Diana Slickman 2004

I'm finally getting around to posting my activities on Hoban Day, 2004. I'm amazed and delighted by the lengths some of you go to; my own efforts are more modest.

I launched two quotes this year. The first I copied on to a postcard of a landscape by Rembrandt and mailed. It wasn't A4 sized and it wasn't yellow but it was at hand, and overlaps nicely with my current project to dispatch one postcard every day for a year. The postcard was chosen at random from a drawer-full I've accumulated over the years, and it was sent to an address chosen by opening the Chicago phone book and pointing with closed eyes. Likewise the quote was pulled from The Moment Under the Moment by letting the book fall open and seeing what was on the page that presented itself. Here's the quote:

The people who run the world were children once. What went wrong? What is it that with such dismal regularity goes wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown-ups? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make any sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.

- from Pan Lives
(an essay from The Moment Under the Moment)

The second quote is one of my longtime favorites from Turtle Diary. This I wrote on a yellow Post-it note and stuck on the third or fourth page of a yellow legal pad in the school supplies aisle of my local grocery store. It was a Cambridge brand pad, a good one with good thick strong back and a dark blue sort of cover on it. Here's what some unsuspecting legal pad purchaser will find after a while:

I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.

- from Turtle Diary

Here's to everything success and better tomatoes!