Richard Cooper 2007

With a two-week-old baby in the house (just what is it with me and this time of year, eh?), I haven’t had as much time to prepare a 4qation as on previous years, and this has only made my ‘normal work panic’ about choosing a quote from the many thousands of words in Russell Hoban’s many books even worse. However, the problem has happily suggested its own solution. The new arrival, Charlie Andaman, has, in the tradition of his Thai side, already been awarded a nickname. His elder brother Joe (born March 2005) being dubbed Squid (Thai: ‘Mg’), we felt something similarly oceanic and possibly Hobanesque was called for, and so Charlie has become Turtle (‘Thou’). Thus I narrowed my search for quotes this year to Russ’s superb early novel Turtle Diary. After some searching – punctuated by assorted changes, baths, feeds, plays, tellings-off, naps, and even a bit of attention to my children – I settled on the following three quotes. They’re from chapter 3, narrated by William G., and from adjacent pages, so not strictly separate quotes, but can be read that way.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: ‘The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...’ I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary

I liked this passage firstly because it sets out the turtles’ incredible quest and achievement, which in itself seems to me a metaphor for the human condition – we spend so long working towards something, not always knowing why or how but only knowing we have to do it, and without any guarantee that we’ll succeed or that the turtle-eggs we lay even if we do get there will survive. Secondly I like the way Hoban takes something negative about the turtle experience – the sacrilege of being turned into soup – and makes something both positive and amusing out of it. As a father now for the second time I’ve naturally spent many hours lately contemplating the kind of future I’ll be able to give Charlie, and the kind he’ll have anyway regardless of my influence, so this passage also suggests to me some good advice to him: We’re all our own kinds of soup; be proud of your Charlie soup, and for that matter your London roots, and don’t be put off by the fact that millions of gallons of other-people soup is sloshing around the world at the same time: your variety is unique.

The second passage follows directly on from the last:

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there... I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks.

“...I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. 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, the steady wing-strokes of flippers in the water. 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

Turtle Diary centres on two people at a crucial point in their lives and confronting their own situations, which, despite being pretty mundane, are nonetheless troubling to them. I can relate to the story and characters partly through being a bit of a worrier myself (and even if I wasn’t, I daresay most parents would admit that having children makes you worry anyway) and this beautifully cadenced passage with its Zen-like idea of ‘swimming, swimming [with] nothing in the mind’ provides me with some reassurance that there is, in fact, a way through, a way forward.

My last selection also follows on directly from the last paragraph, in fact is the final sentence of that paragraph, but I feel deserves separate consideration:

And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

I’m not a religious person and I despise the way that some people use religions and ‘faiths’ to mess up the world. Nonetheless I do retain a great deal of respect for people who manage to have faith (in spite, indeed, of the way faith is regularly abused and misused) and put it to good use, and one of those good uses is simply, as Bob Dylan put it, keeping on keeping on. I believe – or I’d like to believe – in a turtle-god, in turtle-faith, something that keeps you going despite the darkness, the sharks, the chances of getting lost.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far today and time is already running out, so I don’t know where these quotes are going to be 4qated. I doubt I’ll get the chance to go anywhere much further than the high street this afternoon so I’ll see what opportunities present themselves there.

(Later.) In the end I almost didn't manage to actually leave my quotes anywhere. I went to Waitrose and had a few ideas - by a bottle of Jindalee shiraz, which has a turtle on the label; in a copy of their store magazine Source, in a reference to the 'I am the source of William G soup' - but it was too busy and I felt conspicuous, and anyway I was with wife and kids so time was against me. (I also saw a box of some medicine stuff in the health section with the brand name Wellman and thought that would be good for a Kleinzeit quote - maybe next time.) On the way home it was dark and we were all tired and cold but I did manage to leave the quotes on the windscreens of some random parked cars, on a steel lion-shaped bench and through the letterbox of a chocolate shop. Didn't have my camera with me this time though, more's the pity!

Chris Bell 2007

My intended SA4QE attempt this year having been thwarted (I spent a couple of hours yesterday hunting for about half a ream of spare yellow paper quotes I printed out last year, to no avail), my shameful study wall substitute was this quote. I couldn't place the source initially, and an internet search for it took me to a highly dubious website that instantly installed the 'downloader' virus on my computer... oh, and a French blogger called André-François Ruaud who mis-spelt "Russel Hoban":

"It seems to me that the realest reality lives somewhere beyond the edge of human vision. I don't know that it can ever be seen, but I'll keep looking."

from The Russell Hoban Omnibus (preface)

Well being,

Chris

Chris Bell in his Auckland study, with the John Carey photograph of Russell Hoban that appeared in the Independent in the background.

PHOTO: ELISA BOWMAN

Diana Slickman 2007

Happy birthday, Russ!

It was a bright, frigid February 4th in Chicago. So cold that were it not for Russ having been born on this day, I'd not have left the apartment. The night before, the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong was on the TV machine and though not much interested in it, we watched it. Kong always puts me in mind of Kong and the quote I chose for this year was a tip of the pith helmet to the idea of Kong. I placed my quote, neatly folded, in my local video rental shop, Specialty Video, over the plastic sleeve that one must take to the counter to get the DVD of King Kong (1933). Most of the other sleeves contain the artwork that comes with the DVD, but the one for King Kong '33 contained, to my delight, someone's idea of Kong. On a piece of plain cardboard in black marker was drawn a small Empire State Building with a rather impressionistically rendered ape atop it. Little airplanes, like flies, buzzed around the building and in the ape's hand, in an altogether different scale, was a figure in a dress. I may be embellishing now, but there may have been a speech balloon coming out of the figure that said "Help!" I can't tell you how pleased I was.

Here's what the yellow paper said:

I live in a state of surprise much of the time; things others take for granted suddenly amaze me. Moving toward the ever-receding vanishing point I was struck by the frailty of what humans have put together like something out of a box: houses; shops; roads: street lamps; trains and railway stations; aeroplanes and airports. I imagined a gigantic foot stepping on it. Crunch. Of course film-makers imagine that all the time, and build monsters on to the feet.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Added to the sheet was: "February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and this quote was left for you to find as part of a world-wide celebration."

Mike Shuttleworth 2007

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and small one. The sign said: 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...' I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone s the source of his or her own kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary

Why this text, why this place?

I've been thinking a lot about turtles lately, not least because a good friend of mine has been involved in writing an environmental impact report that opposed a billion dollar gas processing plant being built right on the nesting grounds of the flat-back turtle in north west Western Australia. Seems that when the report landed on the desk of the West Australian premier Alan Carpenter he announced, hand on heart, "I will do whatever it takes to get that gas plant built". Maybe a copy of Turtle Diary should have been sent to him. So with a few million bucks slung out by the developers to the government, guess what, suddenly the problem goes away. Just the turtles, I'm thinking.

Anyway, I love the way that William G is perplexed by his own identity throughout Turtle Diary. What is it one must do in order to define who (or what) one is? I have placed the quotation on the table of Mr Tulk, the cafe attached to the State Library of Victoria. You can see the old W-class tram in the background. Books, cities, people, journeys, questions. What I love about the work of Russell Hoban.

Steve Long 2007

This year's SA4QE began for me when I got hold of a copy of The Trokeville Way. It arrived on Saturday 3rd Feb, and I noticed that Russ had quoted a couple of lines from AE Housman's poem A Shropshire Lad at the front of the book. Things immediately began to slip into place - I had been planning to visit Shropshire on the 4th Feb for some weeks, for another reason. I had seen it as an opportunity to 4Qate somewhere different, but the reference to Shropshire in the Hoban book suddenly made it significant.

On Sunday morning I was running in a hill race on the Long Mynd, a hill above Church Stretton. It was a dry and sunny day, although the ground was still frozen underfoot where it was shaded by the hills. The views were superb. The race over, we wanted to look around Ludlow, an historic old town with plenty of timbered buildings, cobbled passageways etc. We found a market there, a typical Sunday market with stalls of collectibles, bric-a-brac, old books, jewellery etc.

I was looking out for some Hoban symbolism, and saw for example a turtle brooch. Then rummaging at a bookstall I noticed a book by a Norma Ridley, called something like "Northumbrian Approach". The similarity between Ridley and Riddley, Russ's Mr Walker, was too good to miss. The book was in a box containing an assortment of hardbacks including some art history, e.g. on van Gogh, and appeared to be popular with the browsing public. I slipped my yellow paper between Ms Ridley's book and the next.

The yellow paper contained the following text:

He went to the window, looked at the frost-sparkling cars, thought of the seasons revolving inexorably while metal rusted and flesh decayed, thought of trees across the common, now bare, how in the summer dawns they swayed their leafy tops in the early breeze, indifferent to humans who slept and woke and slept again.

from Angelica's Grotto

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman's hand on a necklace, a man's hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, entirely?

from The Bat Tattoo

I like the first quotation because it makes a beautiful contrast between nature's cycles and the more superficial cycles of man. Hoban's words show how nature's cycles have such permanence and reliability in comparison to our own. They highlight how unreliable our actions, and how impermanent we are.

In the second quotation I like the idea that anything touched by us somehow retains a memory of us. Things like hand rails and old stone steps are obvious examples, but Hoban uses much lighter touches, contrasting male and female aspects. This sensitivity and closeness of observation is one of the reasons I like Russ's work so much.

On another stall at the market in Ludlow I happened on a copy of A Shropshire Lad, a 1948 reprint of an 1896 edition, and I bought it.

Best wishes,

Steve

Olaf Schneider 2007

Interactive animations inspired by Russell Hoban writings

NOTE: Be sure to have the sound turned on for these Flash animations, and to give them a few moments to load. All open in a new window as they are hosted externally. You need to have installed Flash version 5 or later to view them. If you don't, download it for free.

Enjoy! - Olaf

Night outside

Olaf writes: 'One of my (many) favourite quotes from Turtle Diary'.

Turtle navigation

More turtle thoughts swim through Olaf's mind.

Night-drive to Polperro

Take a ride with William and Naeara from Turtle Diary.

Lara Hoffenberg 2007

Just to add my little bit to Lisa Greenstein's tale of our 2007 4qation .... I never thought I'd 4qate a gym! Never thought I'd be the kind of person who went to a gym, in fact. So the issue of what's-possible, what's-in-you-but-not-of-you, fascinates me at the moment. I left my yellow paper in a locker, between the mats stacked by the huge exercise balls, and hidden in the health-food menus. This was my choice for 2007:

'Think of it," his father used to say - "in a thousandfold dilution, the memory of a single drop of medicine persists and works its cure. Only the memory! In a single cell of a human being is the memory of the whole design. In each of us is the memory, however inaccessible, of the beginning of the universe. We are the memory of the dust of stars." He would press his forehead against Max's. "In you," he said, "there must be memories inherited from me. I know I have these from my father - black trees, the smell of snow, the sound of cossacks. Ravens."

from Her Name Was Lola

Happy birthday Russ!

Lara

Gwenda Hague 2007

I discovered Russell Hoban during my hippie years in the 70's and Turtle Diary, dog-eared, the pages turning yellow, my favourite passages underlined in orange felt tipped pen (how gross) travelled the world with me for years as a kind of easy little bible. Taken out in times of traveller's loneliness, when I wanted to initiate a conversation, as a dreamstarter, to look engrossed when feeling uncomfortable and to kickstart my heart if it ever was in threat of stopping. I loved it like a baby loves its comfort blanket. (Still do.) I thank Russell for this. In later years I have found and read many of his other titles, he never lets me down.

On a day full of cicadas airbrushing the day with their joy I send my happiest birthday wishes to Russell Hoban. I am a silent Kraken member better to let the cicadas do the talking. This year I have joined in the SA4QE homage! My quote - is the Fremder rain quote......a little sad since we in Australia are fast in the jaws of one of the worst droughts on record. Does the rain remember how to rain???? Ahhhh!! The cicadas still believe!

My quote:

"Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?"

"I think everything remembers, Pythia."

"…especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings."

from Fremder

I have taken photos of my yellow paper - it was left at the local library at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Libraries are good houses, "Safe Houses", and there is a chance that someone will take their curiosity on a great journey.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUSSELL HOBAN.....4TH FEBRUARY 2007
SPRINGWOOD, NSW AUSTRALIA

Postscript: The day I SA4QEED the Springwood Library with the Fremder quote, the sky began to throw a few clouds around. By Monday the heavens opened up and a deluge ensued, water ran down streets and eddied and swirled. As it was cascading down some outdoor stairs I heard a little girl call out in absolute wonder - "look a waterfall". The rain had remembered how to rain, the cicadas were right to believe. Did the quote somehow precipitate the precipitation? It did not break the drought but it bucketed in the catchment area and the sky is still frowny. It is a beginning and an end and that little girl's waterfall is now mine.

Lisa Greenstein 2007

So February swung round this year with a bit of a seedy thing going. I'd reached the end of my Year of Internet Dating, which had yielded more stories that can be related here, but then found myself reading Angelica's Grotto and felt like I'd been thrown in the deep end. So to speak. And in the background, for the past few months, Lara [Hoffenberg] and I have become regular gym-goers, and keep finding ourselves getting all sweaty on these squeaky machines while discussing not-so-squeaky things. So getting some yellow-paper action in among the locker rooms and weight machines seemed somehow.... inevitable really.

So first I hunted for some lockers that were, er, locked - it being late at night, there weren't that many. But #69 was forthcoming, along with #130 and a few others. Not #14, but you can't always get what you want, apparently. Then slipped some in between the 10 and 15kg weights on the thigh abductor machines. And that other machine where you open and close your arms like a book and it does amazing cleavage things.

Unfortunately we forgot the camera, so I don't have actual on-site visual evidence this time round, but perhaps that's in keeping with the subterraneanness of it all too.

The quotations follow below...

"Do you think men will ever feel equal to women?"
"Obviously they can't feel equal until they are equal, and whether or not that'll ever happen I can't say. But before any change can happen there has to be recognition of the present situation, and that's the object of this study."
"I'm afraid I'm too old to change, Melissa."
"Nobody's asking you to. I'm not exactly a role model either and I'm too perverse to change, so I guess the two of us will have to carry on being less than perfect."

from Angelica's Grotto

The sky grew dark as they went down Piccadilly towards Green Park Station, Klein whispering, "A winged horse can't do my flying for me, I have to do it on my own. We are something to each other. You don't always know what's happening when it's happening. `This can't be love because I feel so well…' " Suddenly there was rain beating down, urgent and shining and steaming on street and pavement. "You go on ahead, he said, "I can't run."
"A little rain won't hurt me," she said, and pressed his arm closer to her. Drenched and smiling, he felt almost middle-aged again.

from Angelica's Grotto

"I'm not in love with her," Klein whispered into his hand. "That would be too pathetic."
"What are you whispering?"
"I'm not in love with you, Melissa."
"That's perfectly all right, Harold, but if you want to be in love with me, that's all right too. An experience can be life-enriching even when it's emotionally frustrating."
She said this tenderly, with her hand on his arm and her blue eyes full on him. Klein kissed her and she kissed him back.
"This is my life now," he whispered into his hand. "The past doesn't go away, but the present steps in front of it."

from Angelica's Grotto

Love Lisa

Paul Saich 2007

A little late with my contribution this year. I was rather rushed on the day for various reasons and didn’t get out until early afternoon. And it being a Sunday I didn’t feel I had long so I left just three quotes. The first was in HMV, nestled between some CDs by The Waterboys. (No significance to that by the way. It was a random choice based on me feeling rushed and on choosing a moment when I thought I wasn’t going to be seen.)

I went to see if she was still asleep. She wasn’t in my bed. She wasn’t in the studio or on the balcony. She wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen. She was nowhere in the house. The night was gone, the day was here; the tube trains were running and the trees on the common were swaying in the cool of a morning that was going to turn hot very soon. Some birds were twittering in a half-hearted way, as if they were working to rule. At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

The next I propped on a shelf in Waterstone’s normally used for promotions, posters advertising for reading groups and upcoming plays. I used the quote last year and thought it could do with another outing…

In the deep chill and the darkness of the Fourth Galaxy, in the black sparkle of deep space, oh so lonely, see a figure in a blue coverall tumbling over and over as it comes towards you: no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. Is he dead? He can’t be alive, can he? What’s in his mind now? Are there pictures frozen in his mind?

from Fremder

Finally I was going to do another bookshop but it occurred to me that I shouldn’t. As I was thinking, I was passing a line of unoccupied tables outside Starbucks (it being too cold for people to sit outside)…and decided that it was ideal. There wasn’t a good way of hiding what I was doing from the people sitting inside. (I’ve no idea why I feel I should be 4Qating unobserved but it seems appropriate!) So, folded under the ashtray on one of the tables, more from Amaryllis:-

We were climbing then, with lots of sky all around us and was that – yes, it was – the sea, just a greyness, a flatness, a Here-I-amness. We parked at the Beachy Head Countryside Centre, a brown national-park-looking place, THE FAMILY WELCOME, Full menu served all day, 11.30am to 10.00pm.

With our sandwiches and thermos of tea we made our way to the view of the white cliffs and the toy lighthouse and the grey and kelpy-looking strand between us while the sea, grey and dimpled, moved far, far below us like a leaden porridge slowed by distance, advancing in sluggish small wavelines to the base of the cliffs. The joyful little brown dog frolicked ahead of us while the black Labrador continued to urge caution. Reaching the edge of the grass the little brown dog flung himself over headfirst and we were afraid to look but it was not the end of him because he reappeared laughing so it had not after all been an edge of no return.

That was six years ago, and when my mind goes back to that dawn it gives me the vampire wedding, the leaden porridge of the sea, and that meditation of crows.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Roland Clare 2007

SA4QE from Bristol ... Two texts left variously on a fence at the Sea Walls overlooking the Avon Gorge (above), and in other locations (see below).

The two quotations are close neighbours in Turtle Diary. Neither is the bit I was actually planning to use, which was the satirical tale of the rich shark-diver and his rubber-clad brothel experience: in the end I thought that was bit long for people to read in a high wind or a crowded shop.

Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

from Turtle Diary

It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.

from Turtle Diary

The other locations were:

among the 'forthcoming events' at the Redgrave Theatre ...

... in the loo at Bristol Zoo ...

... among the children's books for sale in the Zoo bookshop ...

... and fastened to a spavindy bench frequented by bird-watchers:

Here are some passers-by inspecting the Sea Walls 4qation.

Kerry Power 2007

This year I chose the opening paragraph from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. It is somewhat special as it is the first paragraph of Russ' adult books I ever read. It is quite beautiful.

There are no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind - tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-coloured moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Left on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.

Emmae Gibson 2007

You live in the country now. You lived in the country before, but this is the real thing. Mountains, stones and oceans, trees, green islands and untrodden valleys, and shortly before the 4th February you realise in panic that successful 4quating is an urban activity.

For a start, deer don’t read. Just have no idea.

Secondly, the amount of horizontal rain here lately would wash the profundities of Kleinzeit deeply underground.

Thirdly, you did bus stops last year.

Land and seascape so pristine, a shred of paper of any colour gets dirty looks from green people. Of which you are one, naturally. Yellow paper with black capitals fluttering on a tree trunk? Looks fine in a romantic movie, but you could get your name in the local newspaper; think of the ignominy in the same column as ‘Man Bites Diggs,’ you’d be ‘Woman Accused of Yellow Loitering.’

Out on the waves? Now there’s a pretty thought, a Riddley message in a bottle bobbing, bobbing. But - plastic or glass - Coke or Glenfiddich? Both death to turtles. You dare not.

So you find yourself in the city with your man, who’s always on business, the Saturday night before the Sunday 4th February morning, on the fifth floor of the Thistle Hotel, listening to the raucous voices of party-goers in the street below long after 3.a.m. In New York all you could hear were sirens; at least Glasgow still has its well-documented, human element.

You brought a carrying book, a spare paperback copy of the first Hoban you ever read. You remember another hotel, the one where you read it, how it took you by surprise on the long way home. You could throw it out of the window now and surprise someone else. Not exactly A4 in its presentation, not yellow in deed, but yellow in thought.

But no, it might hit someone and how user-friendly is that?

You go back to sleep. The yellow paper waits written and folded inside the book of surprise, with the golden words:

‘The ends of things are always present in their beginnings…. the ends are actually visible in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again…. some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again, no matter how the seeing changes in between.’

from Turtle Diary

In the morning you go down to breakfast with your man and your book. You don’t leave it on your table for the waiter. You don’t leave it in the room when you check out, or at reception; no, she’s not the one. By now you’re getting desperate. You’ve failed to 4quate, you’ve let the team down, and soon you’ll be back in the car speeding guiltily towards useless, wide-open spaces again. Man asks if you’re okay - concerned - was it the steak last night?

You’re the one with the car park ticket and the money.

“No charge, hen,” says the man in the kiosk with the another-boring-sunday face. “Residents free!”

“Oh?”

You pause for a second as he turns away from his little window, to yet another-sunday-paper. The car starts to slide away. You know he’s the one. You slide the book on to his window ledge, the yellow folded bookmark sticking out.

You could have said something, given it to him, explaining, but that’s not 4quating, is it?

It has to be surreptitious. More fittingly Hobanesque, for the recipient, for the bored man in the green luminous jacket, you have to give him the element of discovery, surprise, the change of face.

You’re sure he was the one.

Frances Patterson 2007

I discovered SA4QE for the first time only a few days before February 4th. But I thought this quote was a good one, especially considering that I got my name from these books. My parents were elementary teachers and really liked Frances the Badger.

"I wish I had a friend," said Gloria.
"I thought Ida was your friend," said Frances.
"Ida is away at camp," said Gloria, "and when she is here she only wants to play dolls or tea party. She never wants to catch frogs or play ball."
"Can you catch frogs?" asked Frances.
"I use Father's old hat," said Gloria. "Shall I show you how?"
"Later," said Frances. "Do you want to play ball?"
"All right," said Gloria.
"If any boys come, they can't play," said Frances, "and I think I will be your friend now."
"How can a sister be a friend?" said Gloria.
"You'll see," said Frances.
"For frogs and ball and tea parties and dolls?" said Gloria.
"Yes," said Frances.

from Best Friends for Frances

I put it on a chair in the Fine Arts building on campus here in Omaha, Nebraska.

Thanks!

Nicole Paluszek 2007

Well a lot of things didn't quite go according to plan but hopefully there will be some positive effect from it all. I found out I was flat broke so I couldn't afford to go buy some yellow A4 and ended up using a purple 5x8 legal pad I had lying around. At least they'll get noticed!

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

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.'

from Riddley Walker

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far. --William G.

from Turtle Diary

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

from Turtle Diary

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. --William G.

from Turtle Diary

Neither the library nor Borders had anything Hoban in stock (how scandalous!!) for me to draw quotes from except for a few Frances booklets, which I read on the spot, and frankly, to my surprise, unlike anything else by Hoban I've read before, I thought they were schlock, not eligible for quoting anything from. So I left Kailua-Kona and went back home and pulled some quotes, five in all, off Dave Awl's website, from the Riddley and Turtle books, and pinned them to power poles along my street in Honaunau.

For the sake of suspense/curiosity all I added is the SA4QE URL.

Aloha,

Nicole

Demarnia 2007

I went for a walk up to Castle Rock, on a hill near my house (Christchurch, New Zealand), to deliver my sa4qe quotes. It was a strangely luxurious 3 hr hike with lots of cicada-filled pauses, a beautiful day, I got a wee bit sunburned on the arms, socks full of grass seeds and a sore knee from an ambitious path abandonement. The quote I chose was:

If the human mind is still evolving, as I believe it is, if our mind/soul capacity is still developing, then the pattern of our mental intake and sorting and storing is not static but changing. It may well be that we shall learn to let go rather than hold on, that we shall become capable of being with the world rather than attempting to consume it... 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 The Moment under the Moment

I left copies in two different miniature cave-like hollows in the rocks, and it is fairly likely noone will find them quickly, but they are in envelopes, sheltered from wind and rain and held down with rocks (but still visible), so should survive a fair while.

As a small bit of attached coincidence - on my return to flat land I showed my partner the quote, and he said he had been having a conversation that afternoon along very similar lines.

All good, thanks for the general enthusiasm, it makes me grin.

Anthony Davis 2007

Here, thanks to the processing power of the mighty Samuel IV, is what was printed on ten sheets of yellow A4 (card) in the early hours of Russ Day:

Orff we go!

`My name is Hermann Orff and you've never heard of me.'
`Oh, but I have. Luise has mentioned you several times.'
There was an upholstered bench behind me. I sat down on it.
`Luise,' I said, `has mentioned.'
`You. More than several times, reverberantly and with plangency.'
`What is Luise to you?'
`Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.'
`Don't roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.'
`Seven years ago with my sound man.'
`What do you suppose she heard in him?'
`Other music.'
`And what did she ever see in you?'
`Flickering images.'
`Of what?'
`It doesn't matter, it's the flickering that gives the excitement. 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 betwen the pictures that we experience the heart of the 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. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?'
`Luise saw all that in you, did she?'
`It isn't only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I'm so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman's natural
holding-on reflex.'
`And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.'
`Nothing is for ever.'

From The Medusa Frequency, Russell Hoban, Jonathan Cape, London (1987), pp. 87-88.

No doubt I've broken all the rules, but even the early-morning experience with the local phone-box (which no one uses, I guess - I checked, and the card was still there, at any rate, when I drove back from the station yesterday) made me start to feel that all this leaving 4qations amongst the groceries just didn't gel with me.

Accordingly, I was glad that, when having an ice-cream with my ex-sister-in-law en route and showing her the Longrow bottle, a chap at the next table was interested, and got involved in my explanation to her of my impending visit to a certain (as of 3.00 a.m. on Sunday, I gather) 82-year-old of our acquaintance. So what could be more natural than to pass him one of my 9 cards with the Medusa text - I gather that others have disseminated multiple texts, but heigh-ho! - for him to read.

What, equally, could be more natural than for him to hand it to his lady partner when she returned, from the loo (I think), and for her to read it, and be told about the novelist and his gift of whisky - quite reasonably, she read it, folded it in two, and put it in her bag...

So the scene was inevitably set for the following 8 distributions (of which, needless to say, there are no photographs - I'm not *that* strange):

1. After a refusal by my neighbour on the Piccadilly Line, to a woman next to me on the District Line who was reading a book (she asked if I had written the piece - I said that I hadn't and briefly explained).

2 & 3. To the two female staff on duty at Auntie Anne's cookie outlet at Fulham Broadway - they wanted one each.

4. To the vendress of nuts and the like under the name of Cranberry who sold me 50g of cashews.

5. To the saleswoman at Virgin® (where I bought The Rutles for Russ - he didn't know of it, so I described it as a piss-take of The Beatles).

6 & 7. To the two female bar staff, post distribution, to whom I was attempting to explain that others clutching Hoban books and/or A4 of a certain hue might be looking for me.

8. Finally, to the attractive woman with a shawl who was keeping her friend company on her birthday (yes, 4 February) at a table nearby, who, unlike her friend (who said that she was too drunk to read it), read the piece and thought that what she described as Russ' 'punctuation' was odd. (Questioning revealed that she had (a) not understood the shocked incoherence of Orff in context when he reports saying "`Luise,' I said, `has mentioned.'", and (b) that she meant the slashes when Kraken says 'there / not there / there / not there'...)

Unorthodox, maybe, but for me it was a far more human experience than skulking amongst the fruit and veg - and I could never do it any other way, whatever the rules. Sorry to shock you all, but no!



Anthony was the Kraken's 2007 'Birthday Bottle' czar, or the member who volunteered to co-ordinate the purchase and delivery of the group's birthday gift to Russell Hoban. This is his account of said delivery:

I can't guarantee that Russ will have broached the capsule of what he and I referred to when I handed it over as 'the gurgling stuff' by now and tried it, but he did say that he would look at the tasting notes first - I provided a copy for him in the presentation-box, on yellow A4 [card], of my posting to this group.

I can tell everyone that he also received (in no particular order):

1. The bluebird card as chosen, which contained the £20 Amazon voucher (as well as an allusion to pp. 71-73 of Gene Brewer's novel K-PAX, where 'the bluebird of happiness' makes its appearance). (Wording of card and voucher [of which there may be one, if the old film-stock permits] to follow...)

2. The Rutles on DVD from me, as I had seen it in Fulham Broadway's Virgin® - whilst I was biding my time - at a knock-down price (along with Dirty Harry, which, likewise on impulse, I kept for myself).

3. The attendance of a gentleman with a laptop who was doing a MORI poll when I arrived, but who obligingly allowed Russ to sign Her Name Was Lola and The Bat Tattoo for me, as well as adding the injunction 'BE STRANGE!' to my already signed copy of Fremder (on the basis that I sought words suitable to its impending re-reading). Let it be said that I have been VERY STRANGE to-day, mostly before I was encouraged to do so, which turned Russ' words into a sort of blessing or benediction on what happened, as well as a sanction for future strangenesses...

4. Sundry phone calls from family members who were busily rehearsing their renditions of the usual birthday song for when he should be free to hear them.

5. A copy (inscribed for him by me) of Italy, My Italy (or Italy! Italy! Italy!), that well-known compendium compiled by Thomas M. Phear PhD (with the assistance of Dr Pauline Sentence) - Belston Night Works, 1997 (0 907795 91 9).

I think that the list is properly concluded, save to say that Russ took all that was offered in good spirits and stead, and wished his best to The Kraken one and all, leaving me to go on my merry way to The Pelican for (what turned out to be) a less-than-Hobanesque, yet still SA4QE-oriented, few drinks, soup and Caesar® salad...

It was, though, a shame only to have the company of Nicole's apologies and Steve's bid at bi-location - unless there were other Hobanites there whom I failed to detect (but I don't really think so). Heigh-ho for the SA4QE drink! (Needless to say, I downed a Laphroaig® for the benefit of and in honour of the absent (and refused to-day's ever-present offer of the abomination of ice).)

Deena Omar 2007

For some reason, I got stuck in my own stillness on Sunday and spent the day re-reading most of Her Name was Lola and huge chunks of Pilgermann. The latter sent me into a strange dark space as it always does. On Monday, happily, my stillnesses blurred into motion. Can't resist Underground quotes - I love 'em, I sometimes feel like I live on the bloody London Underground, I'm in a long-term dysfunctional relationship with it. Here's my first quote:

Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of the carriage become the rolling passage in the darkness of my mind.

from The Bat Tattoo

This was left under a copy of Metro on a northbound Northern Line tube just before I got off at Kings Cross, and another copy of same was left tucked into the leaflet rack behind a leaflet about Oystercards.

My second choice was:

We are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action.

from Fremder

One copy left on a pile of photocopy paper in my staff workroom, the other amongst leaflets in the waiting room of my audiology clinic where I went to get my hearing aid fixed (only the best people wear them, you know).

All had the sa4qe url, book title and Russ's name on them.

Seem to have wheels on my mind this year.

Both choices were partly inspired by Olaf's gorgeous graphics.

No idea if anyone found them.

Vernon Ó Heigheartaigh 2007

The remembering sea, at Kilcar and Fintra, Co. Donegal.

"Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?"

"I think everything remembers, Pythia."

"…especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings."

from Fremder

peter morrison 2007

the first paragraph below i left on paper in the arches in glasgow, and posted the full thing on my blog/journal here and here.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: "The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup..." I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they're swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can't believe they'd swim, 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can't shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.

Mr. Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I'd got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we'd subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.

It's hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he's about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that's what penguins do on overland journeys. They're big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. 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, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. 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. And when they can't see the sun, what then? Their vision isn't good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

i've only been reading hoban for a few years, think this is my 3rd sa4qe? i worked my way through all the bloomsbury books with the matching covers, not really realising turtle diary would become hard to get. but by the time i was ready to just get it despite it not matching the others, the only copy i had actually seen in the shops was gone. so i finally got round to buying it second hand about a month ago, and read it in the last couple of weeks. normally its the humour, the sense of the weird that creeps in that gets me with russell's work, though i acknowledge the darkness in his work. reading turtle, i guess it hit me in the rut, and turning that last page i was left with a sense of melancholy, a need to release my own turtle. since reading it the whole idea of "soup" has become a running gag between me and a friend - you have a choice, accept new ideas and keep moving, or become soup.

i avoided reading the related posts before i went out, not entirely sure why, but i didn't want it to influence me. very weird to then find that the same quote has already been used. and to think i nearly went for the one about the playboy in the shark cage and the parallels between fetishism, or william g's speculations about shamanism and the turtle as his spirit animal.

anyway, a good day to you all, and may you avoid being soup good and long!