As I was saying before Little Grapefruit’s interruption, The Benefaktor reported particularly enjoyed Bill Drummond’s piece “Great Expectations”. There are three ways for you to read this piece – the Little, Brown edition of the book 45 (2000), the Abacus edition of the same book (2001), or Penkiln Burn pamphlet 8 Great Expectations (1998). I am not sure if the wording is exactly the same, but the detail is not important.
The reason for labouring this point is that here was something that konnekted The Benefaktor with the GANTOB projekt. Through the book 45 The Benefaktor kould see most of Bill Drummond’s work, from his record label days, from The KLF, to The K Foundation and into his solo work. While Great Expectations was written almost 20 years before Drummond and Jimmy Cauty wrote the book 2023: A trilogy, many of the preoccupations were there.
I am a trusting sort. I do not look for additional complexities. This has its positives, but can also leave me vulnerable to deception. The Benefaktor has subsequently pointed out that if I had been familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast, and Slow (Penguin 2011), I would have spotted The Benefaktor’s kurveball.
While I was working away on the draft of my first book in late August/ early September 2023 I was almost entirely focused on three things:
- All things K
- Sekuring funding to pay the printing kosts
- Kollekting the work of my father-in-law Curt Finks
I was well covered for the first (K). And when The Benefaktor came along, he ticked the second and third boxes. I should have realised it was too good to be true.
The Benefaktor’s yellow Post-It note accompanied a fragment of a Curt Finks 1982 Edinburgh Fringe programme(*). I had marvelled at the extraordinary tenaciousness behind The Benefaktor’s discovery. I had already publicised the “recipe” for Finks’ programmes (a very strikt alphanumerical count) in GANTOB pamphlet 14: The Sermon. I thought that a klever krossword or kodeword solver would komplete the programme following these rules. What I hadn’t spotted, however, was the absolute impossibility of the challenge, even with the power of ChatGPT. I still do not know if this was intentional on the part of The Benefaktor, or whether he was too kaught up in his skeme to spot it. He avoided the topic when I asked him about it direktly today.
GANTOB
19 November 2023
(*) See The House Guest in Kompanion Volume
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