Posting has been light for a week or two as I work through a little end-of-semester burnout. Posting will be even lighter over the next week, as I hit the road for a quick trip to Boulder, Colorado for a little R&R.
I was feeling guilty about not feeding the blogging habit until I came across this quote. I discovered it in Stephen Ward’s excellent book, The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond. The quote is from Samuel Johnson, writing in the 18th century about the then-new daily newspapers.
He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task, an attention dissipated, a memory overwhelmed, an imagination embarrassed, a mind distracted with anxieties, and a body languishing with disease: He will sometime labour on a barren topic, till it is too late to change it; and sometimes, in the ardor of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication will not suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”
Exactly.
