Methodized

Boswell's teenage commonplace book. (Via Jim C.)

The class

I am teaching this semester is one of the strangest, easiest and most purely pleasurable teaching experiences I have ever had! Today we were reading the amazing pair of narratives by Johnson and Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

Johnson's narrative is studded with amazing formulations (“If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland”), but this observation of Johnson's about aphorism - mediated through Boswell - also especially caught my eye:

Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.

Table talk for 23 October 2008

From Karl Miller's TLS piece on Rodge Glass's biography of Alasdair Gray:

1. "Gray is shown peeing into the sink in mid-dictation. A close woman friend is cited: 'He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met – I just couldn’t take the drinking.'"

2. "He grew up in the Riddrie district of the city, was a 'dreamy' pupil of the sort that used to be detected in the Scottish schools of the period, went to Glasgow Art School, and became a reluctant teacher. He had begun, and was to continue, to suffer from eczema and asthma. Success, when it arrived, could be arduous too. 'I thought to myself – I am now a famous and established man! I must now be able to make some kind of living . . . . I soon realised this was going to be more difficult than expected, and I thought, Oh fuck!' The expletive is overused now in print: here, it is exquisite."

3. "'Being bad at sex' was 'one of his favourite subjects.'"

Gray brainspill

Alasdair Gray on the perils of being Boswellized.

Also at the Guardian, Ian Sansom reviews Rodge Glass's biography of Gray:

"When Alasdair has been concentrating on work," remarks Glass, "and is given a good opportunity to speak about it, listening to him is like opening up his brain and watching the contents spill gloriously on the table." The book includes plenty of glorious Gray brainspill in the form of reported conversation, letters and miscellaneous remarks. "I've found your life to be a lot of fun," says Glass. "The point is ..." replies Gray, "IT DIDN'T SEEM LIKE MUCH FUN AT THE TIME!"

"Long periods of procrastination followed by bursts of superhuman activity"

At the Guardian, Christopher Taylor on Peter Martin's new biography of Samuel Johnson. Nice opening - this I did not know:

One of the more expensive items in Samuel Beckett's working library was an 18th-century edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. He probably bought it in Dublin in the 1930s, when he made extensive notes on Johnson for a play that he was planning to write about the great man. The Johnson that Beckett was interested in wasn't "Boswell's wit and wisdom machine", as he put it, but a sufferer from melancholia, idleness, guilt and fears of madness and annihilation. Beckett pictured his hero as an exhausted old man, "terrified of dying, terrified of deadness", and copied out quotations from the medical diary in which Johnson charted his own decline. The play, Human Wishes, which included a role for Johnson's cat Hodge ("sleeping - if possible"), was eventually abandoned, but the image of the dying writer stayed with Beckett. Years later, pressed for comment on his debts to Swift and Sterne, he told his first biographer that "it's Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me".