Mess as a Marker of “Genius”
On Johnson, Boswell, and Macleod’s Books of Vancouver
Samuel Johnson is one of those writers I read about but never read in college. He was the gleaming pole star in a constellation of eighteenth-century London “wits” who collectively created the persona of the literary man (as opposed to the scholar). For undergraduates at least, it was enough to know that Johnson was “the Sage” of his circle and one of the early practitioners of literary criticism as a paid enterprise without reading either his Dictionary or his Lives of the Poets.
I still have not read Johnson’s works, but, in a way, I have finally read Johnson, for I have read the Penguin abridged edition of Boswell’s Life.
I plucked the book out of absolute chaos: the stacks of Macleod’s Books in Vancouver, BC. I say “stacks” and not “shelves” advisedly, for the entire bookstore is a maze of tall shelves, short tables, and alongside and between them everywhere, from one end to the other, large teetering stacks of books, one or two or three rows deep. It’s as if you had stumbled into a hoarder’s living room, except there is a working cash register in the middle of it.
The “arrangement” of the merchandise in Macleod’s makes looking for a particular book difficult to impossible, but makes finding books one is not looking for all…
