Diana Slickman 2002

from RIDDLEY WALKER

The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.

I left this in the Chicago Cultural Center. The Cultural Center used to be Chicago's main library and is probably the closest thing the city has to a secular cathedral. It was built after the Civil War, by the Grand Army of the Republic, for the dual purpose of housing the city's library and honoring the veterans of the Union Army. It is kind of shabby and magnificent at the same time. Now it serves many functions: it holds the offices of the city's department of cultural affairs, houses the Museum of Broadcast Communications, has several gallery spaces, a couple of lecture/theater spaces, a concert hall, an informal performance space, a café. People from all strata of Chicago's population go there, from the homeless to the well-heeled (or well-healed, if you prefer). To arrive at the main hall, one climbs a staircase of white Carrera marble, encrusted with glass and gold mosaics in geometric patterns. The hall itself has a huge stained glass dome and high on the walls are quotes from authors of different countries and literary traditions, carved into the marble in their original languages. When I went there on Monday, a man was in this room playing a grand piano; practicing to rows and rows of empty chairs. A woman sat on a wide low window ledge and looked out on to Michigan Avenue while he played, but otherwise the room was empty. I sat down to listen for a minute, clutching my yellow paper. Suddenly the man stopped playing and picked up his cell phone which was sitting on the piano. He examined it while it bleeped, but did not answer it. I unfolded my yellow paper and slipped it on to the seat in front of me, feeling very sly. The man resumed playing; I listened a little longer and then went back to my office to eat my lunch.

Dave Awl 2002

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

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


~~~~~~~

from PILGERMANN

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

from FREMDER

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

from A BIRTHDAY FOR FRANCES

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

~~~~~~~


...and into the freezer it went.


Dave

Jane Hyde 2002

On February 4, 2002, at about 3:30 p.m., EST, I deposited the following RW quote on the fiction shelf of a secondhand bookstore, right beside a hardback copy of The Medusa Frequency:

Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.

Thats why I finely came to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.

- from RIDDLEY WALKER

Why this quote? Just one of many favorites. Why that location? Well, it was going to be somewhere downtown, and seeing Medusa on the shelf made that seem like a good place.

Can’t wait to hear about the whole world-wide event! Can’t wait to see what my spelling check does with the quote!

Tim Haillay 2002

Kong with his teddy-bear fur is a fifty-foot tall idea even if the reality was only eighteen inches high. Kong lives.

from TURTLE DIARY

The University of Sussex Library, Falmer, Brighton was the grateful recipient of 10 yellow A4 sheets containing the above quote.

It could have been anything really, from any page in any book, essay etc. It is interesting to note though how early the Kong fixation appeared in print.. Neaera H.’s entry, Chap. 26 “Death of the oyster-catchers...” wonderful stuff...

There have already been two interested parties prior to Monday who had never heard of Hoban and Turtle Diary apart from the awful film with Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson!! Oh for the words!!

The wastebins/trashcans!! were emptied this morning without yellow contents, so unless bins from further afield were the proud owners of the offending sheets, ten cranial worlds are now kongful...

Thanks to Diana for getting the ball rolling....

Tim
XXX

Kerry Power 2002

Placed in underground train:

Trubba Not

- from RIDDLEY WALKER

I first read Riddley soon after it was available here in Oz and I found the language fascinating... RW is a great book to read out loud... I encouraged my friends to read the book and soon we were using a few words from the book, like Arga Warga and Comping Station (we worked in insurance!)... but the most common words we used were “Trubba not”...it has now become a part of my own family sayings... I say “Trubba not” and the kids respond “No Trubba”, even though they have not yet read RW or his adult books - they know him quite well from Frances, The Mouse and His Child and other “kids” books.

So, when it came to selecting a RH quote, this seemed to be the logical choice - it contains the simple innocence of Riddley and if we think about it hard enough, the two words have a depth about them that we could all find comfort from in today's world. If only we could go to the UN and say “Trubba Not” and all the countries of the world reply “No Trubba”.

Sophia Fabre 2002

from RIDDLEY WALKER

You know Riddley there's some thing in us it don’t have no name... its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its lookin out thru our eye hoals...Its in us lorn and loan and shelterin how it can... 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....What ever it is we dont come naturel to it... It thinks us but it dont think LIKE us." Seams like I ben all ways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is.Thats why I finely come to writng this all down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and oansome.

This was left in a crowded pub full of English language skiers in a ski resort on the franco-italian border on a yellow piece of A4 that I filched from work *s*

why did I choose that one? Because I think it's true.

why did I leave it in the crowded pub in the ski resort? Because it’s about the best place to get English-language people in these Latin countries where I live! And also because they do mean live music and pints of ale!

Thanks for making this community so woal and cum natural to us *g*

All bes

Sophia



Black Dog Rules OK *g*

Richard Cooper 2002

Despite many exquisite hours poring over the books, I couldn’t choose just the one quote and ended up with five in all, and quite long ones at that. This isn’t showing off – on the contrary, I’d much rather have had the guts to pick just the one. All the quotes were followed by the URL of the Head of Orpheus website, but otherwise had no distinguishing features, so that any finders of the A4 could go straight to the horse’s mouth.

from KLEINZEIT

HOW - CAN - I - MAKE - WORDS - STAY - ON - THE - PAPER? said Kleinzeit very slowly, as if talking to a foreigner.
They'll stay if you don't put them there, said the yellow paper.
How do I do that?
You don't do it, it happens.
How does it happen?
You simply have to find what's there and let it be, said the yellow paper.
Find what's where? said Kleinzeit.
Here, said the yellow paper. Now.

This was left on a bench by the Thames down the road from where I live. It expresses perfectly to me the problem of trying to create something and your lack of control in doing so; you’re not really creating anything, you’re just a channel for the thing that wants to become itself, and the more you struggle to produce something that's “yours” the more agonising the whole process is. This is especially so if the idea that’s talking to you is having a hard time explaining itself, or if you respond to it from the wrong “language base” (see the quote from Pan Lives, below). “Less is more” is another message I get from this passage – something I aspire to but which I’m not very good at in real life.

Regarding the Thames location, I had the idea of buying a football and writing a shorter quote on that and dropping it in the Thames, in an homage to The Medusa Frequency. But having bought the football (a yellow one, even) I grew rather fond of it, and even started worrying about the symbolism of such an act (throwing away my inspiration?). Anyway, my wife pointed out that it would pollute the river, and that if I were to drop something headesque in the Thames it should be a cabbage. I couldn’t find a cabbage in time and anyway decided it was a silly idea, and stuck with Diana’s much simpler (and easier-to-write on) A4.

from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY

“The Big Rain”

Blue-black shiningness, bluish-white shining on the puddles on the football pitch in the rainy night all starred with lamps and windows. Always in November there comes such a night, blue-black and shining and wild with rain and wind and brown leaves blowing. In the morning suddenly the plane trees on the far side of the common are bare winter trees.

Windowed shapes of light on the ceiling, Melanie Falsepercy asleep beside me, Luise rising in the shining dawn in the wild and rainy night.

In the dimness and the shadows of the room I breathed the novembery fragrance of Melanie Falsepercy. Uncovering her I ran my hand down the long smoothness of her back to the roundness of her buttocks. High, high over us there thundered aeroplanes into Heathrow, safe arrivals for the moment; rumbling through the rain the District Line trains took their golden windows homeward in the night, unseen faces mortal and alone.

I went down to the kitchen and opened the fridge. There were three cans of beer, most of a salami, a mouldering of old cheeses, half a tub of margarine, half a jar of marmalade, half a pint of milk and the head of Orpheus.

'Loss!' it said. 'That's what she was to me, you know: she was the loss of her even when she was apparently the finding of her, the having of her. And I was the same to her, I was to her the loss of me. We were the two parts of a complementarity of loss, and that being so the loss was already an actuality in our finding of each other. From the moment that I first tasted the honey of Eurydice I tasted also the honey of the loss of her. What am I if not the quintessential, the brute artist? Is not all art a celebration of loss? From the very first moment that beauty appears to us it is passing, passing, not to be held.'

I stuck this one on the fridge door in the staff room at my office. I thought it was one of the most distinctive and yet most accessible of Russ’s pages and therefore a good way of introducing him to the newcomer. The location was appropriate but also chosen because everybody in the company would see it. I hoped it would give them all a chuckle, if nothing else. It also has a wonderfully evocative and sensuous description of that exquisite sort of night where it’s raining outside but you’re warm indoors next to someone delicious. Herman knows he’s not going to be able to keep Melanie forever, and art may be nothing more than a celebration of loss, but the moment of the rain and the night and the buttocks will live forever in his memory.

from PAN LIVES
(an essay from The Moment Under the Moment)

If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make any sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying then that there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with a proper action say the right things back. You say to your head, 'We're going to that party tonight and we're going to smile and talk to all those people we don't want to smile and talk to.' Your head says, 'Ache ache ache.' You say to your gall bladder, 'I'm so bitter, life is so hard!' Your gall bladder says, 'If you feel that way about it I'll commemorate it with a stone.' Your heart says, 'I am heavy. I have no ease. You are doing things with only half of me. You are not doing what is close to me. You are following a path without me. I am not in good self. I have no self for what you're doing. You have not gone to the me of the matter. I feel attacked. Maybe I'll attack you.' When your heart says that of course you'll listen, because by then you're probably getting pains down your left arm and let's hope your local emergency ward isn't on strike. Language! Twenty-four hours a day our bodies are talking to us. Now go from the body we live in to the world we live in: trees and buildings, mountains and cinemas and supermarkets and oceans - all of it, complete with sky and weather. All of it, I insist, is talking to us. How could it be otherwise? Ugliness shrieks and gabbles; beauty sings, growls, whispers; the everyness of days bellows like a dying bull; the dead leaves rattle, the madness of nations crouches in its newsprint and chatters its teeth. The stones cry out to be spoken to and we must find a language base from which to respond.

I stuck this on the back of a cubicle door in the gents toilets at work – highly insalubrious I know, but it was guaranteed to be read by lots of blokes who may otherwise hardly read anything except the dull newsprint they have to cut up every day. The media monitoring agency I work for is populated by a number of young people who are doing “something else” in their spare time, whether that be writing, acting, painting, playing sport, studying, or whatever. The “something else” is actually the main thing in their lives, and I sense a fair bit of frustration in the air from time to time as they hear the bellow of that dying bull and lament the amount of time they’re spending not listening to their heart, doing a job just so they can pay the rent, and longing for their big break. I hoped the quote would inspire someone who feels that way to stop wasting their time and devote themselves to whatever it is they should be doing before their heart attacks them.

The idea of finding the appropriate language base to respond to everything also reminds me of something Bob Dylan said about Blowing in the Wind: “The first way to answer these questions in the song is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind.” Like all great artists, both Dylan and Hoban make it sound very easy to “find the wind” or “find the language base” - but that’s because they’re people who’ve found a way to devote themselves to a life of dialogue.

from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY

‘Do you know what I am to you?’ said the head of Orpheus. ‘I am the first of your line. I am the first singer, the one who invented the lyre, the one to whom Hermes brought Eurydice and perpetual guilt. I am your progenitor, I am the endlessly voyaging sorrow that is always in you, I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief moments when you can write.’

‘Endlessly voyaging sorrow and astonishment. Yes, I have those from you, I know that. Perpetual guilt, you said.’

‘In the stories they always say I turned around to look at her too soon but that isn’t how it was: I turned away too soon, turned away before I’d ever looked long enough, before I’d ever fully perceived her.’

‘Does anyone ever fully perceive anyone else?’ I said. I began to cry.

‘Cry on my face,’ said the head, ‘maybe my eyes will grow back.’

‘Is there healing in my tears?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll try anything.’

‘Maybe you ought to stop trying. You’re old, you’re blind and rotten, you can’t sing any more. Why don’t you just pack it in?’

‘I haven’t that choice, there’s no way for me to cease to be. I’m manifesting myself to you as a rotting head but there’s no picture for what I am: I am that which sings the world, I am the response that never dies. Fidelity is what’s wanted.’

‘Fidelity. I got my head zapped looking for a novel and here I am listening to homilies from a rotting head.’

‘You don’t know what you’re looking for,’ said the head. ‘Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging 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.’

[Edit January 2015: Watch/listen to Russell Hoban read this passage here.]

I dropped this one on a seat in the train that had taken me to Waterloo that morning. It’s simply one of Russ’s most beautiful pieces of writing, and so true, especially the part about the danger of looking away from someone too soon and not giving them a chance. I left it on the train hoping that it might be read by someone in a state of crisis in their love life, and inspire them to make the decision they know deep down they should make. Or perhaps by someone who's lost their faith in something or someone, or themselves even, and needs something to reassure them of the eternal in us.

from KLEINZEIT

MAN WITH HARROW FULL OF CROCKS

I left this in the Elephant & Castle underground station – I guess it could have been any station, but I chose it because it’s one of the older ones and very labyrinthine, straight out of Perseus and the Minotaur; you can easily get lost in it. I first of all left the quote on the ground, which was accurate, but I chickened out because it looked too much like rubbish. I was more concerned that someone would moan at me for littering than that it would be swept up and disposed of. Either way I folded it up and put it on a shelf under a payphone.

Kleinzeit and Yellow Paper meet first in the Underground and this is one of the first things he writes on it after he’s lost his job and starts out on his new life. He’s very confused at that stage, as feasibly would anyone else have been who might have picked up my yellow paper that afternoon. But, as the psychiatrist Dr DeVere says in Angelica’s Grotto twenty-five years after Kleinzeit first went down into Underground with his glockenspiel, “Confusion is generally the first step in the process of change.” If so, here’s to confusion...

Graeme Wend-Walker 2002

from TURTLE DIARY

There was a week of nature films on the South Bank and I went to see one about sharks. The film was made by a man of apparently unlimited wealth who fitted himself out with a large ship and any amount of special underwater gear for shark photography. He and his companions all agreed that diving among sharks was for them the ultimate challenge. They were particularly keen to encounter a great white shark, a rare species and the one most feared as a man-eater. They went from ocean to ocean looking for the great white shark and I couldn’t help wondering all the time how much it was costing. I think the money spent on even one of the special diving cages would keep me in high style for half a year at least.

For a large part of the time they followed whaling ships, photographing sharks feeding on whale carcasses. Sometimes they took their pictures from inside a cage but often they swam fearlessly among the sharks. They swam among blue sharks, dusky sharks, oceanic white-tipped sharks and several other kinds but they were continually frustrated by the absence of great white sharks.

Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horsemeat. It was a truly terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in his teeth and shook it about. The wealthy man said it had been fantastic, incredible, beyond his expectations. His friends congratulated him on the success of the expedition and the film came to an end.

I found myself resenting that man, however unreasonable it might be of me. All the money in the world does not give him the right to muck about with a direful secret creature and shame the mystery of it with words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’. The divers were not the ultimate challenge for the shark, I’m certain of that. Socially they were out of their class, the sharks would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking them. It would have gone its mute and deadly way mindlessly being its awful self, innocent and murderous. It was the people who lusted for the fierce attention of the shark, like monkeys they had to make him notice them.

Money can do many things, even the great white shark can be played with by wealthy frotteurs in posh diving gear. But they have not really seen him or touched him because what he is to man is what he is to naked man alone-swimming. They have not found the great white shark, they have acted out some brothel fantasy with black rubber clothing and steel bars. Aluminium they were actually.

It was raining outside so I took Yellow Paper to the supermarket. Everyone goes to the supermarket and it’s a place where a lot of decisions are made but we don’t expect to be confronted with existential literature there. In Bi-Lo they have these rectangular frames for putting pieces of card in with the prices on them: ‘Helga’s Bread, 700g. $2.95’. I slid Yellow Paper into one. The thing is, the card they use for the prices is yellow A4 too. It might take ages for anyone to notice.

I thought the frozen food section seemed right for a piece about sharks, so I put Yellow Paper on the shelf with the pre-crumbed, pre-lemoned fish fillets. I did that at Coles too. I put one in a display box for recipe books. I put one in a ‘WHO’ magazine. I went to the video shop, found Turtle Diary and put Yellow Paper in the box. That was probably the most sensible thing I did. I was going to put one on the noticeboard in the lobby of my building, in front of the lift, but I didn’t. Instead I put one in each of the stairwells, at the landings between floors. I don’t think many people use the stairs.

At the top of the stairs there is a door that doesn’t go anywhere, it just looks out over the rooftops. I put one there.

The piece sums up the spiritual/imaginative void in modern society. The interesting thing is, the speaker (Neaera H.) technically has ‘not really seen him or touched’ the shark either. The difference is that she is faithful to the idea of the shark, which is where the shark really lives; she finds more shark in ordinary existence than the divers do in the ocean. You don’t need to go anywhere or spend any money to do that, because ‘naked alone-swimming’ is what we already are, which we would see if we could drop our ‘brothel fantasies’. I like the Kierkegaardian echoes in this. The most important thing in the world may be something that doesn’t (in the dull, conventional sense) ‘exist,’ but which we must nonetheless reach for in fear and trembling.

Eli Bishop 2002

from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY:

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

Securely paper-clipped to a wire fence in a tiny waterfront park overlooking a lot of slimy dark rocks and the city lights across the river, Grand St. and Kent Ave., Brooklyn, New York, 10 pm.

(The correct size paper was unavailable on short notice, so, U.S. letter-size trimmed down to correct proportions...)

It was awfully cold. Then I went home and had some whisky and drew comic books.



- Eli

Judy Tihany 2002

On the rainy Monday 4 Feb I was visiting Mollymook (a small coastal town in New South Wales, 4 hours south of Sydney). After driving around for a while, I placed this in the letterbox of somebody who had a sign out the front of their house which said ‘Hypnotherapy and Tarot Readings’:

from THE MARZIPAN PIG

The upstairs mouse at No. 6 had watched the hibiscus plant in the front bedroom for a long time.

She had seen the showy flowers one after another bloom and shrivel and fall to the floor.

She used to sit behind the skirting board thinking how she would go about it if she were a hibiscus flower.

Sometimes when there was no one in the bedroom she would run out onto the carpet and strike hibiscus poses in front of the full-length glass.

‘Poor silly things,’ she used to say to herself. ‘They’re pretty enough but they have no grasp. One after another they make the same mistake: they let go. The thing to do is, once you've bloomed, hold on.

Just simply hold on and don’t let go.’

With happiness to have been able to participate in this strange and lovely event, and the best of wishes to Russ,

Judy Tihany

Chris Bell 2002

from KLEINZEIT:

Yes, said Hospital and became one infinite black mouth. Didn't even bother with teeth. Just an infinite black mouth, fetid breath. Kleinzeit backed into a mousehole. If the hole is this big the mice must be like oxen in here, he thought.

Tell you something, said the mouth.

Yes, tell me something, said Kleinzeit.

You may have flats and houses and streets and offices and secretaries and telephones and news every hour, said the mouth.

Yes, said Kleinzeit.

You may have industry and careers and television and Greenwich time signals, said the mouth.

Yes, said Kleinzeit. That’s nice copy. That really sings.

You may even have several pushbuttons on your telephone and nothing but sheaves of ten-pound notes in your pocket and glide you may through traffic in a Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce, said the mouth.

It’s building nicely, said Kleinzeit. But don’t overbuild. Hit me with the payoff now, you know.

The mouth yawned. I forgot what I was going to say, it said.

This quote has that sense of great portent that dreams occasionally have; you feel they’re about to reveal something incredibly important - in fact, it’s on the tip of your tongue, as it were, but it is never quite revealed. To me, this quote epitomises Russell Hoban’s struggle to widen what he has called “the limited reality consensus”.

The quote was left at the Strawberry Alarm Clock, my regular morning cafe on Parnell Road – Parnell is Auckland's small-scale equivalent of Chelsea, I suppose. It’s a place where the yellow paper can easily and innocently be nestled between the pages of the complimentary copies of the daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald. If people are intrigued with it, they can take the yellow paper with them. If not, they can simply leave them where they are for someone else to discover.


from TURTLE DIARY:

I was on South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriage passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.

This sums up one of those special moments that jogs us out of mediocrity, perhaps providing a springboard to an inaccessible state of mind.

I left it at The Mink Bar, Parnell Road – it’s my local, and also the location of one of those ostensibly mundane but very special moments for me – a ‘Eureka!’ instant, when it feels good to be alive. I’ve written about it, and it's the culmination of my novel Liquidambar, which hopefully will appear soon.


from RIDDLEY WALKER:

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.’

This is the way I feel about life, too; I always feel as though I am looking out through something else's eyeholes. Collective consciousness, it's important and real. There are only so many souls to go around.

This was also left at the Strawberry Alarm Clock café. I go here for peppermint tea and breakfast every morning, which helps to break up the working day. It’s like a little oasis, with the friendliest service and a mean fresh fruit salad.


from FREMDER:

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 mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.
(“Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir”)

Some of the quotes I have chosen for SA4QE were intended to be deliberately intriguing, rather than trying to distil the essence of Russell Hoban into a single page. However, I believe this one is saying something special about the way Russ writes. It also contains some of his favourite words (‘occulting’, ‘flickering’) and phrases (‘heart of mystery’, ‘wheel of action’). In-between is the way I feel, most of the time, and certainly it seems to me that my being is not a steady state.

This was another quote left at the Mink Bar. Why? It’s the bar with the most beautiful and patient waitresses in the city. That ought to be reason enough.


from PILGERMANN:

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.

Perhaps my favourite Hoban quote of all, and that second one is certainly my favourite sentence. I love the inversions and the poetic rhythms of it. I’ve never seen an owl this close in real life, but I've seen one in my mind’s eye now, thanks to this quote. I have also dreamt – and so very vividly – that I am Pilgermann, flying, like an owl over the ruins of Antioch. ‘Pilgermann’ is my favourite novel.

I left this at the Strawberry Alarm Clock café because there is a sad lack of owls on Parnell Road.

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 a 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.

This describes my childhood, for sure, and Pilgermann is my favourite Hoban novel. Also, I feel as though I have wasted much of my life waiting. This paragraph makes me laugh about that, which has to be a good thing.

Again, left at the Mink Bar. If any Russell Hoban quotation is going to prove beautiful, intriguing and complete enough to entice a total stranger to visit the Head of Orpheus website and go out and buy one of the novels, it will be one like this. Workable fragments of recognition – that’s what it’s all about.

... 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.

He needs writers to write about it, too. I'm not a religious person, in the traditional sense, but I do believe in God and this quote provides me with a reminder why God sometimes seems to us to do strange, senseless and hateful things. She's simply not operating on a person-to-person level any more. I was dubious about including this quote at first, as I thought it might be dismissed by some as religious fanaticism, or something left behind by a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon. But, having wrestled with it, I remembered God does need helpers, after all.

The Strawberry Alarm Clock was the recipient of this one. It’s a second home to me. It’s nice to be known by name in a cafe and be made to feel welcome.


from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY:

‘In the leafy shade she lay all huddled and forlorn, the red-gold hair, the ivory of her in the cool and leafy shade by the river, her garments all disordered offering to the eye her shapeliness, her long and rounded limbs; splendid and sculptural she was, like a broken winged victory. The honeyed air droned and sang; the ivory of her, the pathetic and savage splendour of her beauty sang in my eyes as I knelt beside her. Gone she was and lost to me for ever, Eurydice! Eurydice!’

This reminds me of my very first love, 26 years ago. Sadly I took her for granted. I left it at the Mink Bar – it’s where I go to forget.



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 I. 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.

Up the Athenians, said Kleinzeit, and went to sleep.

This one was chosen for the creative struggle. It epitomises the joy a writer feels at avoiding what Russell Hoban calls ‘Blighter’s Rock’ (presumably not wishing to name it, as it brings bad luck). Some New Zealanders think I’m a coward because I don't go bungee jumping, parachuting and whitewater rafting. I refer them to quotes like this to prove that writing is a dangerous enough profession.

This was left at the Mink Bar. Why? It’s where the Athenians drink. Didn’t you know?

Matthew Stephan 2002

I dropped 10 sheets of yellow A4 throughout central Taegu, a large industrial city in the middle of South Korea. I left a few on benches in an underground shopping arcade, the majority in telephone booths (a recurring image in The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz), and one on a bench near an outdoor fountain. I targeted central Taegu since it's more likely an English reader would come across it here than in the industrial slums that I teach near. Along with the quote I also left links for The Head of Orpheus and The Kraken. I am not very optimistic about the results but I'm glad I took part in the birth of this project. I wouldn't doubt that my copies of Hoban may be the only ones in this nation, I've never seen any in stores. My resources for culling from were also limited, Pilgermann and Kleinzeit are on the other side of the Pacific so I used some quotes I found in old notebooks. Thanks to Richard for the first quote. Most are from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz since that is the most recent Hoban I've read.

from KLEINZEIT:

HOW-CAN-I-MAKE-WORDS-STAY-ON-THE-PAPER? said Kleinzeit very slowly, as if talking to a foreigner.
They'll stay if you don't put them there, said the yellow paper.
How do I do that?
You don't do it, it happens.
How does it happen?
You simply have to find what's there and let it be, said the yellow paper.
Find what's where? said Kleinzeit.
Here, said the yellow paper. Now.

from RIDDLEY WALKER:

She said, ‘Its some kynd 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 middle 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 dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’

. . .

She larft then she said, ‘Riddley there aint nothing what aint a tel for you. The wind in the nite the dus on the road even the leases stoan you kick a long in front of you. Even the shadder of that leases stoan roaling on or stanning stil its all telling.’

from KLEINZEIT:

An appalling sunny afternoon sky. When Napoleon spoke of two o'clock courage he could only have meant two in the afternoon, thought Kleinzeit. Two in the morning's nothing compared to it.

. . .

Life is the original sickness of inanimate matter.

from PILGERMANN:

Life cannot tolerate itself, life wants to become death.

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ:

Beyond the windows of the dining room the sea sparkled in the sunlight. Part of an island passed, a straggle of ruins, a broken citadel, the pillars of a temple, two figures on a hill. Gulls rose and fell on the air currents beside the ship. This, said the sea. Only this. What? thought Boaz-Jachin. Who? Who is looking out through the eyeholes in my face? No one, said the sea. Only this.

. . .

The petrol stations, owning the world, called to their brother monsters. Distant towers flashed lights. The petrol stations kept up their pretence, fuelled cars and lorries, maintained the fiction of roads for humans. Vast pipes slid effortlessly over miles of world. Huge valves regulated flow. Lights flashed at sea. Music played in aeroplanes. Never did the music name the pipes and petrol stations, the great steel stalking that laughed with striding legs. God is with us, said the valves and towers. With us, said the stones. Cars moved on roads.

. . .

It ceased to matter to him who was looking out through the eyeholes in his face and it ceased to matter who was looking in.

. . .

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

Sandra Smith 2002

Sea turtle tracks, early morning on the Space Coast of Florida, 2001.

Biting the wheel is not enough.

- from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ

Dear Russ,

I thought about where I might leave a piece of paper with your apothegm. I'm only a few hours distant from Roswell, you know. I could have taken it to the UFO Museum. But in the end I decided to commit my yellow paper to the ghost town of White Oaks. Virtually nothing is left of this Victorian gold mining town, which began to die when it lost the chance to become a railroad stop. There is nothing but a tiny wooden saloon of casual construction that serves as the epicenter for a treeless warren of dirt roads sparsely studded with trailers. A steer skull hangs crookedly over the entrance. The scene always makes me think of "The Man With the Dagger". I drove to White Oaks as furtively as one can when one raises a dust cloud, but I was seen. The mission failed.

So then I hit on the idea of placing my yellow paper in the virtual world: hence this photo. I took the picture during the summer of 2001, the morning after sea turtles had come up to deposit their clutches, on the Atlantic coast of Florida near Cape Canaveral. Last week I re-entered the picture in virtual mode, and left my A4.

Some statements are so succinct but at the same time blipful that, like black holes, they suck into themselves any attempt to explain them. I've already told the epiphanic story, over on the Head of Orpheus web site, of how I discovered that wheel-biting lion deep in the narrow corridors of the Assyrian exhibit at the British Museum. I am awestruck at how that lion unleashed such creative profundity in you. I took a version of that lion away with me that day... or perhaps, as lions will do, he chose me. He was, and continues to be, a privelege to witness, a necessity to witness.

Happy Birthday, Russ, and may you have as many more as you can stand.

With warmest wishes,
Asteroid Lil
formerly in the Green Swamp -- now in the land of Billy the Kid