Threads 1 | Threads 2 | Threads 3 | Threads 4 | Threads 5

Before I start this third instalment of the Threads pamphlets, I have realised that there is a loose end that I should tie up. It is an important part of the GANTOB origin story. Graham, the clarinet player I mentioned in the second Threads pamphlet, explained his return to “problem kollekting” in his pamphlet Cycling. He blamed the stones and boulders that he turned over when writing his chapter for Bill Drummond’s The Life Model (2024).

My own excuse for my KLF-related activities (though thankfully not obsessive collecting) is the pandemic. Always the pandemic – whether it’s about failing sales targets at work or opening the Pandora’s box of a project like GANTOB. The years 2020 and 2021 were often a lonely period in the Scottish Highlands. I suspect they were with you as well. July-August 2021 was something of an exception, with some beautiful weeks of sunshine and a return of some intrepid tourists, but by September we were getting back into the grind of worrying about cases and restrictions again. We kept to ourselves on the whole, dodging the Delta variant as much as we could, with a stock of lateral flow tests, a chest freezer of supplies and well stocked cupboards. Ali did his weekly podcast rather than a sermon. He could see the viewing stats, but kept them to himself. I think that’s when he developed doubts about continuing his own job. He seems much happier in the croft.

I twiddled my thumbs on a reduced salary but without the travel. I was, in short, at a loose end myself. It was the kind of boredom where you put the empty plant pots in order in the shed, and search whether they can be recycled, or plumb the depths of all the email updates that you’ve ever signed up for but not cancelled. It was one such afternoon when I read a Penkiln Burn email about the publication of Tenzing Scott Brown’s book Best Gent Hair Saloon (sic) (2021). The price was a haircut. The idea of going to a barbershop in London sounded unbearably exotic during those long months of furlough. Imagine entering the salon, bell ringing on the door, sitting in a line of lockdown-bouffant men, a double row of mirrors reflecting their unclippedness into infinity. And Bill Drummond in the corner, in the guise of The Travelling Salesman, selling his book from a suitcase. I tried to persuade Ali to travel down for a trim (rather than me wielding the strimmer as had been required since March 2020), but he was being a stick in the mud. I think that we were all borderline depressed during this period. I toyed with going myself, but the name above the door of the barber, and its slightly modified version on the book, made it clear that I would not be welcome. Maureen in the village will cut anybody’s hair, but I was not getting the same vibes from the email. Male only.

Well, I thought, why not mail also. I wrote a letter of justification – citing equal opportunities or something like that – and posted it off, after googling the price of a short back and sides in London (I settled on £20, to cover postage and packing as well). And a few days later I received a text confirming receipt and postage of the book. I repeated this trick a few times for the following books, each time adding in a little bit of justification for not enclosing the second-hand teapot or whatever the price of the book was to be. And each time a parcel would arrive, but never again a text. What a hoot.

I received the most recent Bill Drummond book – Under The Junction – sometime in late 2022. The price of one of the first 40 copies was recommending a book to read before you die. I cannot remember my planned answer, but it might well have been Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), because it is a book that I have yet to finish. But more on immortality later. But I couldn’t work out a way of conveying my answer to The Travelling Salesman, who was to be waiting under Spaghetti Junction on the allotted day, so I had to order through the Alimentation.cc website. It was then that I realised that by receiving my books direct from The Travelling Salesman, or whichever guise Bill Drummond was now occupying, I had missed out on Penkiln Burn pamphlets sent out from that website with every order. So it goes. But if I had my time again, I’d do exactly the same, just for the sake of a couple of scribbled notes from the great man in return for my over-elaborate missives. 

And after all that I began 2023 alert that Bill Drummond might turn up at an unexpected juncture, under a bridge, perhaps even in the local shop. This vigilance was rewarded. I mentioned his event at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall that spring in one of my earlier pamphlets (Kultural Vandalism, as featured in the first GANTOB book). And you’ll hopefully be familiar with my adoption of the GANTOB costume in July of that year, and all the writing and art that has ensued from me and many others. The lesson is not to go delving about in your emails. There. I’m glad to have that off my chest. 

Woops. I’ve used up over half the allowed 1600 words of this pamphlet wittering on. We need to get on with the critical analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. I’ve written that year a few times in these Threads pamphlets, but haven’t drilled down to month. The book was published in April 1963. Two years to the month after the Bay of Pigs invasion on a real Caribbean island, and 7 months before the assassination of JFK.

Here are a few of the things that I wrote down when re-reading the book after a break of thirty years (more will follow in future Threads pamphlets):

Lies. The first words of the book: “Nothing in this book is true”. “Foma” = “harmless untruths”. It’s a shame that useful word hasn’t entered our lexicon in the way that FOMO has managed all too successfully. And “bittersweet lies”, taking us to the defining characteristic of grapefruit, the fruit that gives GANTOB her name, and echoed in The Benefaktor’s reflections on cherries.

Entanglement. This is the bit that I remembered from the book, and that encouraged me to re-read the book. Here is the closest that I could find: “If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons…. That person may be a member of your karass.” A karass “ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial and class boundaries”. People are not told that they are in a karass. Vonnegut’s hero John (formally Jonah), a follower of a fictional guru called Bokonon, notes that “humanity is organized into teams… that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing”. You can ignore that cod religious component. Vonnegut (coincidentally a Cape Cod resident) was a lifelong atheist. That will become important later on. The earliest example of a karass given in the book is in a Bokonon song: an American wino, a lion hunter, a Chinese dentist and a British Queen. Vonnegut explains the machinations of a karass throughout the book. Suffice to say, I had some of the details wrong when I wrote in Threads part 1 that when such a group meets in “chance encounters separated by many years [where] we can take up where we left off, comfortable, content to make each other’s acquaintance again”. There is little comfort in some of the interactions recounted by the hero John over the course of the book. I cannot comment on whether the loose collection of GANTOBers would count as a karass. And I certainly would not want to take on the role of cult leader. Just as well, perhaps, that I have abdicated from the role of GANTOB. Long live GANTOB3.

The clarinet. If I was off the mark with my understanding of entanglement in Cat’s Cradle, I was pleasantly surprised by the role of the clarinet in the book. Or should we say Klarinette, to use the German, reinforcing the importance of the instrument to the world of K. (While we’re on the topic, I love that the German for Grapefruit is Pampelmuse (f), from the Dutch for fat or swollen lemon). And I am grateful that, yet again, we can look well beyond the world of The KLF. Sure, the clarinet is important to Bill Drummond’s solo album The Man (1986), The JAMs 1987 LP, Chill Out (1990) and The White Room (1991), through Duy Khiem, Acker Bilk and back to Khiem. A komedy of Ks.

But what I want to focus on here is the earliest of Komponists for the Klarinette. The KLF were frequently standing on koattails. But that other three-letter-acronym, and genuine giant of music, WAM (Mozart – 1756-91) trailed the way throughout his short life, including with his compositions for Klarinettist Anton Paul Stadler (1752-1812). The clarinet had been invented circa 1700 by Johann Christoph Denner, producing an instrument with three registers – an extraordinary range for a wind instrument, with different fingerings in each of the registers. A virtuoso – Michael Collins, Emma Johnson or Martin Fröst for example – makes leaping between chalumeau, clarion, and altissimo look easy, from the lowest notes to the nurtured squeaking of the highest. But in reality it requires superb control of breath, embouchure, throat, tonguing and carefully chosen fingering for a well-played sequence of notes. What is extraordinary about Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (K 581; 1789) and Clarinet Concerto (K 622;  1791), written specifically for Stadler, is that they already demonstrate the range of the instrument to the full, and push the technical ability of the player to the limit. It could be argued that Mozart had, at the very start of the clarinet, done it all. In that way Mozart and The Beatles have a lot in common. What more could be done to follow such a period of mastery and invention?

The Ks in the Quintet and Concerto relate to the Köchel Verzeichnis (Köchel catalogue). Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (1800-1877) took the 800+ compositions by WAM and put them into chronological order. Rather like quoting chapter and verse from the Bible, or giving a route by road numbers rather than names, some people will reference Mozart by K(V) number rather than the frequently more memorable name. K492 anyone? Or would you prefer The Marriage of Figaro? I can’t be doing with road numbers either – Bxxx or the road between the shop and the croft? Nae contest.

But this is perhaps another classic GANTOB wild goose chase. A four-hundred-word diversion on Mozart just to get to the quote about Angela Hoenikker, daughter of Dr Felix Hoenikker: “She had only one hobby. She played the clarinet”. Sounds a bit like me until I discovered my inner GANTOB. Angela’s father is the fictional inventor of the atomic bomb. His real-life counterpart J. Robert Oppenheimer is very much on people’s minds this weekend as we await this year’s Oscar winners. But we’ll come back to Angela and the clarinet in a future Threads pamphlet.

I will end this pamphlet with an observation on WAM. It’s an acronym certainly. But how about an abbreviation? Not so much perhaps, unless you want to dip into Nyungar (wambenger) or obscure dialect (wamble). But I couldn’t help but note that Vonnegut gives one option in his writing. His neologism wampeter means “pivot” – something that a karass revolves around. He writes: “Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail…. At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters – one waxing in importance, one waning”. It is not clear whether any karass has ever had a wambenger (Red-tailed Phascogale – a small arboreal flesh- and nectar-eating Australian marsupial) as a wampeter. But that is beside the point. The KLF’s wampeter might have been a pyramid blaster, but now it is probably a people’s pyramid. And if there is a karass that has a grapefruit as its wampeter, what comes next? Well, we need to be careful what we wish for in these dangerous times of sabre rattling among nuclear powers. Grapefruit are not the only bombs.

To be continued.

Gillian

9 March 2024

Pamphlet 14 of the #52Pamphlets

#GANTOB2024

Have your say – contribute a pamphlet here.

Threads 1 | Threads 2 | Threads 3 | Threads 4 | Threads 5

Threads 1 | Threads 2 | Threads 3 | Threads 4 | Threads 5

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.

Threads 1 | Threads 2 | Threads 3 | Threads 4 | Threads 5

We have been stepping up the number of pamphlets published per week at GANTOB HQ, in an attempt to complete the #52Pamphlets ahead of the Battle of Perth in August.

Pamphlet 12, by Graham, pursues a golden thread laid down by Gillian and other GANTOBers recently. We’re going back further than Blake and beyond even Bioko.

Where do you want to set sail to next? If you have ideas submit them through the pamphlet page. Next up is probably Gillian with some thoughts on Kurt Vonnegut (once she’s finished re-reading Cat’s Cradle) and RLS (after The Photographer’s reference). For the moment though, let’s get pedaling (or perhaps peddling) with Graham…

I am told that I need to find a connection between earlier posts or pamphlets by GANTOBers and my own written piece. In pamphlet 11, Gillian mentioned an island formerly called Fernando Po, now Bioko. It had an important role in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (published in 1975) that inspired Bill Drummond and much of the back story to The KLF’s biggest hits. Searching through the gantob.blog I see earlier mention of the island in a post by Skelbert’s Pickles. Mr Pickles states: “Bronwyn flocks with Swallow-kind to reach the equatorial realm of Bioko, formerly the Fernando Poo of great eskatorial renown. I detekt little of import here”. Fernão do Pó (sometimes Poo) was a 15th-century Portuguese explorer of the West African coast. Pickles goes on to speculate on “undisclosed nuclear frissons with Curt [Finks]”. (The Reverend Finks being GANTOB’s late father-in-law). Gillian also mentions the Cold War and the nuclear threat in her Threads posts. I think that I can see a way of entwining my original piece – about the experience of writing a chapter for Bill Drummond’s memoir The Life Model, and the unexpected places that took me over the past 12 months – into a piece for GANTOB’s 52 Pamphlets. This is my slightly revised re-submission.

About 1,300 miles south west of Bioko is the island of St Helena, part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, and famous as Napoleon Bonepart’s final destination between 1815-21. It is certainly an inaccessible place to hide someone away. I cannot find a means of travelling between the two on Google Maps, but there must be a route, presumably by crossing the few miles of Gulf of Guinea between Malabo and Cameroon, or the longer flight back to mainland Equatorial Guinea, and from there to the airport on the east side of St Helena, south of Prosperous Bay Beach. It was here that Edmond Halley (1656-1742), presumably taking a rather more adventurous route, set up an observatory in 1676-77 and made important astronomical advances that allowed him to make accurate predictions about the comet he viewed from the UK in September 1682. With its predictable 76-year cycle, some of us may see Halley’s Comet’s next flyby in July 2061.

Bill Drummond’s new book – The Life Model – follows a rather shorter but also apparently continuous cycle of 71 days. Blink and you miss the years as they tick by day by day. I contributed the subconscious half of a year that first appeared on Sunday 3 March 2024, but is no longer available. Stephen Clark 1980 provided the conscious half. Separately we had been assigned to cover Bill Drummond’s 32^nd  year (29 April 1984 to 28 April 1985).

My piece was titled Third Kulture Kid. I really enjoyed researching and writing it, and was pleased with the response on social media on Sunday. It made the weeks of knocking ideas around in my own subconscious, scribbled sentences, discarded drafts, and ultimately writing a 1,000 word piece from scratch on deadline day (31 December 2022) worthwhile. I have done very little creative writing in adult life, focusing instead on the quotidian activities of work and family, plus playing in a wind band (but that is simply about playing the next note from a score, and then the next, rather than creating something from scratch). Reading about somebody else’s life, piecing together details into a narrative, and imagining content to fill the gaps was challenging. If you want to read it or listen to Third Kulture Kid you will need to wait until another 71 days are up. So it goes.

Rather confusingly for a memoir, my contribution was written in the third person. This was a mistake on my part. I hadn’t read the instructions. It did, however, allow me to write about the three parts of Bill Drummond’s subconscious – The Sentimentalist, The Filofax and The Iconoclast. I was interested to read in my research for the “improved” version of this pamphlet that GANTOB3 insisted on, that the aforementioned Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s book The Illuminatus! Trilogy was written in a confusing mishmash of first, third and potentially other persons. Sounds like hard work. I’m glad that I stuck to the third person.

If the planning and writing of the 1,000 word piece for The Life Model was inspiring (for me at least), the aftermath was not. It took me back into a spiral of searching, obsessing over, and purchasing items that I suddenly needed to read, listen to, own, even if I had already owned and sold or given them away decades ago. Thirty years on from my first foray into compulsive Kollecting I was back in the zone. But this time rather than popping into record shops around my home town, or when I visited other cities and countries, I had the whole of the internet and social media to check. Minor clues took me into wormholes of searching for records, CDs or  books with a KLF connection and now also pamphlets that appeared to offer new information and potential answers. My bookcase and shelves filled up, bank accounts were raided, and my emails, texts and social media messages filled with a whole army of new contacts driving each other on. If this pamphlet appears to be taking us in a series of cycles, some predictable and comforting as celestial clockwork, the K-themed whirlpool I was being sucked into required escape velocity, if you can overlook the mixed metaphors.

Counterintuitively, my way out of problematic collecting, which had been sparked off by researching and writing about Bill Drummond’s life and The KLF, was to write more. Not the technical and scientific articles and letters that I have been required to write from time to time, but short creative pieces that would help document and hopefully cure or at least contain my resurgent tendencies for all things K. Early 2023, Billy Childish’s Vipers Tongue Quarterly made its first call for submissions. I went for a walk, made a mental note of vivid vignettes I had observed recently from the collector scene, and submitted a piece close to the inaugural (Spring 2023) issue’s deadline. For the next few weeks my frequent refreshes of websites on my phone were biased towards Vipers Tongue and Billy Childish sites rather than anything K themed. And the dopamine hit of seeing my name up on the Vipers Tongue website, and receiving an L-13 stamped envelope with a printed, numbered and hand stamped volume containing a short piece of my own writing rather than an expensive print by Jimmy Cauty or K2 Plant Hire, had a long tail. I checked the next deadline and started writing, and repeated that for the next three issues, until I had documented the cycle of addiktion, kreativity and (hopefully) rekovery.

While I obviously had insight into the issues at play, and can document that through these pieces, none of this is to say that I was fully cured (without the “k”). I still checked and contributed to the KLF sites, watched the birth of The KLFRS, and travelled across to the Curfew Tower Curry Night in August 2023, using up two days of annual leave that I couldn’t really spare.

I also submitted a couple of pieces to the GANTOB #Demokratisation drive in December 2023. One on collecting. The other on waiting for mysterious people to make an appearance even when you know they won’t. All to earn a copy of the second GANTOB book because of even the most spurious of KLF connections (I didn’t know at that point that there would be a Bill Drummond piece in the same volume).

And I bought a crowdsourced 23-themed manual – The Lost Doctor – for my Dr-Who-mad daughter’s Christmas stocking. (I am not sure that the Ken Campbell and Illuminatus references were fully understood). I was still obviously thinking about the letter K, but things were on a better trajectory.

I am keen to close the loop in the episode that led on from my chapter for Bill Drummond’s crowdsourced memoir The Life Model. Here are short excerpts from the resulting three Vipers Tongue Quarterly pieces. If you want to read the full text then each quarterly volume, with poetry and prose from a collection of artists, was produced in editions of 313. They can still be bought from the L-13 website.

VTQ Spring 2023 (VTP pamphlet 22): A certain asymmetry. ‘The connoisseur surveyed his acquisitions. His room was laid out in almost perfect symmetry, apart from the door which opened to the left. On one side were the unread books and unplayed LPs and 45s. On the other side the same titles had been leafed through or played on his specially modified HiFi, before being reshelved in protective sleeves’.

Autumn 2023 (VTP pamphlet 27): Archiving persistence. ‘He has some failures. Reading about a pamphlet that he has failed to find through conventional routes, he learns that a copy was inserted into a bottle, sealed and launched into the sea from Reykjavik in 2003. He charts the tides and books a family holiday to Tiree in April 2023, with a cottage facing west over the Atlantic Ocean” ’. This piece also references a missed encounter with “a local artist”.

Winter 2024  (VTP pamphlet 28): Writing things off. ‘A few months later he sends the first draft to The Agent and they meet on Zoom. There is interest in the subject (a promising young writer/ photographer in the 1950s who sustained head injuries while flyposting and never worked again). The possibility of a TV tie-in is mentioned’.

We all have a book in us apparently. I am not so sure. But I am happy with my few short pieces that contain a sketch of the internal workings of an addikt. I can point to them and demonstrate that I have moved on.

And what next? If I achieve that escape velocity and extricate myself from the orbit of planet K, I would like to write a piece that does not mention or allude to The KLF, Bill Drummond, Jimmy Cauty, or anything else tangentially related to that galaxy. Perhaps it would be for Vipers Tongue Quarterly if there is another issue, or maybe GANTOB would consider such a piece for the “52 Pamphlets” if I can demonstrate some continuation of theme (it would need to be very loosely) from an earlier GANTOB pamphlet. Until then, I am focused on my regular work, family and playing the clarinet each week with my local community band.

Graham

5 March 2024

#GANTOB2024 pamphlet 12 of #52Pamphlets

I realised on receiving the spoken version of this pamphlet on 30 April 2024 that this could be considered part of an answer to question 10 – what is addiktion?

Many thanks to Capt. Apophenia, celebrated author in the world of all things K, for this week’s pamphlet. Handing over to the captain without further fuss.

In the world of Mu, they say you’re never more than 23 feet away from a trilogy. On a long train journey home, I started to write them down and that’s when the apophenia really kicked in. 

WARNING: This goes deep. 

Rather than start at the beginning, let’s start before that.

Dallas, November 1963. Three deaths in two days. Kennedy, Tippitt and Oswald. The latter was a former marine alongside one of the architects of Discordianism, whose Principia Discordia was printed on the photocopier in the office of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who would later bring the only trial around the Kennedy assassination. 

A copy of Principia Discordia found its way into the hands of Robert Anton Wilson and led to writing of not one, not two, but three trilogies. Illuminatus, Cosmic Trigger and Schrödinger’s Cat. But a trilogy of trilogies is not so unique in our story. 

One way or another, the work of Robert Anton Wilson, inspired Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty to form The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who did an awful lot of things in threes. 

As The JAMs, there was trilogy of LPs (1987, Who Killed The JAMs and Shag Times) and a trilogy of sample heavy early singles (All You Need Is Love, Downtown and Whitney Joins The JAMs).

These were followed by a trilogy of Pure Trance releases and a trilogy of ambient LPs (Chill Out, Space and Waiting). The latter was also part of a trilogy of VHS releases (Rites Of Mu, Waiting and Stadium House Trilogy) the latter being The JAMs first acknowledgement of trilogies. 

The Stadium House Trilogy (What Time Is Love?, 3am Eternal and Last Train To Trancentral) also forms part of a larger trilogy of trilogies of reworked songs. What Time Is Love? was released as Pure Trance, Live At Trancentral and America: What Time Is Love? 3am Eternal was released as

Pure Trance, Live At The SSL and KLF vs ENT. Last Train To Trancentral came as Pure Trance A, Pure Trance B and Live From The Lost Continent. 

This trilogy of trilogies appears to exclude one of their biggest singles, Justified & Ancient, but when we look, we see a career spanning trilogy of its own, that shares the same refrain (Hey Hey, We’re Not The Monkees, Stand By The JAMs and Jarvis Joins The JAMs).

Another apparently isolated track is It’s Grim Up North, but its crediting to The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, puts it in another trilogy of anomalous releases by The JAMs alongside Jarvis Joins The JAMs and 2023: A Trilogy. 

Speaking of books, of course there are three books (The Manual, K Foundation Burn A Million Quid and 2023). The Manual itself exists in three editions (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, How To Build A Pyramid Of Stolen Shopping Trolleys The Easy Way and last year’s How To Build A People’s Pyramid The Hard Way) and 2023 can be enjoyed as a trilogy of hardback, paperback and audiobook read by Daisy Campbell. 

Away from The JAMs, Cauty and Drummond have continued to embrace the trilogy. 

As a teenager Jimmy produced a trilogy of Middle Earth posters for Athena alongside another trilogy of posters of sacred sites (Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Avebury). Later on, his RIOT Trilogy of Dismaland, Riot In A Jam Jar and The Aftermath Dislocation Principle followed. 

Bill has a trilogy of birthdays with The Man (ages 33 1/3), 45(45!) and The Life Model (70), he had written a trilogy of books with Mark Manning (A Bible Of Dreams, Bad Wisdom and Wild Highway), released a trilogy of books with numbers for titles (45, 17, 100) and given himself three jobs to undertake on his 25 Paintings World Tour (Make A Bed, Make Soup and Shine Shoes). 

Those of you with a keen eye for numbers will probs have been counting trilogies as we went along and will have probably settled on a satisfactory number of trilogies from world of Mu. That was entirely unintentional, but sometimes these things just write themselves. Remember, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. 

(All of the above may have been an influence when I wrote a trilogy of books in response to Welcome To The Dark Ages. The first book, WHATEVER, was never meant to more than a single book, but the thing about trilogies is that they have a mind and will of their own. Inspired by the successful launch of WHATEVER at the Burn The Shard event, my second book began to take shape and it’s wasn’t until I’d settled on TOGETHER as a title that the WTF TRILOGY revealed itself and then completed itself with the FOREVER TRILOGY. Still available to purchase and enjoy from Amazaba). 

Capt. Apophenia, 17 February

A Page 130 Pamphlet 

AKA #GANTOB2024 pamphlet 07

GANTOB responds:

I wrote in last week’s pamphlet about the thread connecting the recent #GANTOB2024 posts by Urs Benefaktor, Stuart Huggett, A young man on Facebook, and Annebella Pollen. These were four unrelated writers, volunteering or approached to write pieces for a loosely defined art project, breaking out from the orbit of The KLF to explore new horizons. However, in attempting to branch out in the topics covered and the people involved we appear still to be caught up in a tornado that is pulling us ever closer to Kansas or some other K themed setting. JR, a previous GANTOB contributor, not connected to Dallas as far as I am aware, asked in a comment on last week’s blog whether this is coincidence. Who can say.

Now, I don’t do Facebook, but when I check on the weekly stats for the GANTOB blog I note that quite a bit of traffic is generated from Stephen Rennicks’ Searching for the White Room page (which is fortunately open to all, not just those on Facebook). He posted about Stuart Huggett’s William Blake piece on 25 January 2024, and a day later highlighted Capt. Apophenia’s excellent “Brit Pop” take on that English Poet/Artist/Prophet.

Capt. Apophenia has been a loyal supporter of GANTOB, contributing a question to the first book and distributing pamphlets in book drops from the earliest stages of the project. He is also an accomplished author. I approached him to contribute a pamphlet, and the next day he replied with an email titled Th3 M3gic Numb3r.  I read it, accepted it, and filed it away in my brain at The KLF end of the GANTOB scale. When I was writing my response to Annebella Pollen’s pamphlet last week, noting all the connections between recent pamphlets, I was thinking that Capt. Apophenia’s piece was a fire break, or should I say a fresh start. Perhaps, like Prof Grayling Muir’s story on the GANTOB blog last year: a KLF related curio that stands alone.

But when I read Capt. Apophenia’s contribution again, while making a personalised version of the pamphlet for him earlier this week, I realised that there was a lot more to his piece. The word “apophenia” for example. I must have skated over this the first time. I am sure that you will have looked it up yourself by now and will agree that it’s a great word. And JD Tippitt. I didn’t know about him either.

And Welcome to The Dark Ages? That was the 23 November 2017 event that Annebella Pollen wrote about last week, which followed on from the publication of The JAMs’ book 2023: A trilogy on 23 August 2017. The book that introduced GANTOB, a fictional character that I have been fated to re-enact, Sisyphean style. I must have been very bad in a previous life. It also links very closely with A young man on Facebook.

The Benefaktor will no doubt be delighted with Capt. Apophenia’s Schrödinger’s Cat reference, with his love of quantum physics. Though I am less well informed on that topic, I have made mention of it before in relation to the Curt Finks’ story Brent Goose Rock that was sent to the original recipients of my first GANTOB book. This was conceived as a snipped up story contained in a stuck down envelope, and was sent originally to a literary journal in 1987. The editor (or another reader) was to reconstruct the story word by word. We will never know what the editor thought of it, but it was not published. I wrote in the Kompanion Volume to the first book: “But perhaps there is a Schrodinger’s cat side to all this. The sealed item holds promise, and leaving it sealed avoids disappointment”.  Curt Finks, my late father-in-law, performer, writer. I was excited earlier this week to hear that one of his stories has now been published posthumously: “The A to Z of Curt Finks”, in the winter 2024 edition of Billy Childish’s Vipers Tongue Press Quarterly. How wonderfully unexpected (though I gave it a helping hand).

But back to Capt. Apophenia’s excellent piece. A contribution, made in response to a comment about William Blake, which brings together an incredibly diverse range of cultural references, educating us in the process, but also messing with our heads around coincidence, and always bringing it back to The KLF or their origins. We are very definitely in the same orbit as earlier contributions to the 52 Pamphlets (which of course will be the third GANTOB Books publication). Worried? No need. I will leave you with this quote from Psychology Today:

“Earlier descriptions of apophenia, also called patternicity, appeared in the literature in the 1950s by the German psychiatrist and neurologist Klaus Conrad. The term is the Greek “apo” for away, and “phenia” for display. Conrad described apophenia in psychotic patients who had perceptual distortions. Apophenia is not a disorder or a mental illness, it is a normal and common human experience.”

I’m off to a darkened room to think how Bill Drummond’s books 25 Paintings and $20,000 fit in, and whether they mess up Capt. Apophenia’s scheme. But then I realise that they have words or other symbols in their title. And indeed $20,000 is really called For Sale. I think that we’re alright and I can press print/upload.

52 Pamphlets is a free flowing and participative writing and art project as part of the GANTOBverse. If you are inspired to contribute then visit gantob.blog/pamphlet. If your work is accepted then, like Capt. Apophenia, you will receive a personalised pamphlet and a copy of the 52 Pamphlets book (January 2025).

GANTOB 17 February 2024