B. S. Johnson

Bryan Stanley Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic, producer of television programmes and filmmaker.

Early life

Born into a working class family, Johnson was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College and, with this preparation, managed to pass the university entrance exam for King's College London.

Career

After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels that would now be considered visual writing. In his early years he collaborated on several projects with a close friend and fellow writer, Zulfikar Ghose, with whom he produced a joint collection of stories, Statement Against Corpses. Like Johnson's early stories (at least superficially) his first two novels, Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964), at first appear relatively conventional in plot terms. However, the first novel uses several innovative devices and includes a section set out as a filmscript. The second includes famously cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward. His work became progressively even more experimental. The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the chapters marked 'First' and 'Last' which did indicate preferred terminal points) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. He won the Eric Gregory literary award in 1962.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science (Latin Baccalaureus Scientiae) (B.S., BS, B.Sc., or BSc, or, less commonly, S.B., SB, or Sc.B., from the equivalent Latin Scientiae Baccalaureus) is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years.

Whether a student of a particular subject is awarded a Bachelor of Science degree or a Bachelor of Arts degree can vary between universities. For example, an economics degree may be given as a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) by one university but as a B.Sc. by another, and some universities offer the choice of either. Some liberal arts colleges in the United States offer only the BA, even in the natural sciences, while some universities offer only the BS even in non-science fields.Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service awards Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degrees to all of its undergraduates, although many major in humanities-oriented fields such as international history and culture and politics. The London School of Economics offers B.Sc. degrees in practically all subject areas, even those normally associated with arts degrees, while the Oxbridge universities almost exclusively award arts qualifications. In both instances, there are historical and traditional reasons. Northwestern University's School of Communication grants B.Sc. degrees in all of its programs of study, including theater, dance, and radio/television/film. University of California, Berkeley grants B.Sc. degree in Environmental Economics and Policy in College of Natural Resources (CNR), and B.A. degree in Environmental Economics and Policy in College of Letters and Science (L&S).

The Unfortunates

The Unfortunates is an experimental "book in a box" published in 1969 by English author B. S. Johnson and reissued in 2008 by New Directions. The 27 sections are unbound, with a first and last chapter specified. The 25 sections in-between, ranging from a single paragraph to 12 pages in length, are designed to be read in any order.Christopher Fowler described it as "a fairly straightforward meditation on death and friendship, told through memories."Jonathan Coe described it as "one of the lost masterpieces of the sixties".

Johnson said of the book "I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely… But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer; and even if it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind’s randomness than the imposed order of a bound book."

Plot

A sportswriter is sent to a city (identifiable through landmarks as Nottingham) on an assignment, only to find himself confronted by ghosts from his past. As he attempts to report an association football match, memories of his friend, a tragic victim of cancer, haunt his mind.

Johnson

Johnson is a surname of English origin. The name itself is a patronym of the given name John, literally meaning "son of John". The name John derives from Latin Johannes, which is derived through Greek Ἰωάννης Iōannēs from Hebrew יוחנן Yohanan, meaning "Yahweh has favoured". The name has been extremely popular in Europe since the Christian era as a result of it being given to St John the Baptist, St John the Evangelist and nearly one thousand other Christian saints. Johnson is the ninth most common surname in Sweden/Scandinavia, second most common in the United States and 154th most common in the world.

See also

References

Fat Man

"Fat Man" was the codename for the type of atomic bomb that was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States on 9 August 1945. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation caused the third man-made nuclear explosion. It was built by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Laboratory using plutonium from the Hanford Site and dropped from the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar. For the Fat Man mission, Bockscar was piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney.

The name Fat Man refers generically to the early design of the bomb, because it had a wide, round shape. It was also known as the Mark III. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a plutonium core. The first of that type to be detonated was the Gadget, in the Trinity nuclear test, less than a month earlier on 16 July at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.

Two more Fat Man bombs were detonated during the Operation "Crossroads" nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Some 120 Fat Man units were produced between 1947 and 1949, when it was superseded by the Mark 4 nuclear bomb. The Fat Man was retired in 1950.