I’ve come to the conclusion that my computer is great at hiding things from me. What prompted me to think so is a letter I came across that I didn’t know I had since it had never turned up before. My great good luck is that I found it by accident, and greater still is that anything written by Carl Weissner is a delight to read. The recipient of the letter (if in fact Carl ever mailed it) was Sinclair Beiles, himself a writer of no small humor. Carl must have copied the original to his computer, which I had access to after he left us. Since it is too faded to be read easily, I’ve typed it out here (with three explanatory links). If you click the image and then click again, the original will be much enlarged and fairly legible.
Dear Sinclair, I have brought up the matter in the course of a speech I delivered before the Mannheim City Council on the subject of "The notional child-rape of Adolf Hitler" (the biggest rat of them all) in which I disclosed recent evidence brought to my attention by Herr Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz (Chief of Atomic Dissemination Headquarters, Seattle, and renowned Hitlerologist) to the fact that Hitler and Borman parachuted down over Lhasa, Tibet on May 8, 1946, carrying with them a litter of rats which subsequently, under the auspices of Goering's witch doctor (whose name continues to escape me) were mutated into what has become known as the Yeti or Jeti (literally: Snow-Man) — an operation which has become known as The Snow Job. I pointed out the desirability of re-enacting the events that led to the first conceptualization of Hitler as the world's pet rat so to speak in order to provide us with an operating formula for our passage through post-Hiroshima consciousness. Preferably in the way of ritual rat races, cross-breeding, and Darwinistic shindigs to be held at the Mannheim Ratodrome. The attempt at tapping a patriotic vein where it patently does not exist proved ill-advised. Meaning that the Mayor has already sold the City Council on a chain-store idea modeled after Spoerri's in Düsseldorf which is going to run under the label of 'Gastronauts of Inner Space' (...) Far from coming as a choc raté (sic) this has confirmed my hunch that the Mayor is in league with certain drearily predictable elements of the Soft Machine, and has led to my withdrawal from the Advisory Committee on Revolutionary ratagems with the words, 'Yours, gentlemen, is a sinking ship and a noisome one. And you can thank the Rube if you go down with the rats instead of up with the apes.' (signed: 'fragment Sinclair letter June '70 Carl Weissner)
A gem, dear Cousin! Posted on Fb with a link to this site. What a horror in Gaza…now IDF machine gunning starving hordes and panicking aid truck drivers running over women and children.
I wish carl were here to comment on the horrors there and elsewhere. his humor would be some kind of tonic, if a tonic were possible.