anghraine: a stock photo of a book with a leaf on it (book with leaf)
I’m using Samuel Johnson for my exam, and he’s such an odd character.

He was pretty conservative in some ways, but also a hardline opponent of chattel slavery; his argument against the American Revolution was that the drivers of slaves had no moral ground for talking about liberty, and he argued in “A Brief to Free a Slave” (1777) that “No man is by nature the property of another.”

I took a class in which he was only mentioned as influencing a female novelist towards making her heroine more docile at the end, which, yeah, but also, a lot of British people more radical than he was could only seem to grasp slavery as a metaphor for their own lives or extension of their own experiences. Johnson was like, nope, even accepting that a person can give up their own liberty, they can’t make the choice for their children and descendants. And he argued that most people who end up in slavery didn’t give up their liberty but were abducted and traded by merchants whose right to do this had never been examined anyway, and the whole system was morally abhorrent in law and in practice.

He also had a pretty sympathetic take on mental illness in 1759, saying “To mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither charitable nor wise. Few can attain this man’s knowledge, and few practice his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity.”
anghraine: a piece of paper covered in handwriting and a fountain pen; text: writer (writing)
Please be the last. Please, please, please. (Note from the future: it is!! Thank God.)

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anghraine: bingley from 2005 p&p; text: bingley abruptly turns and BITES through the eyes of darcy! (bingley [zombie???])
so close

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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (arceptra and giva (hogwarts))
I never imagined Pekuah would get this much screentime, but here we go. More ship fodder!

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anghraine: unmasked vader and luke between teal panels; text: tell your sister (anakin and luke [tell your sister])
Nekayah/Pekuah tbh

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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (distressing damsel)
ugh

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anghraine: leia c. anh; text: you don't have the buns to be princess leia (leia [buns])
I thought I could finish this in two posts and an hour or two, if you can believe it.

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anghraine: sherlock holmes [benedick cumberbatch]; text: i'm bored & your porn is boring (sherlock)
THE AUSTEN CONNECTION AT LAST!

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anghraine: leia peering sideways (anh) (leia [angle])
continued from this

kill me now


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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (darcys)
Escape! Continued from this.

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anghraine: leia hugging luke at the end of esb (luke and leia [hugs!])
I didn't order a side of RAGING IMPERIALISM with my fable, Johnson.

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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (anakin [grievances])
Continuation of study hall this post.

I began the last post with Austen's allusion to Samuel Johnson in Mansfield Park. In context, the reference comes from Fanny's time at Portsmouth, when she compares Portsmouth vs Mansfield to Johnson's take on marriage vs celibacy—that is, that while marriage has some pains, celibacy can have no pleasures. (Portsmouth = celibacy and Mansfield = marriage in this analogy. Analyze away!) His line comes not from his poetry, but from Rasselas, a "prose fable."

I would ... not call it a fable, though I'm not sure what I would call it. My professor talked of it as a proto-novel: it has relatively distinctive characters, episodic adventures tied into something approximating an over-arching plot (though without appearing interested in an actual dénouement—it doesn't so much conclude as stop), more or less characteristic dialogue, and a major theme. The theme, of course, is Johnson's favourite topic (and/or pet peeve): the proper way to pursue happiness.

However, the characters are very, very thinly drawn, serving more as vehicles for the discussion and reflection than anything like credible human beings. The prof says we don't really get that level of sophistication and psychological realism until Austen, though I think we do see it in drama from the Renaissance onwards. But prose, yeah, iffy, though there are still some compelling characters.

Like! FANTOMINA, GUYS. She has maybe three personality traits, but they are all amazing. It's about a woman who would be a genius superspy in another time, but in her own, wastes her talents on this douchebag that she's completely obsessed with. We've got to assume he's really good in bed, as 1) his name is Beauplaisir and 2) he shows no attractive personality traits, and the actively repellent one of discarding every woman he gets entangled with as he quickly bores of them.

Spoiler: every single one of those women is Fantomina. It's not her real name. She's a lady who keeps disguising herself as different women to catch his interest, without ever being caught. This happens over and over again because, well, her superspy talents are wasted on this asshole. She would have just kept on going, with every indication that she would have succeeded indefinitely, if she hadn't gotten pregnant. Boo. There's a pretty great scene when Fantomina is finally pressured into revealing the identity of her lover, and when Beauplaisir is like "umm I'm pretty sure I would know if I'd dishonoured a lady," Fantomina's like "welllllll as it happens I seduced him under multiple disguises and he never realized he was fucking the same woman. My bad!" And then they're like, um, it seems weird to punish this guy for being stalked by a superspy ~of lust.~

Anyway, back to the less entertaining but more thoughtful fable thing. Not a real novel—or short story/novella—but inching closer. (I still miss the richness of Renaissance drama, though. Now THOSE are characters. Sometimes. *squints at Volpone*)

RIGHT. JOHNSON. ExpandRead more... )
anghraine: b&w leia in anh, melancholy; text: shadows falling (leia [shadows])
In Mansfield Park, Austen makes a reference to "Dr Johnson's celebrated judgment."

Samuel Johnson is the man she's talking about, who I think is most lastingly remembered as The Dictionary Guy. He spent seven years compiling A Dictionary of the English Language, which was commissioned due to the general shittiness of English dictionaries up to that point. To make matters worse, while the £1,575 he made from it was a ton of money for the time (1747-1755), it wasn't actually enough to cover the expenses of the materials, the assistants, and his own household. So he had to keep writing while working on this massive project.

A friend actually pointed out that the standardized French dictionary had taken forty years to create, with forty people working on it. Johnson basically shrugged and went "lol, the French, amirite?" He actually boasted that he could do it in just three years, though it took seven in the end. It's still one of the greatest works of scholarship in the history of English—it was the ultimate English dictionary until the OED. 

In the meanwhile he wrote a play, Irene, helped by his bff David Garrick, former pupil and current theatre superstar. It wasn't terribly successful, but he made money off of it, which was ... well, he was very much of the Terry Pratchett line of thought on writing. More precisely, he said that "no man but a blockhead" would write for any reason but to make a living.

...

Well, he got what he wanted out of it, anyway. He also wrote this poem called "The Vanity of Human Wishes." Coming out of a Chaucer class, I figured it'd be about how people always ask for the wrong things, and don't recognize the right ones (think "Unanswered Prayers," lol—the concept goes back a long way). It's ... well, vaguely about that, but on a far more existential level.

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