‘Everyone in the world is looking for something,’ said Jachin-Boaz to Boaz-Jachin, ‘and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again’....
‘If everything that is found is never lost again, there will be an end to finding some day,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Some day there will be nothing left to find.’
Although most years I have managed to get out and slip a few pieces of yellow paper into the world sometime within a week or so of the fourth, I have rarely managed to get these exploits written up and posted, with or without photos.
One year not so many half-decades ago, I actually organized a little dinner gathering at a restaurant, and placed a folded yellow paper by everyone's place setting. I took pictures of all this. At the moment I have no idea where they might be -- no doubt flotsaming around somewhere in my exobrain. But I certainly never got around to writing the cheery and amusing account of it all that I'd envisioned.
This year, in hopes of keeping both the 4Qation and its documentation more streamlined and therefore more like to make it to the Internets eventually, I limited myself to a single quotation, forbade myself to even think about photography, and for the first time ever hand-wrote the thing on a sheet of yellow paper like Ms. Slickman originally intended instead of typesetting some elaborate handout with multiple quotes like I'd done in the past.
I decided to pick a quotation from a book I'd never 4Qated from before, and something from a relatively recent book (rather than a classic quote from the First Six Novels, which I have mined so heavily over the years).
So I chose this early passage from The Bat Tattoo, which is hands-down my favorite Hoban book of the 00s -- the one I think most deserved a US release and yet inexplicably didn't get one.
Here is what my yellow paper said.
***
February 4, 2009
"Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary -- you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T'ang Dynasty -- their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.
"There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends."
-- Russell Hoban, The Bat Tattoo (p. 3)
Compliments of The Kraken
In honor of Russell Hoban's 84th Birthday
sa4qe.blogspot.com
***
I wrote this out on a sheet of paper at the neighborhood pack-and-mail store, copied it onto roughly half-a-dozen sheets of yellow paper, and then slipped them inside copies of a few of Chicago's alternative weeklies at a couple of different coffehouses in Andersonville (my neighborhood in Chicago). I also slipped a couple between boxes of tea at the neighborhood supermarket.
Thus endeth the 2009 report, submitted only about two months late. Next year my goal will be to get it filed while the sun is still in Aquarius.
Dave
=============================
~~~ http://www.ocelopotamus.com
'I'll leave you to it,' he said, and his footsteps walked away.
When I came out the lobby was pretty empty. I got my things and went outside. The air was cold and seemed heavy with snow that was almost ready to fall. I walked across the forecourt, under the arch, over the road and hailed a taxi. Piccadilly was full of lights and traffic, with a lot of blackness around the lights. When we turned into Park Lane the cars rushing through it looked as if they were emptying London; soon there'd be no more people, only driverless cars hurrying into the night. The trees in Hyde Park were pale under the lamps, with cold black shadows. Bayswater Road stared at me as if I were a foreigner. When we got to my place in Notting Hill the street was deserted, the lamps were dim. I'd left lights on in my house but they looked like lights in an empty house. I could hear a helicopter quite close, then farther away, then close again. My cat Stevo came out to meet me and we went inside together. Before I closed the door I looked back at the street and it was like a photograph of something that was gone. I shook my head and locked the door. I didn't think I'd be phoning Elias Newman.
To be and not to be. That is the answer.
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Fidelity is a matter of perception: nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.
People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. 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.'
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.
One wakes up every morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into the being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.
London City
I have London, London, London-
all the city, small and pretty,
in a dome that's on my desk, a little dome.
I have Nelson on his column
and Saint Martin-in-the-Fields
and I have the National Gallery
and two trees,
and that's what London is - the five of these.
I can make it snow in London
when I shake the sky of London;
I can hold the little city small and pretty in my hand;
then the weather's fair in London,
in Trafalgar Square in London,
when I put my city down and let it stand.
| A yellow paper at the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå, Sweden (photo below). The paper said; William dragged out the first crate, tipped it on the trolley and wheeled it away with an amount of noise that would have waked the dead. I followed with the rope. from Turtle Diary Happy Birthday Russ !
If you have any problems viewing the above video try watching it on YouTube |
If the human mind is still evolving, as I believe it is, if our mind/soul capability 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.
Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. I've certainly never found any way to roll it back so that I could change my actions and the consequences of them. Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions. And lodestones are more frequent than pot-holes on the streets of Used-To-Be.
My third attempt gave me a feeling of desolation and an old woman posing as a black cat. I'd dreamt her many times before; she looked like the old witch in the Grimm story who sent the soldier down into the hollow tree for the tinder-box.
More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.
Dangling from his beak is a dead rabbit who looks exactly like Peter Rabbit without the blue jacket. Bubo bubo's dreadful amber eyes say simply, "It has fallen to me to do this. It is my lot." His fierce woolly owl-babies huddle before him waiting for their dinner.
I don't know what I am now. A whispering out of the dust. Dried blood on a sword and the sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, the action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.
"I'm lost," said Klein.
"In what sense?" said Dr DeVere.
"In the sense of I don't know where I am."
"Can you elaborate?"
"I am of a people who have always been fearless navigators of the mind. The dead sail with us as we make our way from idea to idea, steering by the stars and sea-marks named by those before us. Such a wide, wide ocean! But always know where you are by the waves, by the swells; the winds blow from not the usual quarters. Black squalls come, and heavy seas, the stars are blotted out, the wind moans in the rigging. You suddenly realise that you might never make your landfall, you might drown. A great wave hits the boat and takes you with it, you feel yourself going down, down, down and then you don't know any more which way is up and you can't hold your breath a moment longer and the wild wide ocean fills your lungs and then you're gone: down among the dead men."
Dr DeVere kept respectfully silent for a few moments.
"It's good that you could get that out," he said.
"Is it? I almost don't know who I am. I try to think of how I came to this and it's hard to believe how it all began. I read this lousy piece in The Times and Boom! my world fell apart."
"Ronnie Lang said some good things in his time: one of them was, 'The breakdown can be the breakthrough .'"
"Depends on what you break through to, I should think."
I had a shower, put on fresh jeans and a sweatshirt, thought about going to Phil’s place, then decided not to just yet. I put on a jacket and went out to look for Hope of a Tree. WH Smith didn’t have it so I went back to the Fulham Road and over to Nomad where I bought the one copy they had. ‘How has this been selling?’ I asked.
‘We had two copies,’ said the woman at the till. ‘Sold the other one a couple of weeks ago.’
I didn’t want to go directly home so I went past the North End Road to Caffè Nero at the corner of Vanston Place. It was busy but I got myself an Americano and found an empty table by the window where I could start Hope of a Tree while drinking my coffee. The day was sunny and the Fulham Road was thronged with people doing their Saturday things. With my book and my coffee I felt as if I was in a little island of no hurry and no bother where I could let my mind be quiet for a while.
I opened the book. The dedication was To the memory of my father, J.B. Ockerman. The epigraph was from Job 14:7 –
For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.
Well, I thought, that’s optimistic. Then I started Chapter 1 and there’s Cynthia on Clifton Bridge thinking about jumping and here comes Sam to talk her out of it. OK, I thought, you can get a good love story out of a beginning like that. Then I noticed a woman who’d just sat down at the next table watching me. She was about my age, not bad looking, maybe a little too much jaw, dark brown hair in a Louise Brooks cut. Black polo neck, little pink leather jacket, black trousers and a Birkenstock. Very sleek, very cool and sure of herself.
She gave me a sort of knowing leer and said, ‘Enjoying it?’
‘Just started it,‘ I said. ‘Have you read it?’
‘Had to,’ she said. ‘I was married to the author.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Do you know him?’ she said.‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘I’m his girlfriend.’ I was surprised to hear myself say that but I tend to take against sleek women on sight.
‘Really!’ she said. ‘He usually goes for the intellectual type. Which you don’t, at first glance, appear to be.’
‘It could be that he’s looking to change his luck,’ I said.
‘Which way?’ she said.
I stood up and took half a step towards her. She suddenly looked less sure of herself. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘You’d like to continue this discussion outside?’
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Phil has come a long way down the female evolutionary ladder. This conversation would seem to be at an end. I suggest that you go back to your book and I to my cappuccino.’
‘While you still have your teeth,’ I said. She stayed quiet then, and when she picked up her cup it rattled in the saucer. I was amazed at my behaviour and quite pleased with it. Ms Ex-Wife finished her cappuccino quickly and left, avoiding eye contact the whole time.
Since my extract mentions Caffè Nero, I thought I'd
leave a copy outside the Clifton branch of the same
It doesn't mention dinosaurs, but nonetheless I went into
the Museum and gave a copy to the Plateosaurus
Another ended up in the Visitors' Comments book
'Do not leave anything valuable in this locker,' said the locker
Tawny extra perhaps
Here it is as a Borders Essential (not sure what happened to the apostrophe there)
Nice to find a copy of My Tango with Barbara Strozzi in Borders: I slipped it in to the
right page, as a kind of meta-bookmark. Riddley Walker was the only other Hoban there
I thought a copy might cheer up the chilly motorist who
would eventually have to defrost this windscreen
Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it? Rottin leaves and dead branches and naminal shit and that it all makes live earf on the dead groun and if you look at woodlings edge all roun the barrens youwl see the runty coming up where skin of earf growit back on nekkit groun. Nekkit groun what ben the bloody meat and boan of Bad Time covering its self with skin of earf and grass and woodlings. I thot: What ever it is its my groun. Here I stan.
Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: it bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss.
'When I tuned in to you I wasn't thinking ahead,' said Amaryllis. 'I was desperate for someone to connect with, I had a good feeling about you, I pulled you into my dream and here you are up to your neck in my weirdness.'
'It takes two to make this particular weirdness, Amaryllis. I'm not sorry to be part of it. Are you sorry you pulled me?'
'Actually, no.'
"Empty space," said the driver. "There's a funny thing to think about. The back of the van is full of empty space. I brought it from my town. But I've opened the doors several times since I left. So is it still empty space from my town or is it now several different new empty spaces? This is the sort of thing one thinks about sometimes. If the back of the van were full of chairs the question wouldn't arise. One assumes that the space between the chairs remains the same all through the trip. Empty space, however, is something else."
One wakes up every morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into the being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.
The night wore on and all the tigers danced now, old and young, the grown ones and the children.
They danced the moon dance and the shadow dance and the dance for the starlight and the glimmers on the river.
Under the hissing and humming of the moon, under the racing clouds they danced.
They danced the moon down low and pale into the morning. Some perhaps were moved to pity but they could not stop.
The dance was in them and they danced it.
Harry looked for a knocker. There was no knocker. He looked for a letterslot. There was no letterslot.
There was no door-knob or handle. Harry looked for a keyhole.
When he found it he put his mouth to it and said, "How do I get in?"
A voice said, "Who is it?"
Harry said, "It's Harry."
"What do you want?" said the voice.
"Rain" said Harry.
"And very reasonable too," said the voice. "Only it's the line, you see. You'll have to draw it off."
"I'll bring a pencil," said Harry.
"Not that kind of a line," said the voice. "It's the roaring kind."
"Lion!" said Harry.
"That's what I said," said the voice. "He's much too close, you see. He's frightening my horse and I can't get these hoses screwed together."
Then Harry knew whose voice it was. "You'll have to open the door for me," he said.
"You'll have to say the right words," said the voice. "And this is the rain door, you know. Once you're in you won't get out till rain time."
"I'll have a go," said Harry.
The door opened.
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."
On 1 March 2012 Walker Books published Russell Hoban's final young-adult book Soonchild, with amazing illustrations by Alexis Deacon. Read a lovely review in the Guardian, see some exclusive spreads from inside the book and get more details and a text extract at the Head of Orpheus website. Walker tweeted photos of Russ and Alexis at their offices in January 2011.
Also, on 4 October 2012 Walker published a beautiful new children's book. Rosie's Magic Horse is illustrated by the legendary Quentin Blake (with whom Russ had formerly collaborated on Trouble on Thunder Mountain, among other titles) and tells the story of a little girl and her collection of ice-lolly sticks, which dream of being a horse.
On 4 February 2012 the Slickman A4 Quotation Event celebrated 10 years of sharing Russell Hoban quotes, with many fans across the world posting their favourites in public places both real and virtual. This site was updated daily between 4 February and 10 March 2012 with these quotes. See all 2012 quotes
Russell Hoban's last novel Angelica Lost and Found was published in November 2010 and is available from Amazon and all good bookshops. There were good reviews of the book in the Guardian and Independent and an excellent interview with Russell Hoban in the Scotsman, as well as a revealing audio interview at Tim Haigh Reads Books.
The London restaurant Gaby's Deli, which is mentioned in Russell Hoban's books The Bat Tattoo and Linger Awhile, is under threat. The landlords want to close it and, reportedly, replace it with a chain restaurant. Give their Facebook page a like or sign their petition.
In 2005 the first international convention for Russell Hoban fans took place in London, and was marked by the publication of a fantastic 48-page booklet featuring exclusive contributions from innumerable fans and associates including novelist David Mitchell and actress Glenda Jackson. A wonderful memento of the event, it's also a beautiful collector's item and must-have for any Hoban fan. Although in limited supply, copies of the booklet are still available at £6.00 each plus p&p. Order direct from the Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum website.
Russell Hoban turned 86 on 4 February 2011 and fans celebrated in traditional style by leaving quotes from his books in public places. Browse their quotes here. The Russell Hoban community group The Kraken sent Russ a birthday gift of The Kraken Rum. Read a report about this at the Fantastic Reads blog.
To celebrate 30 years in print of Russell Hoban's most famous novel Riddley Walker, SA4QE broke with its February tradition and conducted an extraordinary SA4QE on 5 November 2010 in which participants shared their favourite quotes from the book. This site was updated throughout November 2010 with the quotes submitted.
Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure: 1 day. 29 London locations. 33 Hoban quotes. 2 sore feet.
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