HOW A REVIEW OF A BOOK OF COINCIDENCES
SPAWNED ITS OWN UNIQUE COINCIDENCES AND HOW WRITERS AND READERS FIND
THEMSELVES
ON THE SAME PAGE
It all started when Madelon Rose Logue, editor and publisher of Black Sheep, a networking fanzine by and for writers and artists who love Seth, Jane Roberts and Rob Butts, asked me to write a review of Sue Watkins’s latest book, What a Coincidence. I told her I’d be glad to, bought the book from Amazon and subsequently wrote my first review for them as follows:
What a Coincidence! The WOW factor in
synchronicity and
what it means in everyday life by Susan M. Watkins – Copyright
For a lover of coincidences like me this book is a feast: a veritable smorgasbord of coincidences, dreams, precognition and psychological insight served up in the most delicious conundrums of often funny and utterly honest everyday occurrences. Written in down to earth language with the most innovative word coining phrases What a Coincidence is at the same time simple and vastly complex, and a definite page turner. My personal little coincidence with this book must not be overlooked here either. It fits right in. On September 23, 2005 my daughter and a friend went to see George Clooney’s new movie Good Night, Good Luck at the New York Film Festival. I had started reading What a Coincidence the day before and on the 23rd found myself on page 111 when the phone rang. The last sentence I had read was: “I’ll just have to settle for ogling George Clooney until I can reeducate myself on the pertinent allegorical derivations, that’s all.” Ever since George’s aunt Rosemary had sung William Saroyan’s Come On-a My House Armenians have had a soft spot for the Clooneys. It doesn’t hurt that George is a hunk. As in all true coincidences (are there any others?) the time element is so important. For it was at this moment, this point in time (the book is published by Moment Point Press, after all), not the sentence before or the one after, that the phone rang and my daughter informed me that after the movie none other than George Clooney had shaken her friend’s hand. A great big WOW for Sue Watkins and What a Coincidence!
But the coincidences don’t stop here. The author of the book, Sue Watkins, emailed me; and I quote: “I want to thank you for your nice words and that great review on the Amazon page. As it happens (ha, ha) that same morning, before I discovered your review, I received an email from my writer friend Kitty (she of the moose and ‘roo in WAC!) in which she’d attached an especially hot photo of Our Mister Clooney, knowing that it would “make my day” (how about a weekend, George?!!). Then I read your review. Wow!”
I had been wondering how page 111 would come into the equation of these notable coinciding incidents, or more commonly known, coincidences, and voila, the timely October issue of Fate, the 666th issue of the magazine, as it turns out, has Lon Milo Du-Quette’s wonderful article on number 666 and on Aleister Crowley in which number 111 plays a role, and I quote: “To understand why 666 is a magick number of the Sun, we must turn to the sacred teachings of the Hebrew Kabbalah where it is taught that the sphere of the Sun is the sixth emanation from the pure essence of God. To express this concept mathematically (something Kabbalists love to do) a square is composed of 36 squares (6x6). The numbers 1 to 36 are then arranged in a balanced way so that every row and every column add to the same number. That number is 111, and the sum of all the squares is 666.” As David F. Godwin in his article The Number of the Beast in the same issue of Fate magazine states, “The number 666 really is everywhere. In Hebrew the letter w (or vav) carries the sound of w. It also represents the number 6. Almost every internet address that we use every day carries the initials of the World Wide Web: www…666. Now that’s the Beast.” In the English alphabet fox equals 666 and in a mixture of both, so does wow. Wow!
Ute
Kaboolian,