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I recently wrote about William Blake’s golden string, and ended up snared in the net of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle (1963), noting along the way some of the parallels with The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), the book that influenced so much of The KLF’s work. And the week before that The Benefaktor was caught up with the symbolism in Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – a graffiti postal horn – reminding him of some of the KLF’s street “art”. But I am not sure that scrawling “1987: What The F*** Is Going On”, “It’s Grim Up North” or “1997: What The F*** Is Going On” on public buildings or bridges is comparable with the subtlety of a symbol that can be sketched quickly in a well-practised loop. I think that Pynchon’s muted postal horn has more in common with the fish in the sand of early Christianity. Both seem like subversive acts with a lot at stake – your life even. Don’t worry though. This is not going to be a religious pamphlet. And there may even be a made-up book or two as well, which is a GANTOB specialist topic.
But the Threads pamphlets – and I realise now that there are going to be at least four in total – require us to focus initially at least on Cat’s Cradle. I had already reserved the book via the Highland Council mobile library service, and the following Tuesday I headed down to the village on my bike, imagining that I might need to chase the van down along its advertised route as the 10 miles down the glen had taken me longer than I had expected. I’m getting unfit with all the sitting around in my new job. But no, there it was, waiting by the recycling bins, and they had the promised paperback edition of Cat’s Cradle safely tucked away. After 6 months in the character of GANTOB, rarely breaking out of the KLF and associated materials for subject matter, it felt good to hold an unrelated book. It was a different edition to the one I had read 30 years ago, with cover art that at first I thought represented barbells and shoulders. I wondered if I had reserved the correct book. Perhaps I had keyed in another Vonnegut title by mistake – Breakfast of Champions (1973) maybe. Or a John Irvine title. They often had wrestling going on. But no, it was definitely Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. They were atoms and bonds, with some clouds and a planet. While I was in the village, and had access to mobile broadband, I checked up the molecular structure of ethene, mentioned recently by The Benefaktor. It was definitely not the molecule shown. That was a relief. I left the introduction for later and read the first few pages of Vonnegut’s writing in the picnic area beside the parking area where the van was serving a straggle of remaining customers. There’s a pond there with several species of birds bouncing off each other among the reeds and rushes. I moved along in an attempt to capture the scene. After standing for a few minutes clicking away at the birds I realised that the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. Shivering, I started cycling back up to the croft. I daydreamed while I pedalled.
It would probably be useful for you to have a timeline. After I finished school I secured a student job in a bookshop. It was 1989. I cannot claim any knowledge of The JAMs or The KLF at that point, though presumably I had heard The Timelords’ single. Winding forward 18 months I was aware of what I realise now was their “Stadium House Trilogy”, but lumped them in with Deee-Lite, De La Soul or The Shamen. Flash in the pan, not like Pet Shop Boys who seemed to have some staying power, though they were rather old. Oh, my years spent listening to BBC Radio 1. The Beatles were among the first to incorporate the technologies into their recordings, with sampled loops on Yellow Submarine in 1966 and the Moog synthesiser on I Want You (She’s So Heavy) in 1969. But these new acts were using them as their principal instruments. Their music was good to stride out to on my way between the lecture theatre and the bookshop, listening on my portable Boots radio, but they were not something I thought of buying.
My interest in The KLF accelerated after reading a review of The White Room in Q Magazine, standing in a branch of either John Menzies or WHSmith, a block along from Boots. Something about that review connected. I bought the album, and a few weeks later found some of the CD singles on import in HMV. I glimpsed the exploits of Drummond and Cauty off and on for a few years, before largely forgetting them. Ali had a few more obscure releases picked up at Fopp, but they sat in a box after university years, and were Destrukted in my activities as GANTOB last summer.
So by the time I was actively following The KLF I had almost two years of work in the bookshop under my belt. I was surrounded by books and had the luxury of dipping into them in the smoke-filled staff room during my breaks, and a generous staff discount. Just out of school, my knowledge of literature was limited, drowned out by the textbooks and exam papers. But mixing with humanities students at the shop, and watching out for the new releases, I received an informal education and I lapped it up. I remember the titles of the first books I read that summer holiday. Catch 22 (1961) by Joseph Heller. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Vonnegut(*). The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irvine. Geek Love by Katherine Dunne (1989). I loved the first four, but felt sullied by the last: a queasiness that I boxed up and tucked away in a cupboard. That, I think, was the first book I “Destrukted”. I spent a lot of time reading the back catalogues of the other authors over that first year at the shop, and for a few years sought out their new books too. But I grew out of love. Heller was the first to go, after struggling through a couple of his books until nothing happened in Something Happened (1974). Irvine was the last to go – I am a bit of a sentimentalist. Other authors filled the gaps – Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Hunter S Thompson. Their slim early books would fit nicely in the gaps between my other commitments. Nowadays I take what I’m given.
So I was an avid reader before I was a music lover (apart from The Beatles and their spin offs). And I was familiar with aspects of American counterculture well before I came to The KLF. I loved the authors’ irreverence, inventiveness, symbolism and anarchy.
But that’s enough daydreaming. It’s served its purpose though. I’ve managed the ten miles back up the glen, past the previously derelict farmhouse now spruced up as a holiday let, the hydroelectric dam, the cattle grid, the tracks carved into the landscape for new megapylons, the forest so badly damaged by last year’s storms that I am worried whether the herons will be able to nest, a couple of deer in the trees, the foundations of a school that my grandfather attended, a bird of prey circling, the long pull up beyond the tree line and back down again into the copse concealing Black Sheep croft.
I’m warming up now, back in the kitchen, with the Rayburn powering away. Cat’s Cradle is a slim volume, and Vonnegut’s style is deceptively simple. I find myself flicking through the pages rapidly, taking notes on most pages (in a notebook, not the library copy I hasten to add).
I remind myself that I have two objectives in re-reading this book after thirty years.
First, I want to refresh my memory of the ideas around relationships – the entanglement of some people, and the impenetrability of other bonds. Have I remembered that correctly?
And the other objective is to see whether there are any parallels in themes between Vonnegut’s novel and The Illuminatus! Trilogy beyond their tropical island settings in the Caribbean and Bay of Guinea respectively. Or to put it another way, did Vonnegut’s ideas so admired in the American countercultural movement of the 1960s influence the two Roberts’ writing in the mid-1970s. Something has drawn me this topic, and I am going to scratch that itch with my sharp claws.
I finish Cat’s Cradle in a couple of sittings. I’m not going to meet my sales targets this week. But that’s OK. GANTOB (the project) has to take priority.
I have a series of ideas jotted down in my notebook. They’re going to take some shaping for the third and fourth Threads pamphlets. There are some promising leads, with at least one path leading directly to a comment made by Bill Drummond in one of his occasional interviews, and another I think I can use to link Vonnegut’s writing to one of Drummond’s earlier books with Mark Manning, but also back to the oldest story of them all.
But first I need to grab at a strand that connects the last pamphlet (Cycling by Graham) to this one. The golden thread. I drop Graham an email, receiving a rapid response, and google the name of the music that he has been practising most recently with his community band. The Hounds of Spring, a Concert Overture for Winds by Alfred Reed. That’s my connection. Reeds, concealing birds. And vibrating to make the sound of a clarinet, an instrument that connects a fair proportion of middle-aged people, Graham and me included. He tells me it was a nudge from his mother, and her love of Aker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore, that started him on the instrument. For me it was the challenge of “the break”. If I hadn’t chosen the clarinet, it would have been the French Horn – an instrument defined by the difficulty of its small mouthpiece and what my music teacher called its “dark side”. Graham tells me he plays the saxophone as well, which makes me envious. But we’ll need to stop for now. There’s a clarinet connection with Cat’s Cradle too, which we’ll need to leave for a future Threads pamphlet.
To be continued.
Gillian
8 March 2024
Pamphlet 13 of the #52Pamphlets
#GANTOB2024
If you would like to contribute a pamphlet of your own please visit the pamphlet page.
(*) In error I wrote that I had read Cat’s Cradle in 1989 in the first version of this pamphlet. I have subsequently corrected this to Slaughterhouse-Five. This is in contravention of the rules of Kreative Tyranny. However, I am no longer GANTOB. I do not know GANTOB3’s rules on correcting errors. I first read Cat’s Cradle in 1994, as I made clear in Threads 1.
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