GANTOB blog

DISCORD (AKA THREADS part 5) (by GILLIAN)

Mar 17th, 2024

AKA Threads 5

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

Mutton and turnip are off the menu come the apocalypse. It has poured for the past two days, and the remaining snow has melted in the warm spell that allegedly attracted the snake. Overnight, the burn beside the house burst its banks, and the vegetable patch is now more suited to growing rice. But the bigger problem is revealed when we pass the copse. Beyond the trees the river that usually meanders through the glen has flooded the lower pasture and taken some of the fences with it. From our vantage we can see submerged ash and silver birch where there used to be little islands of rocks. I wonder what happened to the crescent of sand that had gathered on our side of one of the larger islands, accessible by stepping stones in shallow water. Washed away no doubt. There is water as far as the eye can see, and no sheep. I feel sick.

Ali heads down to the fields while I send a message to the neighbours, checking that they are alright, and asking if anybody has sandbags going spare. An hour later Ali comes back, shaking his head. At least three sheep have gone, but the rest are safe, sheltering behind a drystone dyke. Reports follow later in the day that one of the yearlings has been spotted, drowned, its heavy fleece tangled up in the trees on one of the submerged islands. Two more, marked with their distinctive muted postal horn, are found snared in a neighbour’s ruined electric fence. There’s not much I can do with the ground so wet, so I head to my desk and log in for work.

At lunch our downstream neighbour pops in. He tells us stories of worse disasters that have befallen the area. The radiation clouds from Chernobyl (1986), with the ensuing studies of total body potassium (TBK). Then BSE (1996). FMD (2001). I am quite grateful to return to my BT Client login. I’m on a day of receiving insurance calls again. There are a lot of calls about flooding, and while I feel their pain I have to stick to my script. Our conversations are recorded for training purposes. “And is it sunny where you are today?” the script says. I skip that part.

I have an imagined rap running through my head all afternoon. “The songs of the doomed are the songs of the blessed”. It’s shouted, with Scottish brogue. It’s a misremembered lyric from a JAMs’ track.

I send a message to my supervisor about my deviation from diktat, so that I can refer to it if there is any comeback. A paper trail. A golden thread if you like.

This sequence of “threads” pamphlets – which ends with today’s extended piece – started off from some observations from John Higgs’ book William Blake: Why He Matters More Than Ever (2019), which I dug out after reading Stuart Higgs’ pamphlet on the poet. It has led me to re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) for the first time in 30 years, a favourite of the American counterculture movement of the 1960s. That era clearly influenced The Illuminatus! Trilogy (“the Trilogy”) (1975), that in turn so inspired The JAMs and The KLF.

Over the course of this research (which Vonnegut defines in Cat’s Cradle as to “look again”, p42, which is appropriate) I have stumbled across signs that some of this ground has already been tilled. I have provided some detailed notes in the appendix. All you really need to know is that Vonnegut’s character Bokonon, religious leader, turned up subsequently as a saint in a wild cult book called Principia Discordia, which in turn influenced the Trilogy which was adapted for the stage in Liverpool a year later and famously involved Bill Drummond. The latter goes on, with Jimmy Cauty, to use some of the ideas from the Trilogy in the music of The JAMs (a name directly lifted from the Trilogy) and The KLF (an acronym that references entities in the Trilogy). A lot of overly complicated – and sometimes incoherent – books written by a bunch of blokes (mainly), perhaps under the influence of illicit substances. Vonnegut is the exception I think – writing clearly, in a book that remains of widespread appeal. I am not going to speculate on what The KLF were up to when they wrote their huge commercial hits.

But this does not prove a “golden thread” between these books. Bokonon links Cat’s Cradle to Principia Discordia, but does not appear in the Trilogy. Twenty thousand dollars is mentioned in the Trilogy, which is the sum that Drummond paid for the Richard Long photo in Drummond’s book How to be an artist (2002), but was long after The KLF, and it does not link back to either Vonnegut or Principia Discordia. The quote “Twenty thousand years” appears in Principia Discordia. Is that what The JAMs are referring to when they rap “Twenty thousand years of SHOUT SHOUT SHOUT” in All You Need Is Love? John Higgs notes that Bill Drummond had perhaps not read the Trilogy before he incorporated some of its ideas into The JAMs/ KLF. But perhaps that is not important, because he would have been immersed in the major themes of the book during the preparations and staging of the play. But did the stage play incorporate sections of Principia Discordia as well?

But I think that I have something up my sleeve that demonstrates a more direct connection between Vonnegut and the work of The KLF, via Bill Drummond.

Before that, I am going to pause to consider the word Discordia. Discord – in music, meaning lack (from “dis”) of harmony (from “chord”). I think of the “Lost Chord” that Drummond and Mark Manning go searching for in Bad Wisdom (1996). But also from the Latin (discordare) from “cor” or “cord” (as in coronary and cardiac). And if that pulls at your heart strings, well that might be your chordae tendineae, the tendinous cords that ensure the functioning of the tricuspid and mitral valves in your heart. We have so many fraying edges in the Threads pamphlets.

Before we conclude this series of Threads pamphlets we should also have a look for links between the GANTOBverse – in its widest sense – and Cat’s Cradle, regardless of whether these were pure coincidence or ideas that have rested, like the herpes zoster virus, ready to awaken in a painful bout of shingles thirty years on.

Green maraschino cherries feature in The Benefaktor’s submission for the 52 Pamphlets: The Cherry o n Top. He references a 1960s classic by Pynchon in that pamphlet, but not anything by Vonnegut. But here’s Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle (p19): ‘I mixed him an “End of the World Delight”. I gave him about a half-pint of crème de menthe in a hollowed-out pineapple, with whipped cream and a cherry on top’.

Asking him about this, The Benefaktor confirms that he did read Cat’s Cradle at some point, probably in the 1970s, but he does not think that there is any connection with what he wrote in his anti-fascist piece on cherries. He does not think that the mention of banana republics in Cat’s Cradle (p56 and 58) is relevant either.

Credit: consultthismusic.wordpress.com

Grapefruit. GANTOB loves, and is named after, grapefruit. Not a specific grapefruit. All grapefruit. That remains the case, despite Vonnegut’s words in reference to the bubonic plague: “The lymph glands in the groin and the armpits swell to the size of grapefruit”. I suspect that this is based on a phrase taken from a long forgotten medical textbook. I haven’t been able to find a source from an internet search. Grapefruit is used as a fruity comparison for plague victims elsewhere – for example in a Guardian book review (Justinian’s Flea, 2007).

Boiled albatross. This is, again, The Benefaktor’s territory. The Observer (who we learnt in the “death” pamphlets, reproduced in the second GANTOB book, is actually the ghost of an albatross), presumably did not like this sentence in Cat’s Cradle: “albatross meat disagreed with me so violently that I was ill the moment I’d choked the first piece down” (p168), and from there to a graphic “deathbed” scene in a golden dinghy. This passage, and also the book’s apocalyptic themes, make me think of ST Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798), which takes us back to the first Threads pamphlet with John Higgs’ reference to Coleridge’s term “esemplastic”. The mention of the albatross in the GANTOBverse was also intended as a harbinger of difficult times ahead, and also possibly inspired by the reported loneliest albatross in the world.

But you’re probably more interested in potential links between Cat’s Cradle and The KLF and related projects. And I think that there are some, though it is a moot point whether these are directly through Vonnegut’s book, or via the more convoluted Principia Discordia/ the Trilogy path.

Sirens: I was struck by this description of Mona in Cat’s Cradle: “Her dress was white and Greek. She wore flat sandals on her small brown feet. Her pale gold hair was lank and long” (p100). This sounds strikingly like the three figures retreating into the sea in the KLF’s NME advert announcing their retirement in 1992.

Pirates and Vikings: The founding figures of the Republic of San Lorenzo in Cat’s Cradle are Edward McCabe and Bokonon, arriving via another vessel. They reach an uneasy truce in their role: “The drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people – McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint”. The Trilogy has its pirate/Viking – Hagbard Celine. The KLF have their Viking-inspired myth of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s discovery of America in 992, in America: What Time is Love? On that theme, Vonnegut mentions “doomsday horns” (p101), which is a pretty good description of the sound that issues out from the Viking longboat throughout The KLF’s last big commercial hit.

Destruction: There’s a “Thelma and Louise” type moment – two women jumping to their deaths in a gorge – early on in Cat’s Cradle (p10) that made me think of The KLF’s Cape Wrath moratorium, and its Badenoch associations. Later, there’s a vivid description of the destruction of a canvas portraying a cat’s cradle in a spider’s web of scratches: “He threw the painting off the cantilevered terrace. It sailed out on an updraught, stalled, boomeranged back, sliced in the waterfall (p120-121). Drummond has a history of destroying canvases. Earlier in the book an empty hi-rise hotel (p111), named after a doomed love interest, is described as being built “like a bookcase, with solid sides and back and with a front of blue-green glass”. A book about the end of the world, partially set in a bookcase of its own, destroying the gossamer threads of its own title. Very meta. Very KLF.

The number 23: Readers of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and KLF fans, will probably not be surprised that the number 23 is also central to Principia Discordia. The number has all sorts of derivations and meanings to these cult works. But what if the calculations and justifications are all a distraction? The number 23 is also important in Cat’s Cradle, related closely to what is arguably, despite all the threads and connections between the characters, the main theme of the book – death. The nearest thing we have to a medic in the book, Julian Castle, who operates a humanitarian hospital in the jungle, wants something “to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain”. Jonah/ John, the narrator replies: ‘I suppose I could “overhaul the ‘Twenty-third Psalm’, switch it around a little so nobody would realize it wasn’t original with me.’ To which Castle’s son Philip replies ‘”Bokonon tried to overhaul it [but]…. Found out he couldn’t change a word’. The unimprovable text – the unobtainable. The psalm goes “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters”. It is a source of comfort for those who have experienced loss, and also more generally, regardless of the tune used, or even whether somebody believes in a God. It might also, of course, provoke a negative reaction through over use – in the “I’ll not have that sung at my funeral” vein. But the idea of a message that cannot be improved. Is that what gives the number 23 its power? When I was re-reading Vonnegut’s book I realised that for him to write this as a lifelong atheist, in a parody on a made-up religion, is potentially very significant. It felt like a eureka moment, finding a connection between apparently unrelated sources, in a book about connections and distance.

Drummond, son of the manse, has also written about the 23^rd psalm. In a Quietus piece (2012) to mark his approaching 59^th birthday he said about this specific psalm: “In the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland or the Wee Frees as they are known, only the Psalms are allowed to be sung. They are sung unaccompanied and in Gaelic. It is the most spiritually moving music that I have ever heard or am likely to hear. The Wee Frees are found mainly on the Outer Hebrides. As for hearing a recording of this type of singing, it is always pale experience to the intensity of the real thing. There is not one particular recording that I would recommend but if you are ever in the Outer Hebrides on a Sunday do not miss [out] on the chance to experience it.” He is clear to categorise this as his “spiritual side” rather than necessarily something religious. Graham also referenced Drummond’s Quietus piece in the context of Byrd and Tallis’ choral music – again in spiritual rather than religious terms.

So that’s what we’re left with: a tangle of ideas, with some apparent connections that do not appear to have been commented on previously. I think that it’s enough to say that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, living through the 1960s and 1970s, may well have been aware of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, as influential on the American countercultural movement, but also popular in the mainstream as well. That, and the baton of Bokononism/ “Discord” passed from Principia authors to The Illuminatus! Trilogy, through The JAMs and The KLF, and then on to The JAMs’ book 2023: A trilogy (2017).

As mentioned in Threads 1, the section that I found most interesting in John Higgs’ first Blake book looked at reason, imagination and fantasy. Using the definitions laid out there, I think that we can say that Vonnegut’s book is “imagination”. It takes complex ideas that cannot be dealt with by reason alone – the types of issues that we see individuals, countries and the world grappling with even now – and gives us ways of understanding them. The “wicked issues” of religion, government, conflict, nuclear weapons, technology, poverty, or environmental change for example. We’d add AI now. The 1950s and 60s gave us a series of thinkers who took frightening topics and broke them down into manageable chunks in fiction – for example John Christopher, JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin. Their books provoke further thoughts and may even lead to dialogue and reaching an understanding with people who originally disagree as you try to unpick the issues with family and friends.

The books that came after – whether Principia, or the two trilogies – could be viewed as simply fantasy. They are, on first inspection, pastiche or collage. But as Higgs notes in his book on The KLF, Anton Wilson and Shea and other Discordians were exploring conspiracy theories, complexity and chaos. The knots. As an example of unintended consequences, their irreverent look at topics from the JFK assassination to the Illuminati has no doubt fuelled these and other conspiracy theories. But in a footnote on modern conspiracy theories from the Trump and Covid eras (p36) Higgs notes: “From my experience, however, readers of Robert Anton Wilson have come through this era well – his work gives us vital antibodies that protect us from catching these belief systems. Wilson’s readers may be interested in these conspiracies, and they may be knowledgeable about them, but they sure as hell don’t believe in them”. So perhaps The Illuminatus! Trilogy and other Discordian works are examples of ST Coleridge’s esemplasticity after all, combining different elements to produce something truly original. Or perhaps they were simply building on ideas that were much more succinctly captured in Cat’s Cradle. Bokononism, after all, was founded on lies. That was the compromise that Bokonon and McCabe reached to hold the Republic together, but with such devastating consequences. A potent mix of myth and politics that caused problems in the 1960s. Sounds familiar…

But back to more prosaic matters. Higgs details Anton Wilson and Shea’s route into the public eye, through a regular “forum” letters page in Playboy (in the more literary pages of that magazine). An example he gives is ‘April 1969: “After an hour of heavy petting, I often find myself in substantial pain in the area of my testicle and lower abdomen”’ (p49). Reading that today, I can’t help noticing that yesterday’s “Elderly Gentleman” letter from Bill Drummond (originally from 16 March 2022, available on a cycle determined by date of publication) reads: “HEALTH ISSUES… My left ball has shrunk and my right ball hurts most of the time”. (In passing I note that testicle size can also be compared with fruit, or a string of wooden beads ordered by size, called an orchidometer – there is not a grapefruit option). Universal problems, for 49% of the population anyway.

Speaking of men, I had better call Ali back to the croft. He’s been out for long enough. I’ve been writing and editing for hours. It’s getting cold and will soon be dark. He has rescued a couple of sheep from one of the crofts upriver. We’ll look after them overnight, because the ford (no “n”) is impassable. He’s warming the poor beasts in the barn. We’d have had them inside if they had been lambs, but I draw the line at yearlings. The work of a shepherd is never done. The garden is still flooded, but I can hear the trees now over the diminishing rush of the burn, and in the dusk I saw a heron flying from the river to its nest for the first time this year. I take up my crochet hook and settle down for the night.

GILLIAN 17 March 2024

Pamphlet 17 of the 52 Pamphlets

If you have a pamphlet idea, please submit via the 52 Pamphlets page

Click to read appendix to this post
SERPENTINE (AKA THREADS part 4) (by GILLIAN)

Mar 12th, 2024

AKA Part 4 of Threads

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

Gillian continues her exploration of the links between the work of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly focusing on Cat’s Cradle (1963)) and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975). That Trilogy went on to influence Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their music and writing as The JAMs and The KLF, so Gillian is also looking for echoes of Vonnegut in Drummond and Cauty’s output.

“The scratches formed a sort of spider’s web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry” (Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle)

I wake to CVS’s The Bluebird. Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924, Anglo-Irish composer). Perfection. Tranquillity. I can ignore the cold for a little bit longer. I curl up in my duvet, the cat nestling into the concavity. I must be careful not to fall back to sleep. I was on a late shift last night, fielding calls for a legal firm until midnight. Didn’t matter who it was. I just followed the script. And I’m back on again at 10:00 this morning. Flippety flip.

But for now, I can revel in these harmonies. The high notes soar above the imagined loch. I dream of summer.

Ali comes rushing in waving his phone. “It’s the dominant to the supertonic that does it” he shouts over the pivotal point in the piece. And just at that point the flattened packing boxes that have been doubling up as blinds in our bedroom crash to the floor, light spilling in, sending the cat flying.

Then a scream.

It takes me a moment to realise that it’s Ali. He’s scrabbling around, apparently trying to reconstruct the shield of cardboard, inspecting the snib on the window, before rushing to check the door. He’s gone as white as a sheet. It can mean only one thing. His flipping ophidiophobia. I might as well get up.

My phone pings when I connect to WiFi. Lots of activity on “the crofters” WhatsApp group. And it’s not recipes, borrowed equipment or planting seasons for once. It’s Ali about adders and the sceptical responses.

I grab a quick breakfast and log in for work.

Ali has recovered by lunch time. He brings me a toastie so that I can power through the calls. I am the breadwinner after all. There isn’t money in mutton, wool and turnips as Ali keeps telling me. I desperately need to hold on to this job.

I ask him how his morning has been. He’s not fixing fences or ploughing the vegetable patch. He’s been crafting rather than crofting. Hammering a post into the ground outside our bedroom window, and twisting a construction of stripped electrical wires to nail to the top, in a T shape. He shows me his phone:

“Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.”

It’s from Numbers apparently. The fourth book of Moses, between Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Not something I’ve read. Flicking through a copy of the Bible that is tucked in with the recipe books, there are a lot of numbers and family trees. Codes to be broken perhaps. It makes me think back to Mr Gell’s trilogies pamphlet and Bill Drummond’s numbered books – 17, 25 Paintings, 45, 100, $20,000. But then I remember that Mr Gell, writing as Capt. Apophenia, chose The Magic Number as his title. He referenced 23 in his first paragraph, but it would have been obvious to anybody growing up in the 1980s or 1990s that it was going to be about the number 3. I leave Ali to his tinkering, park any thoughts about the GANTOB project, and get back to work. I have targets to meet. More numbers. I click a link on my screen to select the next contact. I’m making calls this shift. We’ve come a long way from relying on a “book of numbers” for cold calling.

That evening, when cooking tea, and with Ali still hammering away in the garden, I select an MLL album on Spotify. Meade Lux Lewis (1905-64, American pianist and composer). One of the few real people mentioned in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. We’re meant to be focusing on the book in these Threads pamphlets (of which this is number 4 – like Numbers in the Pentateuch).

In Cat’s Cradle we hear about MLL’s experiments with “boogie-woogie piano” and his family’s links to the railroad. Honkey Tonk Train Blues. Catchy, but too much of a stretch to link it to The KLF’s Last Train to Trancentral. In the book they’re listening to MLL’s Cat House Piano LP. It starts with The Pittsburg Flyer (train rather than pamphlet presumably). Then Dragon Blues. And four bars into that piece we read that one of the book’s characters, Angela Hoenikker, “improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare. Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between”. That gives quite a different answer to the question that I asked in Threads 3. I wrote that Mozart [pushed] “the technical ability of the player to the limit. What more could be done to follow such a period of mastery and invention?” Well Angela Hoenikker and of course the non-fictional jazz greats, from Benny Goodman to Artie Shaw, and many others before and after, would have had a thing to say about that.

GANTOB (the project) is my first bit of creative writing as an adult. After 8 months, with hundreds of thousands of words in pamphlets, blogs and books, it is interesting to watch out for recurring themes. And while GANTOB is a collective endeavour, there is a story forming about GANTOB (the person), that must reflect my memories and subconscious. Some of the experiences I have written about are real, and others made up, but it’s not always straightforward to categorise them. I realise that the quote above about Angela Hoenikker’s clarinet solo is echoed, albeit with less virtuousity, in one of the pamphlets in the first GANTOB book. Did you spot it? Having forgotten most of Cat’s Cradle in the 30 years between first and second reading, I wonder if that scene planted memories that guided my writing in August 2023. Something to think about.

Re-reading Vonnegut’s book, we can also see relevance to contemporary affairs. I don’t know if the Oscars on Sunday (10 March 2024) talked about the impact of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike May to September 2023. Vonnegut asked in Cat’s Cradle in 1963 whether “writers have a right to strike?” And the answer he gave was: “I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed”. How about that for a mission statement? But a sacred duty – like a calling rather than a job or hobby. And beauty and enlightenment for the sake of it, or for recognition and potential immortality? Moses managed the latter, on the page at least.

Also on the consequences of the writers’ strikes, Vonnegut throws in a line that makes me think again of the Covid lockdown: “there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems”.

David Hume (1711-76), a key thinker in the Scottish Enlightenment

And we’re back to that word “apophenia” that Mr Gell introduced to the GANTOBverse in The Magic Number. It’s probably no surprise that a wide-ranging book like Cat’s Cradle, written at a time of major social upheaval, global stress, and the mushrooming cultural invention of the 1960s, appears to be relevant to our times, or any time. Or that there are points in common with a topic that we’re studying (e.g. The Illuminatus! Trilogy or The KLF). That doesn’t mean that there is a direct connection. A golden thread. If you throw in a lot of references, then probability alone is going to mean that some of them strike a chord. I’m going to keep going though.

The following morning we wake with the rising sun. Our bedroom is east facing, and Ali was too tired last night to reconstruct the packing box blackout. His DIY skills do not stretch to practical tasks. I either need curtains or a new husband.

Last night we had a conversation about immortality. When I went out to encourage him inside, stop his racket, and switch off the car lights that he was using to ward off snakes, Ali replied that he was simply “illuminating the Ilmarinen”. He was the “eternal hammerer” from the Finnish epic Kalevala (1835) apparently. This was one of the most recent in the line of immortals – or those seeking immortality – from the myths and sagas around the world.(*)

Detail from Kalevala epic (1835)

Well, we seemed to be safe in our bed last night after all his hammering, and his sculpture is still standing this morning. I want to follow up some leads that have been brewing away overnight after Ali’s immortality thesis. Working backwards – the double-serpented Rod of Asclepius from the Ancient Greeks, with its links to medicine and deferment of death, or at least “withering”. Moses with his brass snake sculpture a few hundred years earlier, and then before that Thoth and the serpents on his staffs in Ancient Egypt. And then a jump back of a thousand years to the epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Mesopotamia, and the plant found at the bottom of the sea that brings the eponymous hero within grasp of immortality, only to be snatched away by a snake. If Mozart or The Beatles queered the pitch for their successors, Gilgamesh fulfilled a similar role for story tellers.

Ali is well versed in immortality given his former calling, before the croft brought a different flock. Pheasants/ sheep/ partridges – take your pick. Now he is promising to protect them and us from poisonous fangs. He has an explanation for his “serpent of brass”, protecting those who have been bitten by a snake. I don’t listen to his theological argument, but given the distance between the croft and Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, or Perth Royal Infirmary to the south, we would have to put our faith in something above prompt access to antivenom. Nobody else on the WhatsApp group thinks that it was an adder. Ali is frustrated that he didn’t have his phone to hand (it was buried under the pile of collapsed boxes).

There are frequent mentions – at least 23 – of immortality in the two Roberts’ The Illuminatus! Trilogy (and undersea scenes for that matter). And it’s a central theme in Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut’s hero John/ Jonah has a thing for the whale shaped Mount McCabe, the highest mountain on the island of San Lorenzo. He hears that nobody has climbed it before, and that there is apparently something sacred about it though the details have been lost. Worried about the encroaching frozen wasteland, he dreams of “climbing Mount McCabe with some magnificent symbol and planting it there”. I won’t spoil the punchline, but it relates to an immortality of sorts. I can’t help think of Bill Drummond and Mark Manning trekking across the North Pole with a statue of Elvis Presley in Bad Wisdom. And I’m left with Ali’s lecture and thoughts on mankind’s attempts at immortality. It always seems to be men. Masters of futility.

To be continued…

Gilian, 12 March 2024

Pamphlet 16 of the #52Pamphlets

(*) There’s more on the link between Drummond and Kalevala here.

I have not included DC and Marvel movies in the list of sagas and epics. Wrong verses.

To submit your idea for a pamphlet please visit the 52 Pamphlets page.

Threads 1 | Threads 2 | Threads 3 | Threads 4 | Threads 5
TEETERING (by GRAHAM)

Mar 10th, 2024

Listen to Graham narrate his piece

TEETERING is the imagined perspective of Bill Drummond in 2024. It is not by Bill Drummond and is not part of his memoir The Life Model (2024).

I wrote these 1,000 words on the day that “I am thirty-two” was published in The Life Model for the first time in its repeating 71-day cycle. The “conscious” section of the chapter was blank. That “text” – TWO BLANK PAGES – remains the official version.

29th of April 1985 to 28th of April 1986

I – the imagined Bill Drummond – have to accept that this particular year involved letting a lot of people down. Perhaps it is therefore not a surprise that my memoir – The Life Model (2024) – ended up with two blank pages for the period in question. I was stuck in the middle with me, between artists and management, family and friends, expectations and deliverables.

The year started with a long and boring meeting at WEA HQ in central London. In A&R I spent a lot of time in committee rooms listening to new management theories from gurus fuelled by the attitudes of Thatcher and Reagan. People with names that I could imagine were directly lifted from The Illuminatus! Trilogy were teaching us to relearn our jobs. Filibuster Monteith from Tucson telling us how to leverage value from our portfolio of artists. Sky Cresthawk from Montana giving a lecture with flipcharts on quality and cost being two sides of the same coin. That, I think, was the proverbial straw. Were you meant to toss the coin to see on which side it landed? Or did she really think that one side of a coin influenced the other? I didn’t get it. I tried to relate it to myself, as is anybody’s wont I suppose. My two faces – the genial one smiling encouragement down on wannabe starlings who had to believe they were going somewhere; and the closed one, a portcullis ready to slam down on the same band’s hopes and dreams.

I was ranting on about Ms Cresthawk while playing a game of shove ha’penny with Martin Glover from Brilliant later that same day. His penny – chosen either in rebellion against the name of the game, or as a marker of the inflation of that year – was dangling precariously on the edge of a table beside a mixing desk. Martin – AKA Youth – was explaining a version of the game that incorporated the rules of rugby, flipping the teetering coin and “converting” it over makeshift goalposts fashioned out of my fingers. I did not hold his public school boy ways against him. I was fascinated by a game that seemed to reward players for taking their money to the absolute brink. I could connect with that.

June, Jimmy and Cressida were sitting smoking on amps in the studio next door. Martin, catching snippets of their conversation, realised that he was potentially missing out on a party and ambled off in their direction, flicking his hair. I leafed through my Filofax trying to look busy and, glimpsing diary pages for that week, I realised that that was not far from the truth. I was meant to be up in Glasgow meeting Jill and Rose from Strawberry Switchblade that very afternoon. I rushed out to catch the tube home, debating whether to drive or catch the train. Inevitably I misjudged, caught for hours in a tailback on the M6 after a major accident. Nul points. I managed to let down both Brilliant and Strawberry Switchblade in a single day, leaving both thinking that I was favouriting the other band.

I had intended to avoid naming people in my memories of that year. Instead, I had planned to capture the proverbial gut punches that I dished out and received in almost equal measure in broad categories of failure. I could not work hard, and be in two places at once, and balance figures, and be a husband and parent all at once. But I cannot recall a period in my life when I failed to achieve this seemingly impossible trick quite so catastrophically. The bands that I had spotted, nurtured, and promised success, did not quite meet my predictions. But I kept pushing, and spending. Invest to save. Gambling with that coin about to plummet from the ledge, falling as heavily as any portcullis on a 1p coin. I have estimated that the losses that I racked up for WEA for Brilliant alone at £500,000. Plugging that figure into an inflation calculator puts it at almost £1,500,000 in today’s money.

But you can’t think that way. A subtly different spin and either band could have gone stratospheric. Pet Shop Boys failed to light up the dance floors with their first version of West End Girls in 1984, but they came back in 1985 with an all new version and in January 1986 they were Number One. Another push, and I could have converted my bands into the success they deserved.

Nonetheless, I feel guilty about Strawberry Switchblade’s chart trajectory. If my subconscious ended the previous year hankering after my own Number Ones, my fully surfaced consciousness in 1985 plotted the decline in chart positions of my erstwhile wards, peaking at numbers 59, 84 and 53 for their three singles that year. If they feel that I deserted them, then they’re probably right.

But I am not going to apologise. The management culture of the time did not allow for contrition. Two-faced Janus looked forwards and backwards. I took a determinedly prospective stance. If a band’s songs all sounded the same, well I had invented a new scene. Push that to the NME. I was like a used car salesman talking up a car’s trickier aspects – an overly enthusiastic brake? Great safety feature. In fact, why talk about failure at all? Just take the money that you would have spent on a band and chuck it to landfill, tip it over a cliff in the boot of a car, burn it all. Cut out the middle eight, whoever – or whatever – they may be.

4 March 2024

I would like to pretend that the rest of this pamphlet was written under GANTOB’s conditions of Kreative Tyranny. I wrote the main bit above after a busy shift, on the evening of publication of the TWO BLANK PAGES for “I am thirty-two” (4 March 2024). I have given myself the duration of Arvo Pärt’s album Te Deum (1993, 66 minutes) to complete this second part(*). I am sticking to a total of 2,200 words with GANTOB’s agreement, to account for the 1,000 already contributed above.

I wrote the subconscious chapter for “I am thirty-one”, and posted about it in the pamphlet CYCLING in the #GANTOB2024 #52Pamphlets series. I wrote my bit for Bill Drummond’s memoir in the third person by mistake. I made sure that I did not repeat that same mistake for this unofficial re-enactment of “I am thirty-two”.

I made another mistake in my contribution to “I am thirty-one”. I wrote the following words: “Sunday 3 March 1985, The Man is making soup, trying not to think about work tomorrow. He is listening to BBC Radio 3, which is playing choral music by an ensemble called The Sixteen. He is not in the mood for their carefully rehearsed polyphony. He switches station, adjusting the aerial.”

I wrote this as a bit of a joke, thinking that I had been original. But the real Bill Drummond had already covered this topic in his book 17 (2008). He wrote (my highlights):

“For many years, decades in fact, I have been drawn to choral music. Any sort, from anywhere in the world, from Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion to those women in Bulgaria… Before my voice broke I was in the school and church choirs” (p25).

And in 2004: “I discovered the Estonian composer [Arvo] Pärt. I fell in love with what he did, especially his choral stuff” (p25).

And “There is a choir from Oxford, England, that specialises in singing what is now called early music, which is music from the 18^th century or earlier. I’m a big fan of this choir. They are called The Sixteen. So maybe I was just subconsciously wanting to be like The Sixteen but trying to go one better” (p27).

And to rub salt into the wound he mentions “Finland’s Shouting Men or the Polyphonic Spree or any other vocal ensemble that might exist in the modern world” (p29), to tick off another word that I used in my piece.

I heard Bill Drummond talk about his book 17 at Waterstone’s, Princes Street, Edinburgh in 2008. Perhaps he read this section, and my subconscious had stored it up to regurgitate it slightly shuffled around in late 2022, in my attempt at imagining his reactions in 1985. I was almost certainly incorrect when I predicted that The Iconoclast or any other part of The Man would have lashed out against polished choral music. But the “years, decades in fact” makes it seem likely that even at 31 years old Drummond was a fan of choral music. At least I had done some research – The Sixteen were formed in 1979, with regular releases and performances, so were quite likely played on the radio. Sounds as if our imagined Bill Drummond would have left it playing though. Hopefully by writing this down in black and white it corrects my inaccurate predictions. Before I move on to my next point, I should highlight that Polyphonic Spree are not a classical choral act. Try The Sixteen or Arvo Pärt’s music instead. I can recommend Te Deum.

Drummond also noted his love of choral music by William Byrd (1543-1623) and Thomas Tallis (1505-85) in a 2012 piece for The Quietus. Steve Reich (b1936) and Henryk Górecki (1933-2010) also got a mention. Going by their ages it looks as if choral arranging is good for your health. Like Drummond, I sang in school and church choirs as a child. Dunfermline Abbey had a very active choir, led by a choir master raised in the Anglican tradition. As a result we did a lot of Byrd and psalms, the final chord of each piece floating around the abbey’s nave for seconds after we stopped singing, highlighting our successes or flaws. Luckily for everyone else, I no longer sing.

Before we move off the topic of music in Drummond’s books, I want to mention another 2012 book – Ragworts. This is set in Forgemasters, Sheffield, in a connection to Drummond’s teenage years in another steel town – Corby. Towards the end of Ragworts he mentions inviting Forgemasters’ boss Graham Honeyman to play his saxophone alongside the industrial noises of the plant. In Sheffield Score Five (Seventeen Deep Breaths) Drummond writes: “Take a deep breath/ Blow a long low note on your horn/ A note you imagine to be in harmony/ With the noises around you”. The saxophone. A connection back to Gillian’s Reeds and Rushes in her Threads series. Drummond also reminds us of “a tradition in previous times for composers to compromise their craft by creating works that would include the musical aspirations of their patrons”. I would not attempt to direct that at The Benefaktor – the patron of GANTOB (the project). I do not know enough about his intentions, but it is an important warning about vested interests in general.

In my piece TEETERING, Sky Cresthawk argues that quality and cost are two sides of the same coin. This was intended as a reference to business management practices. But it could equally apply to quality of life and public investment in the arts. I should say at this point that, as a father of three, I have seen the powerful effects of universally-accessible, publicly-funded music programmes first hand. They foster cooperation, collaboration and socialising between schools across the region, and often provide children with their first opportunity to hear and perform a wide range of music to an audience of family, friends and peers.

In his book 100 (2012) Bill Drummond writes: “I am fundamentally opposed to funded art. That said, I have been funded to do certain things in the past by funded organisations, and I am sure I will again in the future”) (p71). It scarcely needs said that Drummond has a slippery relationship with cash, from the K Foundation with their £1m, to his $20,000 Richard Long photo. I wonder what his position on public funding of the arts would be now, after 12 further years of austerity and worsening inequalities across the UK. The devastating cuts being implemented to arts programmes, libraries and other essential services across the UK – for example those announced recently in Birmingham – will have a very major impact on life and opportunities in these areas for many years to come. We just have to look at the impact of removing culture, socialising and learning over the period of the pandemic lockdowns to find evidence of that.

We need a flourishing creative arts sector for people of all ages. Children are arguably the most vulnerable to cuts though. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child supports the right “to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts”. We can see the clear benefits on child development and future prospects with programmes such as Sistema Big Noise. Without ready access to orchestras, choirs, theatres, and the visual arts our communities are incomplete. Creative arts make a huge positive contribution to the country’s economy, and also on health and wellbeing at an individual and community level.

The next generation of musicians, performers and artists will not just appear. It will need nurturing. Secure funding is an important part of that. Not a toss of a coin.

Graham

10 March 2024

Pamphlet 15 of the #52Pamphlets

A contribution to the 9 Missing Years project

#GANTOB2024

Send in your idea for a pamphlet here.

(*) In reality it took two spins of that album.
WAM (SIC) BAM THANK YOU MA’AM (AKA THREADS part 3) (by GILLIAN)

Mar 9th, 2024

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 S a loon (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.

Back cover of Penguin Modern Classics edition of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle

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
REEDS AND RUSHES (AKA THREADS part 2) (by GILLIAN)

Mar 8th, 2024

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
CYCLING (by GRAHAM)

Mar 5th, 2024

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?
ESEMPLASTIC (THREADS part 1) (by GILLIAN)

Mar 3rd, 2024

Last night, following agreement with The Photographer and the Edinburgh branch of the GANTOB team, 10 numbered and signed copies of The Photographer’s Edinburgh-based booklet “6 Times” were distributed to 5 independent bookshops in North Edinburgh. These were disseminated by the food and literature delivery rider. Previously his work for GANTOB has been to deliver parcels to specific individuals who were expecting the items (e.g. a copy of the first book to people who had sent a question to be answered in that book).

Last night, however, our faithful rider described the process of delivering unexpected pamphlets to shops under the cover of night as equivalent to “literary cold calling” or “backwards burglary”. In the latter term, we can hear clear echoes of Missi Formation’s description of pamphlet drops in Little Free Libraries and charity shops last August, in an effort to promote the original Kompetition, as akin to “reverse shoplifting”. GANTOB (the project) is meant to make you feel a bit awkward or edgy. If you received a copy of The Photographer’s booklet through these efforts, please get in touch through the usual channels, perhaps mentioning the bookshop and your response to the booklet.

WARNING: Not all that you will read below is true. Some of it is misdirection, elaboration or confabulation to put certain individuals off the trail. GANTOB is, and must remain, an anonymous project.

Cover photo credit is to The Photographer. Unicorn tapestry photo is from Wikipedia.

I handed over the baton of the week-to-week running of the 52 Pamphlets project a couple of weeks ago. There is a new GANTOB (the person). GANTOB3. I cannot go into details of the numbering, and do not know the name of my replacement, only their personal email address, which gives no clue to their identity. I can say that, after local advertising, the heart of the project remains in Badenoch. I had a lot of materials to hand over. It made sense to do it in person. I deposited my box of GANTOB paraphernalia at the bus shelter along from the Highland Wildlife Park, tucked into a corner against the wall, safely under cover. I remained close by, parked in a layby concealed by trees, lights off, until I received the message that it had been safely retrieved.

This means that the only consistent participant in the GANTOB project since August 2023 is The Benefaktor. Please don’t hold that against the project. He is not a “golden thread”. But more on that later.

I am now simply Gillian. I will continue to contribute, but as writer rather than project manager. I don’t think that I need to justify myself or apologise. I remain the founder of GANTOB, and am proud of everything that we – the GANTOB committees, GANTOBers – have achieved since July 2023.

My paid work is settling into a routine, in the job I started at the end of 2023. I am coping reasonably well with doing my telesales calls from the croft (I am dropping the “K”s; I am leaving stress behind). I never work beyond my hours and I’m hitting my targets. But that honest toil doesn’t define me.

Beyond work I have been feeling increasingly restless over the past few weeks. It must be the approaching spring. Even in the Scottish Highlands it arrives eventually. Snowdrops droop their heads in the eddies of wind around the base of our solitary tree. I didn’t know where to expect them in our new place. I can walk outside without a torch until after 6PM. And I feel the creative juices stirring.

I have been drawn increasingly outside the KLF’s sphere. Stuart Huggett started it, in his piece The Gate is Open. And then Urs’ pamphlet Hawthorny. Both pointed me towards William Blake. And in subsequent emails, Stuart directed me to John Higgs’ books on the subject, and beyond. I read Higgs’ 2019 book William Blake Now (Why He Matters More Than Ever) in an afternoon a couple of weeks ago, between chores. It fired me up. As my family frequently remind me, my creative ambitions are not borne out by my grades in my final year at school in the late 1980s. But that was through lack of trying, or immaturity. I found the books we were reading uninspiring. Why couldn’t we read more contemporary books, like Barry Hine’s Kes (1968) or JL Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) – two of the only course books that I enjoyed reading at school? I couldn’t be bothered with Jane Eyre, Shakespeare or Dickens at that age. Now, in my 50s, I’m keen to learn, but on topics of my own choosing.

Higgs’ explanation of the problems Blake experienced in his life, and his current relevance, lifts a veil, particularly the chapter “Once Only Imagin’d”. Moving quickly from Blake to Albert Einstein and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Higgs provides a compelling explanation for the difference between reason, imagination and fantasy, finishing with the Coleridge coined term “esemplastic”. This is the process in which “separate elements are combined to create something entirely original”. Fantasy is a “collage” of existing elements, but without changing them (he uses the idea of a unicorn, which can be understood as a combination of horn and a horse). Imagination moves us on to new intellectual terrain; it is required when we need to “go outside of established reason in order to find answers”. It’s a slippery concept, but I like it and I’m going to try to live by it. I am considering sending Higgs this pamphlet when it’s finished, to see if he will write a response.

I jotted down some notes while reading Higgs’ book. Golden string (p7), golden thread (p8 and p62), “a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying” (p19), duality (p23), the constructive and collaborative joy of playing a musical instrument (p34), previous Bill Drummond collaborator Neal Brown* (p39), Paul McCartney and Ginsberg (p51), “the competitive, antagonistic and obviously wrong view of the world… being nurtured in exclusive private schools” (p64), the recent failures of British politics (p65), the need for a new Beatles to save us (p67), hopefully without ditching the old Beatles. There is so much that I can relate to here, as evidenced in the first two GANTOB books, but also things that I have stored in my head for further exploration in the GANTOBverse. A cornucopia; a horn of plenty. Not attached to a horse. I kick the ideas around in my head for a day and then sit down to write because it’s still raining outside. I am hoping to create something new.

I have thought frequently in the past about Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 book Cat’s Cradle. It’s been almost 30 years since I read it, sitting in a plane on my way to America for the first time, October 1994. I have not read it since, and no longer have a copy. But my takeaway at the time was of the strands that appear to connect some of us. That even in chance encounters separated by many years we can take up where we left off, comfortable, content to make each other’s acquaintance again. And how with some other people – even perhaps those with whom we might appear to have a lot in common – there appears to be no route in, and we are left feeling ill at ease in their company. I may have misremembered this aspect of the book, but I won’t let that hold me back. I can group some of the GANTOBers into the former category. Many of my regular correspondents catalyse ideas and avenues for further exploration when they get in touch. I don’t think that Urs would mind if I said that she is more in the second category, even though we have a shared “interest” in The Benefaktor. Not a love interest for either of us.

I have mentioned Cat’s Cradle to various people over the years. Googling the book now I cannot see any mention of these points about connection, or its absence. There is a lot of detail about plot and characters. Sounds very complicated. In fact, in its setting and some of the themes, it makes me think of the island setting of parts of The JAMs’ 2017 book 2023: A trilogy. But with Vonnegut’s fictional island (San Lorenzo) off the north east coast of South America, and The JAMs’ Fernando Po off Equatorial Guinea on the west coast of Africa. Reading about it with fresh eyes, I see that Fernando Po is a direct lift from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s book The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1984). Both Cat’s Cradle and the two Roberts’ Trilogy have the nuclear threat of the Cold War looking over them. And the secret religion in Cat’s Cradle – Bokononism – is curiously close to the island of Fernando Po’s current name – Bioko (since 1979). Is this “apophenia”, as I learnt from Andy Gell’s pamphlet (under the pseudonym Capt. Apophenia), or intentional on the part of the two Roberts? Certainly there is reference to another Vonnegut book (Slaughterhouse-Five) throughout their trilogy. “So it goes”, as they say in both books.

Golden Threads. Credit: The Photographer

I am left haunted by the idea of metaphorical strings connecting some people – and ideas – but not others, like the childhood game of cat’s cradle. Threads. Not the BBC drama on nuclear holocaust (1984), which I am surprised to see is also by Barry Hines. No, I’m thinking about William Blake’s golden string, and where that might take us. Not to wind into a ball to lead to Heaven’s gate as Blake writes (and not the gate that Stuart mentioned in his pamphlet). Instead I’m remembering the golden thread from my project management days before I ditched that job to have my kids. The path that leads you from cause to effect, that allows everybody to understand what the project (or organisation) is doing and what it’s for. I can’t find a reference that tells us who first proposed the term golden thread, and how it’s become so widely adopted. I see a government report from 2018 – a response to the Grenfell Tower – that claims the concept for its own, but I know that it was really introduced decades before. And I’m left trying to remember what Higgs wrote about another tower block in London, though in a different borough – William Blake House.

I have handed over the reins of GANTOB to GANTOB3. The first two months, the majority of which was under my steerage, have seen something of a connection in the pamphlets, even with Urs. And recently Mr Gell’s trilogy introduced me to enough of the two Roberts to see a connection with this pamphlet’s themes. GANTOB3 will need to do some sort of project management, even if it’s not the kind you learn through formal training. The idea of a golden thread is quite an intuitive concept. No need for PRINCE2 methodology, or whatever they teach now.

And I want to end this pamphlet with a note on synaesthesia, a neurological condition that affected Blake. In his recent pamphlet, The Benefaktor mentioned that Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, had this condition. He saw music in colours. I wonder what it would take to see his vision by listening to his music. Has anybody cracked the code? There are lots of different types of synesthetes, who may, for example, taste words or link colours to the days of the week. Flicking through the index to John Higgs’ second Blake book (2021) this week I spotted a section on synaesthesia. Apparently Billy Joel is a synesthete. “And so it goes”, as he once sang. I reach for my phone to order Cat’s Cradle from the Highland Council mobile library.(+)

Gillian, 3 March 2024

Inspired? To contribute a pamphlet please visit gantob.com/pamphlet

#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 11 of the #52Pamphlets

* Mentioned in Penkiln Burn pamphlet 22 “Roll over Jenny Holzer”

+ Artistic license is at play here. The van’s schedules and library stocks meant that I would have had to wait a couple of months for the book. I have relied instead on World of Books. To be continued in THREADS part 2 (once I have read Vonnegut’s book again, made notes, and had a bit of time to consider what I have learnt in the process).
PILES (by KATIE)

Mar 2nd, 2024

This blog is contributed by – by my reckoning at least – the youngest of the GANTOB collaborators.

Katie submitted it to me three weeks ago, since when I have been exploring, GANTOB style, the possibility of recruiting experts in the topics to answer some of the questions that have emerged. So far I have not had success on this particular topic. But as The Tillerman once said, in a slightly different order:

“GANTOB was relentless

GANTOB was exhausting

GANTOB became an inspiration”

That’s me.

We have two strands at play in the 52 Pamphlets project at the moment.

One is a golden thread of ideas and inspirations that seems to be weaving its way from William Blake to American counterculture in the 1960s, and then a couple of other destinations, before attempting to explain some outstanding mysteries in the world of K.

The other strand is an interest in the mechanisms behind generating and disseminating ideas, particularly in the form of pamphlets. Katie’s piece is very much in this category, and therefore most welcome in providing balance to the blog. And she does, of course, by nature of her relationship to the funder of GANTOB, have some particular insights that we probably wouldn’t hear from anybody else.

Last summer there were lots of GANTOB pamphlets disseminated across the UK, with the aim of promoting the original Kompetition. Over the winter – and with my change in job from travelling salesperson to telesales operator – the approach has shifted online, with blogs and electronic dissemination of longer pieces – what we’re calling pamphlets, but are really just 0s and 1s in the digital realm. With the peak of the spring bulbs upon us and lengthening days extending our range outdoors I think that we’re ready to return to a more physical approach.

So I am excited to say that 10 copies of The Photographer’s piece 6 Times, uploaded to the blog yesterday, have been printed in a booklet and are being disseminated overnight to selected independent bookshops in north Edinburgh. These will be delivered by the food and literature delivery rider who has worked shifts for the project at various stages. I have no idea what the bookshops will make of the pamphlet/ booklet. Perhaps they will recycle them. But hopefully they will place them on the counter ready to be picked up. GANTOB (the project) thrives on collaboration, and some new participants recruited through these booklets would hopefully take the 52 Pamphlets book (published January 2025) in new directions.

Over to you Katie, or should I say “The Foundation Doktor”.

I leave the hospital on time for once, and hunt down a bus from the strip of stops strategically placed between car parks. No bike for me tonight. Some idiot has locked their frame onto mine at the bike shelter. I refrained from retaliating by locking mine onto his. Has to be a bloke.

I catch the next bus into central Edinburgh and walk down the cobbled streets to my grandparents’ flat. There is still some light in the sky as I take the shortcut along Saxe Coburg Street towards Stockbridge. I can hear the cats before I open the door into the lobby. They are standing on hind legs, crying behind the inner glass door, furious. They are hours late for their evening feed. I shut the front door, securing the airlock between their world and outside. They force me to dish out their dry food before I can start on the errand that my grandfather had tasked me with.

“To The Foundation Doktor,” the diktat started, “we are going to be away for a few weeks, on ‘kultural activities’. Please could you flat/cat sit? It will be a great opportunity for you to stretch out after the constraints of your digs. I wonder if you could also help with a projekt that I am exploring for a GANTOB pamphlet. I’ve left everything you need beside my desk. A few leads. The cats need 23 grammes of salmon pellets in the morning, and the same amount of chicken at night. And the usual business with the litter tray. Gratefully yours, The Benefaktor”.

And a few minutes later, from my granny Urs: “Thanks for doing this. Don’t forget to top up the water every day. Have a few friends round if you like, but don’t go wild”.

What do they think I do all day? I have another set of 12.5 hour night shifts coming up. I would much rather roll out of bed in the hospital accommodation and toddle along to the wards than have to bus or cycle all the way to the other side of town. And I have a couple of weekends away planned. I called my granny, but they were off already, heading to an undisclosed location in Europe. “I’m sure it’ll be fine dear. Must go.”

I locate the extra key that my grandfather keeps in a freezer bag in the coffee beans at the bottom of the chest freezer and let myself into his study (“The Kino”). I have rarely been inside. Recently it’s only been for GANTOB discussions, until Urs was inducted into the secret after asking about the grapefruit logo that turns up whenever we are logged into the shared GANTOB accounts on our phones. The desk is situated between bookcases of film reels and boxed papers. The blinds are drawn to protect the paintings and spines of the books on the wall behind me from the afternoon sun. No risk of that in February.

There are piles either side of the desk, others spilling out of the in tray onto the desk, and even some propped up papers on his revolving chair. What a mess. He’s obviously been flat out on one of his hare-brained schemes. I check the spelling (hare or hair?) and the definitions: “ill judged”. Is that a fair criticism, after everything that I’ve done to enable him? Probably.

I skate over the books. They look heavy (topic wise). The FT and Guardian piles are precarious, so I ignore them. I sit down with the top few issues of London Review of Books. Not the sealed ones, some going back years, in white envelopes or recyclable wrappers. There’s a reasonably recent one – 30 November 2023, and it’s opened to page 22-23: “A National Evil”. On the surface, it’s a medical piece. Quite interesting really, about iodine deficiency and supplementing salt in Swiss cantons. But I’m not at work, and I’ve done enough revising recently for Membership exams. But there is also a lot of social commentary and cultural interest. It’s clearly caught my grandfather’s attention. There’s a little yellow sticky marker beside a paragraph on the first page. It’s about a GP called Heinrich Hunziker: “Hunziker was also a poet, who wrote short, formally precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes”. The yellow arrow points at the last two words. “Pamphlets? Must get” is written in The Benefaktor’s distinctive back slanting capitals. On a Post-It note he has listed a few titles and prices, from Abebooks and a couple of Swiss and German bookshop websites. I wouldn’t put it past him. Searching them out on my phone I reckon that some of the titles are by the wrong Hunziker, and others are too late to count as his early slim volumes. Hunziker, born 1879, died 1982. Jonah Goodman in The LRB is writing about the 1910s. But the relatively easy to find Die Idylle vom Holz that The Benefaktor has listed is from 1951. We need to rewind 40 years. I poke around a bit on a few websites, but there are too many false leads, and I don’t speak German unfortunately. I wonder what he’s looking for, but I know that he loves a bit of intrigue. “Revelation”. That would be enough of a catalyst. I wonder if this is something that the libraries he frequents could help with. But perhaps it’s tricky if it’s in German. And what role did pamphlets have in Hunziker’s medical work, persuading Swiss politicians that a centuries old problem affecting hundreds of babies every year had a quick fix?

I wonder if that’s everything that my grandfather is looking at. “A few leads”. Well, I’ve hit a brick wall with this article so I turn on a few pages. Quite a few pages. These are long articles! There are no further handwritten notes about Hunziker. But the next article, “How to Plan an Insurrection”, has more of the neon stickies. A piece by Niamh Gallagher on James Connolly, Scottish revolutionary, born to Irish parents, grew up in Cowgate, Edinburgh, executed in 1916 following the Easter Rising. My grandfather has marked out the following section: “and like many of the Scottish socialist activists of his generation, he was a prolific journalist, producing pamphlets and essays…”. And there is another list of references that he has tracked down from an internet search presumably. This is well outside the comfort zone of GANTOB and her art project. From what I can see from a quick internet search, the text of at least some of these pamphlets is collected in various books. But if I know The Benefaktor he will be seeking out originals, or finding out what became of them.

“Legacy”. When you’re 83 years old (like a lot of my patients) many people give up any interest in that word. They’re caught up in their own issues, where they’re going to live, wondering when their family are going to visit. Not The Benefaktor. He is caught up in his projects (and projekts). Have his cultural investments allowed others to get their message out there? Is his name in the programme, the sleeve notes, the credits? (In kontrast, he keeps his name out of GANTOB’s kultural aktivities to avoid kross kontamination).

So, what is he planning? I think back to regular GANTOBer Missi Formation and her request to hear less of The Benefaktor. But also her claim to be an anarchist and her goading about the cosiness of some of the December 2023 posts on the GANTOB blog. And recalling the “Welcome to the Dark Ages” stuff from Capt. Apophenia’s recent pamphlet “The Magic Number” I remember that revolution was in the air in The JAMs’ book 2023 (which I still haven’t finished). But that is not what GANTOB (the projekt) is about. Then again, some of the advice in the first GANTOB book was pretty edgy. There were quotes on Death, War, Protest. A picture of a burning figure on a bridge. But surely The Benefaktor is not planning to break out, foment riots. There’s an Alan Moore quote in one of the chapters: “Don’t leave home without your sword – your intellect.” No, I cannot accept that The Benefaktor is planning anything more than writing about these subjects.

I’m exhausted after all this reading and searching. Violence is not my thing, even on TV. I log on to Netflix on my laptop and flick through the list of romcoms that are suggested. It knows me too well. But there’s nothing that appeals. I am unsettled. I head to bed and scroll through dozens of posts about kittens, and puppies, the Japanese macaque that had just been recovered near the Highland Wildlife Park in Badenoch, another about a fugitive raccoon in Sunderland. That’s more like it.

That night, sleeping in my grandparents’ spare room, I dream of towers. I’m surrounded, speeding through a city, but viewing it from above like a computer game or drone. At first I think it’s New York, from the height of the buildings and density of the streets. But then I realise that it’s George IV Bridge, looking down onto the Cowgate. Layer upon layer of windows, families, lives. But something is different. Gas lamps on the streets. Candles in windows. And a glimpse of a figure bent over books scribbling ideas for pamphlets. I detect an urgency, a clear sense of purpose. Did pamphlets ever change the world, in Switzerland, Scotland or anywhere else, and how would we know? And I suspect that is the task that The Benefaktor has set us. Submit your responses to this question, in the form of a pamphlet, via gantob.blog/pamphlet

Katie, uploaded 2/3/2024

Number 10 in the #52Pamphlets
6 TIMES (by THE PHOTOGRAPHER)

Mar 1st, 2024

I was sent a draft pamphlet by an acquaintance of The Benefaktor – The Photographer – a couple of days ago. It was called “Surfacing”. It came in at 1600 words. I liked the general thrust of the piece, but felt that it needed some development. The Photographer replied this morning with this extended piece with its new title. It is, in effect, a triple pamphlet – 3 x 800 words. It is not a trilogy. It is a single piece. And it is one of several that were battling for pole position for this weekend’s slot. All have some time pressure, either because of the specific date, the changing season, the originality of the ideas, or the knowledge that a deadline can help some people fulfil their commitments. I have therefore made the decision – for now – to issue pamphlets more regularly than once a week. Watch the blog for more – and subscribe to receive email updates. If the plan works we may have 52 pamphlets in time for The Battle of Perth (in Stirling), 27 August 2024, but that is perhaps a tall order. We’ll see.

I have issued this in a printed edition of one to The Photographer as a booklet. Not quite the RLS or Welsh volumes, but quite a handsome volume nonetheless.

Feel free to re-enact it if you wish – either word-for-word, picture-by-picture, printing it out as a foldable volume, as I believe some may be attempting with Bill Drummond’s spoken word novels. (If you do recreate The Photographer’s piece as a booklet please send me a copy and I will link to it here. It will need to be in A5 booklet format). Or write your own travelogue of your life and travels and submit it as a pamphlet to 100percentvinyl2@gmail.com as part of the 52 Pamphlets. Or just simply enjoy The Photographer’s response to what sounds like a rather eventful few days.

Meanwhile, I’m off to contact the Scottish Poetry Library to see if I can find out more about the poem The Auld Warld is by wi by Scottish poet George Bruce (1909-2002). See The Photographer’s pictures of doors to see why.

6 Times (by THE PHOTOGRAPHER)

I wait, leaning against the railing looking out over the ruined wharf. I try not to see a message in the rotting struts, like teeth between the collapsed beams. Birthdays have been a sensitive topic since I was ejected by my first wife, landing at the feet of my younger second. As of today, the current model (version three) is no longer half my age, which is a relief perhaps, but at one point would have been a prompt. I remind myself that octogenarians cannot afford itchy feet.

We had been heading to “b-day drinkies” at the top of a vertical distillery. There is a lot of tongue biting with a younger wife. B-day drinkies indeed. The plan had been whisky for me, gin for her. I had even anticipated her request for cocktails and had rehearsed a suitable request – “a Manhattan, please”. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for an Old Fashioned. But we didn’t get that far. The smooth motion of the lift to the top floor, with the parallax of the Edinburgh skyline, sparked off a nausea in her that quickly tipped to retching. After she had spent a few minutes in the toilet we returned to the lift and she managed down to ground level safely with eyes closed. And now she is recovering at my side, a shade or two off aquamarine. If my suspicions are borne out – I have experience here, trust me – I will not mention how many children this will make for me. Straying into Boris Johnson territory, though not the politics.

I cancel the reservation, and flick around the venue’s website for a couple of minutes. I have done the tours of the Spey and island distilleries over the years – the carbon copy talks about the purity of the water, or the trading with local landowners for rights of access to a private loch. Situated at the mouth of the Water of Leith as it enters the Forth estuary I wonder how this place sources its principal ingredient. An aquifer 120m below the ground apparently. I imagine water coursing from the Pentland Hills down to the coast on a smooth layer of rock, landing magically at this precise spot. What are the chances of that? I know not to trouble Veronika with these details. She is still looking hellish.

The view across the docks is picked out in the sunlight of late afternoon. Huge ships with winches and helipads to the right, Britannia to the left, and the dilapidated wharf dead ahead. Blocks of space rocket shaped flats in the middle distance, and beyond that the Lothian and Fife coastlines tapering towards the bridgehead. It really is a beautiful evening. Seagulls preen, enjoying the sun. And a couple of cormorants taking their turn to lift their wings to prayer. I zoom in on my phone camera but it doesn’t do them justice. I take one of the weird fish angle photos that the phone suggests and pop it away. There is romance here. Not that you would know it. V is leaning over the railing making noises that are mimicked by the herring gulls. The tourists are giving us a wide berth.

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure I

Romance. I wonder what RLS – if that three letter acronym is not too familiar for the great man – would make of his beloved Water of Leith now. I am transported back to Christmas many decades ago, visiting my parents, and receiving a second-hand copy of Stevenson’s book Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878). A brilliant present. Much of what he was describing was already old, but there was plenty to learn about our current environs. And here we are, standing on land reclaimed since my childhood, with a shopping centre behind us built at the turn of the millennium, a large part of which is about to be demolished. The world does seem to be accelerating towards some unprecedented endpoint. Or maybe it’s just the usual destination, which is a surprise for each of us when it comes.

The sun is edging over the horizon now, the top rim just visible. We would still have some time to take in a few of the sights if V would just sort herself out. I make some tentative enquiries. She wants to take it easy, appreciate the view, take in the sea air. She comments on a figure at the end of the wharf. I cannot make it out. She is a step ahead. “It’s a Gormley I think”. I nod noncommittally. Cataracts are holding me back in this conversation. I just see glare and shadow.

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure II

I should explain at this point that I have been known as The Photographer since school days. My acquaintances tagged me as such because of my chosen Friday afternoon “society”. All the boys were encouraged to join extracurricular activities, with the promise of a “societies supper” of battered haddock and chips followed by cake and custard of a matching colour each week. My “football friends” (as I believe The Philatelist christened us in the second book) were all off in musical ensembles, but I am tone deaf. Worried about missing out, I chose discussions about SLRs and dark rooms instead – for seven years. I would sit quietly at the back, comfortably full after the best meal of the week. I don’t think that I spoke once in all my attendances at the society. I take photos, for sure. But they’re not professional. I’ve never owned an SLR or even understood the settings on my phone camera. I have a standalone digital camera as well, but the settings are clicked to “Superior Auto” rather than doing anything clever of my own. But “The Photographer” nickname stuck. Could have been much worse I suppose.

The following morning, after dropping V off at her work, I return to the wharf with my digital camera. The optical and digital zoom do their work and I have a reasonable view of a Gormley sculpture part splatted with guano. I am aware of at least one other Gormley in the Water of Leith – it’s a hinged affair that bends over when the water is high. I check Google for an explanation and up comes details of a six sculpture work: 6 Times. They’re all within a manageable distance if I cycle. I pop home to pick up some waterproofs and head round the north Edinburgh cycle path.

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure III

As I pedal, I am transported back to my school days. Passing underneath Wardie Road I can see evidence of the former railway platform and signal in the undergrowth. When we were kids this used to be our starting off point for trips into town or along to Leith. How quickly things change. Who would have thought that the tracks and trains would all now be dismantled, with trees full of blossom in place of billowing steam. At least their drivers didn’t have to dodge dogs, children and grown adults peering into phones or having conversations into thin air. I proceed carefully, squinting through the filters of my cycling glasses in the stop-start shadow-sun. I recall a trip that The Benefaktor, The Ornithologist, The Philatelist and I took from this very spot in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The others were lugging instruments and stands to one of the Leith venues. I was along for the ride, with nothing better to do. The Philatelist was writing out a speech on a scrap of paper balanced on his knee. I can’t remember the details, except that he was always writing or had his head in a book. And with this memory I resolve to write down my current trip as a travelogue through north Edinburgh, as my first written contribution to the GANTOB project. The Benefaktor has promised that he will give me a copy of the second book in return. I want to see what The Philatelist has written in his chapters (they’re not available on the blog). His recent postcards have been no help, except to reveal that he’s no longer in Europe. In the past few weeks he’s been in Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi. There’s a pattern there, beyond just the decreasing order of population. Where next? Sialkot?

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure IV

Cycling further along, past Trinity, Ferryfield, through Pilton, I recall a series of walks that the four of us took near here back in the 1990s, an Irvine Welsh guide tucked under The Benefaktor’s arm: A Visitor’s Guide to Edinburgh (1995) co-written with Kevin Williamson, published by Rebel Inc.* The Benefaktor led the way, stopping outside a “sauna”, getting chucked out of a pub after asking if the TV could be turned off, and missing the opening hours of a fruit and veg shop not far from the red bridge I’ve just crossed. This was part of an in-joke, revisiting some of the infamous scenes from Irvine’s book. His most well-known books – Trainspotting and Porno – despite their periodic hilarity, marked a time when Edinburgh was one of the (injecting) heroin and HIV hotspots of the world, with some areas of north Edinburgh particularly badly affected. The lost generation. In 1994 we had seen Welsh’s Trainspotting on stage at The Traverse theatre**. We imagined ourselves living the parts of the characters. Renton (originally Ewan Bremner in the stage play, replaced by Ewan McGregor for the 1996 film), was The Philatelist. I was Spud (played by Bremner in the film). Sick Boy was The Ornithologist. And The Benefaktor was Begbie. We stayed in character throughout the walk. Privileged men in our 50s, older than the actors, even when they reappeared in Trainspotting T2 in 2017. We knew we were ridiculous. But we loved seeing Edinburgh on the page and the big screen. The Benefaktor’s “Begbie” went too far in our re-enactment, as my tongue reminds me now, excavating a gap in my lower incisors.

And I’m almost there. The long drag up to Ravelston Dykes, and then onto to the road for a short stretch to reach the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One and Modern Two. There’s half a Gormley in the pavement between them. A trip hazard I’d say. I park my bike and head down the steps behind Modern One. There’s another Gormley, standing in the water, above a more turbulent stretch of river. He’s not fishing I decide. He’s sunbathing, head inclined upwards slightly. He could almost be worshipping a sun god, though with hands by his side. I can imagine him rotating on the spot to mark the time of day, but suspect that is not the case. Water would get in the electrics, or somebody would need to wind the mechanism regularly. You can’t beat the force of nature. Branches have collected at his base. But it’s a calm day and he’s in still waters. You can make out his private parts and rivet-like nipples in the reflection. I can imagine how we would have sniggered at that 75 years ago.

I head back up the steps, stop for a scone and a mug of soup in the gallery cafe, and pick up my bike. I dismount and push down a stretch towards the next Gormley (luckily that section of walkway has reopened after years of repairs following a landslide), past Dean Village and St Bernard’s Well. I well recall walking this specific stretch with my son after he had passed his final school exams, retracing the steps I had taken with my mother when I was at the same stage, ready to go to university and start a new life. I can put myself right back in both pairs of shoes. The sense of achievement mingling with the excitement and fear of unchartered waters, and on both occasions the summer sun penetrating the dense canopy, dappling the river and path with an optimistic glow. Not a leaf to be seen at the moment however. And it’s chilly.

The next Gormley is under Stockbridge – the actual bridge – which I was once told is the shortest street in Edinburgh. I can imagine RLS (1850-94) standing on this very spot 150 years ago, and wonder how much has changed looking upriver. The blocks of flats on the left obviously, but not the Georgian houses (including some previously of ill repute) on the right. Downstream is different – a lot of flood defences and raised walkways would have been unfamiliar to the famous son of the lighthouse family. Past a series of doors (but not green doors) and portals that I’d love to see through, Wallace style.

The flood defence gates picturing swans features a quote by George Bruce and art by Gregg Magee.

And then we’re on to two “decorated” Gormleys. One in a football strip near the site of the old greyhound racetrack. I almost fall into the water in an attempt to capture a better picture against the setting sun, skidding to a stop in the wild garlic that is about to flower. (I notice the rivets on the buttocks when selecting the photos to accompany this piece – I imagine the snigger, this time from TV characters I hear my grandchildren talking about). And another in a Christmas hat beside a raised metal walkway. GANTOB tells me that she has shared some of these photos with a GANTOB correspondent – JR – who wrote about Gormley in the second GANTOB book. I ask that it is made clear to JR that I was not the comedian/ vandal making these additions.

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure V

I stop off to admire the goosanders that seem to have set up home on the bend between The Quilts and West Bowling Green Street, the occupations and recreations of the past marked out in street names rather than the architecture or green space. (I read about “back green concerts” in the early 1950s when I look up the story behind the names, but have not been able to find out more). When this waterway was an industrial hub it would not have sustained such flora and fauna. The tufty headed, sharp beaked birds are having a great time with their duck and coot cousins, and a couple of swans. I think back to a walk with The Ornithologist, to explore the new cycle pathways that have made whole stretches of the river accessible, when he pointed out that the goosanders were not the grebes I had thought. I’m a late learner. And then I’m back where we started, at the mouth of the Water of Leith and the last Gormley.

Antony Gormley’s 6 Times Figure VI

I still cannot imagine the aquifer. But I’ve visited 6 Times of my own along the river, walking, cycling and slipping close to the banks, memories surfacing at each turn. I cannot do them justice with Veronika. She hasn’t lived through the first half of my life. That bit of me is a mystery to her, like the half Gormley that may or may not lurk under the asphalt outside Modern One. So I have written them down instead, in case they connect with you. These are my picturesque notes. My visitor’s guide. I’d better get back now. I’ve promised to pick V up and I mustn’t be late.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER 1 March 2024

#GANTOB2024 pamphlet 9 of the #52Pamphlets

The Photographer’s photo of a goosander (Mergus merganser), authenticated by The Ornithologist. GANTOB3 apologises for not including this in the first version of this blog.

GANTOB3 notes, consulting Google, Facebook KLF fanpages, and the database of materials handed over to her by GANTOB:

* In passing, I note that Williamson went on to co-found Neu! Reekie! with Michael Pederson in 2010, publishing a couple of Bill Drummond poems in #UntitledThree (2020), and hosting a Drummond painting “Bill Loves Elvis” in June 2021 with accompanying Penkiln Burn pamphlet – Two (PB pamphlet 33). One of the Drummond plays in #UntitledThree is called Life Model. Drummond’s memoir, which is being published in daily instalments at the moment, is called The Life Model. Today’s “Over” chapter is by Ali Flind (one of 168 different contributors to the “book”), and starts with an RLS quote. Coincidence? Or Apophenia? It’s why I felt that we needed to publish this pamphlet today.

** The Traverse also features in GANTOB’s pamphlet The Gap, a handwritten copy of which was handed to Bill Drummond by GANTOB in December 2023, edited and re-sent electronically [PDF] a few days later, and perhaps resulted in the Bill Drummond contribution to the second GANTOB book. It is also, quite possibly, the location where The Benefaktor crossed paths with Curt Finks for the first time.

Inspired to write? You can submit your own pamphlet.
THE CHERRY ON TOP (by THE BENEFAKTOR)

Feb 24th, 2024

A pamphlet from the LittleGrapefruit-verse – but for adults) – written and narrated by The Benefaktor.

I have written and am narrating this piece as the only consistent member of the GANTOBverse. Gillian is still around (indeed, next Saturday’s pamphlet is probably going to be one of hers). But she is no longer GANTOB. GANTOB3 is now in charge. I have not met them yet, but I believe that they are also resident in Badenoch.

But let the pamphlet begin. Over to me…

Here’s a version generated by a Google narrator (let’s call it the Little Grapefruit version)

And the Benefaktor’s real but rather more turgid version. Give him a chance. He’s 83!

An elderly gentleman, but not The Elderly Gentleman, sat napping in the armchair in his study. His door was shut, and he was wearing his vintage wired headphones so as not to disturb the rest of the house, because he likes to play his music at a volume that allows for his presbycusis. He was listening to Butterworth’s setting of a poem by Housman.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough,/ And stands about the woodland ride/ Wearing white for Eastertide.

He had placed a copy of A Shropshire Lad on the left arm of the chair before he drifted off to sleep, ever mindful of the spines of the books in his collection. His tortoiseshell cat lay peacefully on his lap, studiously avoiding the reporter’s notebook and fountain pen that competed for space in this warm soft patch. He had been working from memory, thinking through conversations with The Philatelist, The Ornithologist and The Photographer, but principally his stamp collecting acquaintance. He had carefully drawn out a banana, a horn and, solely to seek inspiration, one of Hundertwasser’s onion ring trees.

Next door, in the Dining Room, the occupants of the fruit bowl were shifting around uneasily, seemingly as if in Brownian motion, even though the grapefruit, passion fruit, apples and mangos knew that could not possibly be the case. The bananas, were as usual, in a separate bowl. Urs had been told to do that decades ago. The Benefaktor had gone into one of his monologues about ethylene or ethene as he now insisted on calling it. Urs had switched off, but knew enough to minimise future lectures. Little Grapefruit had climbed to the edge of the bowl to peer over the rim. She was wearing prescription sunglasses to see through the window all the way to the tree in the garden outside. It was in full bloom, pink not white. She was not sure which month it was – gone were the days of seasonal produce to guide her. She was aware, however, from the conversations among the older grapefruit, that it was way too early to be in blossom. That other decorated tree was not long down and in its cardboard box, back in the cupboard for another year.

The Benefaktor continued his slumber in The Kino. His dreams were flicking around, like the numbers and letters that jerk in and out at the start of old film reels. There was some flow and sequence in the ideas, if he could just think a bit harder, but he would not remember that when he woke up. First there was the postal horn that The Philatelist (also 83 years old) had recently had tattooed on his wrist after a bet with his purple-haired grandson. And then a graffiti banana – a spraybanane – that The Benefaktor imagined himself stencilling under the doorbell of a local printworks and gallery as a mark of approval. Octogenarians breaking the rules. Right on.

Thomas Pynchon. That was the name he was grasping for in his dream. Out of reach, like the top shelf of his library, built ten years ago to take advantage of the high Georgian ceilings, but now revealing their true purpose: storing the books that he knew that would never have time to take on. The Illuminatus! Trilogy beloved of The KLF sits on that same shelf. The authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were clearly heavily influenced by Pynchon. But it’s all out of sight, flotsam and jetsam, time out of mind. Not for 83-year-olds.

The postal horn, representing communication in Pynchon’s entertaining 1966 novella, The Crying of Lot 49. He had enjoyed that when he read it first in the 1990s, a present from his son. He had thought of that a lot when hearing about The JAMs and The KLF at the start of his discussions with “GANTOB”. The symbolism, the cloak and dagger communiques, the intrigue. But in his dream the horn was played by Felix Klieser: Liszt’s Les Préludes painting the concert hall banana yellow. Perhaps that was the colour Liszt imagined for C major. A little brown mixed in for its relative minor and some green for the E major sections. He could not remember whether Petroc Trelawny had gone into the details in his recent mention of Liszt’s synaesthesia on BBC Radio 3.

In another of their discussions – this time by email – the former GANTOB and The Benefaktor had talked about books that they did not think that they would ever finish – The Golden Notebook for Gillian, Gravity’s Rainbow for The Benefaktor. TB could not recall the reason for Gillian’s failure, but he remembered the snagging section in Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) alright. Intended no doubt as a cornucopia of delights, overflowing with bananas, The Benefaktor had been left feeling jaundiced. American authors do like to pad things out, outstay their welcome.

And this thought jolts him awake. He abhors nationalism. And generalisation. He pads through to the Dining Room to grab an apple – to rid him of that bitter taste in his mouth, and to crunch his teeth back into their sockets after half an hour with his jaw slack while asleep. He wipes dribble from the corner of his mouth with his fraying shirt sleeve. If he had not been doing this for forty plus years he would have worried that he was displaying signs of “decline”.

Outwardly, the fruit are absolutely still in their bowl when the old man approaches. But their insides are squirming. They are not worried by him – he’s far too old to notice their occasional itches and sneezes. They are thinking instead of the uncharacteristically early blossom. The older grapefruit issue warnings to Little Grapefruit and her generation. Beware the cherries.

Page 12 from Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Bananas

The old man opens the window to the garden. It is uncharacteristically warm outside. Bird song and the almond scent of cherry blossom flood in. He heads out to the local greengrocer – a dying breed – and bags up some plump purple cherries that seem to call him from their box, marked with their price in kg and country of origin. He is not worried about the total bill. Or their source. He is thinking of Urs’ face when she sees the first proper cherries of the year. He’ll be in her good books for once. He has forgotten the trouble he caused last year when Urs stained her favourite cashmere cardigan with purple juice.

Despite the older grapefruits’ warnings, the cherries are instantly popular with the carefree citrus children. The cherries are sweet natured and great fun. They roll around freely and can squeeze through little gaps to meet their neighbours, snuggling in against the other fruit with their soft, smooth skin. There is nothing spiky or rough about a cherry. When you talk to them, you are comforted. Their speech pattern is gentle, like music, as if learnt from the birds that had tried to peck at them through the netting. They use simple words in short sentences. Nothing is difficult or complicated. The youngsters play games, sing songs and share meals. They are part of the family.

Big Grapefruit hasn’t met any of the Cherries before, because he works long hours outside Bowlingham. Returning home on the bus, he hears a group chanting a song. It has a nursery rhyme simplicity and is instantly catchy. He does not catch the words. He is thinking about being back home with his family. Big Grapefruit does not think anything more about it, but finds himself humming the tune when he rolls off the bus and heads home.

This tuneful Cherry is called Quinctilius, named after the quince family who had lived next door when he was growing up, as his Mum insisted on explaining whenever anybody asked. He hates the association with another type of fruit. He prefers to be known as Lee. He doesn’t like other fruit. Life for him is a game of “opposite day”.

“Black is white/ Day is night/ Left is right/ Dull is bright”, he sings. He is teaching his two sidekicks some of his ideas. They love this concept that everything is turned on its head. They ignore what everybody else says.

Gravity? Doesn’t exist.

Homework? Forget it.

Grey? What’s that?

Fruit and veg? Bad for you. Best avoid.

The Benefaktor is back in The Kino, resting after his trip out. He is listening to Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Rivers of Light (2015) on Radio 3. He loves modern choral music. He looks it up: considered a companion to another Ešenvalds work Northern Lights (2012). Aurora borealis. He is sure that there is a Bill Drummond connection there if he asks Gillian. But he would rather think about other associations.

Little Grapefruit is playing Pacman with her new friend Lee. Watch the ghosts, but don’t worry about the Power Pellets – focus on the bonus cherries. She dies her hair the colour of green maraschino cherries. What a rebel. Gets drunk on kirsch after eating too many cherry liqueur chocolates, setting fire to the stalks that are left over. High on sugar from full fat cherry flavoured Dr Pepper she heads out, daubing Lee’s new slogans in red on walls around the bowl. Black is white, Left is right. Right on.

The Benefaktor is worrying about world affairs. Gaza. Ukraine. Poland. The Baltic states. Opposition Day in the UK parliament. Trump, Truss. What a mess. Nationalism at the root of it all. It doesn’t make for easy dreams.

And Urs is left, as always, tidying up the pieces. She finds the bowl with its graffiti and bleaches it clean. She has known about the grapefruits’ nighttime activities for years. The Benefaktor must always have a grapefruit available in case there are kippers for breakfast, which there usually are. She has never seen them breaking out like this though.

But she’s old enough to know how to deal with the cherries. She doesn’t listen to their songs or read their ridiculous slogans. She picks up the handful that remain after their coups and putsches, pops them one by one into her mouth, and strips them of their deceptively sweet and juicy flesh before spitting their hard little stone hearts into the compost bin to be disposed of with the next food waste collection.

The Benefaktor, 24 February, 2024

Pamphlet 8 of the 52 Pamphlets

Some notes: maraschino is from the name of the cherry (marasca). The cherries are preserved in maraschino or a syrup of that flavour. What I found out in the course of writing this pamphlet is that marasca is from amaro (Italian for “bitter”), from the Latin amarus. I am reminded of my points on the word sanction in my Stuck blog. Amore vs amaro. Love or bitter. Amorous or amarus? It’s important to listen carefully in matters of the heart. I’m sure that Urs would agree.

My recollection of the banana section in Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow is perhaps misremembered. Flicking through my long ignored copy I can only see mention of bananas for a few paragraphs on page 12. I was sure that I had managed well beyond that on one of my previous attempts, but I cannot see a longer banana-themed section now. Bananas are not even mentioned in the index to Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (though the second edition of that book has a Warholesque banana cover). Having flicked through both books again this morning I am not convinced that I will be returning to either. Yet it is frustrating to be defeated by a book. And having spent time with Shea and Wilson’s book recently (grudgingly) I can see a number of parallels with Pynchon even on the sketchiest of reads. Perhaps somebody else will be able to advise.

The Philatelist has something to say about bananas and Thomas Baumgärtel’s spraybanane in the second GANTOB book (chapter 29; his chapters are additions and are not included in the blog).

If you have a piece that you would like to contribute to GANTOB’s 52 Pamphlets, then please check gantob.blog/pamphlet. If your application is accepted, then you will receive a personalised copy of your pamphlet by post, and a copy of the third book (52 Pamphlets, publication date January 2025). If you don’t have a copy of the second book and would like to read The Philatelist’s chapters, then you’ll need to make your case. I have a very small number of spare copies.