...about how someone like Orwell would have been an excellent blogger. We'll never know. But I'd be equally intrigued by the thought of a smart phone or similarly tweet-enabled device in the hands of B.S. Johnson.
I say this because, reading him at his best, you feel startlingly close to Johnson's consciousness at times. All those internal interjections and self-doubts and muttered-under-the-breath clarifications and, 'oh well, what does anything bloody well matter anyways...?'
The cumulative effect is to make you feel that you're in frighteningly close proximity to such a fiercely functioning mind; you can almost feel all the clanks and frictive shaft shiftings of memory, for instance, as it whirrs and grapples exactly like the net haulers so stunningly evoked in 'Trawl'.
Johnson, I think, would have relished the immediacy of the tweet, don't you think? The logical extension, perhaps, of his book in a box conceit. (He once wrote a book that sort of came in a box kind of thing, so the reader could shuffle the pages and randomise their order - you dig?). The only problem would be in collating the material. (You'd want it in book form, ultimately, wouldn't you?)
Anyway, just a thought. If you haven't read him, you should.
OK, time for Question Time.
Nighty night,
Bob
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