when prophecy fails

 

horsemouth thinks he got don juan's reckless daughter (by joni mitchell) out of hereford record library (so he will have taped it and had it on cassette). it is in many ways a sequel to coyote (indeed there's a recording a gig where joni runs them together). don juan...  comes together less well than hejira  or the hissing of the summer lawns (horsemouth opines) but this is what makes it interesting. it is jaco pastorius' bass that makes coyote (chopped together from four tracks of solo-ing). horsemouth likes his bass on don juan... but mainly he likes the doubled (split-tongue) vocal. 

curiously enough dorothy martin, head communicant (and automatic writer) of the chicago UFO cult that expected the United States to be engulfed by floodwaters (and flying saucers to come to the rescue)  was (wait for it, wait for it) an ex-scientologist.

horsemouth says this because he has just listened to a louis theroux interview with another ex-scientologist (but this one just denounces it as a con).  

on the night of 21 December 1954 this, of course, did not happen. the problem for dorothy was that by that point her group had been infiltrated by a pack of sociologists keen to know what would happen when celebrants were presented with evidence contrary to their beliefs. (and so we have the term cognitive dissonance from when prophecy fails by leon festinger et al.). 

dorothy moved on and up into the realm of the theosophists. still it must have been a bit of a shock to discover that large numbers of her flock were there for the purpose of study rather than worship. 

the flying saucers came up because horsemouth read an article on the lrb blog (or was it the nlr blog? no it was the lrb blog) on how the QAnoners and such like will react to having the plan disproved... and the answer is , probably they'll get out and proselytise about how they were right. 

a friend remarked that the similar moment for him was when the world revolution didn't happen in 1921. horsemouth sympathises. yes. it was self evident and historically necessary (and it also didn't happen).