Leslie Macias Schlag 2011

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

- from The Medusa Frequency 

Posted to Facebook

Steve Long 2011

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 There is a tendency for orienteering maps (as with all maps) to go out of date very quickly and the quotation I chose echoes this, as it echoes life:

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

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

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

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

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

peter morrison 2011

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

Empty Spaces

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

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

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr and LiveJournal

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

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

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

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

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

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

Posted to Tumblr

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

Emmae Gibson 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- from Turtle Diary (1975)

Twitterers, Facebookers and Bloggers 2011

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

- from Turtle Diary, tweeted by Joe Snow

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

- from Kleinzeit, tweeted by David Dixon

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

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

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

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by remotevoices

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

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

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

Facebooked by Olle Lawson

A Dog shall rise and a Rat shall fall.

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

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

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

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

- from The Bat Tattoo, tweeted by Danielle Carr

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

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by Squirmelia

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

Nick Campbell 2011

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

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

- from Pilgermann

Blogged on a pile of leaves

Yvonne Studer 2011

Happy Birthday, Russ, and happy day to everyone!

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

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

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

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

Long Green Dream

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

Best wishes from Yvonne

Also posted to Facebook

Richard Cooper 2011

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

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

- from The Medusa Frequency

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

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

(p83)

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

(p85)

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

(p93)

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

(p110)

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

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

(pp139-140)

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

(p163)

- all from Angelica Lost and Found

Alida Allison 2011

Once more into the breach--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Bosch 2011

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

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

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

Mike Lynch 2011

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

- from The Medusa Frequency

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


Posted to Tumblr and Instagram

Lorna Elsewint 2011

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

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

I said, 'What thing is that?'

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

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

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

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

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

- from Riddley Walker, page 6.

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

best, Lorna

John Hale 2011

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

- from Riddley Walker

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

Martin Eve 2011

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

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

T. Rinyo-Clacton

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

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

Somewhere between Enfield Town and Seven Sisters

The British Library Cafe

Somewhere in the British Library.

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

Dave Awl 2011

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

- from Pilgermann

Posted to Twitter via Twitlonger 

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

- from Angelica Lost and Found

Posted to Facebook

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

Melanie 2011

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

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

- from Riddley Walker

"What are you, a snulture cob?"

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

I have gone to look for a lion.

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

These photos were posted initially on Melanie's Flickr stream

Ra McGuire 2011

Good evening,

Thanks again for this opportunity to participate!

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

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

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

- from the foreword to The Moment Under The Moment

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday!

All best

Ra McGuire

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

Diana Slickman 2011

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

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

- from Fremder

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


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

Rich Bailey 2011

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

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

- from Fremder

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

- from Pilgermann

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

- from The Moment Under the Moment

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

- from The Moment Under the Moment

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

- from Kleinzeit

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

- from Kleinzeit

Roland Clare 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Second quote:

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

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

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

Tucked inside the Richer Sounds catalogue...

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

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