Apologies for the break in writing. It has been over a week. Never mind. It is sometimes useful to pause and take stock. In the period leading up to this gap, there had been pamphlets several times a week, racing to complete the unofficial 9 Missing Years project before the end of the first run of Bill Drummond’s The Life Model. This was delivered on schedule and has been sent to the man himself for information.
I have been busy with work, but have found time for some essential GANTOB admin. I personalised two of the pamphlets to send to the authors and sent the second GANTOB book to the British Library. I have also been sourcing some recordings of previous GANTOB blogs. I hope to upload some of them to the site. I should note that we are over half the way through the 23 Questions – if you want a question answered, you had better be quick. Oh, and we are 3/5 of the way through the 52 Pamphlets (which are all now listed in one place for ease of access).
GANTOB (the project) will end when the last of the 52 pamphlets is completed and the third book published(*). At the current rate this is likely to be by 23 July, the anniversary of the rebirth of The KLFRS and the inception of this work. Whatever the date, after that point there will be no further GANTOB activities. So, if I am finished before 27 August there will not be a Battle of Perth, in Stirling or Perth. If that is the case and you want to re-enact the battle yourself, then please contact me. You would need to provide an idea for the battle and the estimated number of participants. I would send you a battle pack to help you on your way.
But on to more important matters. I have been exploring the box that Bronwyn brought up to the croft a few weeks ago: an unexpected haul of my father-in-law Curt Finks’ papers. I have been struggling to work out what to do with them. After conversations with Ali, we have agreed that two of his Dad’s journal entries and an email, may be of wider interest, but will require some context setting. There may be other materials that we can use later on, after a bit of discussion with Grayling Muir’s family. My Finks “discoveries”, for better or worse, will form the basis of these Muons pamphlets. Be prepared for some hobby horses and rants from the old codger.
| From the Curt Finks journals 22 November 1994 (Dallas, Texas): I am feeling very homesick. Stranded, desperately in need of an English voice. I avoided phoning home for weeks, until the woman selling me a can of Wolf Brand chilli in the 7-11 across the freeway told me about international phone cards. But I cannot bore them all at home with my preoccupations. This is meant to be a holiday for them as much as a reboot for me. Speaking of which, one of the young admin workers in the chaplaincy office(+) showed me how to use a computer. It is not intuitive. Luckily, he does most of the work arrangements for me, printing me out a list of names, plotting them on a map of the hospital. During one lunch break he showed me how to use a mouse and we tried to send an electronic mail message to Ali’s student account. No luck. We will keep trying. He also showed me a thing called The Internet, starting with a database of films. Spending time with patients and their families helps. But you have to find them first. I am frequently lost. Endless corridors, often without windows, connect an enormous hospital (Parkland(^)) to the famous Southwestern Medical Center, a huge library, 24-hour dissecting rooms (for which we may do a memorial service at some point), Chinese and French take away stalls that do not serve in the evening, a 24-hour McDonald’s, adverts for the Royal Bank of Scotland. My favourite landmark in the whole centre is the bus-port with its silver buses which arrive and depart every two minutes – to the North Campus and St. Paul Hospital which are literally just across the Freeway. No more than a few hundred yards, and the hospital built a multi-million-dollar fly-over which has two buses driving backwards and forwards every two minutes, 12 hours a day. On my arrival a few weeks ago, I would walk across on the fly-over – too bowled over by the magnificent view of Downtown Dallas in the bright sun to notice the glares of the bus-drivers as they passed me on this short escape from the air-conditioned indoors. Eventually I was stopped by one of the drivers who asked me if I was trying to put him out of a job – he would be on blowing-leaves-from-sidewalk duty if he didn’t have his bus to drive. I hopped on and haven’t walked the distance since. These regular trips across to North Campus are, however, quite thought provoking. What goes on in these drivers’ heads? They make the same journey over a thousand times every week and listen to mundane comments about Texan weather and medical research almost every trip: they must either switch off to the world or have hours of quality thinking time – remember the Mastermind winner who was a tube-driver? Americans have a peculiar concept of scale. I took a trip by plane to El Paso last weekend, for the price of a hardback book. You can fly the 50 miles to Waco, and businessmen commute to Chicago – a huge distance. Yet when I went to the Rolling Stones concert at the Cotton Bowl last week, my fellow bus-passengers complained that they had to walk from the carpark to the front entrance – a distance of 200 yards. They “hadn’t paid for bus tickets to walk that distance”. These were people in their twenties. They will not be doing their 30 minutes of moderate activity each day. Oh no, these are people who drive from home to work to their bank to mall back home. They have a finger dedicated to elevator button pressing, and their exercise is a carefully planned schedule of racquetball or an hour on the home-friendly exercise machine bought on the credit card after an hour-long infomercial about hip reducing miracles. They would vote for Texas Governor George W Bush for President if one of his policies was to supply drive-thru polling stations – or even better voting by Internet from the home or office! |
Poor homesick Curt. Ali tells me that he was on an exchange between November 1994 and February/ March 1995. He cannot remember the details precisely, as he was at Uni at that point, putting the finishing touches to his PhD. I knew his parents by then – had been to stay with them a few times even – but they were distant figures, more my grandparents’ age. I struggled to talk to my future father-in-law. He always seemed a closed book, already trapped in its pages. But there were, as I suppose there are for all of us, glimpses of something else trying to get out. He loved his music, birdwatching and his film nights. He and Ali could be thick as thieves on some of these topics, as Norah(#) and I were off doing the dishes or baking for one of their regular commitments with the church – mother and toddlers perhaps. And here I am, 30 years on, stuck in the pages myself.
GANTOB 17 April 2024
#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 31
An answer of sorts to question 12: “When is enough?“, as posed by The Quantitative Surveyor
(*) As with the second book, the third book will not exactly repeat the material from the blog. There will be some further developments in the text (though perhaps not the “big reveals” that we secured from The Philatelist and the New Year’s Day Vienna trip in the second book) and editing to help it read more like a book than a “book of the blog”. The Deputy General is on standby.
(+) Please note – this section of the “Curt Finks” journal is imagined. He did spend some time in the Center, but the details of the workings of the chaplaincy are from another hospital, documented elsewhere in his papers.
(^) Mention of Parkland Hospital is not intended as a Discordian reference. It is just where Curt Finks’ chaplaincy exchange ended up. GANTOB (the project) is not an attempt to fill any part of that canon. Furthermore, any coincidences around the number 31 or 22 November are just that – apophenia.
(#) Names have been changed.
GANTOB blog 