Tuesday 17 April 2012

Anthony Bolton is staying strapped to the mast of the Fidelity China Special Situations trust

Well, it's not a ship, but you get the idea, I'm sure. Mr Bolton isn't leaving it. And he'll go down with the ship if he has to. (Obviously, it ain't a ship.) You've got to admire him. And you've got to admire all the others in the band, playing their violins. (What am I going on about? Maybe it's one of those days, like all the days, really. Nothing changes.) The trust fell by 30 per cent last year. I mean, the ship. I suppose it could be worse. Mr Bolton could be the boat. 'I thought it was a ship?' (Shut it! Boat is a ship.) And he could be drunk, washed in vomit and stained with blue wine, dreaming of green nights and glittering snow. Oh dear. Just imagine that!

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Right, enough already! I've got a big conceptual post coming up with Mike Corcell, and I need to mentally prepare myself for it.

But before I go. I've been thinking that my new conceptual literature is ideally suited to the internet and the blog form. There's no way a conventional writer living in the past with novels and short stories would be able to get away with all the repeated phrases and paragraphs. Old-fashioned publishers and their editors just wouldn't stand for it. / And, yes, I meant it, living in the past. Even though James Joyce killed off the novel a century ago, there have been countless "zombie" writers since then who think they know better than such a genius.

My new method means I can go in for a bit more phrasemaking, too. Tolstoy once described Shakespeare as a worthless phrasemaker. (You know, 'To be, or not to be,' and all that jazz.) But Shakespeare's phrasemaking is the best thing about him. Well, conceptual literature is also ideally suited to phrasemaking. There's no story or (much) characterization. Just phrases - and concept, of course.

One more thing: I feel I'm making the personal impersonal. My first conceptual post, Never be three, was as personal as it gets, but reading through it now, it doesn't seem like "me" somehow. And this is something I've wanted to achieve for a long time.