Kahneman also wrote in his book Thinking Fast, And Slow that: “System 1 and System 2 are so central to the story I tell in this book that I must make it absolutely clear that they are fictitious characters”. My sense of reality and identity are shaken after the events that took us from Bill Drummond’s piece Great Expectations to my revelation that The Benefaktor’s Curt Finks 1982 Edinburgh Fringe programme(*) was in fact a forgery. Like Grandfather, like Granddaughter. Did you spot the problem? If not, there are spoilers ahead. You might want to start back at Expektations including footnotes.

The focus of the Edinburgh Fringe “programme” was an area of Edinburgh. It takes us from the architect of James Gowans, and his overambitious schemes, to a sci-fi film that Curt Finks apparently watched while bunking off lectures at uni.

The excerpt that The Benefaktor sent me read as follows:

“Victorian architect’s hubris… aiming to establish… a palace of recreation, performance, and an aquarium… The great entertainment venue was not built to the original plans, and the disappointing substitute was repurposed a number of times [including as a cinema]… before being razed to the ground in the 1960s… I had sat in the cinema in the mid-1950s watching, I think, The Quatermass Xperiment with a few [friends]”.

I believe that The Benefaktor was attempting to draw parallels between Gowans and Drummond/ The KLF/ K Foundation and their magnificent/ hare-brained schemes. He will not be drawn on this.

What The Benefaktor definitely missed was a capital “E”. The sci-fi reference was the Nigel Kneale scripted movie “Quatermass Xperiment” (1955), which was based on a 1953 BBC TV series called “Quatermass Experiment” (1953). Having Curt Finks watch the film (without leading “E”) in the cinema meant that the Quatermass reference had to start with a capital “X”. And the Curt Finks Edinburgh Fringe programme template had no capital X. The Finks method of printing would simply have been to move to the closest alternative (a lower case “x”). The Benefaktor’s forgery had a kapital X. Big mistake.

If you spotted this, well done. If not, then you can konsole yourself that you were stuck in System 1 thinking and head to a comfortable darkened room and lick your wounds. When I konfronted The Benefaktor with this evidence by email he replied with a picture I had taken of Mog the cat.

GANTOB

21 November 2023

Send in your completed blog ideas by 27 November 2023 for a chance to win the book of this blog.

(*) See The Kompanion Volume

I have thought long and hard about writing and sharing this blog. I do not wish to seem paranoid. But I have no doubt that there are konspirators in my “team”, so I am going to make my koncerns public.

I wrote yesterday that The Benefaktor had pointed me towards the work of Daniel Kahneman. In his book Thinking Fast, and Slow, Kahneman wrote: “Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention”. That statement describes my relationship with the letter K. For much of the past year I have dreamt it, sought it out in real life and on Google. If you are reading this blog, you are probably in a similar position.

Kahneman is famous for his two systems of thinking. A good example of this would be finding a copy of a rare record – say The JAMs’ 1987 – in a record shop. It’s priced at a kompetitive £99. You’re sorely tempted. Your System 1 thinking forces your hand into your back pocket, pulling out your credit card. But something else kicks in – your System 2 thinking – when you notice the suspicious sheen of the cover, so you check the run out groove and details on the cover to identify it as a bootleg. You hand it back to the record shop assistant.

My System 1 thought processes read the Curt Finks programme that The Benefaktor (AKA Rev K______)(*) had left me with similar enthusiasm. I was focused on the missing text, and filling the gaps, not on finding problems. Having heard The Benefaktor talk about his love of literature and libraries I was not at all surprised that he had unearthed some Finks esoterica in his studies.

As a follower of all things K I am well used to koincidences. Nothing strange or unexpected in that. And this fragment of the programme looked and felt like other full Curt Finks programmes that I had seen in the past. So I typed up the text, adding some of my own reflektions to make it into a full pamphlet. I would wait to receive the submissions from GANTOB and/or Finks followers, and hopefully gain some insight into my father-in-law’s preokupations from 1982.

My System 2 processes should, however, have alerted me to the fundamental problem(s) in The Benefaktor’s challenge. If you have spotted it/them then let me know before tomorrow’s blog.

GANTOB

20 November 2023

* See The House Guest in Kompanion Volume

Featured image of 3 figures is from the book Thinking Fast, and Slow

Send in your completed blog ideas by 23:23 on 27 November (your time) for a chance to win the book of this blog.

As I was saying before Little Grapefruit’s interruption, The Benefaktor reported particularly enjoyed Bill Drummond’s piece “Great Expectations”. There are three ways for you to read this piece – the Little, Brown edition of the book 45 (2000), the Abacus edition of the same book (2001), or Penkiln Burn pamphlet 8 Great Expectations (1998). I am not sure if the wording is exactly the same, but the detail is not important.

The reason for labouring this point is that here was something that konnekted The Benefaktor with the GANTOB projekt. Through the book 45 The Benefaktor kould see most of Bill Drummond’s work, from his record label days, from The KLF, to The K Foundation and into his solo work. While Great Expectations was written almost 20 years before Drummond and Jimmy Cauty wrote the book 2023: A trilogy, many of the preoccupations were there.

I am a trusting sort. I do not look for additional complexities. This has its positives, but can also leave me vulnerable to deception. The Benefaktor has subsequently pointed out that if I had been familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast, and Slow (Penguin 2011), I would have spotted The Benefaktor’s kurveball.

While I was working away on the draft of my first book in late August/ early September 2023 I was almost entirely focused on three things:

• All things K
• Sekuring funding to pay the printing kosts
• Kollekting the work of my father-in-law Curt Finks

I was well covered for the first (K). And when The Benefaktor came along, he ticked the second and third boxes. I should have realised it was too good to be true.

The Benefaktor’s yellow Post-It note accompanied a fragment of a Curt Finks 1982 Edinburgh Fringe programme(*). I had marvelled at the extraordinary tenaciousness behind The Benefaktor’s discovery. I had already publicised the “recipe” for Finks’ programmes (a very strikt alphanumerical count) in GANTOB pamphlet 14: The Sermon. I thought that a klever krossword or kodeword solver would komplete the programme following these rules. What I hadn’t spotted, however, was the absolute impossibility of the challenge, even with the power of ChatGPT. I still do not know if this was intentional on the part of The Benefaktor, or whether he was too kaught up in his skeme to spot it. He avoided the topic when I asked him about it direktly today.

GANTOB

19 November 2023

(*) See The House Guest in Kompanion Volume

Don’t forget to enter The Foundation Doktor’s competition to win a unique piece of art by GANTOB (inadvertently using TFD’s bootlegged text of an imagined Curt Finks story).

And send in your completed blog ideas for a chance to win the book of this blog.

We next encounter Little Grapefruit on a perfectly yellow beach. She is salty but otherwise unharmed after her trip from Badenoch, down the River Spey, across the North Sea, along the Baltic Sea, to Finland.

At first she was rather confused by the unfamiliar language that she heard from the people walking their dogs and children along the seafront near Helsinki. But she was a quick learner, and soon started to find her way around. It took her longer to lose her sea legs.

Later that morning, feeling zesty after the best cup of coffee that she had ever tasted, she visited Helsingin keskustakirjasto Oodi, which is a fantastic library – all curves, and spirals, painted in a flattering grapefruit yellow. She took a spin around a staircase, marbling out of control for the length of a central foyer, coming to a hard stop against a tall gentleman’s boots.

Little Grapefruit found herself in an auditorium. A presenter was talking in academic terms. But LG well understood what she was saying, and by the end of the lecture was feeling quite learned on the topic herself. It was about what we can pick up from fragments – artefacts, speech, writing, any data really. When archaeologists find a few bones, or part of a mosaic, they can start to build up a fuller picture of what life was like for these people.

After the audience had asked some questions Little Grapefruit slipped out of the hall with the man in boots. He sat in the library café, talking to the lecturer herself. She told him about a short story she had just read. It was about a man who at different points in life came across a green door that he knew from a childhood visit led to a wonderful place. Nobody believed him when he told them about it, and he had no control over when it would appear.

Concentrating on the difficult words Little Grapefruit was transported back to another story that she had heard, where a wardrobe led children to a magical kingdom. Little Grapefruit wondered if these things happened outside books.

Evening came and Little Grapefruit rolled through the streets looking at the doors. At the seafront there were colourful buildings, but nothing with a green portal. She’d had enough of the city for a while, so headed out to the fields and forests, hills and lakes of Uusimaa.

LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT

18 November 2023

Don’t forget to enter The Foundation Doktor’s competition to win a unique piece of art by GANTOB (inadvertently using TFD’s bootlegged text of an imagined Curt Finks story).

And send in your completed blog ideas for a chance to win the book of this blog.

The Benefaktor (AKA the former Rev K_____)(*) and I were chatting on the phone mid-September 2023. I was itching to hang up, but needed The Benefaktor’s kash to allow me to print my book. Bandwidth was also a problem deep in rural Badenoch. He would do the final editing, proof reading, and upload the text of my first book (Grapefruit Are Not The Only Bombs 2023) into a self-publishing website. But even with his help time was running out.

He was giving me feedback about the book and fanzine I had sent him. He had flicked through the Pete Robinson KLF fanzine, and had put that to recycling. I recoiled at this news, and while we talked I starting googling kollektion dates for recycling in his part of Edinburgh, planning its retrieval.

He was now on to 45, the Bill Drummond klassik from 2000. The Benefaktor had read it, researched the references, and taken kopious notes. He was talking at length about Richard Long and his own trips to Iceland. And then he was jumping around a series of numbers, from 14 to 6,250 and back to 45. He had carefully listened to a couple of albums by The Residents and The Bunnymen. Even at 83 (as he is now), The Benefaktor does not do things by halves.

None of these ideas had konnekted with The Benefaktor though. He mansplained that as a minister you are always looking for ways to brighten up otherwise rather dull texts, and that such tricks, pranks and literary sleights of hand were old hat to him. I reminded him that I am a minister’s wife and have been party to such rushed Saturday evening schemes for many years (most recently making up a faked tin of kat food out of mashed up Snickers bars). That stopped The Benefaktor in his tracks for a couple of sekonds, after a bit of “of course, of course” and over-apologising. Seizing my opportunity I asked if anything had drawn him into Bill Drummond’s kritically aklaimed book.

To which he answered immediately: “Great Expectations”. Attrakted by the Dickens title, The Benefaktor had “rather enjoyed” this, particularly the sentence: “Underlying all this was the fact that I realised that I was never going to cut it as a painter”. The Benefaktor mourned the lack of artistic output in his long life. Instead, he would fund my artistik endeavours, living vikariously.

 GANTOB

17 November 2023

* See Kompanion Volume

Cover image of pirate cat with bins, may or may not represent recycling bins, depending on your local authority area.

Don’t forget to enter The Foundation Doktor’s competition to win a unique piece of art by GANTOB (inadvertently using TFD’s bootlegged text of an imagined Curt Finks story).

And send in your completed blog ideas for a chance to win the book of this blog.