Kerry Power 2009

My quote this year is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz:

‘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.’

...on Yellow A4, Platform 3 Parliament Station, Melbourne.


Webmaster's note: apologies to Kerry for the late posting of this 4qation.

Dave Awl 2009

Here amid the ongoing chaos of my life in the midddling-to-latter part of the 00s, I have been very bad at 4Qating in recent years -- and even worse at reporting on it. The Mincery of 4Qation lists my last documented 4Qation as taking place in 2004, such a dizzying long time ago that many people still thought John Kerry might be US president someday and the Doctor wasn't back on the telly yet.

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

John Hand 2009

Hello Gombert!

This February 4th I 4qated in Bendigo, Australia, feeling very connected with everyone else involved in this, the coolest of tributes.

I was in a Come Dance With Me mood and ended up choosing the end of its first chapter. I find it incredibly haunting. And it's how London is in my head, even though when I was there it never got close to snowing.

'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.

from Come Dance With Me

I could read that a million times, and probably will. It wasn't till I was copying out the quote for the 4qation that I realised Christabel slips into "we" a couple of times! (Part of the fun of being slow.) It's so incredibly sad, somehow, but so incredibly alive. Typing it out just now has made me all jittery!

I wanted to leave it in the toilets of the Bendigo Art Gallery, because the quote actually starts out with Christabel in a toilet cubicle at the Royal Academy, but for technical reasons I ended up leaving it atop this nearby poppet-head lookout:



Russ' work certainly does deserve to be up near the heavens, rather than in some toilets.

Happy birthday Russ! Thank you Gombert for making this work.

Ruth Bosch 2009

My original Russmuss Day intention was to walk across Paris, from my apartment to the renowned books-in-English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, but the stairway of the local Metro stop gestured irresistibly down towards the coherence of The Underground and it struck me all of a heap that this was the way to go so I did.

The station is being refurbished by nightly wall removal and daily graffiti revival. I was not expecting such an immediate 4quage, but a sign edge spoke to me without any hesitation at all and I responded, slid a quote into the gap, felt oddly invisible, and hoped to blend in with the non-quotation-bearing citizens. There was a quick shift in the space behind me, like that of a beach-dug hole filling instantly with seawater. I turned and saw two women already talking about what they read, very animated, curious, and reading again.



Similar experience at Odeon in terms of an instant audience.



The Metro posters are a constant joy due to the constant amendments inflicted upon them.



I could hardly believe my eyes, but remembered the thoroughgoing Hobanification of the world that I always experience on February 4ths.





I had already looked at the used books on the shelves outside of Shakespeare & Co. the week before, and hoped that the copy of Kleinzeit was still there.



It was.

Juuuust as I reached towards it a black dog appeared right behind me, without a person. I goggled. Or doggled, possibly. The shop door opened and a young man called the dog in. Her name was Colette and I followed her. "Excuse me", I said to them both. "I am part of a group who leaves quotations from the writer Russell Hoban for people to find. We do this every year on his birthday. Black dogs are important to him. I was just about to put a quotation in one of his books out here and your black dog came and stood next to me. Would you mind if I took a picture of her?" "That's incredible", he said as he put her leash on, "yes, of course, but she's not very good, I mean, she probably won't......sit...." and at the word "sit", she sat. Briefly.



Another paper leaving tribe, for variety, on the pavement.



The notice board outside Shakespeare and Co, with a yellow predisposition. It was as if it knew.



Two interior quotation leavings.





There were three Hoban books; you cannot see that the first one is Riddley Walker. The staff recommendation pinned to the shelf below it is for Half Life, by Shirley Jackson, a book about a post nuclear holocaust world.

I crossed the river to Notre Dame and looked for a good place there, but somehow the act of attaching didn't feel quite right, something about Scotch tape and all that stone, and then I saw the moon and approximated as best I could, with fidelity in mind. Always.



A walk along the Seine, past the booksellers' stands...





...and the Velib stable, which offered a surprising visual quotation of Olaf's stellar sonar animation.



One of a pair of guardian lions being well protected in an antique shop window.



I wondered if the first quote would still be hanging there, tapeless, in the homeward reach of the evening, gravity being what it is. But it was.

Gravity being what it is.



Et voila.

Diana's original description of sa4qe mentioned, somewhere in it, that she herself liked the idea because it was small and private. That was the chord that rang for me back then and so I have done my yearly bit on the quiet, with a particular aversion towards documentation, but this year, somehow, the sheer love for all of the rest of you translated into a different chord.

I do not have my books with me here and copied everything from the sa4qe website, an activity I now think of as "echoquation". I printed out a few pages of each quote, carried them in a bag, and, without looking, pulled one out at each place that spoke to me.

They are:

To be and not to be. That is the answer.

from Fremder

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

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

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

At the bottom of every page is written: "This quotation is further evidence of the world-wide birthday celebration that accumulates in rampant appreciation of the writer Russell Hoban. February 4, 2009"

Much Love to Russ, to Everyone,

Ruthie

Emmae Gibson 2009

4th February 2009. Snowed in this year, as it happened. In Appin, where it doesn't usually. Happen, I mean, snow, I mean. Which made it a doubly happy happening, snowing and 4quating, all wrappin'd up; left it in the rack of books and birthday cards in the village shop:

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.'

from Turtle Diary, ch 24.

Chosen with certain grown-up children in mind.

Struggled home and sent yellow cosmic paper to several members of a writers' group, quoting this other, familiar, wonderful struggle:

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.

from Kleinzeit, Picador edition 1976 p.108.

Deena Omar 2009

Stunned to realise my first quote was identical to Steve Long's from Pilgermann. I chose it pretty much at random. I handwrote it and left it, late last night, among some flyers in the 12 Bar Club, Denmark St, in between sets by Satan's Cock and Sergeant Buzfuz. Here it is…

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.

from Pilgermann

Earlier, I tucked the following inside a copy of Bob the Builder comic, in the Camden branch of Sainsbury's. I had been flicking through the Pedalling Man collection and it jumped off the page and threw a snowball at me…

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.

from The Pedalling Man

My whole day seemed to oscillate between sweetness and darkness and these words mirrored my feelings perfectly.

Happy (and sweet, and dark,) Hoban Day.

Honk if you 4qated yesterday!

Yesterday's Slickman A4 Quotation Event, the annual (and global) Russell Hoban activity wherein fans of the author place quotes from his books in public places, was terrific fun. The newly revamped website http://sa4qe.blogspot.com, taking advantage of the new blog format, was updated in real-time with a dozen new contributions or '4qations' from many of Hoban's brilliant books. Russ fans also tweeted their favourite quotes in bite-sized chunks using Twitter, and a fabulous new Flash animation was created specially for the 2009 event. SA4QE founder Diana Slickman and others braved the inclement weather to place their sheets of yellow A4 in towns and cities from London to Chicago. Regular contributor Lindsay Edmunds perhaps described the experience of the day best: 'All day long 4quations and the delightful stories associated with them have been lighting the dark, cold February day like sparklers. One flashes across the darkness, then another, then another. All wonderful. There is nothing like the experience of Hoban quotations coming at you from random directions for the better part of a day.' Diana herself later commented, 'While I enjoy February 4, I love February 5 even better, when I get to read what all of us were up to on February 4! It's like reading short tales of intrigue and adventure and romance and comedy - all with other stories of Russ's embedded within them.'

You can see all of the 2009 quotes by scrolling down the home page or by clicking on the 2009 label link in the categories below this post.

Other quotes are still coming in, so keep an eye on the SA4QE website over the coming days, either by dropping in to www.sa4qe.com or by subscribing to the updates using Twitter, RSS or Feedburner.

Posted via email from sa4qe's posterous

Antti Savela 2009

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

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!

Paul Saich 2006

I discovered this site a few days after the Some-Poasyum event last year so didn’t take part but I made a mental note to remember it – then forgot about it. A couple of weeks ago in chatting with a friend who travels on the Piccadilly line to Russell Square I suddenly remembered that there was something I was supposed to be doing – and fortunately was a few days ahead of myself.

A few words about the choices of locations and quotes.

Locations – no plan. Any plan I might have had (which was rather vague and involved travelling to South Ken and the Science Museum on the tube and then meandering back to Liverpool St on foot and by bus) went out of the window with the news that much of the Circle was out of action, no Metropolitan, and no Piccadilly. So I went for a bit of a walk and let locations crop up as and when.

For the quotes – I chose five. (I was trying to make up for missing last year but also I just couldn’t choose between them.) One is from Fremder, three from Amaryllis Night and Day and one from Her Name was Lola. I tried to find things that might strike a chord for people. The quotes were all chosen as examples of different sorts of romance (and there’s plenty of that!) Russ’s books all seem to me to be love stories – rather romantic, all the better for being eccentric – and all make me feel different about the world as I read them. For that reason, I’ve deliberately not read them all – I’ve a few that I’ve not started as I suppose I am saving them up for when I need refuelling. I think Amaryllis might be my favourite. And I had to choose something from Her Name was Lola seeing as Max travels in on the Piccadilly Line to Russell Square, which was the start point for me in taking part this year.

I was up at 7am on the day but due to a few distractions, didn’t get out of the house until about 9.30am. The train to London stops at Stratford so my lack of a plan was itself derailed when I decided at the last minute to get off there and leave something on the Central Line – to float across London from East to West. However people kept asking me questions about tube stations – I didn’t realise I looked especially tube-informed! – so instead of leaving anything I got off at Liverpool St and left the first quote on a seat near the platform.

As always, her face came to me half-turned-away. Probably she wouldn’t want to be taken for granted after last night’s glim. With that in mind I went to the first place where we’d seen each other in the unglim world: the Klein-bottle display in the Science Museum. There I waited as I’d done at the town library when I was fourteen and hoping for a glimpse of a girl I hadn’t yet dared to speak to. I seemed to have a lot of breath in me and I had to keep exhaling.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

And then, stuck on the information board of a public phone on the concourse at Liverpool St station, the opening of Fremder:-

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

When I first read Fremder it took me quite a while to get through the first few pages as I kept stopping and returning to what seemed to me to be an impossibly cinematic and romantic start to a story.

Liverpool St was supposed to be the start point of my half-baked plan but it was here that the plan unbaked entirely when I discovered the disruptions on the tube. I’d had notions of leaving quotes circulating around London by leaving a lot on the Circle Line – not today, mate! Well maybe if I walked to Holborn and got the Piccadilly Line to – Nope! Back to the Central Line, I went as far as Chancery Lane. Before leaving, I taped to the inside of the sliding doors:-

‘But I need you to stay with me longer than that, I need you not to wake up too soon.’

‘ “Not wake up too soon!” I don’t think I’ve been asked that before. You need me to stay with you in a dream? I don’t understand that. And I don’t understand how you managed to get into my dream when I’ve never seen you before in my waking life.’

‘It wasn’t your dream, it was mine. I brought you into it because I tuned in to you. I wasn’t sure I’d connected, though, until you turned up at the Balsamic.’

‘You call it “the Balsamic” as if it’s a place you’re very familiar with.’

‘Too true.’

‘You often wait there for the bus to Finsey-Obay?’

She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders as if she were cold. ‘More often than I’d like,’ she said, looking past me.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Off the train, out and into the world above. Along High Holborn I taped the Fremder quote to a wall near a cash point and then the following to the central reservation of the crossing with Southampton Row:-

How quickly the strange becomes the usual! I was in love with a woman who was most responsive to me when we were both asleep. Between the glim and the unglim, where was reality? I went out on the balcony and looked to the west. There was the moon, one night past the full, sailing serenely in and out of the cloud-wrack. Perhaps Amaryllis too was looking at it now. It was 01:35.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Next stop Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d planned to leave this in a phone box:-

‘A notable show of restraint,’ says Lola. ‘Would you like to help me out of this corset?’

‘Yes,’ says Max in his bed in Poole Hospital. The essence of Lola is feeding into him as it were intravenously. Never until now has he felt the charm of her, the strangeness, the sweetness and the pathos of her running in his veins like this. ‘Lola, Lola, Lola,’ he whispers.

‘Did you call me?’ says Nurse Laura, approaching on sturdy footsteps.

‘Just talking to myself,’ says Max.

from Her Name Was Lola

I wasn’t entirely sure about taping a quote mentioning corsets and nurses over ads for the various “services”… and at the last moment changed my mind. Instead I taped it to the side of a building near a phone box. As I emerged from behind the pillar, I nearly bumped into an enormous policeman who seemed as startled as I. I had half a mind to explain myself but didn’t – I just continued down the street. I saw him glance at it but I’ve no idea if he read it or took it down or did anything at all about it. The Chinese lanterns around Gerrard Street obviously reminded me of Amaryllis! Not part of the non-plan and it was nice to be caught off-guard.

There wasn’t a colossal amount of thought going into the rest as I’d had a tiring and odd few days. So – Piccadilly Circus and then a cafe nearby for coffee and on leaving I taped a quote to the table. Went for a wander back along Regents St. It sounded as though there was some sort of disturbance at Oxford Circus. Two of the quotes I left in a branch of Waterstone’s in Oxford Street, and two in the HMV opposite Bond St tube. Carried on wandering west but then at some point decided I’d gone far enough so I crossed the street to make my way back. At Oxford Circus there was a woman talking about God and having a fulfilling life. There was lots of fulfilment. She was very insistent. She also had a loudhailer.

I bought Come Dance with Me in Borders on Oxford St (as well as a new copy of Kleinzeit – no idea where the old one is) and left the “How quickly the strange becomes the usual…” quote folded up into a display copy of Ian McEwan’s Atonement as I was leaving the shop. Then went for a quick (1pm) drink at the Pillars of Hercules. Just tomato juice (on the grounds of overdoing it the night before) but it was one of those pre-mixed ones that was over-sauced. I’m not convinced I felt any better on leaving the pub than I’d done on entering. I left the “bus for Finsey-Obay” quote from Amaryllis on a table near the back of the pub where it’s quite dark.

Nearly at the end. I left the Finsey-Obay quote in a display copy of the new Hilary Mantel book in Borders on Charing Cross Road, Fremder in Virgin on Oxford Street (in between copies of the new Franz Ferdinand CD). Taped one to the front of a vending machine on the Central Line platform at Tottenham Court Road tube, then went back to Liverpool St. The one I’d left by the public phone earlier was still taped there so it lasted at least two and a half hours! A quote folded into a book in Waterstone’s in Chelmsford, and a quote into a copy of the new Murakami. Then – that was that! Off to chat to a friend, watch the rugby with people, etc. Coincidentally I was out at a birthday bash (for two people) in the evening.

A belated Happy Birthday!

And happy birthday to all the rest of you… whenever the solar system gets around to making it your day. It’s been really nice hearing your thoughts.

Cheerio,

Paul

Joe Cooper 2006

Dear all,

My dad would like to apologise for not dropping his yellow paper in time this year. The truth is I've been taking up quite a lot of his time lately. He doesn't seem to mind looking after me, in fact I think he really enjoys it, but it doesn't give him a lot of time to do the things he used to do, such as walking around London for hours leaving Hoban quotes all over the place and helping to organise Some-Poasyums (Some-Poasya? Somes-Poasyum? Whatever). He did have a quote he wanted to drop this year and even got as far as writing it down but before he could do anything with it he'd fallen asleep. We'd not long arrived at grandma's and he nodded off in grandad's chair... it makes me laugh. I mean how exhausting can an 11-month-old baby be? But there you go. I don't take it personally. I tried waking him up by 4qating him with his own sheet of yellow paper but it didn't really work and grandma told me to leave him alone for a while so he could get some sleep. Then the next thing I knew he was off out for a well-earned dinner with mum and then I nodded off myself and then it was morning and SA4QE day was over. He came to grandma's to collect me and I waved the sheet of yellow paper at him but he didn't seem to want to talk about it much. I think in fact he felt a bit ashamed that he'd missed out on SA4QE for the first time since it started.

Anyway dad says he did manage to make a late 4qation this afternoon - he hopes it still counts - and will post full details of why he chose it together with a photo on the SA4QE website along with all the other fabulous quotes that have been dropped elsewhere in the world (I've been reading them since secretly subscribing to the Kraken while dad was snoring another time last week - great stuff!) I've got the quote itself here - it's from Linger Awhile, which I haven't read yet, but if the rest of the book is anything like the passage dad chose from it I'm really looking forward to it. Here it comes:

When I was a child we had a large mirror that took up most of the width of the rear wall in the front room. It had no frame and was fastened flush against the wall. It showed what was in front of it but I used to put my face against the very edge and try to see around it to what it wasn't showing. I never could but I knew that the mirror wasn't giving me the whole picture. I'm still trying to see around the edge.

from Linger Awhile

Nice eh? Well, I'd better be off now because dad'll be awake again any minute.

Lots of love,

Joe Squid

6th February 2006.

Fig 1. Baby Squid retrieves yellow paper quotation.

Fig 2. Baby Squid approaches sleeping dad.

Fig 3. Baby Squid atempts to 4qate sleeping dad.

Fig 4. Mission accomplished! Dad wakes up to the sound of russling yellow paper.

Richard Cooper 2006

 

For SA4QE 2006 a particular quote didn’t spring to mind, at least not one I hadn’t already used on any of my previous 4qations. In fact in some ways I regret 4qating so promiscuously in 2003 because I dropped enough quotes in one day then to last a lifetime, and although it was great fun at the time it satisfied my hunger to 4qate and I’ve rarely felt quite as hungry since.

To complicate matters, SA4QE day this year fell on a Saturday. In years past this would have given me more time to find a quote and go out and drop it, but, with the birth of my little boy last March, 2006 is, to say the least, not like other years. Both my wife Koy and I work full time, so we take turns in looking after Joe, and not only is Saturday one of my days, but tonight Koy and I are going out for dinner for the first time in ages and Joe is staying at his grandparents'. So in addition to the usual routine of changing, feeding, playing and (most sappingly) frustrating his quest to bring down the contents of the flat on top of himself, there's the added task of getting all his bottles, pyjamas, nappies, wipes, creams, spoons, jars of food, extra clothes and the kitchen sink together into one bag that I can actually lift, and getting it and Joe to my mum and dad's... as fantastic as it is, having a baby has turned "not enough hours in the day" from a casual expression into a way of life.

However, as the ancient Chinese proverb has it, "Not being hungry is no excuse not to eat when someone offers you a fortune cookie", so as I rush out the door with baby under one arm and holdall under the other (and the moment under the other), with my spare tentacles I pick up my copy of Linger Awhile and a sheet of yellow paper (from a ream of gold or “apricot” A4 I bought from Ryman’s for the Some-Poasyum last year) and head for the street.

I thoroughly enjoyed Linger Awhile and felt it was Russ’s best book for several years, and as I only finished reading it a few weeks ago much of it is still (in principle at least) fresh in my mind. Under the circumstances, this is important: in years past as SA4QE day has approached I’ve spent several hours looking slowly through my Hoban collection for something to 4qate, but this year this obviously hasn't been possible. I also think it would be appropriate to use the opportunity of SA4QE day to promote Russ’s latest book (if, that is, leaving a quote from a book on a sheet of yellow A4 in a random public place doesn’t somewhat stretch the definition of “promote”).

We arrive at my mum and dad's and to my great relief they fuss over Joe immediately, giving me the chance to survey Linger Awhile from the comfort of my dad's armchair. My memory of the novel is that there are many great quotes and passages in it, but now that I skim through as attentively as possible in the little time I have before meeting my wife, they prove surprisingly slippery. I think it was Graham Greene who said he had a habit of marking the books he read to indicate passages that particularly struck him for future reference; I have a habit of not doing this, as much as I’d often like to, mainly because my instinct is not to risk spoiling the enjoyment of any future reading by distracting yourself with something that caught your eye on a previous reading, especially if it means you only ever re-read the bits you've marked rather than the book as a whole. Then again, this instinct is not unconnected to my inner Felix who likes to keep books (and everything else) pristine, and the suspicion that this has triumphed over the writer in me who wants to scribble all over them gives me a momentary identity crisis. Whatever's the case, not for the first time it becomes clear to me that the interest factor of many (if not all) passages one reads comes in context, in the act of reading the text, not just from the text itself; reading is not a passive occupation, it's creative and interactive, and the DNA of a book gets mixed up with the DNA of your own self and personality and situation and experience until it's a whole other unique thing altogether - and not just once, but each time you re-read it.

After about 45 minutes of speed-reading the book up to page 78 I have three or four passages that I would be more than happy to be seen out 4qating with. Curiously, all are from chapters narrated by Irving Goodman – perhaps, as his name suggests, because he’s a good man (the only truly good character in the book, perhaps, apart from Grace Kowalski), the one with all the self-knowledge and memories and poetry and melancholy in him. While Istvan Fallok is guilty of greed, and Chauncey Lim of opportunism, Irving is only really guilty of falling in love. Even though Irving ends up the same way as the other two, at least he does so having realised the depth of his mistake, and that the woman he loves is a real one and not the Frankenstein’s monster he has helped to create. Although Irving is a melancholy character, it’s maybe the melancholy that saves him; it is that capacity for reflection – as rotten as he feels – that leads him to understand what he’s done wrong. The other two, while not exactly carrying on regardless, don’t have enough melancholy in them to realise the consequences of what they’re doing and stop it before it runs out of control. Irving indicates several times through his memories of his childhood that he’s never been a confident person, but if anything it’s Istvan’s and Chauncey’s confidence that causes their undoing.

It’s one of Irving’s memories of his childhood that I finally choose:

When I was a child we had a large mirror that took up most of the width of the rear wall in the front room. It had no frame and was fastened flush against the wall. It showed what was in front of it but I used to put my face against the very edge and try to see around it to what it wasn’t showing. I never could but I knew that the mirror wasn’t giving me the whole picture. I’m still trying to see around the edge.

from Linger Awhile

When I first read this passage I felt sad because Irving is 83 and he’s still looking round the edge of the mirror, as if he never learnt the lesson that he can’t see what’s there. When I thought about it some more though the fact that he's 83 and still looking struck me as profoundly uplifting.

It’s ironic then that it’s this admirable need to see around the edge that gets him and a number of other people into deep trouble. But it’s in keeping with the best of Russ’s characters, the ones who take the risks and go on quests and have dangerous adventures, that he follows his feelings and keeps trying to find his way around the edge. Without characters who do that, there are no stories, there is no drama, there is no heroism in life. And at least Irving does it for love, or what he believes is love anyway.

My mum and dad have a full-length mirror in their hallway, this one tall and narrow and with a wooden frame, so not quite the same as the one described by Irving Goodman, but still whenever we visit, Joe always crawls over to the mirror, stands right up against it, looks at it for a bit and then tries to see what’s behind and around the edge of it. So, Joe, a word of advice – try and stay out of trouble if you can, but don’t ever stop looking.

Anyway, 4qationwise, as luck would have it I end up falling asleep in dad's armchair (a reflection on my lifestyle rather than Russ's book) and the next thing I know Joe is attempting to 4qate me with my own yellow paper. Then my wife rings from the station and, as we've booked a table for 7pm on the basis that we have to make room for another booking by 9, I rush out and the quote gets left behind... oh well. In an attempt to repent I order for my starter goat's cheese salad a la russe and toast Russ's 81st with a nice glass of house red.

In the end, the quote doesn't get 4qated on SA4QE day itself but the following Monday I nip out in my lunch hour and head for a very Hobanesque spot not far from my office in Waterloo, where I sellotape the quote around the pole of a lion-tastic traffic sign in Stamford Street, with King's College (helpfully yellow), the IMAX cinema and London Eye bringing up the rear:

Further reflections...

My dad said once that his earliest memory is of looking at his mother’s dressing table, which was one of those old-fashioned ones like a desk with three large hinged mirrors around it, triptych-like; my dad says he must have been about two at the time and remembers going round behind the mirrors to see what was there. So with this and the other two examples above maybe children and mirrors simply have a thing going on. If so, I wouldn’t know as I can’t remember having a mirror memory myself. That said, a couple of the (many) comic strips I read as a kid spring to mind. In one, a single-frame cartoon, a man stands in front of a mirror about to have a shave, his reflection upside-down. He looks angry and early-morning irritable. “Okay,” he barks, “who turned the mirror upside-down again?”

The second cartoon is from Garfield. In the first frame, the eponymous cat walks towards a mirror. In the second frame he stands in front of it, but where his reflection should be is Snoopy instead. In the third frame he looks towards the reader and says, “I can see it’s going to be one of those Mondays.”

All of these mirror stories converge again towards Hoban as I now remember at least three great mirror quotes from his other books:

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. (Turtle Diary)

I exist, said the mirror.

What about me? said Kleinzeit.

Not my problem, said the mirror. (Kleinzeit)


An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of a night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do. (The Medusa Frequency)

Something that Irving Goodman would concur with, I’m sure.

Olaf Schneider Christmas 2005

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

Voices of the Starfield

Max and Lola, Lola and Max... a beautiful new animation based on a key scene from Her Name Was Lola, created specially for Christmas 2005.

The Pigeons of Trafalgar Square

An epic journey through the London landmark, as celebrated in Amaryllis Night and Day. Another Christmas special.

Graeme Wend-Walker 2003 (2)

From: Graeme Wend-Walker
To: The Kraken
Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 3:01 PM
Subject: [the-kraken] The International Fork You Ate

Greetings to awl!

I haven't posted to the Kraken for about two months. But I did, during that time, meet a few of you, as I wended my way around the world. Special greetings to those of you I was able to meet. You know who you are (at least as well as anyone does).

As an adjunct or appendix or (forward-lookingly) aperitif to our annual event, I remembered the fork you ate, and cast yellow paper into several corners of the world. Follows my belated report:

Whatever my original plans, once en route I found myself disinclined to leave yellow paper in public places. Partly because they were not "my" public places any more, partly because I was travelling in a time of war and unease. Partly because I felt, as a traveller, more than usually between things, and that's where I wanted to leave yellow paper; not thrust into the world, but left quietly in places which, as a university student, I am required by law to refer to as interstices. And partly because the quotes I had taken with me began to seem to be of a piece, and seemed to me to want to address themselves to other travellers, rather than to locals. So I left them in the hotels I stayed in, in drawers and wardrobes, to be found I hope by other unusually in-between people. And perhaps then to make their way even further afield.

Here are the quotes I used:

The world vibrates like a crystal in the mind; there is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road might be taken.

- The Medusa Frequency

I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?

- The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

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.

- Fremder

And here are the places where yellow paper was left, some places where people and things might be lost, found and dis/appeared, and from where any road might be taken:

Quails Inn Hotel, San Marcos, California, USA

USA Hostel, San Diego, USA

Chelsea Centre Hostel, not in Chelsea at all but in the East Village, New York City, USA

Hughes-Parry Hall, Bloomsbury, London, England

Ngoc Mai Hotel, Ha Noi, Viet Nam

Princes Hotel, Cat Ba, Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam

Old Darling Café, Ha Noi, Viet Nam

Kind of nice to be back. Hope everyone is well.

World being,

Graeme