As The Benefaktor and The Foundation Doktor babble on about things, and pick daintily at their French patisserie like extras at a Swiss finishing school, I am thinking about need, and yesterday’s Nurse Matilda quote. I have demonstrated previously that the GANTOB project has fulfilled a need in many of the participants. It has connected people, fuelled their creative processes, given a new sense of purpose. I need to reignite that spirit.
I have asked people to contribute up to 3 posts for December 2023: a secular, month-long advent calendar, closing 2023 and anticipating the coming of 2024. I imagine kontributors opening the blog each day to see if their piece has been selected, just as I do when I have submitted a story to a literary magazine.
I await the proffered prose with the same sense of trepidation as the questions I needed for my eponymous book over the summer.
Will I receive enough applications to make this blog a worthwhile venture?
Will the applications provide plausible and interesting contributions to the GANTOB cannon, or will they be snippets of dream sequences that build up to some KLF-inspired chaos? If this is a re-enactment of The JAMs’ 2023: A trilogy I probably need both.
And if I do receive a reasonable number of submissions, will they fit together to produce a collective whole, or will they read like a fragmented mess in need of an editor?
I wonder about promotion of this newest engagement with my readership. Will it be of interest to The KLFRS’s Tillerman? I hadn’t heard a peep from The KLFRS for weeks. I worried I was on the wrong track with this blog. But then they shared one of my posts on Wednesday. A much-needed boost.
The pendulum of doubt in the creative process is all too familiar to me from other parts of my life. It’s like closing a deal as travelling salesperson, customers blowing hot and cold, detailed negotiations about final terms. I’ve written previously about the “pedestal phenomenon”(*).
The channel of need in a creative process runs in two directions. Sitting in this cliquey café, watching The Benefaktor and TFD bond, I feel as isolated as when I’m stuck in The Manse in Badenoch, waiting simultaneously for inspiration and for the phone to ring. I need to engage instead with my readership, The KLFRS and readers of The JAMs’ 2023: A trilogy.
GANTOB
10 November 2023
Don’t forget to enter The Foundation Doktor’s competition to win a unique piece of art by GANTOB (inadvertently using TFD’s bootlegged text of an imagined Curt Finks story).
And send in your completed blog ideas for a chance to win the book of this blog.
The featured image in this blog (a version of Maslow’s hierarchy of need) is from Simply Psychology. Inspired from a discussion with my son.
(*) See On Anxiety (GANTOB pamphlet 16)
GANTOB blog 