Big Johnson and the Legendary But

A Brief Bio of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

Dr. Samuel Johnson, by Joshua Reynolds (Wikipedia)

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the esteemed writer, critic, and lexicographer of the 1800s would hate me. Well, I like to think that we would get along pretty well, but he would certainly despise my writing. I'm partial to subtle puns, rhymes and alliterations, and circumlocution. Johnson didn't care for puns very much at all, and famously criticised writers who used a slew of words when one would do. He's one of the few, and first, to lay criticism on Shakespeare. He's famous for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), in which he's compiled definitions of words based on how they were used previously and contemporarily. His famous collection of essays and opinions features what literati today refer to as The Johnson "But" or "Yet." Dr. Johnson frequently used these conjunctions to spin his arguments, giving an objective, two-sided view of the topic at hand. An excellent example, and darned-good read in general, is his collection of essays, The Rambler, which was published every Tuesday and Sunday from 1750 - 1752. Totally 208 short papers, the series covers, criticises, then defends everything from whores to procrastination. Check out, too, The Adventurer, a sister series based off Dr. Johnson's travels through Britain with Scottish author and contemporary, James Boswell. Like a good Englishmen, he drank good liquor. His greatest fear was poverty and, as he approached it, death. Apposite to his future, he was born above his father's bookstore in Lichfield, England. Today is his birthday.

A Different Take on Pictures

What Writers and Memories Have In Common with Canon 

(or any other camera, for that matter)

There's a stanza in one of my favourite poems ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), but not at all my favourite stanza, which reads:

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.

It always reminds me of a very characteristic old man I saw leaning out the window of a building above a very crowded Parisian street, watching, with ostensible amusement, all the pedestrians hurrying their way across the street in the narrow flow of the crosswalk freshet.

I like to think this tanned, leather-skinned man not only enjoyed all us pedestrians hastily going this or that way, but that this gentleman watched every day the hoards migrate.

I had wanted to take a picture of this old, smiling man, his big eyes wide and amused, his white undershirt wrinkled like his skin. But, between his noticing me glancing and me not desiring to upset the quick pace of foot traffic, I restrained.

When I went back to that crosswalk and peered, camera ready, at the window, he was gone.

It doesn't weigh me down, but I've never forgiven myself for not being "socially unacceptable" in raising my lens, in taking a photo a perfect stranger, in deviating from the status quo of respected privacy, in being different. Andy Warhol, the famous American pop artist, perhaps said it best: "You have to do stuff that average people don't understand, because those are the only good things."