pro’mptuary. A storehouse; a repository; a magazine.

- Johnson’s Dictionary : A Modern Selection by Samuel Johnson (1755), ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963)

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

Writing about your travels can be a difficult task.  Not only do you have to attempt to portray to the reader what the location was like, but also you have to prove to them that your account is trustworthy.  One way to analyze these traits in an author is to look at their use of ethos, logos, and pathos. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited Scotland together in 1773 and wrote very different accounts of what the experience was like. While Boswell’s account of the journey reads like a diary, Johnson writes with a sense of national pride and intellect.  Because of the personal journal style that Boswell uses, his account ends up feeling entirely like pathos and is not particularly effective.  However, Johnson uses pathos and logos very effectively, while his writing on the trip as a whole is an excellent use of ethos.

Samuel Johnson has a unique way of using pathos effectively while still coming across to the reader as an intellectual and not a daydreamer. While in Scotland, Johnson begins to ponder the desire for change among the Scottish. By offering his brief opinion at the end, Johnson is able to appeal to the reader’s emotions. Johnson writes, “Since they have known that their condition was capable of improvement, their progress in useful knowledge has been rapid and uniform. What remains to be done they will quickly do, and then wonder, like me, why that which was so necessary and so easy was so long delayed.” (Johnson, 151) The Scottish have made some advancements in education, and Johnson believes that the more they search for knowledge, the more they will wonder why they hadn’t searched earlier, just like he has. Johnson wants the Scottish to be educated and thankful, and this desire comes through when he states that he wonders why they did not seek out knowledge sooner. Education is of utmost importance to Johnson, and seeing people aspire to reach it helps him feel worthwhile. Johnson did not have to describe the education level of everyone in Scotland to reach the reader’s emotions, only throw in his opinion.

Most people would consider the use of logos strictly as a way to include facts, yet Johnson uses logos for a number of different reasons. While visiting a hut, Johnson begins to describe to the reader the details of its construction and location. By describing these, the reader can imagine exactly what the hut looks like, as opposed to begrudgingly reading a long description. “A hut is constructed with loose stones, ranged for the most part with some tendency to circularity. It must be placed where the wind cannot act upon it with violence, because it has no cement; and where the water will run easily away, because it has no floor but the naked ground.” (Johnson, 152) The hut is rather scantily furnished and constructed quite simply, for the stones are not plastered together and there is no floor.  However, the location must be quite reasonable, or else the hut would be destroyed. This description of the hut works better than Johnson describing the make-up of the entire building because we get a sense of what the hut is like with only a few brief descriptions. Also, no emotional descriptions are given, which helps the reader imagine the hut simply as a setting before the emotional details are added, such as who lives there and what the scenery is like. By using logos in his description of the hut, Johnson portrayed vast amounts of information in only a couple of sentences and avoided boring the reader.

Authors can build up ethos in many ways, including using the piece of writing as a whole to their advantage. For the most part this is the technique that Johnson employs. However, there are places in his writing where Johnson will use previous knowledge of his to build credit to his name. Johnson compares Cromwell’s take-over of Scotland to the tactics of the Roman Empire, giving an opinion that good things can come from awful sources. By including this piece of historical information, Johnson is able to increase the reader’s sense of his intellect without bogging down the writing. “Yet was the Romans did to other nations, was in a great degree done by Cromwell to the Scots; he civilized them by conquests, and introduced by useful violence the arts of peace. I was told at Aberdeen that the people learned from Cromwell’s soldiers to make shoes and to plant kail.” (Johnson, 150) Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland eventually became peaceful and even gave the Scots information they did not previously have that improved their daily lives. By giving this comparison, not only does Johnson give the reader a better sense of what the situation was in Scotland at the time, but the reader is impressed by his understanding of history. Even though the information presented is not directly about the journey Johnson took personally, he was able to use this passage to build trust with the reader that he was a reliable source for information. Anyone who can present insightful information at a moment’s notice is going to appear reliable to those around him, and Johnson uses this to his advantage quite effectively.

Boswell is quite a bit younger than Johnson, which may be a partial explanation for why his writing comes off as being an excerpt from his personal journal. Although he does give detailed descriptions, the writing does not give the reader a sense of the entire situation. While travelling, Boswell and Johnson find themselves in the hut of an older woman. “Mr. Johnson asked me where she slept. I asked one of the guides, who asked her in Erse. She spoke with a kind of high tone. He told us she was afraid we wanted to go to bed to her. This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a like being was truly ludicrous. Mr. Johnson and I afterwards made merry upon it.” (Boswell, 154) Johnson became curious about where the woman slept, and when asked she became afraid that Johnson and Boswell wanted to take advantage of her.  Both men considering her quite ugly, they laughed due to the sheer ridiculousness of the idea.  Although this gives us a great description of one moment, this information does not help the reader understand the journey through Scotland, or what Scotland itself is like. Anecdotal scenes like this can be acceptable when interspersed between descriptions relevant to the whole journey, but do not add merit to the writing when left alone. Overall, a personal journal account of a journey is not always the best description of the entire situation, and this is Boswell’s downfall.

Trying to portray every aspect of an expedition can be incredibly difficult. If a writer is not careful in how they present their work, holes will be left in the writing and the reader will miss important information. By presenting situations using ethos, logos, and pathos, Samuel Johnson was able to portray his experiences in Scotland in 1773 to the reader effectively.  However, due to the diary format used by Boswell, the reader was left asking questions about what the experience was like as a whole and did not give the reader a sense of his credibility. Although ethos, logos, and pathos may seem to be three simple words, Johnson’s use of all three in his account pushed him above his companion, Boswell. In the case of Samuel Johnson, “three” was company.

Works’ Cited

Johnson, Samuel. “A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.”  Travel Writing 1700-1830. Ed. Elizabeth A Bohls, Ian Duncan. New York: Oxford Press, 2005. 149-163. Print.

Boswell, James. “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” Travel Writing 1700-1830. Ed. Elizabeth A Bohls, Ian Duncan. New York: Oxford Press, 2005. 149-163. Print.

Purdue OWL. “MLA Formatting and Style Guide.” The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 10 October 2009. Web. 14 Oct. 2009.

Three’s Company. ABC. WABC, Burbank. 1977-1984. Television.

Three’s a Crowd. ABC. WABC, Burbank. 1984-1985. Television.

One of the people I met at the Oxford tercentennial for Johnson was Henrik Bering, a thoroughly excellent drinking partner and dinner companion in addition to being an expert in, among other things, urban warfare. Not your ordinary conference attendee! He recently wrote up the conference for the Weekly Standard, and it’s a thoroughly fun piece:

While Johnsonians may differ on matters of emphasis regarding their man, certain things bind them together: A deep distaste for the Romantics and everything they represent, which became plain during a visit to one of the other colleges Johnson had strong connections to, University College: When passing Edward Onslow Ford’s exceedingly decadent fin de siècle sculpture that shows the drowned
poet Shelley artfully arranged on a slab of Cremona marble, one delegate was heard scornfully muttering about Shelley’s “remarkably flaccid member.” Perhaps a bit uncharitable, given the fact that the man had just drowned, but indicative of the robust spirit governing the proceedings.

Not all the time was spent listening to papers. A series of events were planned along with the seminars: A Mozart string concerto was performed in Johnson’s honor in the Pembroke college chapel, somewhat ironic when considering Johnson’s profound lack of interest in music. Once when inattentive during a concert, a friend pointed out the technical difficulty involved. Johnson replied: “Difficult, do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.”

A visit to the college wine cellars was also a must, considering the fact that Johnson was capable of downing great amounts of claret, when not confining himself to lemonade: “No sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy.” When some delegates showed up the next morning somewhat worse for wear, others were quick to recall Johnson’s rebuke to Boswell: “Sir, you are without any skills in inebriation.”

One thing is certain, these people don’t frighten easily. When the fire alarm went off three times during the gala dinner in the great hall of Pembroke, nobody paid it the slightest attention.

I didn’t even hear the fire alarm, but then again, that gala dinner was pretty liberal in its use of the Pembroke cellars. No one can accuse Johnsonians of being without skills in inebriation.

I have not read this novel by Samuel Johnson, but it looks interesting.  I was pointed to it by the BBC’s recent Open Book programming on neglected classics.  Apparently it is about the quest for happiness and whether or not happiness can be attained in the face of much human suffering in this created cosmos.  The protagonist is Rasselas, a young prince, who goes in search of the happy life.

For a short summary of the book:

http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/johnson/rasselas1.html

Samuel Johnson on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

And if you’re cheap like me then you can read the book here (it’s legal, don’t worry):

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/652

“Let’s say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare’s plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?” asks Sheldon Flender of his fellow bohemians in “Bullets Over Broadway.” It’s a terrifying dilemma, although its terror assumes that people wouldn’t remember one of the most memorized writers there has ever been. A Shakespeare-less universe is unimaginable. On the most basic level, what would people say in those moments when we say “To Be or Not To Be”? What would people do when they want to crack a joke near a skull? What would “Brave New World” be called?

In fact, I suspect we’d soon get over it. True, there is a fairly startling drop in quality between the 100th best work of literature and the 101st (a distance equivalent to the drop from Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” to his not-bad but not-great “Adventures of Philip“). But so much of the canon’s greatness comes from the time we spend studying it and admiring it. Not all of it, but definitely some of it. If Shakespeare were to disappear, we’d still have Milton. So we wouldn’t have Brave New World, but we’d still have “Look Homeward, Angel” as a title. And we’d also still have Marlowe and Jonson, who’s most likely be the greatest beneficiary of a vanished Shakespeare. His plays take time to like, time that we now dedicate to the tail end of Shakespeare’s canon.

And I think that applies to periods of 100 years in one country as much as it does to all the time in the world. You can knock the top few works out — the essentials — and still be left with new essentials — a rich and important corpus that rewards study and delivers beauty at roughly the same degree. Samuel Jonhson’s Lives of the Poets, to me, presents the best test case for my little theory, as well as sort of confirming it. The most disturbing part of that work is how much time he dedicates to poets that no one cares about any more. According to my theory, that’s because Johnson only had about 200 years of what you might call modern poetry to discuss — a mere five generations of poets. As more poets emerged to grab our attention, the others got pushed aside.

It could well be, of course, that those poets deserved to get lost. The rhyming pentameters of the eighteenth century gave poetic license to a lot of lazy, overblown rhetoric. But still, it’ll be good to see what gems Johnson has in store, as well as to dig out some Johnsonisms. (I will post any good Johnsonisms on twitter in the meantime.) This is British literature, 1600-1800 without Milton, Shakespeare, Marvell,  Swift, Pope, Gay or Gray. Let’s see how it looks.

FIRST UP: CONGREVE!

How sweet was it that Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured side-by-side reviews of a biography of the great critic-lexicographer-biographer Samuel Johnson and an autobiography of wrestler-celebrity-nobody Hulk Hogan?

So it was that Johnson’s “Falstaffian vitalism” paralleled Hogan’s “herculean body-slamming of André the Giant at Wrestlemania III.”

And Johnson’s “spiritual complexity and intellectual splendor” rivaled Hogan’s “raspy, bombastic voice and finger-pointing, chest-beating flair.”

And finally, this conclusion: “Johnson’s personality was worthy of Shakespearean representation,” while “[Hogan's] compulsive confessing feels more like an effort to pre-empt the Us Weeklys and TMZs of the world.”

Johnson-Hogan Texas Death Match coming soon to a pay-per-view venue near you.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson liked books to be lived-in. He scribbled notes in them and – an avid tea-drinker – left ring stains from tea-cups on their covers. Reading thousands of literary works, he noted letters of the alphabet next to words that he could include in his dictionary.

Apparently, this deterred people from lending books to him but it’s an attitude I like: a book containing scribbles that’s damaged or well worn gives the impression of being well loved and enjoyed, whereas a pristinely kept book gives the impression of being unopened, not yet enjoyed.



Johnson’s house at 17 Gough Square (the only one of his 17 London homes that remains today) is full of trivia like this. Famous for creating the first comprehensive English dictionary in 1755, two of Johnson’s 1st edition dictionaries (from the original print run of 2000 copies) can be seen here. It’s the only house on the square that survived the Blitz bombings in 1940-41 (World War II) thanks mostly to the firemen in residence at that time. And, for children who visit, there are Georgian costumes to dress up in (I was tempted but sadly too big).

Nearby is the intriguing Ye Old Cheshire Cheese pub where Johnson reputedly drank. Rebuilt in 1667 – a year after the Great Fire of London – it’s a maze of bars (some cosy, some spacious) serving a good range of drinks and food.

More:
~ Dr Johnson’s house website
~ Photos of Gough Square
~ Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
–Samuel Johnson

A truly powerful force in the universe is that of optimism. Optimism lies at the root of our mental and physical health. Feelings of hope can stimulate the body’s immune system and inspire recovery from a critical illness.

Optimism expresses itself in the persistence and resilience of living things. A child learning to walk repeatedly falls down and picks himself up until he stands erect. A decade after the eruption of Mount St. Helens destroyed the local ecology, life had reestablished itself on this volcano with amazing abundance and rapidity. And despite its hostile environment, a sole dandelion miraculously pushed itself up through a crack in the concrete. That dandelion was optimistic that it could and would survive.

In the long run, the forces of love and life always triumph over those of fear and death. No matter how challenging the obstacles or difficult the tests, there is always cause for optimism.
–Douglas Bloch

X is for Xiguna
2.5″ x 3.5″ Watercolor & Ink

An edible fruit that looks similar to a watermelon, only shorter in size. Chinese

I was happy to find a food that started with X, for my alphabet series.

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 -December 1784), often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and political conservative, and has been described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”. He is also the subject of “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

Douglas Bloch, M.A., is an author, teacher and counselor who writes and speaks on the topics of psychology, healing and spirituality. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from New York University and an M.A. in Counseling from the University of Oregon. He is the author of ten books, including the inspirational self-help trilogy Words That Heal: Affirmations and Meditations for Daily Living; Listening to Your Inner Voice; and I Am With You Always, as well as the parenting book, Positive Self-talk for Children.

His newest work, When Going Through Hell…Don’t Stop! A Survivor’s Guide to Overcoming anxiety and Clinical Depression has just been published.A former radio talk show host and popular public speaker, Douglas has given hundreds of lectures and workshops to businesses, schools, church groups, recovery centers and national psychology conferences. He has also appeared on radio and television shows across the country.Douglas makes his home in Portland, Oregon with his partner Joan and his two cats and muses, Gabriel and Athena.

I didn’t attend this one, but there’s a wonderful article on it in the Harvard Gazette:

Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” was first published in 1755 as his attempt to both rein in and celebrate the galloping vigor of English. For 150 years, it was considered the pre-eminent compilation of its kind.

But Johnson — born 300 years ago this coming Sept. 18 — was more than its author. He was England’s most famous man of letters, rising from humble origins as the son of a provincial bookseller to become an accomplished poet, literary critic, playwright, essayist, and (not least) conversationalist.

Johnson — in all his fullness, contradiction, erudition, and energy — was remembered, reviewed, and revered late last month (Aug. 27-29) in a Harvard literary celebration.

The three-day event, “Johnson at 300: A Houghton Library Symposium,” drew more than a hundred Johnsonians from all over the world….

The symposium was the largest scholarly celebration of Johnson this year in the United States, said organizer Thomas Horrocks, Houghton’s associate librarian for collections. He called the author “this good and great man.”

Accompanying the article is this wonderful picture of Greg Clingham, professor and director of the university press at Bucknell, and a scholar whose work I have been admiring since I was a graduate student whose dissertation was barely a blip in his brain:

A glimpse of pastoral life, a glimpse of any particular quantity – in Crabbe’s artistic terms, a glimpse of any “tale” – encourages a normally functioning, supposedly “properly functioning” mind to build up notions about the essential nature of things, to come away with the belief that something essential has been learned from experience. But in Crabbe’s world, if you’ve seen one tulip, you’ve only seen one tulip. One tale encourages formulation of one set of notions; another tale, another set. Were Crabbe to have written an imitation of Rasselas in accordance with his own late vision, he would have given us only Rasselas experiencing his negative glimpse of pastoral life but also a second hero experiencing an antithetical, positive glimpse of pastoral life; and he would then have allowed both to continue on their separate journeys, each confidently believing he understood Patoral-ness. Each man lives his own, single tale in life; thus he generates his own “essences” and dreams he has found or is now finding stability – until time’s whirligig snaps his head back. In Crabbe, then, we learn to fear not the loss of reason but the reasoning process itself, because it leads a Rasselas (and, behind him, a Johnson) to believe he can understand the Tulip-ness of things. Crabbe’s rewriting of Johnson would, therefore, alter the Johnsonian postulate, substituting: “Of all the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the belief we can reason our way out of some uncertainties.”

L.J. Swingle, ‘Late Crabbe in Relation to the Augustans and Romantics: The Temporal Labyrinth of his tales in Verse, 1812’, in ELH, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), p.591.

“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with beauty by calling imagination to the help of reason.”

416

“There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.” – Samuel Johnson

I HAVE MADE A DISCOVERYYYYYY!

Reading Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, one will come across the term ‘conies’. It’s in chapter XIII, when the protaganist, Rasselas, is still looking for methods to escape his homeland, the HAPPY VALLEY. Doesn’t sound like the kind of place you’d want to escape, right? Well, he is not as happy as everyone else (shock horror, no one understands this melancholy thing) but is convinced by one of the wise elders that if he saw the suffering that took place elsewhere in the world, THEN he’d realise how happy he should be. So, he’s trying to escape. Now in come the conies:

‘As they were walking on the side of the mountain, they observed that the conies, which the rain had driven from their burrows, had taken shelter among the bushes, and formed holes behind them…’

Right. This is clearly an animal. Evidence points towards rabbit. Pretty much correct…

Coney is, apparently, an English word for a rabbit. Surprisingly it rhymes with bunny, so sounds more like kunny, which I don’t think I like very much.

It is also (and here’s the real revelation) another term for a PIKA. HERE IS A PIKA.

Basically pika are the cutest of the cute and I want one.

Pikat is ‘to squeak’ in Russian, so that could well be its etymological root.

I want to be a lexicographer.

This week, Birmingham City University in conjunction with Birmingham Book Festival celebrated the tercentenary of the life of Samuel Johnson with an event entitled Now and in Time. Johnson, born in Lichfield in 1709, wrote extensively on a huge range of subjects, which were well-reflected by Professor Philip Smallwood’s discussions of Johnson, and in the readings from Johnson’s works. It is difficult not to be delighted by Johnson’s aphorisms, such as “A man of genius has been seldom ruined, but by himself” – there are plenty more here - you’ll be surprised how many are familiar to you, such as that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience”. This event, though, demonstrated how much more there is to Johnson than his pithy soundbites; Professor Smallwood highlighted the modern resonance of “Late Transactions Concerning Falkland’s Islands”, in which Johnson asks: “what continuance of happiness can be expected, when the whole system of European empire can be in danger of a new concussion, by a contention for a few spots of earth, which, in the deserts of the ocean, had almost escaped human notice, and which, if they had not happened to make a seamark, had, perhaps, never had a name!”

Other pieces, such as “The Life of Richard Savage”, show Johnson as shrewd observer of character, painting such a picture of his friend that one cannot fail to feel one knows the man; “To Mrs Thrale, On Completing her Thirty-Fifth Year” is both touching and (mostly) hilarious – as well as written extempore, which shows the genius as well as the humanity of Johnson:

  Oft in danger, yet alive,
  We are come to thirty-five;
  Long may better years arrive,
  Better years than thirty-five.
  Could philosophers contrive
  Life to stop at thirty-five,
  Time his hours should never drive
  O’er the bounds of thirty-five.
  High to soar, and deep to dive,
  Nature gives at thirty-five;                                10
  Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
  Trifle not at thirty-five;
  For, howe’er we boast and strive,
  Life declines from thirty-five;
  He that ever hopes to thrive,
  Must begin by thirty-five;
  And all who wisely wish to wive
  Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.

For those who, like myself, spend much time commenting on other people’s artistic endeavours, Johnson has some salutory words in The Idler No. 60 – which show, perhaps, just how much he is the writer’s writer:

“Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expence. The power of invention has been conferred by Nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom Nature has made weak, and Idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a Critic.”

Some of you might have just arrived or others, who have lived all their lives in London, all are here because of a reason. I came to London to study Journalism and Psychology at City University, London.

London is defiantly a huge and vibrant city, endless in opportunities. It is a melting pot of cultures; it is the New York of Europe. When a man is tired of London he is tired of life (Samuel Johnson) a famous saying says.

Of course there is a big difference if someone just visits this city or has to live in it. In this blog I want to write how it is to live and work in London.