Slowly climbing back up to par

The last four weeks or so have been alternately fine and terrible, marked by periods of doing nothing and periods of doing everything in equal measure.  I officially put the seal on the last bit of work from the just-ended term yesterday, and I can now devote my attention more or less entirely to the rigorous beauty of Dr. Samuel Johnson, LL. D.

The course looks like it will be an excellent one.  We have six weeks to cover all of our reading material – roughly thirty-eight hundred pages all told.  Admittedly we’ll be skipping many of the less important Ramblers and Idlers and whatnot (and also, regrettably, his verse drama Irene), but we look to be covering the rest of it.  All of this will naturally be supplemented by Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which accounts for 1400 of those pages on its own) and London Journal, and also Mrs. Thrale’s memoirs.  It would be fair to say that I’ve scarcely ever been in a course so completely suited to my interests.  Anyway, we meet twice a week and keep up a pretty cracking pace, so this is going to have to constitute the bulk of my reading from here on out.  All of which is to say, as you may already have guessed, that you should in no sense be surprised if my prose style suddenly begins to drift into somewhat unfamiliar and old-timey territory.  Dr. Johnson likes long sentences and lots of commas, and also great symmetry of expression, and these are features that are easily adopted into one’s own writing whether by accident or design.  I think it may have begun already, actually.  I’ll try to keep a lid on it.

Apart from that, though, expect to see some Johnson-related stuff on here as the weeks go by.  I’d be foolish not to make use of that content, after all.  You need not worry about being scandalized; that furious gentleman was on the side of solid sense in most matters, and wasn’t afraid to kick foolishness to the curb, so to speak, in defense of greater things.

He did not care for the Church of Rome, though.  My goodness, but he did not.