SA4QE - Spreading the Word of Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban reader survey reminder!

2012-01-21T12:12:00.000Z

SA4QE has seen an excellent response to the Russell Hoban reader survey, launched on 28th December. The survey will be taken offline next Saturday night (UK time), 28th January, so if you haven't taken it yet, get cracking! The more responses we get, the more interesting the survey will be. You don't have to log in, register, give your name or anything like that in order to take the survey, which asks for your favourite Russell Hoban books, characters and quotes. Here's the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NS63CHQ

The survey results will be published on this site on the next SA4QE day, Saturday 4th February 2012.

Don't forget that SA4QE celebrates its 10th birthday on 4th February, so we hope you're busy thinking of your favourite quotes and other fun things to do to spread the word of Russell Hoban on that day!

Russell Hoban's funeral, 4 January 2012

2012-01-06T08:35:00.000Z

SA4QE was honoured to be invited to the funeral of Russell Hoban in London last Wednesday, along with a number of Russ's associates, fans from the online community The Kraken and of course family and friends.

The service took place at Mortlake Crematorium, right on the banks of the River Thames. The weather was appropriate, turning Russ's favourite grey and rainy as the mourners gathered.

The chapel was light and peaceful. The order of service was printed on folded sheets of yellow A4 paper, with a lovely photo of Russ on the front, dressed - one must say atypically - in a shirt and tie, with a Panama hat and cane, looking very happy.

Underneath the photo it read:

Russell Conwell Hoban
4 February 1925 - 13 December 2011
I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?

This most appropriate quote is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and has been chosen by SA4QE contributors a number of times.

Mortlake Crematorium

Inside the order of service were a quote from Joseph Conrad's Youth, another from AE Housman's Fancy's Knell and a haiku by Bashō. On the back of the service was an illustration by Caspar David Friedrich of a large mournful owl atop a coffin about to be interred.

Russ's coffin, made in wickerwork and laden with pink roses, iris and small yellow flowers, was borne into the chapel and the service started with a period of silence followed by Haydn's Die Schöpfung: Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde, a piece which starts off quietly and suddenly blasts into life:

There was no minister. The eulogy was given by Dominic Power, an old friend of Russ's who has a walk-on part in several of his later books as "Seamus Flannery". Russ's son Jake Hoban then took the stand. "This was written by my dad in 1989," he said by way of introduction to a short piece called North from The Moment under The Moment. The vivid, wintry piece is not about the north of England but

the north where one goes in fear, the north that the compass cannot find, the north that is the cold and implacable truth from which one doesn't always return.

Later Jake said he chose it partly because it includes some themes developed in Russ's new book Soonchild due to be published in March.

Russ's eldest daughter from his first marriage Phoebe Hoban then read an appreciation of her father and his work. Her brother Brom then produced two sheets of yellow A4 and recited the Kaddish (echoing his and his father's Jewish upbringing), which Brom described as "a request for peace", and a poem of his own composition inspired by watching, when a child, his father paint a canvas called The Boxer. (Russell Hoban was a professional graphic artist at the time of Brom's childhood; there is more information on this period of his career in Chris Bell's excellent blog post from July 2011.)

The service closed with another piece from Haydn's Die Schöpfung, Holde Gattin, dir zu Seite - both pieces were chosen by Russ himself:

After the service we walked the short distance along the Thames towpath to The Ship, a lovely old pub also overlooking the river.

The wake was very pleasant and the family endlessly hospitable and it was great to be able to chat to old Kraken friends, SA4QE contributors and other people who knew and loved Russ.

Phoebe Hoban with SA4QE contributors Eli Bishop (right) and Richard Cooper

The Kraken were among the last to leave; we stayed about three hours. It was a great privilege to be there and see Russ off and we would like to take this opportunity again to thank the family for inviting us. All of us at SA4QE and The Kraken will miss Russ terribly, while of course remembering the many, many hours of pleasure he and his writing gave us all.

Photos by Roland Clare and Richard Cooper

Read the messages posted to the SA4QE Book of Condolence

Update 8/1/12: This report has been edited to remove some content at the request of a mourner. SA4QE apologises wholeheartedly for any insensitivity that may have been implied by reporting on this event.

SA4QE 2012: How will YOU celebrate 10 years of Russell Hoban quotes?

2011-12-28T10:30:00.000Z

SA4QE 2011 by Ra McGuire

Just let your imagination take you...

On 4th February 2012, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event will notch up 10 years of sharing favourite quotes from the books of Russell Hoban. We're calling on all fans of this wonderful author to help make this an extra-special celebration.

Russ, as he was affectionately known, passed away on 13th December 2011 aged 86. He was a big fan of SA4QE, allowing us to reproduce our favourite quotes on the site, reading through them until he was "goggle-eyed", occasionally correcting misquotes, making his own contribution on one special occasion and perhaps most touchingly paying tribute to the event thus: "Words have a life - without response, they die."

SA4QE started in 2002 when Hoban fans were trying to think of an appropriate way to celebrate Russ's birthday on 4th February. Diana Slickman, a founding member of Hoban community The Kraken, suggested writing favourite quotes on pieces of (A4) paper and leaving them in public places, and the event and its acronym took off from there. It has since been celebrated by some 90 fans in around 50 locations worldwide, from Argyll to Ypsilanti.... and those are only the people and places we know about.

We're kicking off the celebrations early this time, firstly with The SA4QE 2012 Russell Hoban Survey, in which you get the opportunity to state your favourite books, favourite quote and character, and more. We're not aware of any such survey happening before, so this is causing great excitement at Slickman Towers. The results will be posted on the SA4QE site on 4th February 2012, with the survey being closed shortly before that date. The survey is free and anonymous, and does not require registration.

Secondly, we're encouraging Hoban fans to celebrate 4th February 2012 in as special a way as possible. This might go a bit, or even a lot, beyond your regular "leaving your favourite quote in a public place" activity (which of course we're also encouraging you to do as normal!) Your celebration can take whatever form you like - the world's your oyster (remember 4th February is a Saturday!) Here though are some suggestions:

meeting with fellow Hoban fans (or even friends who are not yet fans) in a cafe or pub and reading aloud your favourite quotes to each other;
inviting friends over to your house and exchanging favourite Hoban quotes while drinking boilermakers and eating fruity buns;
making Mobius strips from sheets of yellow A4 and paper-chaining them together around an unsuspecting local landmark;
organising a Hoban-themed flashmob at a museum, gallery or other Place of Culture;
acting out a short scene from your favourite Hoban book and uploading it to YouTube;
reading or reciting a quick passage in your town centre, passing yellow paper to passers-by, and then retiring to a nearby establishment for drinks, or potato pancakes.

If you wish to organise a public event at which other Hoban fans are welcome, you can use the comments box below to post details of the venue and time. You can also comment below to say anything else you'll be doing.

Russell Hoban by Lisa Greenstein

SA4QE wishes to take this opportunity to say it was already thinking of special ways to celebrate its 10th birthday when the dreadful news of Russ's illness, and then death, arrived. We did consider calling off the event out of respect, but fairly quickly decided that SA4QE should carry on doing what it was meant to do, which is to share Russell Hoban's wonderful work with the world at large. SA4QE does not wish to come across as frivolous at this time of mourning; Russ was a man of both great humour and imagination, he was known personally to the SA4QE webmaster and many in the Kraken community and we feel strongly he would have approved of celebrating 10 amazing years of sharing his favourite quotes in ways that would be enjoyed as much as possible by his readers, fans and the unsuspecting public.

The Medusa Frequency quoted on Radio 4

2011-12-20T08:37:00.003Z

The following passage from Russell Hoban's wonderful 1987 novel The Medusa Frequency was quoted in the BBC Radio 4 programme Something Understood this week:

‘Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging [said the Head of Orpheus] I think constantly of fidelity. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognised they fill the heart. In love or terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.’

Commenting on the quote, the programme narrator says: "In these words from writer Russell Hoban, love is far from blind. What matters most seems to be the ability to perceive another person fully, to listen, and acknowledge them."

The episode was entitled "99 words", following the theme that if you had only enough breath left to speak 99 words, what would they be? The above is actually 110 words and the reader says "pitiable" instead of "pitiful" (sorry) but here at Slickman Towers we agree that if under those circumstances you came out with these words, or many others from the work of Russell Hoban, you wouldn't be doing too badly in the grand scheme of things.

You can listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer for a limited time - the quote starts at 17:48.

Hat-tips to the eagle-eared Alastair Bickley for flagging up the quote and Chris Bell for the link.

The image above is Head of Orpheus Drifting on the Waters, or the Mystic (1880) by Odilon Redon, borrowed from this site.

Russell Hoban, 1925-2011

2011-12-14T16:52:00.000Z

SA4QE is very sad to report that Russell Hoban passed away last night, aged 86.

He was admitted to hospital in his adopted city of London a few weeks ago to have a pacemaker fitted, but complications arose.

At the time of writing, Russ and his most famous book Riddley Walker are trending on Twitter, with scores of tributes coming in on the social networking service, as well as on The Kraken, the Russell Hoban community group.

The news first came through this lunchtime via Gollancz publishers' Twitter account, who had been told the news by Russ's longtime literary agents David Higham Associates.

Walker Books, who are publishing Russ's much-anticipated new book Soonchild in March 2012, also tweeted a lovely tribute from Russ's editor David Lloyd, saying family and friends had been reading to Russ at his bedside in his last weeks.

The Guardian have also published a very good news story on their website. Will Self later wrote a fitting personal tribute calling Russ "my hero" and describing Riddley Walker as "perhaps the post-nuclear-apocalypse novel sans pareil". The Telegraph also published an excellent memoir by Tim Martin mentioning The Kraken and SA4QE, and the BBC have reported on Russ's death. More obituary links are being recorded by The Kraken here and the official Russell Hoban site The Head of Orpheus has since been updated with a wonderful round-up of news, tributes and other links.

The photo above is from the excellent Guardian Book Club interview in November 2010.

We'll be posting more in the coming days, not least because 4 February 2012 marks SA4QE's 10th birthday. No doubt this one will be very poignant but also very special.

SA4QE, aka the Slickman A4 Quotation Event, has celebrated Russell Hoban's words every year on his birthday since 2002. Read more here.

Thank you for everything, Russ. As you wrote one time:

More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

- from Fremder

Russell Hoban news - Riddley Walker puppet show and project with Quentin Blake

2011-09-11T18:54:00.001+01:00

A couple of nice bits of Hoban news in recently. First, from 29 September until 16 October the Trouble Puppet Theatre Company in Austin, Texas is staging a version of Riddley Walker - with, as the theatre company name would suggest, puppets. Full details can be found on the Trouble Puppet site, while tickets can be booked from Brown Paper Tickets.

Meanwhile, in July those lovely people at Walker Books tweeted a photo of Russell Hoban meeting at their offices with legendary illustrator Quentin Blake on a new project. Walker didn't post any details about the project itself, so we'll just have to wait for further details. Blake and Hoban have collaborated a number of times before on books including Trouble on Thunder Mountain, Monsters and How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen. Walker are due to publish Hoban's new young-adult book Soonchild in 2012.

Video clip of Russell Hoban "Map Marathon" interview

2011-06-04T08:04:00.000+01:00

Russell Hoban in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist from The Serpentine Gallery on Vimeo.

A couple of days ago The Serpentine Gallery put up a selection of videos from its Map Marathon event last October, including the full interview of Russell Hoban by Hans Ulrich Obrist. SA4QE posted a partial transcript of the interview with photos back at the time but this is the first video we've seen. Although only a brief interview, it's a highly enjoyable 15 minutes and well worth (re)visiting to hear Russ talk about how maps have influenced his life and work, from childhood scouting days to Riddley Walker and The Mouse and His Child. He also talks a bit about The Kraken fan community and SA4QE. There are some eccentric camera moves in this video, but the audio is excellent throughout, and it's worth sticking with for some terrific close-ups.

Can't see the video above? Try watching it on Vimeo instead.

Pynchon in Public Day and SF writers' choice

2011-05-15T13:46:00.000+01:00

Pynchon posting in Brighton (courtesy Martin Eve)

This week saw two nice little Russell Hoban cameos in the Guardian. The first was courtesy of Thomas Pynchon student and sometime SA4QE contributor Martin Eve, who co-organised Pynchon In Public Day, the first international celebration of the author's birthday in similar style to our own. The Guardian picked up on this and interviewed Martin in this short but sweet piece, and also went on to ask readers for ideas for similar celebrations of other favourite authors. Nice one, Martin!

The second was in Saturday's Guardian Review, in which Russell Hoban himself contributed to a feature in which "leading SF writers choose their favourite novel or author in the genre". Hoban, it could be argued, is not strictly an SF writer (Fremder excepted), although given the chance a lot of people would probably put him in this category, if only for want of any suitable category. Then again, the author he chooses is HP Lovecraft, who is probably known more for horror than SF. But why split hairs? "Lovecraft is not everybody's mug of Ovaltine," observes Russ in the feature, elsewhere riffing on Cthulhu, "but I have always found him horribly cosy." Yum.

SA4QE exclusive - Russell Hoban's 86th birthday portrait by Mike Tsang

2011-03-11T15:05:00.001Z


Russell Hoban, 4/2/11, by Mike Tsang

SA4QE is delighted to receive an email from photographer Mike Tsang offering an exclusive portrait of Russell Hoban, taken at the writer's home on his 86th birthday last month.

As our intrepid correspondent @AliB68 reported, her delivery of The Kraken community's birthday gift was concluded a few minutes before the photographer was due to arrive to take the picture, for a feature called "Dreams of Literature" in the decidedly trendy magazine Glass. "Russell is featured there along with Junot Diaz, Liz Calder and Isabel Allende," comments Mike, adding that the photo attached is not the one used in the magazine itself. "Russell was great to photograph and it would be good to get this shot out there," he remarks.

SA4QE hasn't seen a copy of the actual magazine issue yet, but is far too excited to wait and get hold of one. There doesn't appear to be a version of the article on the Glass website, but here's a list of stockists worldwide if you'd like to head out and find yourself a real paper copy. (In fact if you see one, get yourself two, as you're bound to meet a fellow Hoban fan who wants one.)

More of Mike's superb photography can be found on his website www.miketsangphotography.com.

Many thanks again to Mike for his generosity.

Leslie Macias Schlag 2011

2011-03-02T12:00:00.000Z

Is there a story of me? I asked myself. Am I in it?

- from The Medusa Frequency

Posted to Facebook

Steve Long 2011

2011-03-01T12:00:00.000Z

I chose my quotation from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz this year because it has somewhat to do with maps and maps are playing a large part in my life at the moment. I'm setting the courses for a large orienteering event due to be held near Henley-On-Thames in Buckinghamshire next month. As you may know orienteering is a competitive running sport using map and compass for navigation on specially drawn maps in areas of forest or other open land. There is a tendency for orienteering maps (as with all maps) to go out of date very quickly and the quotation I chose echoes this, as it echoes life:

‘For years I have sighted and measured and located this point and that point on the face of the earth,’ said the surveyor, ‘and I have gone back to the same places to find my stakes pulled out as the boundaries waver and lose accuracy. I sight and measure and I plant the stakes again, knowing they will be pulled out again. It is not only the stakes and boundaries that are lost – this is what there is to know about maps, and I tell you what I have paid years to learn; everything that is found is never lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that? You’re still a boy, so maybe you can’t. Can you understand that?’

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

On the 4th I spent the afternoon in the forest checking various things to do with the event and afterwards went to Henley to 4Qate. I don't know Henley very well but I know a good second hand book shop and in the poetry section at Richard Way I came across a book entitled "The Clever Daughter" by Susan Wicks. I liked the connection with Russ's book Fremder, and left the yellow paper on the shelf there and bought the book.

After some wandering I went into the Helen and Douglas House charity shop and upstairs they have a book section and a coffee maker and a few chairs. The area seemed a little under-used, but I left my second yellow paper in a rack of leaflets on the coffee table hoping it would be found by sooner or later.

Finally, after much wandering around the streets I left the last one in a rolled up property paper in a rack outside an estate agent. I wanted my yellow papers to be found by people with time to look at them. Hopefully I succeeded!

peter morrison 2011

2011-02-28T12:00:00.001Z

Today is Russell Hoban's 86th birthday, to celebrate, have a quote from the first novel of his that I ever read:

Empty Spaces

‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery. ‘His palette is muted his compositions unsettling. The figures in his pictures seem about to depart, and there are odd empty spaces that make the viewer wonder who or what is coming.’

But that’s life, isn’t it? And those of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write books or compose music. There are many talented people who never will become painters, writers, or composers; the talent is in them but not the empty spaces where art happens.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr and LiveJournal

I think this quote is particularly significant [on my Tumblr art blog] - about the empty spaces that drive creativity.

The dream stayed with me so strongly that I could play it back like a videotape: the bus stop in the summer dusk, the street lamps lit against a sky still light - that time of day that always catches at my heart.

There was the sign that said BALSAMIC; the letters were sharp and clear; they riffled like rail departures but the name stayed the same. There were those shaky-looking buildings and the bust stop and there she waited, the thin woman with the straw-coloured hair, blue eyes, and pale face, unknown but seeming to look at me round the edges of my memory. Sleeping or waking, I’d never seen her before.

Again and again she gestured with her clenched fist and said “Yes!” silently. She wanted me to follow her. Why? Here came the bus: FINSEY-OBAY, yellow, pink and orange rice paper and bamboo lit from within - like a Japanese lantern. Such a light against that not-yet-dark sky! Again she looked at me as she boarded the bus and I felt the thrill of terror as stepped back. And again the sense of loss. What did she want? How could I find her again?

She was gone; I was left behind in the present moment, which not a simple finite thing measured by the clock; it’s a palimpsest of all the present moments before it, their images, music, words and whispers rising up through the layered years from the oldest present moment to the newest; and in those moments live, remembered or forgotten, sleeps and wakings and dreams.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr

While this is from the third chapter, it recaps the dream that occurs in the first chapter, it is this image which caught my attention, this image being the reason I bought this book in the first place. I’d love to see that image come to life, the bamboo bus in its yellow, pink and orange rice paper.

Emmae Gibson 2011

2011-02-27T12:00:00.001Z

Once upon a time in February I wanted to see turtles, giant, green, sea turtles, chelonia mydas, loggerheads would do. I didn’t know I wanted to see them until I got there. There, was a very long way away, not in my mind yet; I don’t live in London or near a zoo, don’t keep cats, birds or tropical fish and never fancied turtle soup. Fate had her own agenda, though, it seemed I would be 4qating in another country whilst engaged in a geographical, nostalgic odyssey.

So we landed, drove from Melbourne to Adelaide, to somewhere in the middle and marvellous dusty places in between, across the Snowy Mountains to Bateman’s Bay, to Sydney to Toowoomba to Goomeri to Monto to Mount Larcom to Gladstone ... chasing memories of childhood farms, departed relatives in sepia, snakes under the porch, nuns with hard rulers, rodeos, dynamite, cattle sheds with cows’ names, men dying doing men’s work, immigrant homesickness. We found all of them, and gratifyingly, much more. People, who knew and remembered.

Then as if serendipity hadn’t done enough to link the decades, the sat-nav drew our wagon to Bundaberg on the Queensland coast, near Mon Repos beach. That’s like arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon and suddenly remembering it’s where Shakespeare was born. Until then I’d failed to pay attention to the shadow of the thought that was trailing me – it was close to one of the nesting grounds in the world. Where female turtles come ashore at night at certain times of year, to dig pits and lay their eggs, spread sand over with their flippers and cry reptilean tears. Or, later in the season, where tiny hatchlings break out and make their precarious way in darkness towards the sea.

Anyway, there was Mon Repos and I knew I wanted to see turtles. There I would 4qate that very evening (what better place?) with a group leaving by minibus, to await the hatchlings’ appearance on the beach, possibly as late as 2a.m., probably with marine commentary by a keen turtle Ranger.

That’s when I began to feel uneasy. That’s when it began to feel too easy, just a bit voyeurish. Would I like a gang of snapping turtles waiting around to watch me deliver, or to watch my babies hatching into the world without me? It’s a private thing, surely, at least it was, when the turtles evolved and went back to the ocean 150 million years ago. Why were humans permitted to exploit a mysterious, nocturnal miracle of nature? By the way, it was the rainy season, the best rainy for farmers in Qld. for ten years, worst for everyone else. Creeks flooded, dams rose, roads were closed, skies thundered and lightninged, winds bent the motel-palms to the ground and beaches were inclement. In other words, the turtle viewing closed, all turtle tours were cancelled, a wash-out, even on the beach. Straight away I knew it had to be Hobanesquely so. You get there and everything’s shut.

Anticipation turned without much ado to relief at this ‘bad’ luck. Bad for whom? It was an intrusion to which I would have been party, along with engines, headlights, voices, smells, bacteria, litter... tainting the nesting grounds of an endangered species, their fragile existence. We’re assured they can’t hear human voices, well, they don’t have to, they’re bound to feel the vibrations are not quite benign, their sense of smell is greater than a dog’s, everything is a predator and they cannot run!

No doubt the turtle handlers are sensitive, they help more baby turtles into the sea with their hands than nature might allow, and the money may go into conservation. But you can’t help asking, are the shrinking numbers a side-effect of sheer human presence? Like the bats in Carlsbad Caverns and the coral on Great Barrier Reef. And which is more degrading, the zoo tank or the turtle tour? I’m no born-again greenie, but this was planet-priority Australia, I mean, they don’t let you take fruit from one state to another, their traffic police are truly Mad Max, yet this.... Nor did I feel smug, leaving Bundaberg in the sheeting rain, I just felt lighter, knowing they were out there, that they could have hatched in private that night on the waterlogged sand.
I’d left my yellow paper behind in the information rack. Let this belatedly be my report, with apologies, because that, I’m afraid, was February 2010. This year, the weather became cyclonic and I haven’t heard yet what turtles do in a typhoon.

‘I’d been aware of the turtles for some time before I went to look at them. I knew I’d have to do it but I kept putting it off. When I did go to see them I didn’t know how to cope with it. Untenable propositions assembled themselves in my mind. If these were what they were then why were buildings, buses, streets? The sign said that green turtles were the source of turtle soup and hawksbills provided the tortoiseshell of commerce. But why soup, why spectacles?’

‘A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.’

- from Turtle Diary (1975)

Twitterers, Facebookers and Bloggers 2011

2011-02-26T12:00:00.000Z

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

- from Turtle Diary, tweeted by Joe Snow

Place of dismemberment? said Kleinzeit.
Everywhere, all the time, said Hall of Records.

- from Kleinzeit, tweeted by David Dixon

Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don't know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. when I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

- from Come Dance With Me, tweeted by John D here and here

‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by remotevoices

There's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us.

- from The Mouse and His Child, tweeted by Chris Bell

(Bat bowl from the Victoria & Albert Museum that inspired The Bat Tattoo)

Facebooked by Olle Lawson

A Dog shall rise and a Rat shall fall.

- from The Mouse and His Child, Facebooked by Alison Baker

I do not like the way you slide,
I do not like your soft inside,
I do not like you lots of ways,
And I could do for many days
Without eggs.

- from Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs, Facebook-commented by Becky Morgan

I am actually a believer. I have faith that there's nothing that cares about us one way or the other.

- from The Bat Tattoo, tweeted by Danielle Carr

I searched in my A to Z for anything Balsamic but there was nothing.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by Squirmelia

And finally, here's a lovely post on the happy birdaycake blog from 7 February 2011 in which a mother and daughter make a real "Marzipan Pig" - not exactly a 4qation but just as tasty...

Nick Campbell 2011

2011-02-25T12:00:00.000Z

Here’s my Hoban quotation contribution. It’s from Pilgermann, and I think it demonstrates him pretty well:

Certainly we are slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn't want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and night.

- from Pilgermann

Blogged on a pile of leaves

Yvonne Studer 2011

2011-02-24T12:00:00.000Z

Happy Birthday, Russ, and happy day to everyone!

There have been too many "toos" this year: too much work, too many extra events at my school, too little time to sleep. But fortunately there was also this day to look forward to. So I could barely wait for the last report meeting of the day to be over. As I left my school, the sun was shining (we'd been under a cover of fog for more than two weeks) and coming out of the building, I felt like William G. at the end of Turtle Diary, "Coming up on the escalator with my hair flying I felt as if I was coming out of a dark place and into the light, then I laughed because that's what I was actually doing." (ch. 53).

Earlier I had decided to go 4qating in the real world rather than the digital one this year, but as I didn't get home from work until late in the afternoon, I couldn't go on a very extensive tour. However, there was an ideal place for a quote near the block of flats where I live, the fence around a construction site on which someone had sprayed, "Wer es wagt, zu träumen, kann alles erk..." (Whoever dares to dream can ... everything.) The original word was "erkämpfen" (achieve something by fighting for it), but another sprayer had added his tag, so only "erk" remained, turning the sentence into a delightfully polyvalent message. It can now be read as "Wer es wagt, zu träumen, kann alles erkunden / erkennen / erklären / erklimmen" (Whoever dares to dream can explore, recognise, explain, get on top of everything).

The fence with its graffiti had been sending out signals to me for quite a while but I wasn't sure I would hang up an SA4QE quote there until The Last of the Wallendas And Other Poems, Russ's 1997 collection of poems, opened up to the poem "Long Green Dream". I knew then that the fence had to be this year's 4qation site.

Here's what I printed on a piece of yellow A4 paper:

Long Green Dream

Last night there came a long green dream,
it pulled in like a train.
I climbed aboard and found a seat, it started
off again
and chuntered on and on and on to oh, so
many places
with place-names that I couldn't read and
hundreds of strange faces.
We journeyed half-again as long as any trip
should take,
and yet it got me back on time, and brought
me to Awake.

Best wishes from Yvonne

Also posted to Facebook

Richard Cooper 2011

2011-02-23T12:00:00.000Z

This 4th February I failed to do any "proper" 4qation beyond posting this to Facebook:

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

- from The Medusa Frequency

My original intention was to 4qate only quotes from Angelica Lost and Found, Russ's latest novel, which I read and enjoyed over Christmas, but failed to do that either. As some might say, "Fail better!" So, unless anybody objects, my personal SA4QE contribution this year is to post my favourite quotes from that novel to this site. Here goes:

Afterwards, lying in his arms, I saw that he was crying.
'What is it, Clance?' I said, and kissed him.
'I can't describe it exactly,' he said. 'There's a great sadness come over me, what a little short thing it is to be alive and so strange. Maybe it's just the whisky.'
'No, it's the sense of loss, something lost so far back we can't remember it.'

(p83)

There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.

(p85)

Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for 'Everything is OK'? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn't really think it was and it wasn't.

(p93)

A first love is the one that took you to a place you never knew before, so it'll always be part of you.

(p110)

Did God invent Handel or did Handel invent God? ... 'I know that my Redeemer liveth,' sings the soprano. From what are we redeemed? Original sin? Unoriginal sin? I think uncertainty is what we are redeemed from by this redeemer whom we have invested with the power to redeem us. The extra-strength placebo. If you think it works, it will.

And, unaccountably, it does. Listening to 'Messiah' I feel redeemed.

(pp139-140)

'You don't look like a shrink,' I said.
'I charge like one though,' he said. 'What can I do for you? If anything.'
'I have a reality problem.'
'That's called life.'
'But I'm living in two realities. Maybe more.'
'And?'
'I'm trying to understand them, trying to define what they are.'
'Why?'
'So I'll know, so I can deal with them.'
'Knowing won't help. That's a waste of energy. Get practical.'
'How?'
'It doesn't matter how many realities there are or what they are; just handle them one at a time and do whatever needs to be done.'

(p163)

- all from Angelica Lost and Found

Russell Hoban in conversation with Will Self at the British Library, 15 February 2011

2011-02-22T09:23:00.003Z

Will Self and Russell Hoban

On the evening of this special event, SA4QE fetches up in the main foyer of the British Library, which is a very civilised place – “Good evening,” says the security guy at the door, checking our bag, “how are you today?” Having assured him we are very well, SA4QE proceeds to the information desk for directions and is despatched back into the night across the forecourt to the Auditorium, where we are joined by Roland Clare and friend Louise Sheffield, and Jake Hoban, Russ’s son. After a brief chat we head inside, meet some other Hoban fans including Deena Omar, spot a guy wearing an Arga Warga t-shirt and mill about for a few moments before being ushered into the modern, woody hall decked with comfy seating.

Russ takes the stage with help from his wife Gundula, with Will Self taking a seat opposite. While Russ is short and stocky, Self is approximately 12 feet tall, yet hunched, giving the distinct impression of a rheumy-eyed vulture, or as AliB68 tweets, “a stork interviewing a robin”. Thankfully these metaphors are only visual, as the conversation goes on to be anything but predatory - as Martin Eve says, “Self [is] the most gracious of ‘interviewers’.”

The British Library host introduces Russ at some length with critical epithets including “the strangest writer in Britain”. Riddley Walker “keeps astounding everyone who encounters it ... its vision of a possible future English takes the story of a future English language as documented over in the BL’s exhibition Evolving English – One Language, Many Voices into a far, far, far possible future.” Self meanwhile was chosen for his “love of and bravery with language and his willingness to embrace the barely possible in his novels” which in turn made him an “ideal choice” to write the introduction to the 2002 edition of Riddley Walker.

Will Self thanks Russ and says it’s a great honour to share a stage with him, although “it probably bores him endlessly to have people say they grew up reading his books, yet I did grow up reading his books in those fine Picador paperback editions of the 1980s.” He says he can’t imagine anyone else writing the books that he did; “Russell doesn’t take the novel as a given. Some writers write novels like you might make a table – there’s nothing wrong with that, but they all have to have four legs and be level, whereas Russell approaches it as if there are no rules – the legs can all be of a different length, and you don’t necessarily have to eat off it – you might want to lie down under it.” He adds that he’s read RW four times and finds it “stunning and emotionally disturbing”.

Self then goes to the lectern and reads the Hart of the Wud passage from early in the book. Before he starts he says Russ had asked him backstage to be sure to do the readings “in the Kentish accent some two thousand years in the future.” The reading is superb: despite seeing Self many times on TV including in unlikely contexts such as Shooting Stars, SA4QE had never really considered him a performer, but he assumes a persona and reads the passage with magnificent menace (and a good accent). Above the applause afterwards Russ can be heard to tell Self the reading was “beautiful”.

Self asks whether the story of how the book came to Russ at Canterbury as told many times is true. Russ says it is true and that he will indeed be repeating himself to retell the story, but tells it anyway, citing a series of articles by Edmund Wilson about Punch and Judy puppeteers he had read in The New Yorker magazine coming to him at the same moment in 1974 that he first looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral.

Self says this genesis surprises people and asks whether, given the period in which the novel was written, there was no element of wanting to warn people of the follies of nuclear war in his planning of the book. “Writing novels with a message, I dare to say – although I’m sure there are examples to prove me wrong – is a sure road to disaster,” says Russ. “I think the best writing is done with what enters you and takes possession of you and doesn’t let go of you until you get the job done.”

Self says he understands the book started in normal English and the Riddleyspeak came later. Russ says it shifted into Riddleyspeak quite quickly and kept lists of the words he’d invented to keep everything consistent. He also says he didn’t calculate it this way but realised that the language has the effect of slowing down the action to Riddley’s speed of perception. Self adds that the language seems simultaneously of the distant future and of the distant past; Russ agrees, saying some people had compared it to Middle English, but that this was due to inspiration rather than research. He summarises a half-remembered Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about “a channel of public energy that a man can tune into”, saying that he was able to tap into various channels of ideas during the writing that he hadn’t formerly known existed.

They talk about the book’s long gestation, Russ saying that after the first two years he had 500 pages which “weren’t it” because they weren’t concentrated enough and were spread over too much geography. Self asks how much moving to England inspired the book, and whether he could have written it in the US. Russ says he couldn’t have, then “tracks back” to the time period, recounting the familar story of how he came to England as a fan of British ghost stories. “I opened myself to the ethos of... English storytelling? I don’t know, I’ve never said this before, I don’t know if it rings true or not, but anyhow that’s what I’m saying now ... I finished Turtle Diary in 1974 and around that time read a story by Gerald Kersh called Voices in the Dust of Annan, in which an explorer from the future falls through the ruins of what used to be London and finds himself living with some very small people who dress in rat-skins and hunt rats, and sing corrupted versions of songs like ‘Oo Kill Carobbin’, and I felt like fooling around with language that way.”

Russ goes on to relate his original discovery of the legend of St Eustace on the wall of Canterbury Cathedral, and Self talks about how Riddley’s people conflate the half-remembered and corrupted stories of Christianity with the “cultural memory” of science. Was there an intellectual element to this or was it inspiration? “I plead innocent to the charge of intellectuality,” says Russ, to laughter and a smattering of applause. “You have many supporters!” says Self.

Self talks about Riddley himself and says one of the surprising things about him is how many miles he covers during his “roading”, anything up to “50 miles a night”. “Charles Dickens was a hell of a walker, you know,” Russ shoots back. “He’d go for 25-mile walks and come home and write 50 letters. Riddley’s walking is consonant with his culture. As Goodparley says, ‘Riddley youre a mover.’”

Self wonders whether Russ’s army service in the last years of WW2 informed any of the grimness of the book. “I never fired a shot in anger, but I was shot at,” says Russ, “and I saw a lot of dead bodies turn various colours and bloating, so that comes into the consciousness.” Is Riddley’s world a war zone? “Yes it is, it’s full of danger from all sides.”

Self says that on one level he would have expected Riddley’s culture not to be literate, yet Riddley and other characters such as the officials at The Ram can read and write. At the same time, he says that it is one of the wonderful things about the book that it is an “entirely believable world entire” in which literacy can exist – it’s not as if Russ simply reproduced an iron-age culture. Did Russ research history prior to writing? “In the first drafts which were in standard English, Riddley was a kind of anthropologist studying his culture. That got tossed out fairly early on and I did what I had done in Kleinzeit, where instead of reading medical dictionaries I made up my own names for things.” Self says he remembers very well the language of Kleinzeit, and they talk tantalisingly briefly about this pre-Riddley book. (The comparison isn’t quite exact though, as in Kleinzeit Russ uses real words such as stretto and hypotenuse in place of medical terms, whereas in Riddley the words are either entirely fabricated or corrupted versions of our own.)

Self says he found Riddley Walker very intense and emotional; was this Russ’s experience too? “Yes, I did live that book as I wrote it... the point where Riddley and I both wept when I was writing the book was after Goodparley and Granser have blown themselves up, and the Black Leader of the Bernt Arse Pack, who ‘looks like death on four legs’, shoves his nose into Riddley’s hand and wants to be petted, and Riddley says ‘That’s when I cried for the dead’ and that’s when I cried too.”

At the start of the book Riddley doesn’t allow himself to respond to his father’s death, but as the action progresses he changes allegiance to various men, such as Goodparley, Belnot Phist and Lissener. Is this about Riddley coming to terms with his father’s death? “The death of Brooder Walker has a profound effect on Riddley – he’s seething inside and is just about ready to go, when he digs up the Punch puppet and hauls Belnot Phist over the fence.” Self gets up to read this passage in his “absolutely immaculate” future Kentish accent:

Returning to his seat, Self invites Russ to open the “little bag” he has with him, and Russ opens his rucksack and brings out his Punch puppet, as made by Bob Wade. Russ summarises Punch’s notorious dark character and murderous acts: “Percy Press once said to me ‘Punch is so old he can’t die,’” and then, with a slip of the tongue into Riddleyspeak, “‘he’s a law unto hisself.’ ... There’s something in him that doesn’t care about him, that he is simply the vehicle for. And I always remember the ‘broken seagull’ – do you want to read that bit?” The two try to find the passage in question but can’t locate it; a Google search brings up the reference on the Riddley Walker Annotations website: “they myndit me of gulls eyes. Eyes so fearce they cudnt even be sorry for the naminal they wer in”. Russ summarises the passage and Self comments that it echoes what Lorna says early on in the book about “something looking out through our eye-hoals”: Riddley’s people have a sense of an elemental force that is refracted back to them through the Punch story. Russ: “Riddley looks back in time to us as the people who made the 1Big1 – this thing is in us, but it didn’t care for us.”

There then follows a very slapstick exchange. Self: “There’s a tension, isn’t there, in the perception of the people of the past – he both thinks that they’re kind of ‘before the fall’, they’re prelapsarian figures who are integrated psychically, and he feels the weight of dualism, doesn’t he – he’s always worried about the two being made into one, he feels his own reflected self-consciousness as a burden. And yet in the mythology, the Punch story that comes round, Mr Clevver is responsible for the destruction of all that’s good, so it’s almost as if enshrined in the people from the past is their own destruction at the same time.” Russ: “Yes. I’ve never had the opportunity to use the word prelapsarian.” (Much laughter.) “I myself feel postlapsarian but it eases up later in the day.” Self: “I never feel the day is done without feeling prelapsarian. [In fact] Let the day begin!” Russ: “Anyhow, my answer was yes.” (Even more laughter.)

They talk a little more about Punch and how old the myth is and the fact that there’s a Punch in every country including ancient Greece “where there were characters with large phalluses and did strange things”. Puppets “will always get a laugh and a gut response from the audience.”

What inspired Lissener and the Power Ring? Russ says the latter was inspired by the CERN particle accelerator, but there was no particular reason for having a blind Ardship of Cambry, except for his part in the story of the Other Voyce Owl of the Worl. Self “goes out on a limb” and wonders whether Russ’s having been trained as a radio operator during the war had anything to do with this “listening”: “No – I was trained as a radio operator, but that availed me nothing – I was a foot-messenger, and in fact I had such a bad sense of direction that I had to tear up bits of K-ration boxes to leave a trail so that I could find my way back... One time, I passed and re-passed a hill so many times that the Germans thought I was a troop movement.”

Self says it must have been very emotional finishing Riddley Walker, but as if that weren’t enough Russ then “goes and has another epiphany in Galilee” and writes Pilgermann. “How did it feel to move from Riddleyworld to Pilgermann-world, which is by no means that jolly?” “That was in my high-energy period,” says Russ, summarising the inception of Pilgermann during a trip to Israel. “I like that book a lot... I had a good time writing it. I did a good Pope, Uncwit the Seventh or something, who had some pretty good dreams!” He laughs cryptically.

Self scoffs at this so-called high-energy period when Russ has been “remarkably prolific over the last decade”, turning out almost a book a year. Russ: “Well yes, I do what I can.” Self: “You continue to move into different areas – some of the work has been very erotic, for instance.” “Yes,” says Russ matter-of-factly, “well, I mean, life is, isn’t it?” Self agrees and Russ describes his next “big one”, Soonchild: “It’s about an eskimo shaman, whose daughter doesn’t want to be born because she refuses to come out into the world until he brings her the world-songs, so he brews up a big dream brew and goes on a dream trip through many changes. I have to hang on in there until 2012 as it won’t be published until then.” Self: “Well, I hope you’ll hang in there a little bit longer than that, if it’s all the same with you.”

Self then opens the conversation out to the audience.

The first questioner asks “Was it the case when you were writing Riddley Walker that you were in analysis and you would take along chapters to read aloud?”
Russ: “Would you repeat that for me, Will?”
Self: “He’s saying he’s heard you were in psychoanalysis and you would take the novel in MS to your analyst – which if true does beg the question of why your analyst didn’t pay you.” (Much laughter and applause.)
Russ: “It wasn’t psychoanalysis, it was psychotherapy, and I used to have sessions with Leon Redler, and I used to read him what I was writing. I’m trying to think of my reason – maybe I just wanted a private audience!” (laughter) “Maybe I wanted to test the validity of it, whether the characters would ring true.”
Self: “Do you remember any of what he said about the book?”
Russ: “No, I don’t.”
Self: “You definitely need your money back.”

Roland's friend Louise asks: “Did you have to tone the book down at all to make it more accessible?”
Self: “Were you calibrating it as you wrote it to see how difficult it was against standard English?”
Russ: “No, again I just wrote it as it came to me – ‘I done it how it come’.”
Self: “There’s a mini-glossary and notes in the new edition. I confess I found those very helpful... personally I find the book is very different each time I read it. I can’t help finding this is a function of the book that it reminds you that English is a very variable and flexible language.”
Russ: “I was very pleased with some of my inventions, such as ‘I had to vote no kynd of fents’, which is a breakdown of ‘vote of no confidence’.”
Self: “I think that Ed Miliband, the current Shadder Mincer, would be well advised to read Riddley Walker.”

Female questioner: “Do you have any academic experience of linguistics or pidgins and creoles?”
Self repeats.
Russ: “No.”
Self: “I knew he was going to say that.”
Russ: “There are things that spring naturally to the tongue, such as ‘great’ becoming ‘girt’. Also when I was growing up in Pennsylvania the auxiliary verb was often thrown over the side, so you’d say ‘I done this’ or ‘I gone there’.”
Self: “We do that here too.” (to questioner) “Is that called glottal drift or something?”
Woman: “I can’t remember.”
Self: “You studied it once though, didn’t you?” (laughter) “That was certainly worth our tax dollar.” (hilarity) “Sorry, that came out harsher than it should have.”
[Roland Clare later advises SA4QE that the term Self was reaching for is 'metathesis': "I told him {Self} afterwards (he was v. nice!)."]

Self: “The bearded man up there – oh right, sorry, you’ve got a beard too, it’s not as big as his...”
Questioner with beard: “How much time did you spend in Kent researching the geography?”
Russ: “A lot of time. At that time we had a Bedford camper, and with my wife Gundel and our two sons we’d go up hill and down dale in the Wye Valley.”

Male questioner: “I have to read the book out loud rather than internally in order to understand it. I wondered whether reading it aloud to yourself was involved in the creation of it?”
Russ: “All of my books, not just Riddley Walker, are written for the ear, so that they will bear up under reading aloud. I sound them out in my head and go over them aloud until it works.”
Self: “Where does that come from? Were you read to a lot as a child?”
Russ: “Hm, I’m trying to remember... certainly I was read to a bit as a child, enough to instil it in me, and I was given plenty of books as a child, and I still remember my father - who was a socialist, but I guess he would have to be called a communist sympathiser at the time – used to bring me books – I remember one called Fairytales for Workers’ Children, a collection of hard-luck stories. There was a little black guy, and a yellow dog who had a terrible time. Left its mark on me, I can tell you.”
Self: “So presumably if your father was a fellow-traveller, you weren’t an observant family?”
Russ: “No, and apropos of his fellow-travelling, the first two rules of etiquette that I learnt were always to eat the label on the pumpernickel for good luck, and never to cross a picket-line.” (audience applause) “My father was put in jail for marching in a picket-line at the hosiery mill, which was the local industry in Lansdale.”

Self identifies the next questioner as “The woman in a hat just there.”
Woman in a hat: “Woman in a hat!”
Self: “Well, it’s an easy way of identifying you. I don’t know your secret hopes and desires.” (audience laughter)
Woman in a hat: “And you’re not going to, Will.”
Self: “Well if she objected to me typifying her as a woman in a hat, what can I do?”
Woman in a hat: “You didn’t start off by saying ‘Here is Russell Hoban in a hat’! Anyway, let’s stop arguing. Here is my question...”
Self: “What is your question?”
Woman in a hat: “Russell, in 1970, you gave a writing workshop at a conference on children’s literature in education in Exeter.”
Russ: “Yes.”
WIAH: “At that writing workshop, which I wasn’t lucky enough to be born to be at...”
Russ (to Self): “What was that?”
Self: “SHE WASN’T BORN. Or else she would’ve been there.”
(audience hysteria)
Russ: “All right! You’ve made the effort now...”
WIAH: “...you said the most important thing was to describe ‘the thingness of things’. Do you still believe that?”
Russ: “Was describing..?”
Self: “‘The thingness of things’ – what guys with ten-dollar words call quiddity, I believe.”
Russ: (pondering) “The thingness of things... um, yeah, the thing-in-itself...” (ponders some more) “Ding an sich?”
Self: “Ding an sich... I knew you’d get onto Kant and metaphysics, hiding your intellectuality.”
Russ: “I have never read, er, ‘Karnt’.”
Self: “I believe it’s pronounced Kunt actually.”
(audience beside themselves)
Russ: “I’m getting credit for learning I don’t have. I can take a book this thick and riffle through it and come up with one quotation which will convince people I’ve read the whole thing. It’s artful.”
Self: “Maybe what the woman who we must not call the Woman in a Hat is saying is that your novels are about ‘things’ rather than, say, character or the relationships between people.”
Russ: “The writer whom I credit with the Thingness of Things more than anyone is Anton Chekhov, who is my current main squeeze. He just does it, he can talk about the moonlight on the ocean, the smell of the trees and flowers in a garden which transcends mere description – he gets right to the thingness of things. It can’t be learnt. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

Male questioner: “Riddley Walker is depressing and disturbing and the end is ambiguous. Do you find it optimistic or pessimistic? How do you classify it in terms of a story?”
Russ summarises to Self what he thinks the question is.
Self: “You got it in a nutshell, although the front end was largely a statement. A good statement, mind you...”
Russ: “It’s left that way – we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what his future is, any more than we know our own.”

Self: “A final question from the man with the beard, glasses, shirt, pullover, trousers and underwear.”
Male questioner: “Hi Will.”
Self: “Hi.”
Male questioner with clothes: “When you were first looking at the painting of St Eustace, it was a life-changing moment, but I was wondering how long you were looking at it for and how you were feeling.”
Russ: “The...?”
Self: “He wants a more visceral description of your epiphany.”
Russ: “The viscera of my epiphany are internal.”
Self: “Well, how about the thingness of your epiphany?”
Russ: “I don’t rightly know that I can say more about it. It just got to me. You don’t have to be a writer to have that experience when an event or something you see or some person suddenly gets to you, and there it is, you suddenly have to do something about it. Can’t say more than that.”

Self: “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think the modern mania for getting writers up on stages and making us trot around like performing dogs, like the dogs in Riddley Walker, when he has the vision at Cambry and they rise up on their hind legs and dance around him, is often not a good thing, but I’m sure you’ll agree that this evening has been an exceptional and rare privilege to hear Russell talking.” (Sustained applause)
Russ: “Can I say that I could not have asked for or imagined a better companion and conversationalist than this gentleman.” (more applause)


Photos by GOMBERT YAWNCHER Hi-res versions and more photos available as a set on the SA4QE Flickr feed

Alida Allison 2011

2011-02-21T14:00:00.000Z

Once more into the breach--

The streets in my little Colorado town are extremely steep and extremely icy today with our unusually cold weather--- so for now I've put my yellow paper on a table in my house next to Li Po, who is obviously toasting Russ. The quotations below are from a volume of Hoban’s short stories and essays, The Moment under the Moment:

Consider fiction phenomenologically. The word itself is derived from the past participle of the Latin fingere, to shape, fashion, form or mould. We take it for granted that there will always be fiction of one kind or another in the form of stories: forming; shaping. Why do we take that for granted? Why do we make fiction? Why do we say, ‘What if?’

We make fiction because we are fiction. Because there was a time when ‘it lived’ us into being. Because there was a time when something said, ‘What if there are people? A word, perhaps, whispered in the undulant amorphous ear of the primordial soup: ‘What if there are people, hey? What if?’

It lived us into being and it lives us still. We make stories because we are story. The fabric of our myths and folk-tales is in us from before birth. The action systems of the universe are the origin of life and stories. The patterns of blue-green algae and the numinous wings of the Great Nebula in Orion and the runic scrawl of human chromosomes are stories. Begotten by no one knows what, stories beget people to live them. We are the offspring of innumerable ideas.

The myths that are in us, whether they be of Demeter/Persephone’s winter descent or Orpheus losing Eurydice, are the dynamics of thing-in-itself acting itself out in the collective being and consciousness of which each one of us is a particle.

- from “Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” The Moment under the Moment, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992, 141-155.

Huck Finn, standing alone against the authority of the failed-child establishment and refusing to sell his dark brother down the river, is about as unfailed a child as you can find: a child eminently practical and resourceful, cunning enough to survive the grey city of the world, a child in touch with the mystery of being and always in a state of innocently becoming. An American Dream with him in it has a good chance of not being a nightmare.

- from “I, that was a child sleeping…,” The Moment under the Moment, as above.

Ruth Bosch 2011

2011-02-20T14:00:00.002Z

There is a wonderful restaurant in western Massachusetts, The Wagon Wheel. I think there's a joke there somewhere, something about biting the wheel, but I never get it quite right. Anyway, this year's quotation was left there, in one of their fascinatingly decorated bathrooms. The walls are covered with black and white family photos, nearly all in black frames. One of my favorites is of two older men, dressed like bankers, lying down on the floor and putting together the tracks of a toy train set. Another favorite is this:

Under it I put a quotation from Pilgermann. I didn't have any yellow paper but made a color quotation for a heading.

Certainly we are the slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn't want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and the night.

Mike Lynch 2011

2011-02-19T14:00:00.000Z

‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘I said that fish and chip shops are metaphysical.’
‘Everything is.’

- from The Medusa Frequency

Tucked into an odd piece of street furniture in Haymarket, Sydney, Australia.

Posted to Tumblr and Instagram

Lorna Elsewint 2011

2011-02-18T14:42:00.000Z

On 4 Feb, sheets of yellow paper appeared on the streets and in the public buildings of Mile End and Thebarton, inner suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia.

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.'

I said, 'What thing is that?'

She said, 'Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don't even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'

I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.'

Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.'

I said, 'Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?'

She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.'

- from Riddley Walker, page 6.

[4 February is the day of the annual Slickman A4 Quotation Event. SA4QE is now in its 9th year and began as an idea for a way to celebrate the birthday of novelist Russell Hoban on 4 February - he will be 86 this time round! Visit us at http://sa4qe.blogspot.com/ ]

best, Lorna

John Hale 2011

2011-02-17T14:00:00.000Z

Time back way way back befor peopl got clevver they had the 1st knowing. They los it when they got the clevverness and now the clevverness is gone as wel.

- from Riddley Walker

The quote was left on a stop sign right across from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles California.

Martin Eve 2011

2011-02-16T14:21:00.000Z

My quotation this year is taken from the beginning of Hoban’s 1998 novel Mr. Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, definitely not one for the kids, but which I hope proves intriguing. So, without further ado:

He winced. “Please — the idea of Pelléas in English is abhorrent. Must go now. See you later. Or not, whichever.” In the fresh breeze he made as he passed me I smelled money and something else, medicinal and disciplinary, that I thought of as bitter aloes. As far as I know I’ve never smelled bitter aloes but the name suggest the smell I have in mind. The card said, in an elegant little typeface:

T. Rinyo-Clacton

Although Russell Hoban was born in a different era, as were we all to some extent, the world does not stand still. This year instead of printing my quotations directly onto yellow paper, I printed the above QR code, which when scanned on an Android, Blackberry or iPhone device redirects to this very post (producing a pleasing cyclical reference in the picture above).

Here’s three photos of my drop locations (there were many more, but these were the ones I photographed):

Somewhere between Enfield Town and Seven Sisters

The British Library Cafe

Somewhere in the British Library.

The above photos were posted to Martin's blog and to his Facebook profile

Dave Awl 2011

2011-02-15T14:00:00.000Z

Mortal life is a difficult proposition because hardly anything can be experienced as what it actually is; everything is time-distorted. In childhood we wait for things that seem too long in coming, we wait for treats, for presents, for festivals and holidays, we wait for growing up. There is so much waiting that suddenly childhood itself is gone with all that was being waited for. As grown-ups we find ourselves pitched headlong down a steep and slippery slide with everything hurtling towards us at great speed; some things smash us full in the face, others streak past half-glimpsed or unseen; everything has happened before we were ready for it. Only after the hurly-burly of mortal life is over can one have a really good look at what has happened; unburdened by choice and unthreatened by consequences one is able to sort through the half-glimpses of a lifetime and find perhaps one or two workable fragments of recognition.

- from Pilgermann

Posted to Twitter via Twitlonger

My aeons-long sojourn with the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep had made me realize how provincial my outlook had been before.

- from Angelica Lost and Found

Posted to Facebook

Dave's summary of Pilgermann can be found on his Head of Orpheus website

SA4QE special: Hoban for Valentine's Day?

2011-02-14T14:00:00.000Z

Orphée et Eurydice by Federico Cervelli

Most of Russell Hoban's novels are love stories of city-dwellers. Is that too sweeping a statement? In an email to Head of Orpheus webmaster Dave Awl back in 2002, he described his then-impending novel The Bat Tattoo as "my usual thing of two people meeting in an odd way in London and a quietly offbeat relationship developing." Readers of his early novel Turtle Diary would recognise this theme and structure; indeed that and The Bat Tattoo share the form of the male and female protagonists taking turns to narrate the story. The outcomes are different however; in Turtle Diary Naeara and William bond over a plan to set sea-turtles free from London Zoo, but whether they are actually suited to each other romantically remains to be seen. In The Bat Tattoo though, there seems no doubt that Roswell and Sarah are falling in love.

Kleinzeit, published the year before Turtle Diary, is a manic linguistic romp in which the eponymous hero no sooner gets admitted to hospital than he falls in love with the ward sister. Hoban's most recent novel, Angelica Lost and Found, sees the lovesick hypogriff from Girolamo da Carpi's painting Ruggiero Saving Angelica break free to search for Angelica in modern-day San Francisco. In between, Herman Orff in The Medusa Frequency laments a lost lover through the eternal story of loss, Orpheus and Eurydice, while in Angelica's Grotto a septuagenarian art historian seeks love of a darker sort through a pornographic website. Maybe the only novels not principally "love stories" are The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Riddley Walker, both of which, while seeing the protagonists involved with other characters in a sexual or romantic way, are principally quests for something more complex. It isn't, perhaps, therefore an overstatement to say that Hoban's abiding theme is love and relationships, even if he tackles the subject in a satisfyingly different way from most writers.

Over the years SA4QE has seen hundreds of quotes chosen from Russell Hoban books. Here is a selection of quotes that may be appropriate for today:

"We smiled at each other over our glasses, time seemed full and easy, available in unlimited amounts. George seemed to carry a clear space about him that made all things plain and simple where he was."

- from Turtle Diary

(chosen by Lindsay Edmunds)

It is not love that moves the world from night to morning, it is not love that makes the new day dawn. It is the longing for what cannot be. The world needs the power of your yearning, the world needs the power of your love that cannot be fulfilled.

- from The Second Mrs Kong

(chosen by Dave Awl / Richard Cooper)

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

- from The Medusa Frequency

(chosen by Eli Bishop)

"He loved her simply because she was. What a thing, thought Jachin-Boaz. Love without purpose."

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
(chosen by Emmae Gibson)

Emmae comments: "A Hoban novel for a Valentine's Day gift would probably have to be Amaryllis Night And Day. Not only is it love and romance, sensitive and complex, hobanesque fantasy-reality with soft colours and crazy glass, but also, (more important, you might say, on such a day,) it has a happy ending."

What are your favourite Russell Hoban quotes on love? Would you give a Hoban novel as a Valentine's Day gift? Please comment below.

Melanie 2011

2011-02-13T14:00:00.000Z

My friend Peter enticed me into joining in with the posting of yellow notes to celebrate Hoban, so as of 4/2/11 there are yellow notes with Hoban quotes all over the Austrian public library. It was awesome fun and nobody seemed to notice my note sticking and picture taking!

She said, ‘Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals ... It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’

- from Riddley Walker

"What are you, a snulture cob?"

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

I have gone to look for a lion.

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

These photos were posted initially on Melanie's Flickr stream

Ra McGuire 2011

2011-02-12T15:26:00.000Z

Good evening,

Thanks again for this opportunity to participate!

Russell Hoban’s birthday began, in White Rock, British Columbia, Canada, with a menacing darkness squatted defiantly over Semiahmoo Bay. My yellow paper had been wrapped in plastic, as always, to protect it from an inevitable rain coast pelting - and subsequent melting - of Mr. Hoban’s words, but the particularly unwelcoming weather kept me inside until early afternoon …

At 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, on Russell Hoban’s naming day when he come 86, the dark clouds parted and the sun shone down. I headed down to the beach with my lovely wife, yellow paper in hand.

Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else--only the strangeness of it can be taken in...

- from the foreword to The Moment Under The Moment

It was left on the best bench. Close to the water but distant from the action. A peaceful yet powerful spot. The wind was still whipping up the water. The gulls like that.

I am proud to once again represent for White Rock. I hear that, as of this year, I’m no longer the only Canadian contributor to SA4QE. This makes me proud as well.

My best to all members of the Kraken Community ...

And Thank you again, Russ, for the joyous mystery and the mysterious joy

Happy Birthday!

All best

Ra McGuire

This was also posted to Ra's blog and his Twitter feed

Diana Slickman 2011

2011-02-11T14:00:00.001Z

I dropped this at my longtime local bar, The Hopleaf. I've been drinking there, off and on, for 20 years.

"You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German."

- from Fremder

I added: This yellow paper was placed here on February 4, 2011 as part of a world wide event in honor of Russell Hoban’s birthday. Your finding this and reading it makes you part of the celebration. Cheers!

Diana is the founder of the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. Read about the genesis of SA4QE here.

Rich Bailey 2011

2011-02-10T17:21:00.000Z

I just finished A4Q-ating for the first time. I've known about the the tradition for years, but somehow living in a mid-size southern city where there is no subway and I know most of the people who run around downtown, it just didn't seem right. I moved to New York City last summer, and now it feels right. I left two copies each of the following quotes in swath of lower Manhattan running from Chelsea Market at 9th Avenue westward along 14th and 15th Streets, dipping south into Greenwich Village around Bleecker and 7th Ave, then continuing along 16th Street to Union Square. I did not see the Gom Yawncher man, but I watched some buskers and made a cash deposit in a homeless person's cup.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

- from Fremder

There is a point where pattern becomes motion; the pattern has found me and I must move, must be aware of moving, must be a motion, an action of the Word. Poor bare tuned fork.

- from Pilgermann

To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

We are the children of the mystery that inhabits us and I believe that it wants us to meet it with innocence of becoming; not to meet it is to be a failed child.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

The black howled in the tunnels, the tracks fled before the train. Whatever lived walking upside-down in the concrete put its paws against the feet of the people standing on the platform, its cold soft paws. One two, three, four, walking softly in the chill silence upside-down with great soft cold paws. Underground said words to itself, names. No one listened. Footsteps covered the words, the names.

- from Kleinzeit

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do, HERO, I'll call it. Chapter 1. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

- from Kleinzeit

Roland Clare 2011

2011-02-09T14:43:00.000Z

Around us all is night, black night that howls outside the circle of our words or crouches magically with the fire reflected in its eyes. We are in it; it is in us. We need to know that night and we need not to know. Our primal ‘What if?’ is the twining of our fingers in the dark with those of unseen Chance and whispering Dread who walk with us. They are sister and brother to us, father and mother: the ancient family of not knowing, walking in uncertainty.

- from Household Tales (an essay from The Moment under the Moment)

Placed on the music stand of a fine harmonium in Bristol Museum (above), and also:

Participating in the Chinese New Year celebrations at Bristol Museum (I tucked it in after taking the photograph), plus:

Lurking among the frozen peas in our local branch of Waitrose.

Second quote:

Pan, the all, the everything half-human, half-animal god, is there to be a Thou for us to talk to. Because that’s what the language base is. It’s a place where the Thou of things is perceived and the silence speaks. The best that words can do is to make a space in which the silence can speak, in which the language of the everything can be heard. Humankind is naturally and properly religious, and I suggest that one definition of religion is that it is a mode of being and perception in which everything is Thou and nothing is It. Certainly we’ve tried it the other way; we’ve tried making both things and people It, and we’ve seen the results.

Is it possible that the sadness we sense in childhood is the sadness of the Thou perceivers who know that the world will come between them and the Thou of things, will stop its mouth and their ears? Is it the sadness of the listener who will not be allowed to hear the silence speak? Or is the sadness something else? Is it that whatever looks out through the child’s eyes knows that it must destroy the child to make the adult, must close the garden of the child to the grown-up just as Adam and Eve closed Eden to themselves? Is the sadness of the child the knowledge that it is doomed to repeat the original sin, deny its knowledge of the Thou, kill humble Pan and crucify the Word?

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

Tucked inside the Richer Sounds catalogue...

In a little red drawer in Habitat (I closed the drawer after taking the photograph)...

Lurking among the magazines in our local branch of Forbidden Planet.

Heather Uhl 2011

2011-02-08T16:12:00.000Z

Hello from Canada!

I've intended for years to participate in SA4QE but always gave way to lazy excuses. I didn't want to just copy someone else's shared quote - that felt like cheating. I wanted to re-read the books and re-find specific phrases that had spoken directly to me, and for me. There are countless lines of Mr. Hoban's books that I've let swish back and forth and linger, exciting tastebuds I didn't know I had, until swallowing them to discover the next delicious bite.

A stack of Russ sat on my nightstand will full intent. And no crisply perfect printer sheet for me, either - for all the joy I've received, this deserves the effort and intimacy of a handwritten, carefully chosen passage!

Yeah.

Well, that was the plan. And yet there I was, on February 4th, copying and pasting on a computer. I'm sure there's an insightful and witty quote somewhere in my Hoban library that would suit this perfectly. Maybe I'll find it before next year comes speeding around.

The passage I chose was the following:

Sometimes I don't know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understanding patchy but I have action; I go. I can't tell this as a story because it isn't a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action.

- from Pilgermann

There is a small parking area outside our international airport where people can sit and watch the planes. It seems to me that it's a place full of large and small spaces, action (and inaction), deciding, remembering, and dreaming. An appropriate place for a golden paper and the above quote.

I pulled in and parked, suddenly unsure of potential repercussions of this mission. It's one thing to drive too fast and tear tags off of pillows, but I don't need the Federal Department of Transport annoyed with me. To my right was an airport shuttle van, the driver napping in the sun coming through her window. To my left was a man who sat behind his steering wheel and ate four burgers and two cartons of fries while I waited impatiently for him to leave. I wonder if he has much action.

There is only one other Hoban fan who I know personally - a co-conspirator who introduced me to Russ's work and, through it, to worlds where fantasy is genuine, one can worry without fear, men are unapologetically male, and moments are not so filled as to be useless. I send my deep thanks to Mr. Hoban, to my dear friend, and to all the other 4qaters who share their adventures and delight in this brilliant lunacy. Happy birthday, Russ!

Lindsay Edmunds 2011

2011-02-07T15:44:00.003Z

And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going. . . . Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

- from Turtle Diary

The above quote was included in Lindsay's contribution to The Huffington Post on 4 February entitled The Kraken rising: Russell Hoban's 86th birthday

The following was posted the same day by Lindsay on her own blog, Writer's Rest:

Under our ordinary speech there are always invisible subtitles in an unknown tongue.

- from The Medusa Frequency

Stephanie Payton 2011

2011-02-06T09:38:00.001Z

I am a senior at California Lutheran University and I decided to participate in SA4QE day and have left A4 paper around campus. The first is at a professor’s door:

What ben makes tracks for what wil be. Words in the air pirnt foot steps on the groun for us to put our feet in to.

- from Riddley Walker

The other is in a bathroom stall:

I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.

- from Kleinzeit

This was also posted to Facebook.

I am so excited to participate!

- Stephanie Payton

Giles Bailey 2011

2011-02-05T10:32:00.001Z

- from Riddley Walker ("3 stroaks")

The quotation was left next to the parking ticket machine at the Lijnbaan multi-storey car park in Rotterdam:

Thanks
Giles
www.1200m.org

Olaf Schneider 2011

2011-02-04T12:34:00.005Z

Click here to view the Flash animation, complete with sound effects, in a new window

The painting of the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep: the words alone make you want to lean against a wall.

- from Angelica Lost and Found

The title of the mysterious painting sounds like a magic potion. I have no clear opinion about the meaning of the words but they suggest something primordial, something not-yet-there but somehow beyond time, something of great power, a consciousness not aware of itself. However, the words have a strong impact on me and I feel exactly like Jim the psychiatrist, who says these words in Chapter 61 'Mental Jimnastics'.

Happy 86th birthday, Russell Hoban!

See all Olaf's animations

Happy birthday, Russell Hoban! Yes, it's SA4QE 2011

2011-02-04T07:52:00.003Z


Russell Hoban in London, 22/11/10 Photo by Peter Morrison from his Serpentine Set

Today is Russell Hoban's 86th birthday and we here at The Slickman Building (4th floor) like to celebrate in style.

Fans from around the world will be sharing their favourite Hoban quotes by leaving them on sheets of yellow paper in public places, and also posted to Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We'll be gathering up all those that we hear about, and which are sent directly to us, and posting them here from today and in the coming days. (Oh yes! We like to spread out a celebration if we possibly can!) So do keep an eye on this site and the Twitter feed.

You can email your quotes and photos to us using sa4qemail@gmail.com or tweet with the hashtag #sa4qe (or mention @sa4qe). You can also upload photos to Flickr using the tag sa4qe.

Leave a birthday greeting and/or your favourite quote in the comments field below.

However you choose to celebrate, have a great Hoban day!

More about SA4QE
How to take part

The long-awaited report! Ruth Bosch and Richard Cooper 2010

2011-01-28T14:40:00.003Z

For the uninitiated: every year The Kraken, the Russell Hoban fan forum (est. 1998) clubs together to buy a birthday gift - usually a bottle of spirits - for "Russ" as he is affectionately known, and a volunteer hand-delivers it to his London home. In 2010 longtime Krakenites Ruth Bosch and Richard Cooper were the volunteers, and composed a report on the day for sharing with Hoban fans that, by all accounts, was simply spellbinding. However, in a bizarre incident involving a Giant Squid, Putney Bridge and a Klein bottle, the report disappeared and was never heard from again. Richard and Ruth found it understandably difficult to get over this tragedy, and struggled to re-compose themselves, as well as the report. However, we here at Slickman Towers are delighted to say that they have now managed to produce the following account. We hope you enjoy it.

Russell Hoban's birthday 2010, the SA4QE, and the Kraken Birthday Bottle Delivery Event were so rich in so many ways that both of the Birthday Bottle delivery persons have bogged down and rebogged several times in their hopes of recording and sharing the full enjoyment of it with everyone involved. As SA4QE 2011 is close upon us we throw caution and detailed Russellogues to the wind and hope that at least our sense of the beauty of the day finds other beholders.

We approached February 4th with a full set of vibrant Hobanian themes in the abstract and witnessed them being fleshed out, lioned out, yellowed out, and mouse-and-owled out by a graphically obliging universe, with emphatic double-deckerings, undergroundings, and apocalypticisms thrown in for ambience.

As if the world weren’t enough as it is.

Here are some photos and recollections of the day, in chronological order, with comments by Richard (RC) and Ruth (RB). Richard started the day at home near London and Ruth, at home in Paris, meeting mid-morning by Fulham Broadway tube station and proceeding Russwards.

Getting there

RC: Early in the morning I opened The Medusa Frequency, the first Hoban book I read and still my favourite, and found my 4-year-old son Joe had been practising his letters on a yellow post-it in an appropriate place. Copying "The Slickman A4 Quotation Event" he only got as far as "The Slick Joe" but that didn't seem an unreasonable statement.

It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.

I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadows first before me, then behind. 'Nothing to declare,' I said.

- from The Medusa Frequency

RC: The tawniness of the lion was in him.

RC: I 4Qated myself with this custom t-shirt, featuring the SA4QE logo on the front and a favourite quote about yellow paper on the back.

One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect ... I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into ... I never use white paper - to intensify the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.

- from Blighter's Rock (The Moment under The Moment)

RC: Another customisation, a sticker on the boot of my car which I drove to the station to hopefully arouse the interest of fellow motorists. Can't think of a suitable motoring Hoban quote though except for the one about Harold Klein getting run over by a London bus.

Meanwhile...

RB: Papier jaune sur le Paris metro.

RC: checking contributions to the website on the train, armed with coffee and Kleinzeit.

Sister stood holding the helmet, listening to the clink of money falling into it. I don't know if this is right, she said to God.
What's wrong with it? said God.
Is it, I don't know, heathenish? said Sister.
You've got to move with the times, said God.
Are we talking about the same thing? said Sister.
One usually does, said God. I mean how much is there to talk about really. It's pretty much all one thing, isn't it.

- from Kleinzeit

Meeting there

RB: In Fulham Road on the way to Russ's. Richard models HAT inherited from Eli Bishop during the 2007 Riddley Walker adventure in Ireland. Excellent to have a red London bus and a flying lion in there too.

Being there

RC: Arriving at Russell Hoban's house, we were pleasantly surprised to find some yellow paper on the front door. This turned out not to be a 4qation but rather a note from Russ to his postman saying "Please keep knocking and ringing - I am hard of hearing."

RC: Russell Hoban with the 2010 birthday gifts from The Kraken - a bottle of Glenfarclas single malt whisky, a DVD set of the films of Jan Svankmajer, and, courtesy of Ruth, some exclusive chocolates from Paris. The chocolates themselves were in a small bowl itself made of chocolate, complete with a pair of chocolate chopsticks, or "chocsticks" as Russ dubbed them. Ruth apologised that the chocolates were of normal sugar content and thus probably not on doctor's orders, given Russ's condition. "Oh, don't worry," said Russ. "I'm not a career diabetic."

RB: Russ was splendid. One of the best things was having the chance to tell him that if he had only given us his books it would be quite enough, more than, but he has also given us Kraken friends and that is something.

RB: Russ with Richard. Behind them is the TV on which Russ watches a different movie (or sometimes two) every day.

RC: Not pictured here are all the things we chatted about - far too many to remember, but certainly we talked about Ruth's job as an antique fan-restorer, and the two Americans shared their recollections of home. At one point Ruth said "More importantly..." which inspired Russ to comment that the correct construction was "more important". This point turned up as a niggle of one of the characters in Russ's 2010 novel Angelica Lost and Found. Speaking of which...

RC: Russociate Jake Wilson popped over while we were there. A documentary film-maker in his own right, Jake was later to be found listed among the acknowledgees in Angelica Lost and Found, for reading the manuscript at varying stages of composition. Russ had a proof copy with him during our meeting and Jake commented approvingly on the cover, which featured the Girolamo da Carpi reproduction as found on the version you can now buy. Apparently there was an earlier cover which wasn't as good. The two chatted for a few moments about 3:10 to Yuma, a classic western they'd both recently been investigating.

RC: Russ flicking through Jake's birthday gift, a copy of Tippoo's Tiger from The Victoria and Albert Museum.

RB: The business end of two distinct synchronicities were also delivered by Jake, unbeknownst to him. The subject matter of both had been cleverly and variously introduced by Life in the guise of my friend Jean-Yves during the week or two preceding the trip to London. Synchronicity #1: Jean-Yves asked if I had seen the large musical automaton, Tippoo's Tiger, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, describing it in detail it when I said I hadn’t. It was a bit odd, as I had been to the museum so many times and it’s the kind of thing I love and would tend to remember, but I drew a blank. Jean-Yves’ description stayed vivid in my mind and I hoped to go and see it when in London.

I was sitting across from Russ as he unwrapped Jake's gift, the new book about “Tippoo’s Tiger”. Jake had played the organ inside the tiger for a documentary made by the V&A,

Synchronicity #2: During those same Londonimminent days I was walking alone on the street near my house in an unfocussed sort of way, hallucinating sideways and without conscious intent into walking in the same place with Jean-Yves. Both of us looked at the sidewalk and saw a trail of coins. The sense of this was so strong that my non-hallucinating self pulled itself together to look down at the sidewalk and lo, a line of coins, 1 Euro and 15 cents, as it turned out.

Jake told us a story about dreaming and childhood and the way he and his brothers discovered they were sharing the same dream, this primarily having to do with the way they told each other about it, knowing it must be so because every one of them had the evidence of his own recent memory. Their shared dream was of looking at the ground and finding a trail of coins. I know this is not an unusual theme, but the story continued for me in a way that made it more remarkable. I later told it to another friend, and she related it to her husband when they were walking in the woods. They stopped walking as she finished telling the story, both of them looked at the ground and saw 14 pennies scattered across their path.

When I first started reading Russ's books I was neverendingly amazed at the way they "happened" to me. They were three-dimensional events, series of events, that coincided precisely with whatever else was happening in my life. They coincided in ways that were exactly like the things that happened in his books and the intersection showed a plane of existence that I knew.

RB: Tulips for Gundula (Mrs Hoban), on the floor of Russ's kitchen along with some pussy-willows (hidden by the red wrapping paper) and a quantity of Gundula's market-stall stock.

RC/RB: We left after a very happy hour, as Russ had to have his lunch, and so did we.

Lunching there

RC: The window display of the delightful Fulham cafe where Ruth and I had lunch.

RC: Checking Facebook for yellow paper updates.
RB: 4qating our dining table with the words:

One assumes that the world simply is and is and is, but it isn't. It is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

- from Pilgermann

4qating there: wandering westwards

RB: Yellow pages, meet yellow paper!

RC: We walked from Embankment tube to Trafalgar Square. Seen here 4qating one of the lions with Ruth's aforementioned Pilgermann quote.
RB: Richard expressed some concern about "4qating by the lion's bum".
RC: I don't remember saying that.
RB: You did. It was delightful.
RC: I'll take your word for it!

RB: Richard at the bottom of Nelson's Column. It was a deceptively long way up onto the plinth. I almost didn't get down again.

RB/RC: We passed through Chinatown...

RB: 4qating in Old Compton Street, Soho:

Loneliness is the essential human condition. Everything else is gravy.

- originally quoted by Emmae Gibson

Tea-and-cakeing there

RB/RC: We stopped into this suitably-coloured cafe, The Profile.

RB: Yellow paper at the Profile.

RC: The decor matched the SA4QE website :-)

RC: Yellow paper and the absence of Ruth. Quoted tabularly:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- by HP Lovecraft from The Call of Cthulhu

(quoted by RH in The Medusa Frequency)

RB: 4qating the greetings card display in a nearby gift shop with the previously-mentioned Lovecraft/Medusa quote.

Roading there

RC: By now the sun had well and truly set, but our 4qday still had some life in it. We had another place to be, appropriately enough near Russell Square.

RB: We actually got here via Holborn tube. The Pilgermann quote was re4qated, being here the mummy of all Hoban quotes.

RC: Heading for dinner at Hoban favourite Il Fornello we passed 90 High Holborn, offices of the law firm Olswang, which looks like a giant yellow paper drop. (HT to Hugh Bowden.)

RC: The Hotel Russell, Bloomsbury, near Russell Square.

Drinking there

RC: with fellow 4qater Deena Omar.

RC: Saying goodbye to Ruth B.

Homeing there

RC: SA4QE day ends for another year. But stay tuned!

(c) Bosch-Cooper Productions 2010. All wrongs reserved.

SA4QE 2011: The Slickman A4 Quotation Event is recruiting!

2011-01-21T16:31:00.002Z

It's that time of year again, when fans of the great American author Russell Hoban share their favourite quotes from his many wonderful books with the world.

SA4QE is now in its 9th year and began as an idea for a way to celebrate Hoban's birthday on 4 February - he will be 86 this time round! - in suitable fashion.

To take part, simply write your favourite passage from a Hoban book (and there are lots to choose from, from the 1980 masterpiece Riddley Walker to the children's classic Frances the Badger to the most recent novel Angelica Lost and Found) on a piece of paper, and leave it in a public place on Friday 4 February.

In the past few years SA4QE contributors, or 4qaters (pron. fork-you-aters) as they're known, have also shared the Hoban love across various social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This is very much encouraged, but of course as the very name SA4QE suggests there's nothing quite like leaving a good old sheet of A4 on a park bench, on the wall of a subway train or on a bookshop shelf.

In deference to Russell Hoban's preferred medium, contributors generally use yellow A4, but this isn't obligatory; we certainly wouldn't want you to feel you had to buy a whole ream in these straitened times just to take part, although many Hoban heroes from Kleinzeit to Herman Orff have found that this investment has set them on an adventure they'll never forget... (Disclosure: SA4QE is not sponsored by Ryman's, or indeed any other stationer.)

Whatever you choose to lay your quotes out on, please share them with this site. You can do this in a number of ways, such as by emailing us direct (the best method if you take photos of your yellow paper drop), posting them on the Kraken (the official Hoban fan forum established 1998) or using the SA4QE comments facility which will be clearly posted on the front page of this site starting 3am UK time on 4 February.

In the meantime watch this space in the next few days for a nice surprise!

All about SA4QE

How to contribute - full details

All 2010 posts

Paris subway 4qation photo by RUTH BOSCH

SA4QE Christmas special - video clip of Russell Hoban Guardian interview

2010-12-24T17:14:00.002Z

Here's an SA4QE treat - an exclusive video clip from the Russell Hoban Guardian event on 22 November 2010. This was part of the audience Q&A which followed John Mullan's interview with Russ. A member of the audience asks about the rhymes in Riddley Walker, and where they originated from. The audio is a bit quiet - you're recommended to plug in earphones and crank up the volume a bit.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all 4qaters and Hoban fans worldwide!

Russell Hoban at the Guardian Book Club, 22 November 2010

2010-11-26T18:06:00.006Z

Russell Hoban and Mr Punch

UPDATE: Hear the interview at the Guardian podcast

SA4QE was lucky to get a front-row seat on Monday night at John Mullan's Guardian Book Club interview with Russell Hoban.

There were some 125 people in attendance at the Guardian's Scott Room, where Hoban spoke to Mullan and answered questions from the audience for about 90 minutes on Riddley Walker.

Dressed in a black roll-neck and beige bodywarmer, Hoban took to the stage with help from his wife Gundula to warm applause. He doffed his black baseball cap and as Mullan did his introductions Hoban rummaged in a bag for a Mr Punch puppet, extemporising a few Punchisms in authentic voice to everyone's delight.

SA4QE didn't get a recording or formal notes of the interview (unlike for the somewhat shorter Serpentine gig last month), and it was being recorded for a future Guardian podcast anyway, but fortunately several of Hoban's beautifully-crafted answers were almost exact quotes from an article he wrote for the Guardian Book Club (to be published in the print edition on Saturday 27 November). 'People say to me: "Where do you get your ideas?" "Out of the air,"' was among Hoban's replies, as was his reference to 'the place where the remembered blood of Thomas Becket seethes on the stones' during an account of first visiting Canterbury Cathedral and seeing The Legend of St Eustace.

SA4QE, not being a Riddley expert (we leave that to the formidable Eli Bishop and his RW Annotations website), admits it was unaware of the fact that St Eustace 'has no official standing among the beatified. Perhaps his legend turned up on the back of some Middle-Ages cornflakes box and grew from there. Being thus non-factual, Eustace is quite at home in a work of fiction.' Hoban talked awhile about the poor St Eustace, recounting his separation from his children before finally landing up roasted alive in a brazen bull, checking at one point with Mullan if he was 'spending too much time on this'. Mullan, as captivated as the rest of us, bade him carry on as long as he wished.

Mullan read out some of the place names Hoban gave to actual Kent locations in Riddley Walker (Do It Over for Dover, Horny Boy for Herne Bay etc), querying where 'Bollock Stoans' was. 'I don't remember that one,' Hoban replied, adding something to the effect that 'a certain amount of bollocks' was involved. Another Mullan question revolved around the character Abel Goodparley's misinterpretation of the story of St Eustace, asking Hoban to read out the passage in question. Hoban explained that his eyes don't allow him to read very well these days, so Mullan read it out instead ('St stands for 'sent', meaning he dint jus turn up, he was sent' was among the well-received quotes from the book).

A question about how Mr Punch came into things produced one of several excellent lines of the night, Hoban asserting that his ability to write what and how he writes lies in a facility for 'being friends with my head ... I take its hobo journeys in fast freights, riding the blinds to unknown destinations. Sometimes I get thrown off the train in the middle of nowhere and sometimes I get to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.' One of these journeys evidently took in Punch and Judy, and thankfully Hoban was good enough friends with his own head (what a delightfully Orphic image!) to take that ride and connect Punch with St Eustace to produce the unique work we know today.

There followed a further 40 minutes' fascinating patter, during which Hoban gave some eloquent - if sometimes unnervingly brief - answers, touching on the language of Riddley Walker - 'it slows the reader down to Riddley's pace of thought and the language itself becomes a character in the novel' - and on why people feel drawn to the book despite its apocalyptic mood. Hoban's paraphrased answer to the latter revolved around the perennial attraction to ghost and horror stories as well as to the idea of characters at the very extremes of existence. 'I believe Cormac McCarthy has done something similar recently with a book called The Road,' Hoban added - to, frankly, the relief of SA4QE which understood from past exchanges that the great man studiously avoided contemporary fiction.

John Mullan

Mullan then threw the evening open to the audience. Again, the exact answers (and indeed the exact questions, some of which were of baffling length) will become clear when the podcast is released, but thankfully Claire Armitstead, the Guardian's literary editor, was tweeting summaries of each exchange in real time. The following are summarised from her selected tweets.

'I've been asking myself what is it with the dogs [said Hoban about the book's famous canines]. It's first off, the blackness of them. [I'm addicted to black.] I'm a schwartzophile. I based the dogs on the physiognomy of the hyena. They're not tail-waggy things.'

'Punch is the lawless id, the spirit of rebellion that Riddley digs up. It's the dead hand.'

Q: 'What's your philosophical position?' A: 'All my books are an exploration. The action comes out of the characters and the characters come out of the action.'

One questioner asked at some length how Hoban reconciled writing his Frances series ('my one commercial success') and other books for children with the dark adult fantasy of Riddley Walker. Hoban's explanation gave rise to what will probably be Hoban's best-remembered line of the night: 'I believe it's called talent.' If almost any other writer had said this they would have been roasted in a brazen bull for it, but it seemed more matter-of-fact than arrogant and even a non-Hoban fan could hardly argue with it - SA4QE is of course biased, but the body of work speaks for itself.

Russell Hoban signs for Roland and his class

Another questioner had read the book after doing Islamic studies and said that when people ask what Sufism is she tells them 'read Riddley Walker'. Hoban responded that he hadn't read Sufism. He added though that he had read zen.

There were a number of other questions which will have to wait for the podcast, but the final one was sent in by Kate Laity on Twitter - 'Is it possible to have such a varied career as yours today?' Hoban responded, refreshingly without cynicism: 'Talent will always find a way.'

Several of SA4QE's friends were also in attendance, including Tim Haillay, Deena Omar (forever known as the 'Some-Poasyum quiz winner'), Alastair Bickley, Richard Cooper and Bristol Grammar School's Roland Clare, who had brought eight upper-sixth English students with him. Roland's former students Rowan Evans, who pinned a Riddley quote to a tree on a former 4qation, and Thomas Lipscomb also came with the party on a fabulous day trip which had taken in Riddley-themed sessions at the British Library. SA4QE is pleased to report that the Bristolians were interviewed later as part of the Guardian podcast about their studies of the book - this can be heard about 21 minutes into the audio file on this page.

Altogether it was a fantastic evening, and SA4QE thanks the excellent folks at The Guardian, including of course John Mullan as well as Claire Armitstead, Hannah Freeman and Justine Jordan for enthusiastically tweeting about it.

PHOTOS BY GOMBERT YAWNCHER
Hi-res versions are available as a set on the SA4QE Flickr site

Meet up with other Russell Hoban fans in London on Monday 22 November

2010-11-19T19:12:00.003Z

If you're coming to the Russell Hoban interview at The Guardian on 22 November, why not meet up with other Hoban fans?

The interview takes place at The Guardian's Scott Room, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU (map), at 7pm. This event is sold out, so please note if you haven't already bought a ticket you won't be able to get in.

If you do have a ticket though and are in the area before the event please drop into The Fellow, a public bar at nearby 24 York Way, N1 9AA (map). The function room has been booked for the use of Hoban fans from 5.20pm to 6.45pm. There is limited space in the function room, but you can of course also meet in the public bar downstairs. (Fans of Russ are recommended to identify themselves by approaching likely-looking members of the public and whispering "Trubba not!" or similar quote from Riddley Walker, the subject of the Guardian interview.)

If you can't make The Fellow there will very likely be the opportunity for socialising after the event.

If you're on Twitter, you can register your intention to attend the tweetup at http://twtvite.com/russellhobanfellow

Hannah Freeman November 2010

2010-11-18T09:30:00.001Z

Posted on Twitter:

walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley walker.

@fortuna_nul_1 November 2010

2010-11-17T09:20:00.001Z

Posted on Twitter:

Well, it don't make the sun shine, but at least it don't deepen the shit.

Chris Bell November 2010

2010-11-16T09:05:00.000Z

Posted on Twitter here and here:

I wan tu go I wan tu stay I wan tu dark I wan tu lyt I wan tu day I wan tu nyt I wan tu big I wan tu littl I wan tu aul I wan tu nuthing.

...

Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it.

Chitra Ramaswamy November 2010

2010-11-15T09:11:00.000Z

Theres some thing in us it dont have no name … it ain't us but yet it's in us. It's looking out thru our eye hoals.

Quoted as part of an excellent interview with Russell Hoban in The Scotsman

Happy birthday Riddley Walker, 30 years old today... #russellhobanrules

- @Chitgrrl

Fred Runk November 2010

2010-11-14T08:28:00.000Z

Russell Hoban is one of my favorite authors, and Riddley Walker, his post holocaust novel, is one of my favorite works. I've read it several times and will read it again. This is the 30th anniversary of its creation.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.

* See Fred's full blog post which includes more Riddley quotes at http://freds-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/russell-hobans-riddley-walker-30th.html

Ruth Bosch November 2010

2010-11-13T19:29:00.002Z

Trubba not

As is often the case I have no copy of Riddley Walker, having given mine away again. The last one, bought mere moments before at the fall festival library sale up the street, went to the woman standing next to me in line as we waited for pumpkin doughnuts and cider. We were watching radiant and victorious pumpkin doughnut eaters come away from the tent. The line itself was a half-hour project so there was time to get acquainted. My companion was wearing a shirt with a bat logo and the name "Alternative Tentacles". When I admired it she pointed out that the decorative border around the bat was actually a pattern of overlapping tentacles. I just gave her Riddley Walker immediately and tried to describe and do justice to my experience of Russ's books, including bats and tentacles. She was gracious and did not move away. All of this is to say that "Trubba Not" was the quote I was sure of in my bookfree condition, left in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts with gratitude.

Mike Dickman November 2010

2010-11-12T09:16:00.000Z

Fading fading dwindling on the air but the fading an the dwindl sending out their sylents roun and roun that circel never slowing to a stilness. Wel really there aint no stilness any where is there. Not 1ce you begin to take noatis.

...

No it aint ben beartht it never does get beartht its all ways in the woom of thigs its all ways on the road.

The Other Voyce Owl of the Worl - SA4QE special for 11/11/10

2010-11-11T11:24:00.001Z

There wer the Other Voyce Owl of the Worl. He sat in the worl tree larfing in his front voyce only his other voyce wernt larfing his other voyce wer saying the sylents. He had a way of saying them. He said them wide and far where he begun them he said them tyny when they come close. He kep saying the sylents like that in his other voyce and when he done it the sylents wer swallering up the souns of the worl then the owl wer swallering the sylents.

No 1 knowit he wer doing it. He wer trying to swaller all the souns of the worl then there wunt be no mor worl becaws every thing wud foller the soun of its self in to the sylents then it wud be gone. What the owl had in mynd wer to get it all swallert then fly a way.

No 1 knowit what the owl wer doing only a kid. He dint have no eyes he lissent all the time. When he heard the owl saying the sylents in his other voyce he heard the sylents swallering up the souns of the worl littl and big from the wind sying in the trees to the ants crying in their hoals. The kid knowit the owl wer trying to say the woal worl a way and he knowit it wer on him to stop the owl so he begun to lissen every thing back.

He kep them souns safe til the day stood up. Then the kid unheard the souns and they gone back where they livet. The kid were larfing at the owl but the owl dint know it he thot he done a good nites work. He sat in the worl tree grooling and smarling all day thinking he wud get the woal worl gone only he never done it.

from Riddley Walker, Chapter 11, p82-83

Olaf Schneider November 2010

2010-11-11T09:02:00.001Z

It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we don't fit. Sometimes it cant find the arm hoals and it tears us a part.

(Posted on Twitter)

Dave Awl November 2010

2010-11-10T08:23:00.000Z

Posted to Facebook:

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

* See also the Riddley Walker page on Dave's original Russell Hoban website, The Head of Orpheus.

Roland Clare November 2010

2010-11-09T08:06:00.001Z

This was the first time I've ever 4quated in the dark and the driving rain; the photographs below reflect all that Novembering.

I said, 'No 1 ever starts his self.'

He said, 'Yes they do. You dont start the life in you thats like a rivver running in you stil there comes a time when you push your oan boat out in to the middl of it.'

(page 182)

Behind the grille that protects the glass of a very distinctively run-down, military memorabilia shop that has finally folded after occupying a conspicuous corner-site near the centre of Bristol for a good sixty years

Similarly, my Riddley quotation peeping from behind a grid: here it's in front of some posh offices built inside a mediaeval building, St Bartholomew's Hospital, in the centre

A longer shot of the same

Self-explanatory ... lots of people will have seen this one, I imagine

The old telephone-box gambit is getting a bit hackneyed by now ... though the boxes are getting harder and harder to find

Lindsay Edmunds November 2010

2010-11-08T08:09:00.002Z

...You cud get jus the fayntes glimmer of what it musve ben to be the Puter Leat [the computer elite?]. To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyond the sarvering gallack seas [the sovereign galaxies]. Not jus singing it you know. Acturely going it acturely roading out thru space.

This quotation is part of my blog this week, which started out being about something else and ended up being about RIDDLEY.

Am I right about the meaning of Puter Leat?

- Lindsay

Yvonne Studer November 2010

2010-11-07T07:58:00.001Z

I'll be dancing not on two weddings today but on two birthdays. One is for one of the most intriguing books of the later 20th century, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, which was published exactly 30 years ago.
The other party is for the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, which has just turned 25 and is now fighting for survival. Some of the best known Swiss authors, Adolf Muschg, Iso Camartin and Ruth Schweikert, will read from translations of Joyce's works. And my part will be to contribute to a memory puzzle of what the Foundation was like 25 years ago. I was a student then, and the Foundation was my oasis.

As for Riddley Walker, I'd like to post one of my favourite quotes right here [on Facebook], a quote that has become my Words-To-Live-By:

Its the not sturgling for Power thats where the Power is. Its in jus letting your self be where it is. Its tuning in to the worl its leaving your self behynt and letting your self be where it says in Eusa 5:
... in tu the heart uv the stoan hart uv the dans. Every thing blippin & bleapin & movin in the shiftin uv thay Nos. Sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit.

(ch. 17, p. 191)

Happy Birthday, Riddley Walker, Happy Birthday Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Long may both of you live, places of the heart and the mind!

Lara Hoffenberg November 2010

2010-11-06T07:37:00.001Z

Posted to Facebook, 5 November 2010:

Which wud you rather? Have the worl in front of you and free or have some thing hevvy on your back for ever?

from Riddley Walker

Today is the 30th anniversary of this brilliant book - if you haven't read it already, what have you been DOING for the last 30 years??

Riddley Walker special SA4QE today - post your quotes

2010-11-05T07:10:00.000Z


Russell Hoban with Punch head (2005 photo: Lisa Greenstein)

Today marks the unofficial 30th birthday of Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban's magnificent 1980 novel.

To celebrate, SA4QE is inviting fans of the book to share your favourite quotes with your friends and complete strangers alike.

The traditional method is to write your quote on a sheet of paper (yellow if you can get it) and leave it in a public place for others to chance upon, while with the power of social media you can also post your quote as your Facebook status update, tweet it on Twitter or post it on your blog.

Any quotes that the SA4QE webmaster picks up either by chance or design will be replicated on this site, so if you'd rather not leave it to chance please post your quote as a comment on this very post below or email it to sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com

This site will be updated throughout the day, so keep an eye on it and also on the Twitter feed.

If you're looking for inspiration see this wonderful article on Riddley Walker by author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas etc) on the Guardian site, written especially for the 2005 Hoban convention.

See also this post for more useful Riddley Walker info and links.

Extraordinary SA4QE on 5 November to celebrate 30 years of Riddley Walker

2010-10-25T12:20:00.003+01:00

Russell Hoban's seminal masterpiece Riddley Walker was published 30 years ago this year. To celebrate this, SA4QE invites fans of the novel to participate in a special SA4QE on 5 November, by leaving your favourite quote(s) from the book in a public place, and/or sharing it online such as by posting it as your Facebook status update for the day, or tweeting or blogging it.

Why 5 November? This date has been chosen as it was officially the day that Russell Hoban completed the novel in 1979. It's also Guy Fawkes Night (aka Bonfire Night), on which British people commemorate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot to destroy Parliament in 1605. In Riddley Walker the characters' quest for the "clevverness" leads to the rediscovery of gunpowder, with explosive results for some of them. (Don't try this at home.)

Why "extraordinary"? Every SA4QE is of course extraordinary but it usually takes place on 4 February each year in celebration of Russell Hoban's birthday. A break with this tradition doesn't seem too outrageous given the recognised position of Riddley Walker both in Hoban's oeuvre and in late 20th-century literature.

What do I have to do? Basically just pick a favourite quote from the book, write it on a piece of paper and leave it somewhere for others to find. Full guidelines for taking part in this or any SA4QE, and sharing your selections with this site, can be found on the Contribute page.

Also of interest: Russell Hoban is being interviewed before an audience in London on 22 November about Riddley Walker as part of the Guardian Book Club series. At the time of writing tickets are still available. The novel is also the Guardian's Book Club book for November, so keep an eye on their website and/or buy the Guardian on Saturdays throughout the month.

Further information

Riddley Walker outline on The Head of Orpheus

Riddley Walker Annotations website

Riddley Walker on Wikipedia

Buy Riddley Walker from Amazon

All posts labelled "Riddley Walker" on the SA4QE site (includes quotes chosen by participants as well as other articles of interest)

Russell Hoban at the Serpentine Map Marathon, 16 October 2010

2010-10-24T10:02:00.004+01:00

Russell Hoban onstage

Last weekend Russell Hoban made a rare public appearance - an onstage interview for Map Marathon: Maps for the 21st Century, a multimedia event featuring dozens of writers, artists and academics hosted by the Serpentine Gallery at the Royal Geographical Society, London. During the interview Russell talked about the "mystique" of maps and the part they have played in his work, and his new novel Angelica Lost and Found. The SA4QE event and The Kraken Hoban community also got a mention. A number of SA4QE/Kraken stalwarts were in attendance including Anthony Davis, who takes us back there now. A transcript of the interview is included below.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER MORRISON

Travel difficulties / delays apart, and despite being without a MAP at the crucial moment requiring a circumnavigation of the Royal Albert Hall, all turned to the good! Peering into the dark of the RGS's lecture theatre soon revealed the features of some well-known Krakenites, and I even had a seat reserved where I could witness Gilbert and George, rather tangentially, reading their 'mapping' of postcards that, to their eye, featured the Union Flag (they know so much better than to call it the Union Jack!), i.e. a list, in alphabetical order, of the largely arbitrary - and not without a comic bent - titles that they had given to these cards whose collection they had so dutifully curated; likewise their mapping of 'telephone [box] cards', but only those that - to their mind - left something to the imagination.

For me, seeing these icons of the gay art world and hearing them talk about their maps of county towns and seaside resorts was a very fitting prelude to Russ's own session, and one which made the whole protracted jurney (sure some Riddley?) quite worthwhile, as, of course, did seeing Russ again and a no. of Hobanites, old and new.

Eleanor Bron started the session with a lovely reading from the start of The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, although I really don't know how she kept her composure with the noise and bustle of people re-taking their seats, and generally milling around the lecture-space as if no thought-out and sensitive rendition were being given. [The reading is available from Thoughtcat as an mp4 audio file; you will need to turn up the volume as it is quite soft.] Russ was then helped, with the support of a clearly much-needed arm (that of his would-be interviewer and host, Hans Ulrich Obrist), down, across and up to and into one of the padded chairs to the right of the lectern: his physical frailty was patent, and I'm sure that everyone watching (not just those who knew him) must have felt for the effort that he was making just to be present at this event.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (l) with Russell Hoban

So much was Russ enjoying being there, though, that it was evident not only in his mental liveliness, but also in his quirkily engaging quality and character of speech, which were immediately to the fore in his first answer. Coupled with these was the comfortable way in which he was clearly sensing the room and its occupants, as the professional communicator that he is. (In fact, he could be seen, once settled into his chair, already putting out what one could call tentacles or feelers for this purpose.)

After first answering a question about Lion that arose from the reading, Russ had politely, but definitely, to decline to address the second one put to him [of whether he thought that the "master map" that Jachin-Boaz wanted to make for his son to "show him where to find whatever he might wish to look for" was a kind of precursor to the Internet; "Can I dodge that question?" Hoban responded, to the delight of much of the audience]. I felt this exchange spoke volumes about the lack of preparation on the part of the interviewer, in establishing a rapport with Russ: I am guessing that, otherwise, he would not have offered a lead that was felt to be so inappropriate that Russ seemed quickly to have decided that he would prefer to answer a different question and volunteer some information.

I'm not definite about this, because I obviously imagined that the question asked was going to be turned to, and Russ then talked about something else, but I think that what he had been presented with was a too circumscribed way of inviting him to share feelings about his works and their genesis: I believed at the time, and still do, that overstepping a question to present material that one would have one's audience hear, rather than just the response to some tired or otherwise vexing or uninteresting enquiry, must have been the right one. (I know from talking to Russ that he, rightly, does not reward poor questions with his attention, and I think that it is because he simply doesn't find any life in them, and so the questioner is punished, in a way, with an impoverished answer.)

I had been glad to learn, from his answer to a question about Riddley [see below], that he had used maps in writing it, both an early Ordnance Survey map of Kent, and one, of a futuristic nature, that projected that a former channel of water would reopen, separating the rest of the county from an area that he called The Ram. For me, this fuels an existing desire to be guided around the lands over which Riddley roams (and from which others have come), and to do so in, on and around a vehicle with a like-minded crew, willing to absorb the sights, sounds, drinks and other delicacies in a joint exploration of what this very different county tells us about the places in which Russ placed the unfolding of his story.

The interview

The following is a transcription of the interview from an audio recording by Richard Cooper. The recording started in the middle of the answer Russell Hoban was giving to the above "dodged" question about maps and the Internet.

Map from Treasure Island (Wikipedia)

RH: ... As a boy I used to send away to the Canadian-Pacific Railways for their maps and they sent me these wonderful maps with the provinces and the states in different colours and blue for the oceans, and maps are a - how can I say... er, take Robert Louis Stevenson's book Treasure Island - every edition, whether hardback or paperback, has that map in the front, and you look at that map and you know good things are in store for you. [laughter] And that is more often that not connected to action - you look at a map because you want to get somewhere to do something. Sometimes it's just you look at a map to know where you are. And when you first approached me about this stuff I began to think about maps and it hit me all of a sudden that maps were the precursor of language. And I was thinking - we don't know whether prehistoric man, Cro-Magnon man, had language or not, but I was imagining a couple of Cro-Magnon guys, and one of them wants to tell the other where he saw a herd of mammoth. And first of all he would have to establish the man he was talking to himself, so maybe he marked something in the dirt with a stick, make a stick figure or maybe just some kind of a mark, and then he would have to indicate time somehow - it was time behind him, it was yesterday, he saw the herd of mammoth by a river and there was a big rock. And so then he would scratch in the dirt the river and something that indicated the passage of time, say the sun going up and down, and that would be the first map. And from that map he had language. And now you get into a taxi and the driver has a satnav, and [inaudible] maps of the heavens, so it all began with a guy drawing with a stick in the dirt.

HUO: What about your own maps? Do you have a collection? Gilbert and George talked about the huge collection they have of maps, do you collect maps?

RH: I have often used maps. When I wrote Riddley Walker I had a copy of the first ordnance map, I think it was the very first one which was during the Victorian period, and I also had a put-together composite of the ordnance survey maps for the area that I was working in, and I had this up on the wall, it's a big thing, and I also had a chart of the Thames Estuary, which indicated places that I needed to refer to. And I have smaller maps that showed parts of Kent that I was working in. And the maps are always a strong support and a kind of inspiration - as I say there is a mystique about maps that I have responded to all my life, and working on those maps, with those maps, I got Riddley Walker done, and I also drew a map of my own which I put together with the help of - I forget the organisation they were with, it might have been an agricultural college, I don't know - who showed me how in the future the Wansum Channel between one part of Kent and the other would probably open again, so there would be water flowing between the main body of Kent and the other part, which in my book is called The Ram.

HUO: Are there other books of yours with maps?

RH: Well, The Mouse and His Child has a little map in it, and The Trokeville Way has a map in the front. Oh and I'm also thinking apropos of Stevenson's map in Treasure Island, in Edgar Allen Poe's story The Gold Bug I believe there was a map too. And maps are frequently used in thrillers, you know, where the bad guys are after the map that the good guy has, and there are... I think that as a boy we may have sometimes played chase games in which one person had a map.

HUO: I am curious to know about your latest novel, Angelica Lost and Found. Any connection to maps there? If not, I am curious to know anyhow, it would be great to hear about your new book.

RH: Well [laughs], it's a funny thing, when I wrote the book, it didn't seem out of the ordinary to me. It happened to be about a hippogriff who falls in love with a flesh-and-blood woman. The hippogriff is an imaginary animal, and this imaginary animal falls in love with the flesh-and-blood woman, and they achieve intimacy [laughter], and one thing leads to another all through the book, and the imaginary animal has a voice in the narration. And as I say, when I wrote it [there was] nothing remarkable about it, and then I'm trying to figure out where it was coming from. And in 1997 having read Barbara Reynolds's wonderful, wonderful translation of Orlando Furioso I wanted to do something with the characters and the ideas that were in it. And I tried to do something with the hippogriff, whom I called Volatore, and it went on for two pages and fizzled out, and I couldn't see what to do with it. And then a couple of years ago I took out a folder I had called Ariosto Revudebus[?] - I looked at my notes and there was nothing there, and I began to think of another way of doing it, so that's when I started writing Angelica Lost and Found, and that impetus carried me along to the end of it. I might say that the main stimulus that got me started on it was a painting which is reproduced on the cover of the Italian edition of Orlando Furioso, and the painting is by Girolamo da Carpi, a 16th-century Italian painter, and it shows Ruggiero mounted on a hippogriff rescuing Angelica from the sea-monster called Orca. And this painting is interesting because - it's on the cover of the book Angelica Lost and Found - the painting is interesting because first of all it differs from previous paintings by da Carpi, like his Madonna and Child: this painting is almost naive in its rawness, and oddly Angelica is squeezed into a corner held behind a rock, and you can't even see her whole body, you can't see her too clearly, and over here in the sky is this hippogriff with Ruggiero sitting on it and raising his sword. And that painting stayed in my mind. And that was how I got started thinking about what to do with these characters, Ruggiero, Angelica and the hippogriff, and that's the novel.

HUO: I have one more question and that is, I hear a rumour that every year on your birthday, your many fans, also known as the Kraken Club, leave quotes from your work on yellow paper in many places they hope will be picked up. I read also that one member left 33 quotes in 29 locations all across London, which is almost connected to mapping. Can you tell us about this fan club?

RH: Well I don't remember how The Kraken came into being [we do! - Ed], but it did and as you say they ... select quotes from my books and they type them on yellow paper. I use yellow A4 - people ask me why it's yellow A4, and it's because when I was in America I would read many books that would say "The man had a plain deal table on which was a ream of ordinary foolscap". I thought what was foolscap? Maybe it's a kind of paper they make fools' caps[?] out of*. When I got to London I found out foolscap was a size, but I still thought of it as being yellow paper, and that is why I write on A4 yellow paper.

HUO: Thank you so much Russell, thank you very much. [applause]

* Richard notes: This bit of the audio was difficult to hear and the connection with foolscap and yellow doesn't really make sense; there is more information on the SA4QE FAQ page about Russell Hoban's choice of paper. Coincidentally though a Google search I did to try and shed light on this turned up this curious Fool’s Cap Map of the World.

Following Russ's appearance, the attendant Hoban fans filed out of the auditorium in an effort to say hello to their man. Anthony takes up the narrative again.

Anthony provides light for Russ to sign

One of the photographers for the event had asked Russ if he could walk 100 metres to where a studio had been set up, and he had had to decline to take those steps (pun intended). Instead, then, some shots were then taken of him in front of a temporary - and easily overlooked, by those such as I - barrier between the public areas and the stage door [see the result on the Serpentine's Facebook page], so, at this point, Gundula [Russell's wife] said that Russ was in need of a glass of something. When she said that the whiksy (hic / sic!) that I happened to have about my person would be too much, investigating the environs allowed me to rustle up (pun intended!) a glass of Merlot. It was then decided that occupying a free table in the bar was the best way around giving 'hospitality space' to Russ, which had not otherwise been forthcoming, and also to his guests.

Gundula and he had been so kind, and had bought wine for everyone (two bottles each of red and white from the bar - I should rephrase that: they weren't buying two bottles of wine for each person, but four bottles to serve us all!).

Russ and I had a chance to talk about a few things [and he also chatted to the other Hoban fans present and signed books they'd brought]. Maybe / maybe not (in a flicker sort of way) you weren't there yourself - but had you thought that you might have been there on a map that Russ might compile of all of us here to keep us close and near, which he might have in his breast-pocket, or even in his heart...?

See the full set of peter morrison's photos on Flickr (also featuring several other contributors to the Map Marathon)

Facebookers and Twitterers 2010

2010-02-24T12:00:00.001Z

Yellow paper found its way into various social networking sites in 2010. Here is a selection of the Russell Hoban quotes found on Twitter and Facebook on 4th February.

One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by the Russell Hoban Page

'She said, "Be the world-child with me"' said the head. I will.

- from The Medusa Frequency

Facebooked by PA Morbid

The above from Fremder Facebooked by Tim Haillay

The sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world.

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by Chris Bell

We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.

- from 'Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road' from The Moment under the Moment
Facebooked by Lara Hoffenberg

Sometimes I don't know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understading patchy but I have action; I go. I can't tell this as a story because it isn't a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards ...

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by Dave Awl

I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you.

from Riddley Walker
Facebooked by Olaf Schneider

The fog made everything more personal, as if it were taking me aside to tell me a secret.

from The Bat Tattoo
tweeted by Lindsay Edmunds

At three o'clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere.

- from The Medusa Frequency
tweeted by Richard Cooper (at three o'clock in the morning*)
*courtesy of HootSuite's scheduling facility :-)

The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us!

- from 'Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road' from The Moment under the Moment
Facebooked by Lara Hoffenberg

The above from Pilgermann Facebooked by Tim Haillay

Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself.

from Pilgermann
tweeted by Olaf Schneider

Here's to Art and all who sail in her.

from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi
tweeted by Lindsay Edmunds

There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
tweeted by Dave Awl

The action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.

from Pilgermann
tweeted by Chris Bell

Chris Bell 2010

2010-02-23T08:00:00.001Z

Apologies for the delay in sending this through. As you’ll have seen from my Twitter tweets, that site is where I spent most of my 4 February this year — I’m attaching a screen-grab of one of my Twitter pages and, as you’ll notice, they’re mostly Hoban quotes.

With a two-year-old boy to mind at home, I don’t get out much any more. So a physical quote drop wasn’t possible. I decided to restrict my 2010 quotes exclusively to my favourite Hoban novel, Pilgermann, this year. Space permitting, I endeavoured to include links to the SA4QE website on my tweets. I also re-tweeted other 4Qations on Twitter like a madman.

Here’s a screen-grab from my Facebook page, too.

The sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world.

- from Pilgermann

I also posted a Pilgermann quote to my blog, NZBC:

This is probably my favourite Hoban sentence of all. Russ’s voice radiates from it; instantly recognisable, incontrovertibly beautiful. I 4Qated it before, in 2002, but it’s so good it bears repeating.

Twilight it was, the dying day shivering a little and huddling itself up in its cloak. Suddenly there came flying towards me with a mouse dangling from its beak, an owl, what is called a veiled owl, with a limp mouse dangling from its cryptic heart-shaped face.

- from Pilgermann

What a great year for 4Qating it was — there was a real buzz on Twitter and Facebook, and it was fun watching the Twitter ‘ticker’ on the SA4QE home page to see who else was 4Qating.

Well being,

Chris Bell
New Zealand

Quillory 2010

2010-02-22T12:00:00.001Z

In my contribution to Russell Hoban Day, I left this paper in a newspaper machine in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The paper says:

I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.

- from Kleinzeit

I don't know about you, but on some mornings I have that very conversation with my mirror.

Webmaster's note: Many thanks to Quillory who posted this report on Flickr. If Quillory would like to get in touch to add any further details about him/herself please email sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com

Alida Allison 2010

2010-02-21T12:00:00.008Z

Here are my 2010 quotes (actually, Russ' quotes). I'm also sending a pic of my school where I and about 30 students scattered the yellow sheets.

Tom liked to fool around. He fooled around with sticks and stones and crumpled paper, with mewses and passages and dustbins, with bent nails and broken glass and holes in fences.
He fooled around with mud, and stomped and squelched and slithered through it.
He fooled around on high things that shook and wobbled and teetered.
He fooled around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and fishing them out.
He fooled around with barrels in alleys.
When Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong asked him what he was doing, Tom said he was fooling around.
‘It looks very much like playing to me,’ said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. ‘Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful.’
‘All right,’ Tom said.
But he did not stop. He did a little fooling around with two or three cigar bands and a paper clip.

From How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen,
Whitbread Award, 1974, Illus. Quentin Blake

The squidgerino squelcher was put together by the wizard Bembel Rudzuk. Bembel Rudzuk made up three jars of monster powder, then he added twelve buckets of water and Splosh! There was the squidgerino squelcher. It slobbered and it moaned, it left a loathsome track behind.
Everyone was terrified, everyone ran off and left the princess all unguarded.
The squidgerino squelcher chased her up a tower then it crept around to the bottom of the tower slobbering and moaning.
The princess looked at the mess the squidgerino squelcher was making and she became rather cross. ‘Where’d this monster come from?’ she said. ‘And who’s going to clean up after it?’

From The Flight of Bembel Rudzuk,
1982, Illus. Colin McNaughton

Pablo K. 2010

2010-02-20T12:00:00.002Z

Quotes dropped around south-east London:

I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

[channelling H.P. Lovecraft]

I had told myself that I was not going to relive the past but of course this is not possible: what we call the present is only the accumulated past.

- The Bat Tattoo (2002)

"You took your time", says Moe.
"My time took me", says Max. "Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph."
He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - Willa Cather, My Antonia

- Her Name Was Lola (2003)

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of anything youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

- Riddley Walker (1980)

Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I'd do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: It bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don't know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one's proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who'd have wanted to know about them? They'd have stayed in the garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they'd have been a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God MADE us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn't done it.

- Pilgermann (1983)

"What's pathetic about trying to understand what happens to you?"
"It's cowardly. Besides which I don't believe you. I bet you're writing it all down trying to make a story out of it. I can tell by the miserable look of you. You're not really living your life, you're pulling the legs and wings off it, one by one. Why don't you take up vagrancy or crime, it's more manly."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

...I must say though lightning strike me as I speak that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I'm being arrogant, and maybe that's why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it's that simply - God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and PFFT! there go a few hundred or a few million X. Ah! To be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.

- Pilgermann (1983)

There is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it; he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it; singers to sing it; lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others.

- Pilgermann (1983)

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

I think about the dead a lot, their wants and needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it's because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn't; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting...The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day - sometimes I see my hand life a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel the ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names...I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.

- Fremder (1996)

More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

- Fremder (1996)

There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.

- Fremder (1996)

Things don't end; they just accumulate.

- Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (1998)

"Death is longer than life", she said, "and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we're left with, maybe some of us more than others."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

See the slideshow below for all the excellent photos from this report. If you have problems viewing this, you can browse the set on Pablo's Flickr page.

Steve Long 2010

2010-02-19T12:00:00.000Z

I 4qated a day late this year, but better late than never I feel. The pressure of work done with for the weekend I used the Slickman technique of more or less random selection. I has preselected Riddley Walker, and was delighted to come upon this in the first page I looked at:

Persoon Eusa comes up agen this time hes got like a iron hat on his head. 2 long wires coming out of the top of the hat and littl pegs on the ends of the wires. Plus there’s a cranking handl on the side of the iron hat. Eusas trying to shift some kynd of a box its biggern he is. He gets the box heavit up on to the show board. He says, ‘Hoo! Thats a hevvy 1.’ Theres a cranking handl on the side of the box as the 1 on Eusas hat, 2 littl hoals and a slot in the top of the box and a nother slot in 1 end of it.

Eusa sya, ‘2 heads are bettern 1.’ He takes them 2 wires coming out of his hat and he pegs them in to the hoals in the box. He says, ‘Now Iwl jus input a few littl things in to my No. 2 head.’ Hes terning that crank on his iron
hat. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

Eusa says, ‘Now les see if it works.’ He takes a peace of paper and he says out loud what hes writing on it; ‘Whats my name?’ He puts the peace of paper in the slot in the top of the box he says, ‘Now les see it you can anser
that.’

Eusa terns the crank on the side of the box and a peace of paper comes out of the slot in the end of the box. Theres writing on the paper. Eusa reads it out; ‘My name is Eusa.’

Eusa says ‘Thats the ticket.’ Hes terning the crank on his iron hat some mor then. Hes inputting all kynds of knowing out of his head in to the box.

Mr Clevver comes up and hes watching Eusa and lissening to him. Eusas mummeling all kynds of numbers and formlers it souns like hes inputting all the knowing there ever ben in the woal worl out of his head in to that box. Hes saying the Nos. of the rain bow and the fire quanter hes saying the smallering Nos. and the biggering Nos. plus it souns like hes saying some thing about the 1 big 1. Mr Clevver hes leaning closer and closer hes lissening lissening.

Mr Clevver he says to Eusa, ‘Thats a guvner lot of knowing youre inputting in to that box parbly theres knowing a nuff in there for any kynd of thing.’

Eusa says, ‘That’s about it. I dont think theres many things you cudnt do with that knowing. You cud do any thing at all you cud make boats in the air or you cud blow the worl a part.’

Mr Clevver says, ‘Scatter my datter that cernly is intersting. Eusa tel me some thing tho. Whyd you input all that knowing out of your head in to that box? Whynt you keep it in your head wunt it be safer there?’

- from Riddley Walker

I added a few explanatory words at the bottom and took the yellow paper with me to Milton Keynes theatre to see the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake. We arrived quite early and I left the yellow paper in the foyer by a rail close to a stand carrying publicity leaflets for future shows. My mother-in-law was with us when I dropped the yellow paper, I thought she would be puzzled as to what was going on but she said she has "been on one of these before"! I can't remember which...

Best wishes to all,

Steve

peter morrison 2010

2010-02-18T12:00:00.002Z

You’ll notice that i don’t call It by its right name. speaking its name might not actually bring it on but why take foolish chances. I’m talking about a certain sort of stoppage or ungoing, not infrequently an ongoing ungoing, that sometimes afflicts those whose trade is the writing of fiction. One of the strange truths about fiction is that practitioner writing with no difficulty on Monday may be utterly incapable of doing it on Tuesday. The poor blighter is suddenly rocked. ‘How’s it going?’ one’s friends ask cheerfully. ‘It’s not,’ one replied.

Can you pick it up from casual liaisons? Yes. From toilet seats? Yes. From reading the Sunday supplements? Watching The South Bank Show? Yes, yes. There are more ways of picking it up than not.

Various writers deal with it in various ways’ alcohol and frequent snacks, the traditional folk-remedies, do little to relieve the blankness of the page. Jogging has been known to result in the odd paragraph and a fair number of heart attacks. Hot baths and cold showers, travel and other forms of escape are unproductive.

One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect; certainly, in the mind-to-paper process, one’s choice of paper is important. I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into, isn’t It. While at the same time making a modest living if possible. Yellow paper definitely has less word resistance than blue; yellow-paper molecules are happier with blank-ink molecules than the blue paper ones are, and more susceptible to Brownian or even purpureal motion. I never use white paper - to intensity the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.

from "Blighters Rock", The Moment under The Moment

the picture shows this year's quote on my work monitor, with post-it to prompt the sourcing of yellow paper.... the quote itself was then tweeted (in a chopped up, unfortunately messy fashion), though was one of those days where i went to work and had dinner at friends, so had little other option. and would help if twitter weren't blocked from work....and all the parts had actually gone in from my phone. so it goes.

Lindsay Edmunds 2010

2010-02-17T12:00:00.001Z

I put a quotation up on my blog, tweeted a couple more, and wrote one more on yellow paper, which I left in a bookstore cafe:

The electric light changed a lot of things. It was an Irish writer, maybe Padraic Colum but I'm not sure, who said that traditional story-telling had to do with the circle of the firelight and the night all round. When electricity banished the night something was lost.

from "The Bear in Max Ernst's Bedroom,"
The Moment Under the Moment

Diana Slickman 2010

2010-02-16T12:00:00.000Z

I picked a quote more or less at random from The Medusa Frequency this year. It was at the top of the Hoban pile for no particular reason. Here's what I wrote out on to the yellow paper for this year's SA4QE:

It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.

I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadows first before me, then behind. 'Nothing to declare,' I said.

I crossed the common and headed down to the New King's Road. The Belisha beacons clicked as they blinked in the coldness of the morning. Cars at intervals hissed past me, in each one a face as questionable as the faces on the tin windows of toy cars from Japan. The shops stood like sleeping horses.

The lamps on Putney Bridge were still lit, the bridge stood in simple astonishment over the water, a stonelike creature of overness, of parapets and ghostly pale cool tones of blue, of grey, of dim whiteness in the foredawn with its lamps lit against a sky growing light. Far below lay the river; slack-water it was, turn of the tide, the low-tide river narrow between expanses of mud, the moored boats rocking on the stillness.

A sort of singing filled my head; it seemed an aspect of the particles of light and colour that made in my eyes the picture of this time just before dawn. I thought of the dew on the grass where the olive tree stood. There seemed to be a question on the air.

'Yes,' I said, 'I will.' I spoke aloud because I wanted my answer to be recorded on the early air.

At the bottom I wrote:

- from The Medusa Frequency
by Russell Hoban

This paper was placed here on 2/4/10 as part of a world-wide celebration of Russell Hoban's birthday. Your finding it and reading it is part of the party.

I folded this up to about two inches square, wrote "SA4QE" on the outside and put it in my pocket. Left the office. I had an errand I had to run; I went to The Spice House in Evanston, not far from my office. I had to get refills for my empty bottles of ground cumin, chili powder, and red-and-black pepper. The Spice House is a wonderful place, but it quickly overwhelms me with all the possibilities - all the things that could be made with all the spices and herbs and extracts and salts and peppers. When I leave, I leave a little sad that I'm not using more spices, and I leave smelling like a pumpkin pie - spicy and warm. I wandered around looking for the right place for my packet of words and finally settled on a little basket attached to the west wall of the store. In it were small, clear packets of seeds labeled "Grains of Paradise". I nestled my yellow packet among the clear ones and drifted off to make my purchases. Went back to the office. And back to work.

Happy birthday, Russ!

Yvonne Studer 2010

2010-02-15T12:00:00.001Z

As I'm on sabbatical and have been spending a lot of time on Facebook recently, spreading the word in public this year meant sending out quotes to those of my Facebook friends I thought might enjoy Russ's books. I set my status update to a quote from the essay 'I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment (1992):

Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis.

Then I added the following comment:

"Today, on 4th February 2010, is the American writer Russell Hoban's 85th birthday. To celebrate the day, fans from all over the word spread quotations from his books for adults and children in various places, an event we call the "Slickman A4 Quotation Event", short SA4QE. Often the quotes are written on sheets of yellow A4 paper because this kind of paper played a major role in Hoban壮 second novel for adults, Kleinzeit (1974). But other forms of expression from handwritten quotes on rizla paper to digital posts and animations are just as suitable. If you want to learn more and enjoy looking at examples from past years, check out the special SA4QE blog at http://sa4qe.blogspot.com/

Since I've always "4qated" ("fork-you-ate-it") places where I was busy, I decided to be active on Facebook this year, and particularly in Pet Society. So, don't be astonished if Purryl drops you a note with a quote today. Time is too short to 4qate all houses, though, and since everybody doesn't play Pet Society, the quote in my status update is for all those who won't get a personal message.

What the status update didn't allow me to type because there is a restriction on its length is that the essay from which I borrowed my quote is from the collection The Moment under the Moment.

Here on Facebook, we probably show each other a little bit more of our dreams than we usually would, and that's definitely something to celebrate and be thankful for. Here's to our unseen lives then! x"

Finally, I posted individual messages to twenty friends via the game we play together. If the quote was too long for an in-game note, I would direct them to the Inbox and place the quote there, stating why I had sent them these particular bits. These were the quotes:

"'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang."

(Kleinzeit, 1974)

"Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right."

(Turtle Diary, 1975)

"...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off."

(Linger Awhile, 2006)

"'5p more, luv,' said the lady at the ticket-taking booth. 'Fare's gone up.' That's life, Kleinzeit noted. Yesterday it cost so much to get from here to there, today it costs more. Just like that. Who knows what it'll cost me to wake up tomorrow."

(Kleinzeit 1974)

"Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They're gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn't need to come back."

(Turtle Diary 1975)

"Ink on paper makes books; books make worlds. You don't need a printing press, you don't even need to be grown up. Little children take pieces of paper, of different sizes as often as not; on them they print great gangling words with capitals and lower-case letters not always in the usual places; they draw pictures on the pieces of paper and they staple them together and the pages turn and it's a book with monsters and spacecraft from beyond the galaxy. Or trees and flowers and there was a princess who lived in a castle."

('With a Choked Cry', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment 1992, and in A Russell Hoban Omnibus 1999)

"I don't believe there's anyone who could know my needs and bear the burden of my sorrow the way you do."

(My Tango with Barbara Strozzi 2007)

"We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now."

('Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

I hope you all had a great day, and, once again, Happy Birthday, Russ!

Lisa Jones 2010

2010-02-14T12:00:00.001Z

Rather than leave my quotes in archetypically "New York" places, I thought it would make a more interesting photographic series to go about my evening normally and put them up randomly along the way, trying to evoke something of the mood and atmosphere of the quotes through the way I shot them.

Sometimes between two people it's as if one is a lock and the other is a key and they take turns being lock and key; but at other times it's as if both are keys or locks and nothing can be done.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

- from Fremder

In all, I'm very pleased with how they turned out.

Hope you like them! There are lots more in the slideshow below.

Cheers,

Lisa.

If you have problems viewing the above (excellent) slideshow you can view all the photos on Lisa's Flickr page

Ben Hennessy 2010

2010-02-13T12:00:00.001Z

a couple of quotes left around Waterford, Ireland - one in a bookshop and one in a cafe

from two of my favourite Russ stories

all bes and well done on an amazing site

ben

Ben Hennessy
Artistic Director
Red Kettle Theatre Company

from THE GHOST HORSE OF GENGHIS KHAN

In the hospital his father opened his eyes. “O thou of two worlds,” he said.
“How are you feeling?” said the night sister.
“I almost didn’t get here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I felt my horse sink underneath me, then…”
“Then what?”
John’s father laughed. “It was a dream,” he said.

It was almost four o’clock in the morning when John’s mother woke up and went into the study. She saw her son asleep at the desk with his head cradled on his arms. She read the page in the typewriter that had ended: “…on and on until a long, long shudder…” Now there was more. She read:

…on and on until a long, long shudder passes through the horse but it doesn’t stumble, it keeps on galloping. The pursuers have no more arrows and they stop chasing Temujin.
It was getting dark when the red roan brought Temujin to his camp. His brother Khasar pulled out the arrow and bandaged the wound and got him a fresh horse. It was time to move camp, and they rode away. Temujin’s wound hurt, he’d lost a lot of blood. He fell asleep in the saddle.
When he woke up the moon was shining and they were in the hills. The horses were put out to graze and he went to look for the red roan but he couldn’t find it.
“Where’s the red roan?” he asked Khasar.
“How should I know?” said Khasar.
“But I rode into camp on it, said Temujin.
“I found you lying on the ground at the edge of camp and there was no horse,” said Khasar.
“Were there any tracks?”
“No tracks.”
Then Temujin knew that the red roan had galloped beyond death to save him.

In two weeks John’s father came home. He sat down at his desk and looked at the page in his typewriter. “Someone’s been typing on my page,” he said.
“It was me,” said John. “I woke up in the middle of the night and came in here and I sort of had a dream at your desk.”
“Sleeptyping?” said his father.
“Something like that,” said John.
“It’s not bad,” said his father. “Not bad at all.”

from A NEAR THING FOR CAPTAIN NAJORK

One morning after breakfast Tom was fooling around with his chemistry set and he invented anti-sticky. Then he fooled around with anti-sticky and jam and springs and wheels and connecting-rods and he made a two-seater jam-powered frog.

Tom got into the frog with Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet and started it up. The frog hopped over the fence and the next three gardens in one giant hop.

“What makes it go?” said Aunt Bundlejoy.
“Jam,” said Tom. “When the anti-sticky hits the sticky it bounces back. The spring keeps it going, the connecting rods move up and down, the wheels go round and the frog hops.”

Tom and Aunt Bundlejoy took the frog out for a spin. They hopped along the river and they hopped past Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork’s house.

Captain Najork was in the observatory looking through his telescope at the girls’ boarding-school across the river when the frog hopped past.

“Follow that frog!” he shouted to his hired sportsmen as he leapt into his pedal-powered snake, and away they undulated.

Hugh Bowden 2010

2010-02-12T14:00:00.005Z

These are not happy times to be an academic in Britain, or anywhere else come to that. My job, like that of my colleagues in Arts & Humanities is, technically, at risk of redundancy. At least I have no teaching on Thursdays, so once I had dealt with all the administration that had been piling up in my e-mail inbox and elsewhere I had time to get out of the office and do a brief bit of 4quating. The following exchange seemed to resonate with my mood:

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

- from Pilgermann

I printed it out on yellow A4 paper, added today’s date and the sa4qe.blogspot.com address, and took them off to the college library. It was inevitable that I would leave them in the history section: one on a desk, next to War, a book edited by Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is currently part of the Chilcot enquiry, and the other next to a book called Truth is the First Casualty, on events in the Vietnam War.

Plenty of students there suffering from attacks of history. And the rest of us.

But some can wear 85 years of history lightly: Happy Birthday to one of them.

An Hugh Bis
Dr Hugh Bowden
Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Department of Classics, King's College London

Join the Facebook group campaigning against the redundancy threats
Further information and petition: http://stopclassicsfacultycuts.webs.com/

Hugh's brand new book Mystery Cults in the Ancient World (in which Hoban fans will be pleased to hear Orpheus plays an important role) is available from Amazon

Lorna Elsewint 2010

2010-02-11T14:30:00.000Z

THE QUOTE:

When we gone out thru the gate there wer a kid up on the hy walk sames I use to be up there all times of nite when I wer a kid. 7 or 8 he wer may be. Sharp little face liting and shaddering in the shimmying of the gate house torches. Sharp littl face and he begun to sing:

‘Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back.’

Now whered that kid ever hear of Drop John and what put it in his mynd to sing that of me? Why dint I ask him? I dont know. May be I dint want to know.

Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he always kil the babby if he can? Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.

Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back.

Stil I wunt have no other track.

- from RIDDLEY WALKER, final page

THE DROP: Through the streets of Thebarton and Mile End, Adelaide South Australia. Mouse over the pictures below for location/caption:

ME: Lorna Elsewint, Tel Woman.

Ra McGuire 2010

2010-02-10T12:00:00.002Z

I am surprised (but proud) to see that I am still the only contributor from Canada. Since I am the only one, it is a little embarrassing that I have chosen the same quote as last time for my SA4QE event. I have made up for this, I believe, with the significance and beauty of the location of my yellow paper.
As of this beautiful west coast morning my quote is firmly affixed to the very large and anomalous White Rock after which my city is named.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

from Fremder

I've also posted an SA4QE post on my web site.

Happy Birthday Russ!

Ra McGuire
White Rock BC
Canada

Dana C. 2010

2010-02-09T14:27:00.001Z

I've been 4qating for a few years now, but this is the first time I've chosen to contribute to the site. I'm a lurker on the Kraken yahoo list, and I guess this is as good a way as any for me to say "happy 85th birthday, Russ" and "I'm out here, fellow Hobanites"! ;)

The quote I chose this year is one that resonates with me as one of those pieces that just catch in my eye as I read, and I find I have to go back and read it several times, to let the words melt into me and become part of me. I love the phrasing here; it is one of my absolute favourite passages in a Hoban book. It comes from The Medusa Frequency:

There's no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is. There is an endless surging and undulating of me, and endless cycle of ebb and flow: that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.

It's just such a poetic stream of words. What a beautiful way of seeing oneself, and one's place in the world.

I'm going to take my yellow paper and tuck it into a journal at a bookstore later this evening, or slip it between the pages of a diary -- so that someday, when someone goes to populate the blank pages with words of their own, they might find Russ's, and a spark of inspiration might come to them.

As ever, thank you for your words, Russ, and all the inspiration you've given to me, personally, as a writer.

A very merry 85th birthday, and my sincere best wishes.

Cheers from Michigan, USA!

Dana C.

Roland Clare 2010

2010-02-08T12:00:00.004Z

Here are some Bristolian SA4Qations perpetrated in the noontide gloom not far from my workplace. The text is from Turtle Diary … a chapter that has always made me laugh out loud, and yet links so interestingly to later work like The Raven (from The Moment under The Moment):

… The Original Therapy lady was a rampant-looking woman of about forty. Shiny red hair in the style of old musical films, tight white trousers, gold sandals, silver toenails, bursting purple silk blouse. Swarthy boyfriend with a St Christopher medal and a racing-driver watch strap.

Her name was Ruby and she sounded as though she lived in a caravan, her voice and her way of talking. She began to tell us about her therapy while some of the people in the room sat in lotus positions with very straight backs and others held their heads. One girl wailed a little now and then, another muttered the whole time.

She was American, this Ruby. Told us how she’d knocked about, been a rodeo rider, done roller derbies, wrestled, had three husbands and all kinds of troubles. Discovered her Original Therapy whilst wrestling one night. Another lady had a scissors grip on her and was squeezing very hard, got a bit over-enthusiastic and wouldn’t let go. Under the pressure Ruby experienced a strange alteration of consciousness.

“I was seeing all kinds of coloured lights and shooting sparks,” she said, “and the sound of the crowd was beginning to come and go like the roar of surf far away. Something began to happen to me. I could feel myself going way way down and way way back, like thousands of years, millions of years, glaciers coming and going and the dinosaurs sinking into the swamps and the primitive trees being crushed into coal. Farther back than that even, crawling out of a warm ocean and gasping on the beach and beyond that back to the sea and smaller and smaller, all the way back to a single cell. And back beyond that to nothing, just the warm sea, what they call the primordial soup.”

Ruby went farther than the soup even, she got to a point where there was nothing, no time, no her, no anything. Then there came something like the idea of a question, a kind of original YES? or NO? It put itself together as YES. There was a mystical green pattern with no sound, then a red explosion in Ruby’s mind and the people in the ringside seats were picking the other lady wrestler out of their laps. That was the turning point in Ruby’s life, going back to the origins of life and finding the big YES, and she was going to show us slides and then demonstrate her therapy …

The slideshow below shows:

(1) A bit of Turtle Diary on the bench outside a suitably Hobanesque café.

(2) Hobanised yellow paper left amid virgin yellow paper in stationery shop.

(3) The ‘Pedestrians’ sign seemed like a ready-made notice-board.

(4 & 5) Hoban quotation obscuring ‘All the stuff you need to know’ at a well-used info-terminal near the city centre.

(6 & 7) Stuck to a random door, because I liked the ‘doorbell’ there.

(8) Yellow sheet left in a derelict refrigerator on waste ground … something for the low-budget drinking community to enjoy, perhaps.

John Hand 2010

2010-02-07T12:05:00.003Z

I 4qated the following in drizzling Melbourne:

'Stupid,' he said. 'I'm not going to stab anybody.' He moved a little way up Surrey Street towards the Strand, muttering to himself, 'For the first time I think of time as a sphere, as a globe on which, at various intersections of latitude and longitude, all things past and present are located, some near, some far from where I am. I'm thinking of Crazy Horse. On that great globe of Time, in western plains across the ocean, herds of long-gone buffalo make the ground shake and shadow hoofbeats sound down endless trails of sleep. Who am I that I should think of that strange one, the mystic, the great warrior who painted himself with lightning and hail and wore a little stone behind his ear? Riding into battle he shouted, "Hoka hey! It's a good day to die!" Now in the long yesterday of the place that once was his the visions flicker but there is no one to see them. In Paris at the Crazy Horse Saloon the naked dancers shake and wiggle for the tourists.

Wow. It's from Angelica's Grotto, which is wholly brilliant. Madness has never been so natural - hoka hey!

I blu-tacked the 4qation onto the underside of this strange sculpture titled *Vault*, which itself looks like a tribute to yellow paper and hence Russell Hoban. It was originally erected in central Melbourne but the public weren't ready for it, though it's now beginning to slowly gain the recognition and love it deserves....

Happy birthday, and thank you, Russ. Thanks Gombert for your efforts, too.

SA4QE 2010 - a fine year for yellow paper!

2010-02-05T14:30:00.006Z

Many thanks to everyone who dropped Russell Hoban quotes around the world yesterday!

There were many tweets, a news story, lots of Facebook updates, some photos on Flickr and several new 4qations posted initially here as comments on yesterday's post.

The webmaster and his accomplice visited Russell Hoban - now 85 - at his London home to deliver the Kraken's birthday gifts (a fine whisky, some DVDs and chocolates, as well as flowers for Mrs Hoban). Russ was in great shape and entertained his guests in fine fashion til lunchtime. The Krakonic delegation then Tubed it westwards leaving yellow paper quotes in various locations.

Full reports on all of the above with photos will be posted on this site as soon as time allows, so keep an eye out here for updates. If you follow SA4QE on Twitter you will receive a tweet each time the site is updated with either a post or a comment. You can also subscribe by email using the Feedburner form near the bottom of the page.

Many thanks again to everyone who participated around the world and helped spread the word of our favourite writer!

Contribute your favourite Russell Hoban quote for SA4QE 2010!

2010-02-04T03:00:00.003Z

Yes, it's that time of year again, when The Slickman A4 Quotation Event does what it does best - celebrates the work and words of author Russell Hoban, who turns 85 today! Many happy returns, Russ :-)

If you have a favourite quote from a Hoban book, there are a number of ways you can take part in SA4QE and share it with fellow fans and the world at large - write it on a piece of paper and leave it in a public place, blog it, tweet it, Facebook it, film it... whatever tickles your fancy. If you want to submit your quote to this website complete with pictures and a personal narrative, as many others have done around the world since 2002, you need to email everything to sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com. Please note your post may not appear on this site immediately, as the webmaster is in London today 4qating! Thus, for the moment (under the moment) you can also leave your quote below as a comment on this post.

See also: A Full List of Things You Can Do On SA4QE Day and How To Take Part in SA4QE and Contribute to This Website.

Photo: found on Google Images by Mike Shuttleworth, attributed to Corbis, probably a publicity shot from sometime in the 1970s. If anyone has full details of the photographer/owner of the photo please contact us on sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com. Ta.

SA4QE 2010 - spreading the word of Russell Hoban again on 4 February

2010-01-11T07:22:00.014Z

Welcome to the Slickman A4 Quotation Event, or SA4QE, in which fans of the novelist Russell Hoban celebrate his birthday on 4th February each year by leaving their favourite quotes from his work in public places.

SA4QE has been going since 2002 and in that time hundreds of quotes have been left in big cities and small towns alike across 14 countries. Some 350 of these quotes are recorded here on the SA4QE website, where they can be browsed by book title, contributor, year, location and media.

Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania in 1925 and has lived in London since 1969. His 85th year will see the publication by "Harry Potter publisher" Bloomsbury of his new novel Angelica Lost and Found, and he has also recently submitted a new young-adult novel called Soonchild which is due out from Walker Books in 2011.

Chances are you will have come across one of Hoban's books somewhere on your travels, whether it be the 1980 dystopian classic Riddley Walker - with which Cormac McCarthy's recent bestseller The Road is often compared - or the Frances the Badger books which you might have read to your child, or had read to you. In between, Hoban has written scores of books for adults and children alike, and they're all eminently quotable.

Here's a list of things you can do to celebrate Russell Hoban's birthday this coming 4th February:

* Write your quote on a sheet of yellow paper and leave it in a place of your choice - cafe table, bookshop, park bench, telephone booth, train station, you name it!

* Submit your quote to the SA4QE website and it'll be added here by the webmaster with a page all your own.

* Take a photo of your quote in situ and upload it to Flickr with the tag sa4qe and it'll appear automatically in the slideshow.

* Tweet your quote using the hashtag #sa4qe - this will make your tweet appear automatically in the sidebar of this website. If 140 characters isn't enough space for your quote, try www.twitlonger.com which allows you to write as much as you like and auto-tweets a truncated version. (You can also follow SA4QE on Twitter - everything posted to the site on 4th February will be tweeted as it happens.)

* Post your quote on your own website or blog - if you include the keywords sa4qe and/or Russell Hoban it too will automatically appear in the blog feed in the sidebar.

* Use your quote as your Facebook status update for the day. (There are also Russell Hoban and SA4QE groups you can join on Facebook.)

* Use your quote as your email signature for the day, or otherwise drop quotes into emails, text messages and online chats.

* Film yourself reading your quote and upload it to YouTube with the tags Russell Hoban and/or sa4qe and it will appear in the sidebar.

These are just some of the ways you can take part, but the sky's the limit, the world's your oyster and Bob's your uncle. If you have any further suggestions, or are planning any activity in particular, please share it by commenting using the form below.

Happy 4qating!

Questions? Answers.

Kerry Power 2009

2009-07-11T17:56:00.002+01:00

My quote this year is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz:

‘Everyone in the world is looking for something,’ said Jachin-Boaz to Boaz-Jachin, ‘and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again’....

‘If everything that is found is never lost again, there will be an end to finding some day,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Some day there will be nothing left to find.’

...on Yellow A4, Platform 3 Parliament Station, Melbourne.

Webmaster's note: apologies to Kerry for the late posting of this 4qation.

Riddley Walker DVDs - everything must go!

2009-07-01T09:07:00.002+01:00

Stocks are now running low on the DVD of the 2007 Riddley Walker stage production in Ireland.

The 2-DVD sets, priced at 15 euros inclusive of p&p to anywhere in the world, have always been a limited-edition item, but stocks are now down to the last 20 copies and *no more* will be made by film-makers Stickman Productions after 30th August 2009. All copies *must* be gone by that date.

Thus if you still have not seen the play - which was innovatively staged inside a big top in Waterford by the Red Kettle theatre company - this is your LAST CHANCE to grab a copy!

Further info, links and order/payment form can be found at http://thoughtcat.wordpress.com/buy-stuff/riddleydvd/

Dave Awl 2009

2009-03-29T11:12:00.005+01:00

Here amid the ongoing chaos of my life in the midddling-to-latter part of the 00s, I have been very bad at 4Qating in recent years -- and even worse at reporting on it. The Mincery of 4Qation lists my last documented 4Qation as taking place in 2004, such a dizzying long time ago that many people still thought John Kerry might be US president someday and the Doctor wasn't back on the telly yet.

Although most years I have managed to get out and slip a few pieces of yellow paper into the world sometime within a week or so of the fourth, I have rarely managed to get these exploits written up and posted, with or without photos.

One year not so many half-decades ago, I actually organized a little dinner gathering at a restaurant, and placed a folded yellow paper by everyone's place setting. I took pictures of all this. At the moment I have no idea where they might be -- no doubt flotsaming around somewhere in my exobrain. But I certainly never got around to writing the cheery and amusing account of it all that I'd envisioned.

This year, in hopes of keeping both the 4Qation and its documentation more streamlined and therefore more like to make it to the Internets eventually, I limited myself to a single quotation, forbade myself to even think about photography, and for the first time ever hand-wrote the thing on a sheet of yellow paper like Ms. Slickman originally intended instead of typesetting some elaborate handout with multiple quotes like I'd done in the past.

I decided to pick a quotation from a book I'd never 4Qated from before, and something from a relatively recent book (rather than a classic quote from the First Six Novels, which I have mined so heavily over the years).

So I chose this early passage from The Bat Tattoo, which is hands-down my favorite Hoban book of the 00s -- the one I think most deserved a US release and yet inexplicably didn't get one.

Here is what my yellow paper said.

***

February 4, 2009

"Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary -- you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T'ang Dynasty -- their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.

"There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends."

-- Russell Hoban, The Bat Tattoo (p. 3)

Compliments of The Kraken
In honor of Russell Hoban's 84th Birthday
sa4qe.blogspot.com

***

I wrote this out on a sheet of paper at the neighborhood pack-and-mail store, copied it onto roughly half-a-dozen sheets of yellow paper, and then slipped them inside copies of a few of Chicago's alternative weeklies at a couple of different coffehouses in Andersonville (my neighborhood in Chicago). I also slipped a couple between boxes of tea at the neighborhood supermarket.

Thus endeth the 2009 report, submitted only about two months late. Next year my goal will be to get it filed while the sun is still in Aquarius.

Dave

=============================
~~~ http://www.ocelopotamus.com