Dave Awl 2002

As luck would have it, I was trapped in my apartment all day on deadline with work on the 4th itself, so my make-up SA4QE actually took place the following evening, on the 5th. Graeme and I were apparently listening to the same muse, the muse of freezer-cases in the frozen food aisles of supermarkets. I left my sheet of yellow paper between two boxes of frozen organic macaroni and cheese at the Jewel supermarket on Clark Street in my neighborhood. I thought the yellow paper went so nicely with the yellow of the cheese on the boxes. Having been privileged to receive numerous communiques from Mr. Hoban on his own yellow paper, I am painfully aware that the paper I was forced to use was a much brighter and sharper shade than the genuine article, and it was 8 1/2 x 11 rather than the slightly larger A4. (Perhaps I should have more properly proposed acronyming the event SYPQE, with YP for "yellow paper"? But then the acronym is devoid of numerals, so much blander somehow.)

Focus. I was also unable to choose only one quotation...I am a person who is incapable of ordering just one thing at a restaurant, I always need a little of this and a little of that. And I generally enjoy the juxtaposition of things more than the things themselves. So I went ahead and catered to my Gemini side, and printed out the following troika:


~~~~~~~

from PILGERMANN

When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened – whatever that thing might be – that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.

from FREMDER

Perhaps this world that's in us, this world that we're in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it's only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

from A BIRTHDAY FOR FRANCES

"That's how it is, Alice," said Frances. "Your birthday is always the one that is not now."

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...and into the freezer it went.


Dave