Paddy, Jan & Russell Caleb 2008

Hello there

The Mouse and His Child is one of our favourite books, and we thought we'd celebrate the return of beavers to Martin Mere at the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust's centre with a few words from Jeb and Zeb. We left one page of yellow A4 inside the hide and another copy by the beaver sculpted from wood outside.

"Jeb," said the voice of Zeb, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"A beaver," said Jeb without hesitation.
"A beaver?" said Zeb.
"A beaver!" echoed Muskrat.
"Right!" said Jeb, clicking his teeth and whacking the floor of the lodge as hard as he could with the flat of his tail. "Beavers do things! They cut down trees! CHONK! BONK! Make dams! SPLASH! KERPLONK! Beavers get rich!"

from The Mouse and His Child

Best wishes,

Paddy, Jan and Russell (age 18 months)

Chris Bell 2008

I’m sure you’ll sympathise when I say that neither multimedia 4qation nor yellow paper distribution was a serious option this year… but we did manage to enlist Frank’s help, in conjunction with some of my miraculously salvaged yellow paper quotes from two years ago—the Linger Awhile ones that disappeared mysteriously but which have since been found again. I chose my quote for this year (the one the five-week-old Frank is holding in these shots) from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi:

“When I left her I spun out into the North End Road where the street lamps glowed like fire balloons. A 28 bus trundled by as shiny and sweetly red as a toffee apple. Scatterings of Saturday-night shouted and screamed in random decibels that spiralled into the darkness above the illuminations of Ryman, Fish and Chips, and Cancer Research UK. Brightness pervaded the North End Road all the way to the night lights in Waitrose. At the roundabout I crossed to the Fulham Road which was awash with buses, cars, taxis, litter and louts of all classes. Turned into Barclay Road at Domino’s Pizza and made my way to the west side of Eel Brook Common, Basuto Road and home, descending through levels of unlight and quiet to ordinary reality where I was uncertain of her kiss that still lingered on my tongue.’”

from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi, Chapter One: ‘Phil Ockermann’, page 27 (published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007)

Diana Slickman 2008

Monday! Busy. Cold, windy, rainy. Winter in Chicago! My standard MO on Hoban Day is to open a book and see what presents itself. The Medusa Frequency being at hand, I opened it up and here's what it yielded:

Dr. Carnevale looked into the room and called my name and I followed him into his office. 'Pains in your chest and left arm?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'At first it was like an iron fist, but now it's as if I've swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.'

'Let's have your shirt off.' He unlimbered his stethoscope. 'Guess by now you've finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year.
Breathe in.'

'No, actually I haven't.'

'Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I'm told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell?'

'No. Is he a novelist?'

'Undertaker. He says they don't last as long as journalists.'

'Undertakers?'

'Novelists.'

'Why is that?' I said, as he took my blood pressure.

'Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?'

'Well, I can't be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.'

from The Medusa Frequency

This I copied out on to yellow paper and took with me to the grocery store. Monday nights I play cards with a group of interesting and intelligent women; February 4th was my night to host; hosting means making dinner. And so to the store. I slipped this, folded, between two bottles of Sauternes, which seemed fitting.

At lunch time, I opened up the book again and this is what I copied out of it this time:

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

from The Medusa Frequency

Out I went, to get some lunch and to find the right place for the yellow paper. I went into a book store: big, impersonal, lit like an operating room. I walked purposefully about, but I didn't know where I was going. Then I saw a book of movie posters from the 1930s on a shelf-end display and flipping through found a spread of two King Kong posters. I slipped my yellow quote in between them and replaced the book. Up the elevator to the fiction and literature shelves. "H" went straight from Hillerman to Hoeg. I went back to work.

On both of these pages I cited the work and the author along with my standard tag line, something along the lines of "February 4 is Russell Hoban's birthday. By finding this yellow paper and reading it, you are involved in a worldwide celebration of the day."

Happy birthday, Russ!

Carolyn Mayne 2008

As a new-ish member of the Kraken I decided I'd like to join in the sa4qe this year, then realised that we would be travelling to our house in Devon that day. I had chosen extracts from Kleinzeit and Turtle Diary, obtained a supply of gold paper, and planned several suitable places to leave them in my home town of Guildford. However, Surrey's loss was the west country's gain. The first two were left at the Solstice Somerfield shop, a couple of miles from Stonehenge - one in the display of newspapers where the Guardian should have been and one in the ladies' loo (tucked into a large bucket of fresh flowers - the gold paper complemented the yellow chrysanthemums). Later on that evening, in Hope Cove on the south Devon coast, we went to the pub for dinner and left a couple there (one in the ladies' loo again I'm afraid, wedged by the mirror). Then, walking back to the house in gale-force winds, I left the last one in the telephone box only a few yards from the crashing waves - appropriate, I thought, for the Turtle Diary piece.

He put his face in front of the bathroom mirror.
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.

from Kleinzeit (1974)

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 (1975)

No pictures I'm afraid. Perhaps next year!

I have enjoyed Russell Hoban's novels for many years, and have managed to get one of his books onto the programme of both book groups I belong to - Riddley Walker and Her Name Was Lola. Both were popular choices, though none of the other readers had previously heard of him.

~ Carolyn

Steve Long 2008

I have a photo of a large lion taped up on a partition by my desk, because I like the lion and because of the Hoban connection. I say the lion is large, well it is, literally huge. At Whipsnade zoo, not far from my home, they carved a lion shape in the chalk of the hillside some years ago, in the tradition of ancient and not-so-ancient chalk figures in the landscape of southern England. In recent years the zoo people have taken to illuminating the lion's outline at night, and last spring I attempted to photograph it. I don't have a fancy camera, and what I ended up with, flash turned off, camera zoomed right in and held as firmly on the top of a gate as I could manage, was a somewhat blurry but (what I think of as) atmospheric photo of the lion. There are better photos of it on the internet, but I like mine. There is a sense of movement in the photo (maybe even motion/stillness to use a Russ-ism), that for me gives it an interesting quality.

That was the inspiration for my SA4QE this year. Being tight for time I thought the least I could do was 4Qate at work, and I printed the following quotations on the regulation Ryman "gold" paper and taped it up below the lion photo. Both are taken from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.

Jachin-Boaz… took the master map out of a drawer and spread it on the counter for his son to look at. "I have been working on it for years," said Jachin-Boaz, "and it will be your when you are a man. Everything that you could wish to look for is on this map. I take great pains to keep it up date, and I add to it all the time."

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, at the cities and towns, the blue oceans, the green swamps and grasslands, the delicately shaded brown and orange mountains, the clear lines in inks of different colours that showed where all things known to his father might be found by him. He looked away from the map and down at the floor.

"What do you think of it?" said Jachin-Boaz.

Boaz-Jachin said nothing.

"Why won't you say anything?" said his father. "Look at this labour of years, with everything clearly marked upon it. This map represents not only the years of my life spent upon it, but the years of other lives spent in gathering the information that is here. What can you seek that this map will not show you how to find?"

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, then at his father. He looked all around the shop and then at his father, but he said nothing.

"Please don't stand there saying nothing," said Jachin-Boaz. "Say something. Name something that this map will not show you how to find."

Boaz-Jachin looked around the shop again. He looked at the iron doorstop. It was in the shape of a crouching lion. He looked at his father with a half smile. "A lion?" he said.

"A lion," said Jachin-Boaz. "I don't think I understand you. I don't think you're being serious with me. You know very well there are no lions now. The wild ones were hunted to extinction. Those in captivity were killed off by a disease that travelled from one country to another carried by fleas. I don't know what kind of joke that was meant to be." As he spoke there opened in his mind great mystical amber eyes, luminous and infinite. There blossomed great taloned paws, heavy and powerful. There was a silent roar, round, endless, an orb of reflection imaging a pink rasping tongue, white teeth of death. Jachin-Boaz shook his head. There were no lions any more.

[...]

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being. The wheel had been when he ran tawny on the plain, printing his motion on the grateful air. He had died biting the wheel that went on and left him dead. The wheel continued, the lion continued. He was intact, diminished by nothing, increased by nothing, absolute. He ate meat or he did not eat meat, was seen or unseen, known when there was knowledge of him, unknown when there was not. But always he was. For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him back to death and life again.

Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was."

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

At the bottom I simply put the SA4QE web address, because if anybody wanted to know more they could just ask me. Shame that nobody did. Possibly just too weird in an engineering R&D department!

I like the first passage just because it makes me think about the relationship I had with my father as a young adult. Russ has captured that difficult time when I wanted to be independent, and anything Dad did or told me was of no interest to me, and the frustration Dad no doubt felt at my rejection of his attempt to pass down to me the wisdom of years. Perhaps this is typical of many father / adolescent son relationships, but I shouldn't make that assumption.

I like the second passage simply because it is Hoban as his best, his most articulate and powerful. The words are a joy to read.

All the best,

Steve

Thomas Lipscomb 2008

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s fifth novel and dropped on 4 February 2008:

We are, for example, clever enough to know that a year is a measure of passage, not permanence; we call the seasons spring, summer, autumn, and winter, knowing that they are continuingly passing into one another. We are not surprised at this but when we give to seasons of another sort the names Rome, Byzantium, Islam, or Mongol Empire we are astonished to see that each one refuses to remain what it is.

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.

‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

from Pilgermann

Jonathan Cape 1983, pages 116-117

Olaf Schneider 2008

The Kraken speaks from the depths of the exobrain at 3am. Featuring Russell Hoban reciting his own poem from The Last of the Wallendas - an SA4QE exclusive.



If you have problems viewing the video above try watching it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnDx-Z8U-6o

You can also view the original Flash animation at the following link:

The Dream of the Kraken

NOTE: Be sure to have the sound turned on for this Flash animation, and to give it a few moments to load. It opens in a new window as it is hosted externally. You need to have installed Flash version 5 or later to view it. If you don't, download it for free.

Charlotte Amor 2008

“The fact that you’re alive means that someone cares about you.”

from Amaryllis Night and Day
Bloomsbury, London (2001) p68

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s ninth novel and dropped on 4 February 2008
In celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Rosie Harrold 2008

I am one of Roland's students. We have been studying Mr Hoban's work as part of our AS course and decided to participate in the sa4qe.

“Thursday. Grey and rainy. That was a help, sunny blue-sky days always look like bad luck to me.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

“There’s nothing like a little physical violence to make a man feel young again.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4th February in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

John Hand 2008

Hello Gombert (and to whomever owns the eyes Gombert is looking out from),

I participated in the SA4QE this year, in Melbourne, Australia. Russell Hoban's work picked up my little life and threw it into a satisfyingly confused and scared dimension, so I had to jump on board this tribute. I left a piece of yellow A4 bearing a quote from The Medusa Frequency in my uni library. It was the beginning of Herman's first chat with the Head of Orpheus -- I chose it mostly because it represents so much of what I love about Russell Hoban's work, but also because anybody who came across it would have to be made of stone to not want more.

It was an eyeless and bloated human head, sodden, covered with green slime and heavy with barnacles. I took it in my hands; where the flesh had been eaten away I could feel the ancient skull.

I could feel the head humming and buzzing in my hands, then it began to speak. Its voice was more elemental, more profound than human voices are; the way it spoke seemed more animal than human; it was as if speech had suddenly become possible for an animal, as if the creature were for the first time putting thoughts into words. 'Who are you?' said the head.

'Nobody, really. Nobody you'd know.'

'You wouldn't be seeing me if I didn't know you. What's your name?'

I didn't want to tell it my name.

'Speak up!' said the head. 'What are you afraid of?'

'Everything.'

from The Medusa Frequency

Unfortunately I couldn't take a photo because my camera insists on making a loud digital shutter noise and I was 4qating in a library.

Thanks for doing this, it adds yet another twist to the twistedness of Hoban fandom.

Antti Savela 2008

Happy birthday Russ!

Antti


If you have any problems viewing the video above try going direct to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7rQo90fHK0

Paul Saich 2008

More disorganised than usual this year as I'd been struggling with a couple of laptop failures that have involved losing a lot of stuff! Monday being work, instead I SA4Qated on Sunday 3rd and late in the afternoon left the following three. First, pinned to the gates of a building site where some new flats are being built:-

When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did - walked and talked, dined in intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I'd wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.

from Fremder

Next, stuck to a wall next to the ATM of a bank in town,

"...The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water's edge and swayed their tops against the sky."

"There opened to you underworld," I said, "and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping."

"Yes," said the head, "in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld."
Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and silence filled my mind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.

I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I suppose in some way it was still with me.

from The Medusa Frequency

And finally, stuck on a noticeboard by a bus stop:-

"As we get on, you see, the fugal system has a little more trouble spacing out the subject and answer, and if entries come too fast it's rather like Sunday traffic on the M4. And there you jolly well are with a blocked stretto. Now, the only known function of the stretto being to channel entries, it's of no use whatever if it's blocked. You'll feel a little breathless and as if everything is piling up inside you from behind while at the same time you're quite unable to move forward to get away from it. Naturally that's distressing, not to mention the possibility of worse trouble later on. What I say is Do it to stretto before stretto, you know, does it to you."

Dr Pink's voice had become a long and massive Sunday afternoon through which Kleinzeit drowsed like a fly in amber. At the end of his remarks it was Monday morning, a change not necessarily for the better. Kleinzeit felt breathless and as if everything was piling up inside him from behind while at the same time he was quite unable to move forward to get away from it. It's marvellous the way Dr Pink knows exactly how it feels, he thought. I wish I'd never met him.

from Kleinzeit

Roland Clare 2008

I chose a bit of Barbara Strozzi that I liked – wish I'd thought to leave a copy in the Coroner's Court. As it was, one copy went in the National Gallery Touring Exhibition entitled 'Love' in Bristol Museum, which seemed a suitably Hobanesque location, while the other went into the leaflet dispenser at Bristol's Folk House where I rather hoped there would be Tango lessons afoot, though a quick inspection didn't reveal any. Maybe somebody will be moved, by the novel, to initiate such classes ...

The Coroner’s Court in Fulham is shaped like a large telephone box, and my thoughts rose up vertically both inside and outside of it. The clear grey light that came in through the windows was cool and sceptical. Possibly it had heard too many lies to take anything for granted. Ten Bibles in the jury box, two more by the witness box. There was a poor box by the door. Behind the Coroner the royal arms said DIEU ET MON DROIT.

As all the persons having anything to do etc. drew near and gave their attendance we were sworn in and testified that everything had happened the way it had happened. Then the Coroner returned a verdict of accidental death, Bob was our uncle, and there we were out on the street blinking in the sunlight.

Barbara and I were looking at each other as if our mouths had forgotten how to form words. Eventually we both spoke at the same time: ‘Maybe …’ was our joint utterance.

‘You first,’ said Barbara.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘we could have dinner one evening?’

‘That’s what I was going to say.’

from My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
Bloomsbury, London (2007), page 158

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s most recent novel and dropped on 4 February 2008

in celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Chloe Quinn 2008

Happy Birthday Russell Hoban!

“Always and always out into the dark and the dark coming in, Fremder, that’s what it is to be human. The dark needs your humanness.”

from FREMDER

JONATHAN CAPE LONDON (1996)

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s seventh novel and dropped on 4th February 2008 in celebration of his 83rd Birthday.

Kerry Power 2008

On yellow paper, placed in Parliament Station, platform 4, Melbourne Underground:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most a writer can do - and this is only rarely achieved - is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

from The Moment under The Moment
(foreword)

Daniel Potter 2008

I am one of Roland Clare's students. Here is my first SA4QE contribution.

actually he’s not properly a he and he’s nothing you could picture in your mind. what we’re talking about here is a space-time singularity which is in fact a neuron of the cosmic mind to which the universe has occurred. similarly the great snyukh is a simplification of a cusp of negative probability. once inverted it reverses its polarity and becomes an accelerator of event.

from The Medusa Frequency

Picador, London (1987), page 132

She spoke of Amerikanischer Imperialismus enchantingly and unmaliciously, and she finished each news item with a rising inflection in which one could hear her tidy small pleasure. Her voice made in the crackling and whispering of the evening airwaves a quiet place of its own. Knowing hardly any German I was able to let go of all comprehension so that she came to my ear naked, giving me, unvitiated by any surface meaning, the sound that signified only herself. Whenever she paused for breath I was shocked by the intimacy of it. It was just such a voice as the Vermeer girl might have spoken with.

from The Medusa Frequency

Picador, London (1987), page 78

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s sixth novel and dropped on the 4th February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

James Poolos 2008 (4)

Fortunately, I did take part in SA4QE with that very quote. In fact, I was so thrilled at the subversiveness of it all, I posted it twice (on the bulletin board at my kid's school in San Francisco and on the front door of Dr. Insomnia's coffee house in Novato).

Sometime now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I do not know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. When I wake up, it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

from Come Dance With Me

James Fowler 2008

Goodparley and Orfing had a red and black stripet fit up it bens tanning there ready to go and little kids creaping in and out of it wylst we ben doing the scar take. Orfing cleart the kids out he tol them ther heads wud tern to wood if they dint come out of it quick.

from Riddley Walker

Jonathan Cape 1980, page 44

Hugh Bowden 2008

After having failed dismally to 4quate last year (I was on leave, so all the time in the world but never enough time for anything) I made rather more of an effort this year, although I think the result shows a disappointing literal-mindedness. My excuse is that I had been busy trying, and failing, to make sense of the cult of Isis in the Greco-Roman world (as one does), and was not able to think very subtly. My choice of quotation was from the fifteenth chapter of the Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, starting somewhere on the second page (I left out the detail of who was saying the words):

‘Easy enough to see where the sculptor’s sympathies lay. His commission may have been from the king but his heart was with the lion. The king, for all the detail and all the curls in his beard is little more than an ideograph, a symbol referring to the splendour of kings. But the lion!
‘The king is almost secondary. The mortal stretch of the lion’s body meets the length of the spears he hurls himself upon, becomes one long diagonal thrust of forces eternally opposed. That thrust is balanced on the turning wheel and the lion’s frowning dying face is at the centre, biting the wheel. Masterfully composed, the whole thing. The king is secondary, really — a dynamic counterweight. He’s only there to hold the spear, and nothing less than a king would be of suitable rank for the death of that lion.’

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz

There was really only one place to leave the passage, so I printed off five copies, with a picture at the top and 4 February 2008 www.sa4qe.com on the bottom, and headed to the Assyrian Galleries of the British Museum. The museum was full of school parties and tourists, and there was a constant trickle of people through the lion hunt passage. I sat on the bench and looked at the lion biting the wheel - although I actually always find my self drawn to the dead lion to his right, body twisted upside down and his tongue hanging out - and put the sheets of yellow A4 paper on the bench beside me, with my hand resting on them. Feeling more like a character out of a le Carré novel than an Hoban one (but then again, middle-aged academic sitting on a bench in central London feeling that I am doing something vaguely improper - who am I trying to fool?) I waited until the museum attendant had made her slow way through the gallery, and then walked out in the other direction, without a backward glance.

Not really a photo-opportunity, although the scene could be illustrated with the lion biting the wheel. In all probability the paper will have been spotted by a cleaner and rapidly consigned to a bin, but there is always a chance that someone will have picked one up, thinking it an information sheet - which of course it was. I suppose that, had I thought about it more, I could have mocked it up to look like a BM leaflet (although those are mostly full-colour these days) or a school work-sheet, but I don't think that that would be quite in the spirit of the exercise.

Happy Birthday Russ!

An Hugh Bis

Frances Patterson 2008

Here is my quote for this year:

All the sandwich cookies sweet

In their frilly paper neat

They are gone this afternoon,

They have left you, Lorna Doone ...

You are plain and you are square

And your flavor's only fair.

Soon there'll be an empty place

Where we saw your smiling face.

Lorna Doone, Lorna Doone,

You were last but you weren't wasted.

Lorna Doone, Lorna Doone,

We'll remember how you tasted.

from Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs

And it's dedicated to my roommate Alyssa because she loves those cookies!

Thank you!

~Frances