ITT: We come up with the possible reactions good Dr. Samuel Johnson would have if he were to teleport to 2026 and begin browsing the /lit/ catalog.
>>25620733Show me to the nearest large stone.
>>25620733He would be thoroughly depressed that the only poetry anyone cares about nowadays is in the form of popular music. Maybe he would like some songs by The Beatles but I wouldn't be too optimistic.
>>25620733He'd be too flabbergasted about the situation in England to care..If I was teleported back to the time of The Great Cham I'd probably keep my eyes wide open and quiet. Also, I'd commence a diary desu
Sir, I have now gazed upon this "catalog," as you term it, for the better part of an hour, and I confess myself more astonished by it than I was upon first beholding the steam-carriage, the flying machine, or the American colonies grown insolent. Here, I am told, convene the lovers of Literature; yet I observe that they converse chiefly in abbreviations unworthy of a tombstone, address one another by no name at all, as though ashamed equally of their opinions and their persons, and conduct the whole of their discourse beneath a crude pictograph of a frog, which I am given to understand is not a jest peculiar to this assembly but a kind of universal totem, worshipped with the solemnity that my own age reserved for the Classics.I had supposed Anonymity the refuge of the coward and the libeler; I find it is now the architecture of the entire institution, so that a man may call his fellow a fool and suffer no more consequence than the pressing of a key, which he then abandons, as a assassin abandons his dagger, to vanish into a crowd of others precisely as nameless as himself. I marvel that a society so jealous of its right to insult should be so wholly indifferent to the discipline of being answerable for it. We fought duels for less than what I have read in the space of three postings here, and I begin to comprehend why the gentlemen of this age appear to have so little practice in civility: they have arranged their entire society so as never to require it.And yet -- and here I confess myself unwillingly charmed -- amidst this great midden of vanity, impersonation, and bile, I do discover, buried like a coin in a dunghill, a genuine and unfashionable love of books: a boy inquiring, with real diffidence, whether he ought to attempt Clarissa before he is twenty; a wretch confessing, under cover of his frog and his numeral; a furious disputation on Pope conducted with more real feeling than I have heard in certain drawing-rooms consecrated to nothing else. It seems that Literature, like Religion, cannot be extinguished even by the manifest unworthiness of many who profess it, and that the frog-worshippers, for all their barbarism of manner, have not entirely lost the thing itself, however poorly they are taught to express their love of it.I conclude, therefore, that this "/lit/," as you call it, is Grub Street reborn, with all its vanity, its forgeries, its hacks, and its occasional, unexpected flashes of genuine feeling for the thing it pretends to despise — and that I, who once lamented the degeneracy of the London press, must now confess that Grub Street, for all its faults, at least had the decency to sign its libels.
>>25621705Based effortpost. I would read your take on Johnson writing about modern England.
>>25621705AI slop
I have to say, I am quite taken with these illustrations of fluffy ponies shitting and being tortured to death!
>>25623070Rude, and doubtful.
