Posts Tagged ‘James Boswell’
“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead”*…
Mark Frauenfelder surfaces a 1978 review from the marvelous Clive James…
In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.”…
… Here’s an excerpt from the biography:
The plenum once again proved convincingly the CPSU’s monolithic unity, its stand on Leninist principles, and its political maturity. It demonstrated the fidelity of the Party and its Central Committee to Marxism-Leninism and expressed the unswerving determination of Communists to adhere to and develop steadfastly the Leninist standards of Party life and the principles of Party leadership, notably that of collective leadership, and boldly and resolutely to set aside every impediment to the creative work of Party and people...
“A review of the most boring book in the world,” from @boingboing.net.
And for the masochists among us: the full text of the biography.
* Clive James, from the review
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As we tackle tedium, we might spare a thought for a spiritual forebearer of James: Samuel Johnson; he was born on this date in 1709. A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, Johnson’s best-known work was surely A Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1755, after nine years work– and which served as the standard for 150 years (until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary [see the almanac entry in the “Clive James” link above]). That said, Dr. Johnson, as he was known, is probably best remembered as the subject of what Walter Jackson Bate called “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
But Johnson was, in his time, also a famous aphorist– the very opposite of a man he described to Boswell in 1784: “He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others”– a role he often played as an influential critic…
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Dr. Johnson
“I cannot well repeat how there I entered”*…
A collection– and consideration– of the illustrations inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy…
A man wakes deep in the woods, halfway through life. Far from home, unpermitted to return, his heart pierced by grief. He has strayed from the path. It’s a dark night of the soul, his crisis so great that death becomes a tempting end. And then, as wild beasts advance upon this easy prey, his prayers are answered. A guide appears, promising to show him the way toward paradise…
[This month] marks the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the Florentine poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, arguably our most ambitious Western epic. Eschewing Latin, the medieval currency of literature and scholarship, Dante wrote in his vernacular tongue, establishing the foundations for a standardized Italian language, and, by doing so, may have laid cultural groundwork for the unification of Italy.
The poet’s impact on literature cannot be overstated. “Dante’s influence was massive”, writes Erich Auerbach, “he singlehandedly established the expressive possibilities and the landscape of all poetry to come, and he did so virtually out of thin air”. And just as the classical Virgil served as Dante’s guide through the Inferno, Dante became a kind of Virgil for later writers. Chaucer cribbed his rhythm and images, while Milton’s Paradise Lost may have been actually lost, were it not for Dante as a shepherd. The Divina Commedia is a touchstone for works as diverse as fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan verse; Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and Mary Shelley’s Italian Rambles (1844), which finds the poet at every turn:
There is scarcely a spot in Tuscany, and those parts of the North of Italy, which he visited, that Dante has not described in poetry that brings the very spot before your eyes, adorned with graces missed by the prosaic eye, and which are exact and in perfect harmony with the scene.
If Dante’s poetry summons landscapes before its reader’s eyes, artists have tried, for the last seven hundred years, to achieve another kind of evocation: rendering the Commedia in precise images, evocative patterns, and dazzling color. By Jean-Pierre Barricelli’s estimate, a complete catalogue of Commedia-inspired artworks would exceed 1,100 names. The earliest dated image comes from Florence in 1337, beginning the tradition soon after the poet’s death in 1321. Before long, there were scores of other illustrations…
A thoughtful consideration and a glorious collection: “700 Years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Art,” from @PublicDomainRev.
* Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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As we visualize, we might send well-worded birthday greetings to Samuel Johnson; he was born on this date in 1709. A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, Johnson’s best-known work was surely A Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1755, after nine years work– and which served as the standard for 150 years (until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary). But Dr. Johnson, as he was known, is probably best remembered as the subject of what Walter Jackson Bate noted is “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. A famous aphorist, Johnson was the very opposite of a man he described to Boswell in 1784: “He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.”
Apropos Dante, Johnson observed “if what happens does not make us richer, we must welcome it if it makes us wiser.”
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure”*…
When a man is tired of memes, he is tired of life.
Samuel Johnson’s original observation pertained to his hometown of London, the streets of which he knew better than most. As a man of letters and author of a best-selling dictionary, he wrote volumes [see here]. But nowadays, in the words of one English professor, “Samuel Johnson is one of those figures whom everyone quotes and no one reads.” (The use of “whom” is how you know an English professor wrote that.)
That’s perhaps as it should be: As the subject of the first modern biography [see here], Johnson (1709-84) was known as the best social talker who ever lived. And 228 years after his death, referencing Johnson’s portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds became a universally recognized expression of this profane sentiment:
Resurrecting history’s most quotable man: “The memeification of Dr. Johnson“
For more on the remarkable Dr. J., see “A Word A Day, the Doctor’s Way.”
* Samuel Johnson
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As we share the love with Shakespeare, we might recall that it was on this date in 2000 that Charles M. Schulz published the last daily Peanuts strip. (The final Sunday panel ran on on February 13 of that year.)
“Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger”*…
An anonymous 17th-century allegorical painting inscribed Nosce te Ipsum (Know thyself)
We all know the most famous bit of ancient advice inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know thyself. It’s a powerful and daunting recommendation. If you take it seriously, you will begin to push through all of the misconceptions you have, not only about yourself but about human beings generally. You will begin to think deeply about who you really are and who you ought to be. You might start making life-altering decisions, decisions that (if you are right) bring you into harmony with your nature and your circumstances, or (if you are wrong) turn your life into a big mistake. There should be little wonder that this one command is the highest command of all philosophy: follow it like a religious law, and – one way or another – you will be a great philosopher.
But this powerful command is in fact just one of some 147 apophthegmata (pithy words of wisdom) inscribed upon a stone monument at Delphi. It’s not clear where these lesser-known maxims came from. The ancient compiler Stobaeus attributed them to the Seven Sages – wise men of the sixth century BCE, such as Solon and Thales – but maybe they were generated in the same hazy way that all instances of folk wisdom (sticks and stones, stitch in time, etc) are generated, and then set in stone for the benefit of later seekers of wisdom – such as us.
Some of these maxims are, for us, complete nonstarters…
Appraise the advise at “More than ‘know thyself’: on all the other Delphic maxims.”
* variously attributed to Mark Twain, Abbie Hoffman, and Aardvark Magazine
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As we wonder about wisdom, we might send well-worded birthday greetings to Samuel Johnson; he was born on this date in 1709. A poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer, Johnson’s best-known work was surely A Dictionary of the English Language, which he published in 1755, after nine years work– and which served as the standard for 150 years (until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary). But Dr. Johnson, as he was known, is probably best remembered as the subject of what Walter Jackson Bate noted is “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. A famous aphorist, Johnson was the very opposite of a man he described to Boswell in 1784: “He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.”
Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Dr. Johnson
“A word after a word after a word is power”*…
Sumerian cuneiform tablet
There is evidence dating back to Neolithic times in various parts of the world of people using pictograms—that is, drawing little pictures of objects to represent those objects. They might be scratched in stone, incised into pottery, or carved into bone or shell. Examples have been found in China (at Jiahu in Henan province), in southern Europe (at Vinča in Serbia), in the Indian subcontinent (at Harappa in Pakistan), in Egypt (at Girzeh), in Mesopotamia, and in Central America (near Veracruz in Mexico). The Chinese symbols, dating back to around 6600 BC, are currently believed to be the oldest discovered.
However, most scholars do not class these symbols as “writing.” They do not appear to be capable of communicating complex or abstract ideas. They are pictures, or at most signs—perhaps used for identification, claiming ownership, or as memory aids.
The general consensus in academic circles is that the earliest “true” writing system emerged in Sumeria (modern-day southern Iraq) around 3100 BC, and was fully developed with a substantial body of written texts and literature by around 2600 BC…
More at “Hieroglyphs aren’t words—so which civilization invented the idea of writing?“
* Margaret Atwood
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As we ponder prose, we might recall that this is National Biographers Day– celebrated on this date each year to commemorate the anniversary of the first meeting, in 1763, of Dr. Samuel Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell. Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson is widely claimed to be the greatest biography ever written.
Boswell (center left) meets Johnson (center right, on chair)
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