American institutions of higher education are not rigorous enough and have “abandoned responsibility for shaping and developing the attitudes and dispositions necessary for adult success.”

Just what are those attitudes and abilities? Character traits are seen as the most important factors, according the Pew study we’ve reported on this week. For example, 6 of 10 Americans say “a good work ethic” is extremely important. Teamwork and getting along with others is also important, cited by 57%. A college education itself was cited by fewer than half (42%) as a determinant of success.'

"With all these interests, how do you keep from just being a dilettante?
It’s not about being a generalist. I like to go deep in a lot of things, but when I do, I like to go deep enough to contribute. If I like scuba, I become an instructor. If I like music, I become a disc jockey. If I like movies, I want to work on a movie set. I don’t become a world class academic in that field, but I get good enough to understand the nuances. And then, because I have experience in so many fields, it gives me a pattern that other people don’t have. For me, being unique and having friends who are unique is a really important thing."

"You’ll be told it’s because it makes communicating your vision easier, and that’s true.  But there are two more important reasons.  First, if you know how to be a sound man, you know how to make the sound man’s job easier. This has the potential to make you very popular with sound men (or editors, or cinematographers, etc), something you’ll need when your only currency is good will.  Second, when you begin producing your own work, this renaissance approach to filmmaking will allow you to start before anyone else signs on.  Knowing you can finish in a pinch, if you have to, will lend you a confident relentlessness that makes others want to get involved."

"The specialist sacrifices resilience during times of change for earning potential in the short run. It also bears pointing out that the short run benefits to specialization are only significant when selection pressures amplify the specialist’s competitive advantage. Otherwise, being 5% better than second best only provides 5% more benefits.

If this point isn’t immediately obvious, consider an analogy to the strict zero-sum competition in sports contests. In an Olympic race, being 1% faster than your competitors could easily be the difference between first and last.  Outside of that zero-sum competitive environment, the practical value of being 1% faster than the next guy is negligible."

'While “self-styled” seems mostly a put-down, it is a notably weak one. The user of this phrase notes that someone claims something, but lacks an official credential, or strong consensus, supporting this claim. But we the reader can also note that this speaker offers no stronger criticism, and is not willing to directly contradict the offending claim. After all, instead of calling someone a “self-styled visionary,” you might say “he calls himself a visionary, but he’s not; he hasn’t has a vision in years.”'

"In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions…"

"Parsons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The program is based in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, which encompasses innovative programs that apply design thinking to study the intersection of cities, services and ecosystems."

"That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions."

"One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)"

"Fluency, in the fluency game paradigm, means you don’t learn, you teach; either you teach yourself, or you teach others. In doing so, you achieve a major milestone: all your skills and knowledge “come alive”, because they can readily jump from you into others. As living skills, they can spread throughout the people in your family, community, and work life. And your fluency in one skill signifies a fluency in self-teaching. With any new skill, you know just where to start, and where to go after that."

'"What is it that identifies humans? The use of tools. For that reason, perhaps engineering is the most human of studies. ... Maybe we should teach engineering as a liberal art, and maybe a piece of every literate person's experience should be to create a useful artifact that improves life, including something as important as communication."'

"If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius."

"Kelvin did not believe that heavier-than-air flying machines were possible and he regarded X-rays as a hoax. Kelvin’s ingenuity was manifested even in cases where his overall predictions were wrong. He gave a lecture on the state of physics at the turn of the twentieth century, and - not unlike Hilbert’s famous lectures in mathematics - claimed that physics was nearly complete and all problems would soon be settled. He mentioned, however, “two clouds on the horizon,” the unexpected behavior of ether in the Michelson-Morley experiment and the problem of the spectrum of the black body radiation. His genius as a physicist was manifested by the fact that of all the scores of open problems in physics present at the time (as there always are), he pinpointed the two problems that subsequently led to revolutions: the ether problem led to relativity, and black body radiation to quantum theory."

"What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important."

"The best way to have one good idea is to have a thousand ideas."

When it comes to graceful expertise, I am reminded of the intentional stance Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson take in their work.

"Reality," said Willem de Kooning, "is a slipping glimpse"

"There is definitely a major shift underway and at its core is a growing recognition of the enormous value that a whole..."

And also: will bitch-slap next person to use phrase "an evolution" as a noun, in any context. Period.

I wish Google bothered to punctuate. We're scanning another copy, and will send it through Distributed Proofreaders soon, but in the meantime read the page scans from Google if you like....