GANTOB blog

65. LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT AND THE CAPITALS – PART 3

Nov 27th, 2023

Little Grapefruit feels self-conscious as she looks into the water. She worries that people will try to rescue her, not realising that she is an experienced swimmer with a clear travel plan. Instead, she takes the bus from Bratislava to Hrad Devin. She rolls past thistles that make her feel homesick, into the ruined castle. From the crenellations on the battlements she looks out over the setting sun, throwing a grapefruit pink over the still water of the river bend and the plains of Burgenland. She hums the words “The Danube is pink, it’s pink, it’s pink” to that old tune by Johann Strauss II.

Little Grapefruit recalls visiting the other side of the Danube when she was a very little girl, looking up at the cliffs and this castle, past barbed wire fences and watchtowers. She has had a number of regenerations since then. The world has changed beyond recognition since the 1970s. Little Grapefruit thinks that we take a lot for granted nowadays. She is relieved that grapefruit can now travel freely across Europe.

Little Grapefruit taking the Blue Danube Orbital

LG rolls down from the castle into the Danube, dodging the pleasure cruisers. She swims upstream for hours, never flagging, her mind freed up now that she can forget the acronym that has guided her this far. Along the way she communes with a small school of friendly common nase (Chondrostoma nasus) that are hiding on a gravel bed at a large bend in the river. They readily share their meal of algae, and swap contact details. LG heeds their warning about the giant fish called huchen (or Hucho hucho to give them their scientific name) that would eat even a large grapefruit in a single gulp.

Little Grapefruit feels conspicuous for long stretches of the river, as the only pink object in evidence, catching the light of the full moon. The stars are bright on this clear night, away from the glow of the city. But little by little they fade, partially obscured by the dull red dome above Vienna, and Little Grapefruit starts to recognise familiar landmarks. She turns off at Donaukanal and surfaces at Schottenring because it has a friendly ring to it, and it’s a good starting point for the day ahead. It’s exactly 03:00. She sleeps in a bush at Votivkirche. She feels relaxed. This is the city where she grew up, in a Julius Meinl supermarket on Krottenbachstraße.

LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT – SENT BY POSTKARD SELEKTED FROM A TABAK ON THE GRABEN

27 November 2023

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64. LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT AND THE CAPITALS – PART 2

Nov 26th, 2023

Little Grapefruit is high up in Tallinn, spinning round the upper decks of the tower, enjoying a perfectly clear morning. A large part of her enjoys being little, but she worries about her deceptively soft rind being stepped on and pierced by a stiletto heel. She shakes off her concerns by bouncing along the old streets of Tallinn, before heading south along trunk roads out of town. She breathes a sigh of relief when at dusk she reaches the peace and quiet of tracks that carry the scent of wolves. She navigates successfully by celestial bodies until she reaches the next village.

That night she ruminates on height. Everybody seems very tall in Estonia. She thinks back to her days in Bowlingham: the arguments with her siblings, and the comforting words of her mother. There should be no stigma, no labelling of grapefruit by size or colour. She sleeps in a barn by the border with Latvia.

Little Grapefruit wakes to the sounds of bells. She drops down onto the soft hay, nodding to the hens who offer her breakfast, crosses the border, and hitches a lift to Riga with a pig farmer who is off to visit the bank. In the Latvian capital she enjoys a concert by a local children’s choir. She persuades a passing rollerblader to untie a yellow pedalo that is wintering against a pier. They cross the Daugava River, stopping off to explore the islands on the way. It is all a bit of a blur.

She follows a similar schedule as she travels through Lithuania and Poland, stopping off to do the tourist trail, talk to the locals, and search out family members in the supermarkets. Her penultimate stop is Bratislava. She travels there by train, taking the advice of the helpful ticket collectors along the way, sometimes struggling to make herself understood as she asks about the best routes. She has a good ear and is a quick learner, but she has to make a number of adjustments along the way from Estonian, to Latvian and Lithuanian, then Polish and Slovak. She will check with her teachers back in Scotland if they are on the school curriculum. Arriving at Bratislava Castle a couple of hours before closing time she catches her first glimpse of the Danube and her little heart leaps. She rolls down to the water humming a tune by Johann Strauss.

LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT – EMAILED TO GANTOB FROM AN IoT ENABLED FRIDGE IN A SUPERMARKET IN BRATISLAVA

26 November 2023

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63. LITTLE GRAPEFRUIT AND THE CAPITALS – PART 1

Nov 25th, 2023

Little Grapefruit keeps in touch with her parents in Bowlingham, and her many siblings across the world. After rolling around Finland for a few days, taking a triangular track from Helsinki to Turku, up to Tampere, and back to the capital, she visits an internet café, pays the owner for an hour, and logs on. On Instagram she spots GANTOB and The Benefaktor getting into a lather about a “Kapital X”. Checking her emails she spots a note from a Welsh cousin who has recently taken a rather rough ferry crossing during an adventure to Liverpool. An accompanying photo shows her cousin in a markedly green hue, almost as if still on the tree.

Little Grapefruit was going to cross the Gulf of Finland by ferry, but after checking the weather she decides to go by seabed instead, making a mental note to avoid disturbing the cables and piping she has read about in the newspaper. She readies herself for the journey committing a few details to memory. She has left all her usual kit in Badenoch, knowing that her mobile phone and paper maps would not survive her travels by sea (and create uncomfortable corners). Before her hour is up in the café, she has learnt the following lists: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia. That’s easy – alphabetical order. But in the last few seconds of her session she realises that the signs that she will be relying on to navigate will not use country names (except at the borders) – they’ll be focused mainly on nearby towns and cities. She zooms out of the map, just far enough to see the capitals. She tries to remember them all: Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw, Bratislava. She tries to think of a scheme – anything – that will allow her to remember them in order. Tractor reaches velocity with bales. That might work. Her time is up.

Little Grapefruit tilts herself to 5 degrees as she passes the owner, hoping that he will recognise this as a gesture of thanks. She can’t say anything, or she’ll forget her list. TRVWB she recites, imagining a pastoral scene at harvest. She plops into the water, holding her breath, and uses the techniques her mother taught her to weigh herself down by thought processes alone, and trundles across the Baltic Sea, reaching land a couple of days later, making a beeline for the top of Tallinn TV Tower.

AS KONVEYED TO GANTOB BY THE GHOST OF THE OBSERVER

25 November 2023

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62. KWALITY KONTROL

Nov 24th, 2023

Note: The “featured image” for this post is a photo of three new pamphlets (from a recent tweet). Copies of these pamphlets are not yet available electronically. They have been posted to GANTOBers and a very small number were available at The Krossing in Liverpool.

I have spent much of today performing bureaucratic gymnastics. After a 3-month hiatus I am about to re-enter the world of sales. References are not required. Progress against company targets will be assessed after a month.

I wrote yesterday of going “off grid” to avoid The Benefaktor. If only it was so simple. Pamphlets don’t just print and distribute themselves. It’s hard to go incognito in a small village. Everyone knows your business. Eyebrows have been raised at grapefruit stationery, “K” earrings, a need to recycle large numbers of printer cartridges.

My family in Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth are too busy to help. So I had to rely on The Foundation Doktor again. She is still doing her penance for the “Curt Finks” skateboard bootleg. She seemed agreeable to printing pamphlets and stuffing envelopes. I emailed her the files, transferred funds by PayPal. Job done by Saturday evening, nipping into the Easter Road Post Office before 6PM.

A regular GANTOB associate sent me a scan of the pamphlets he had received on Tuesday afternoon, and I have been checking them against my master copies. Initially I thought TFD had discharged her duties without complication. They were printed two-sided, flipped on short edge, trifold. But on closer inspection I noted two anomalies.

An excerpt from the first of the new pamphlets – Who Died Last? (GANTOB Pamphlet X12)

First, TFD has removed a mention of Ali. Instead it states that The Observer is the only “person” to have seen me and The Benefaktor at the same time (which was during our “induktion meetings” on Calton Hill). Sekond, the final “k” dropped in what should have been “konjekture”.

I approached TFD about these changes, and to her kredit she acknowledged her aktions without hesitation. In fact, her answer was almost too quick. Ali knows The Benefaktor as Rev K____, so The Observer remains the only “person” with such direkt knowledge of my troubled partnership with TB. And the “c” that krept into “konjecture” was for aesthetics. She just doesn’t “get” the K stuff. She was born in 2000, long after The KLF, or The K Foundation, or 2K. She’s all Weyes Blood and Beyonce.

I let both excuses pass. I find myself warming to her, bonding over shared tasks. She asked me not to tell “The Thin Man”, as she sometimes calls The Benefaktor. I agree, unkonflikted.

I tell Ali about his disappearance from the pamphlet and he seems unphased, muttering something about being Lapidoth to my Deborah.

GANTOB

24 November 2023

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61. XPERIMENT 2

Nov 23rd, 2023

After further reading I realise now that there was a konnektion between Kerr and another kultural reference in the Kompanion Volume. I wrote KV in a flurry of aktivity in September 2023, reeling from the changes in my work and home circumstances, tying up loose ends from my first book (Grapefruit Are Not The Only Bombs 2023), generating ideas for the next stages of the GANTOB project and getting to know my new funder, The Benefaktor.

This period was full of “green doors” – those branch points where life could have gone in a different direktion. As an anonymous projekt, and out of kash, I could just have melted away, and only a few people would have wondered what had happened to the book. Or I could have asked The KLFRS for an extension to my 23 September deadline and made an applikation to an arts funding body.

Instead, I ploughed on, forged my alliance with The Benefaktor and put the book out on skedule. What I hadn’t appreciated was that The Benefaktor was playing his games throughout that period, making in-jokes for his literary friends in Edinburgh, and laughing at my efforts as first-time author.

His first few posts on this blog alluded to various pairings and duos, from Drummond and Cauty to Lennon and McCartney and subatomic relationships. I had read these as a metaphor for our partnership, and my willingness to host his writing while I sorted myself out. I had missed another more subtle relationship that had been introduced by hook or by krook.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049646/

I wrote yesterday of my koncerns that The Benefaktor guided my first ever book drop subconsciously, with Judith Kerr’s Mog representing the first photographic evidence of my unexpekted meanderings north into Edinburgh’s New Town. And before that I noted The Benefaktor’s subterfuge in faking a Curt Finks story, identified eventually by the mention of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass Xperiment. I wonder if I ever had kontrol of “my” projekt at all. Kneale (1922-2006) was a successful screenwriter, and was married to Kerr (1923-2019) (all the Ks, and a 23). I pore over both their biographies, noting a Dr Who konnektion and other possible leads. What is The Benefaktor playing at?

I realise that I need to go off grid. Today, with most of the KLF focused fraternity focusing on The Krossing, my main kommunikations will be by pamphlet, out of sight of The Benefaktor.

GANTOB

23 November 2023

Cover photo is from one of my earliest tweets. It features photo promoting The Wardrobe Ensemble adaptation of the classic book by Judith Kerr

Down in Edinburgh for the evening, to see some Edinburgh Fringe shows

Nice to see one of the cultural icons featured in 2023: 𝘈 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 making an appearance

Back to Badenoch tomorrow

Time to drop off some books with #GANTOB2023 pamphlets along the way I hope pic.twitter.com/F8k690QAoU
— Gillian Finks (@GANTOB2023) August 4, 2023

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60. XPERIMENT 1

Nov 22nd, 2023

X marks the spot.

Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X.

Don’t put all your X in one basket.

X-cise.

X-roads.

Yesterday, when The Benefaktor made a comment about Mog the cat after I confronted him about the letter X, I experienced a sense of déjà vu that I have been unable to shake off. The same queasy feeling I have whenever entering Edinburgh city limits.

As a child of the 1970s, with children of my own, I am very familiar with Mog and Judith Kerr’s other famous feline character Tiger. But it is the domestic variety that has been darting through my brain for the past 24 hours.

On 4 August 2023 I left Edinburgh Waverley Station and wandered through the streets of Edinburgh, looking for a suitable spot for my first ever book drop. I was on my way to see a few Fringe shows, but rather than heading into the koncentration of venues around the Old Town I headed north to the New Town, taking a photo of a poster for the “Mog The Forgetful Cat” show. I realise in hindsight that I kannot explain my aktions that evening. It is almost as if I was being guided by an external force.

The second hand book and charity shops were closed, but I knew about the Little Free Libraries from my previous visits. I looked up the LFL website and found some suitable locations, but checking this today I see that the Scotland Street LFL that I used is not even listed. No X marking the spot. Yet I followed what now seems to have been a trail that was laid out in advance, to areas of the city unfamiliar from my previous visits. Reading through The Benefaktor’s post Knots, I wonder if he had placed the markers, forcing me down a particular route. Yet I kannot believe that he was instrumental in pasting Fringe posters or other klues that would have direkted me.

But perhaps I am forgetting details, or missing a key point that The Benefaktor is either direkting me towards or wanting to konceal. I search for possible motives. The mention of children’s karakters in The JAMs’ book 2023: A trilogy – including Mog – appears to be extraneous to the plot. I mentioned Blue Cow and Blue Peter in recent posts. Were they inkluded in The JAMs’ book? I am losing trust in everything, including myself.

22 November 2023

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59. KAPITAL X

Nov 21st, 2023

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.

The Curt Finks template

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

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(*) See The Kompanion Volume
58. FAST AND SLOW

Nov 20th, 2023

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.

Fragment of a Curt Finks story retrieved by The Benefaktor

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.
57. PIP

Nov 19th, 2023
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.

From KLF.DE

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.
56. THE GREEN DOOR

Nov 18th, 2023

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.