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.

Alida Allison 2010

Here are my 2010 quotes (actually, Russ' quotes). I'm also sending a pic of my school where I and about 30 students scattered the yellow sheets.

Tom liked to fool around. He fooled around with sticks and stones and crumpled paper, with mewses and passages and dustbins, with bent nails and broken glass and holes in fences.
He fooled around with mud, and stomped and squelched and slithered through it.
He fooled around on high things that shook and wobbled and teetered.
He fooled around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and fishing them out.
He fooled around with barrels in alleys.
When Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong asked him what he was doing, Tom said he was fooling around.
‘It looks very much like playing to me,’ said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. ‘Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful.’
‘All right,’ Tom said.
But he did not stop. He did a little fooling around with two or three cigar bands and a paper clip.

From How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen,
Whitbread Award, 1974, Illus. Quentin Blake

The squidgerino squelcher was put together by the wizard Bembel Rudzuk. Bembel Rudzuk made up three jars of monster powder, then he added twelve buckets of water and Splosh! There was the squidgerino squelcher. It slobbered and it moaned, it left a loathsome track behind.
Everyone was terrified, everyone ran off and left the princess all unguarded.
The squidgerino squelcher chased her up a tower then it crept around to the bottom of the tower slobbering and moaning.
The princess looked at the mess the squidgerino squelcher was making and she became rather cross. ‘Where’d this monster come from?’ she said. ‘And who’s going to clean up after it?’

From The Flight of Bembel Rudzuk,
1982, Illus. Colin McNaughton

Alida Allison 2009

Here are my quotes for Russ' big day--

From the short story The Ghost Horse of Genghis Khan:

Genghis Khan, said John's mind. The mind was much older than the boy, it was as ancient as the stars, it remembered all sorts of things that John had never known. It was curious about everything and it was playful, it was obsessed with names and the sounds of words: Khwarizm, Khurastan, Karakorum; Gengis Khan, Genghis, Genghis, Genghis, it said, Genghis galloping, galloping. The thudding of unshod hooves is in the name; the bending of the bow is in the name, the bow of horn and sinew and lacquer. The rider twisting in the saddle draws the bowstring back and looses the arrow, the hiss of the hungry arrow cleaving time and darkness, cleaving forgetfulness so that the galloping of the ghost horse of Genghis Khan is fresh and strong in me.

(as published in The Russell Hoban Omnibus, p763)

The house was certainly grand enough for her, or indeed for anyone. The very cornices and carven brackets bespoke a residence of dignity and style, and the dolls never set foot outside it. They had no need to; everything the could possibly want was there, from the covered platters and silver chafing dishes on the side board to the ebony grand piano among the potted ferns in the conservatory… The house had rooms for every purpose, all opulently furnished and appropriately occupied: There were a piano-teacher doll and a young lady pupil doll in the conservatory, a nursemaid doll for the children dolls in the nursery, and a cook and butler doll in the kitchen. Interminable-weekend-guest dolls lay in the guest room beds, sporting dolls played billiards in the billiard room, and a scholar doll never ceased perusal of the book he held, although he kept in touch with the world by the hand that rested on the globe that stood beside him. There was even an astronomer doll in the lookout observatory, who tirelessly aimed his little telescope at one of the automatic fire sprinklers in the ceiling of the shop. In the dining room, beneath a glittering chandelier, a party of lady and gentleman dolls sat perpetually around a table. Whatever the cook and butler might hope to serve them, they had never taken anything but tea, and that from empty cups, while plaster cakes and pastry, defying time, stood by the silver teapot on the white damask cloth.

from The Mouse and His Child

Alida Allison 2006

My yellow paper quote for 2006, placed randomly around Ouray, Colorado:

One wakes up in the 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 caesure 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 simpy raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion of being into 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

Bes',

alida

Alida Allison 2003

What's below
Is what goes
All around
My campus--

Feb. 4, 2003

Happy Birthday, Russell Hoban!

Quotes from Russell Hoban's Children's Books

La Corona was the name of the beautiful lady in the picture on the inside of the cigar box lid. She wore a scarlet robe and a golden crown. Beyond her was a calm blue bay on which a paddle-wheel steamer floated. A locomotive trailed a faint plume of smoke across the pink and distant plain past shadowy palms and pyramids. Far off in the printed sky sailed a balloon.

But the lady never looked at any of those things. She sat among wheels and anvils, sheaves of wheat, hammers, toppled pedestals and garden urns, and she pointed to a globe that stood beside her while she looked steadfastly out past the left-hand side of the picture.

Inside the cigar box lived a tin frog, a seashell, a yellow cloth tape measure, and a magnifying glass. The tin frog was bright green and yellow, with two perfectly round eyes that were like yellow-and-black bullseyes. He had cost five shillings when new and hopped when wound up. He had fallen in love with La Corona, and he was wound up all the time because of it. He kept trying to hop into the picture with her, but he only bumped his nose against it and fell back into the box.

"I love you," he told her. But she said nothing, didn't even look at him.

"For heaven's sake!" said the tin frog. "Look at me, won't you? What do you expect to see out there beyond the left-hand side of the picture?"

"Perhaps a handsome prince," said La Corona.

"Maybe I'm a handsome prince," said the tin frog. "You know, an enchanted one."

"Not likely," said La Corona. "You're not even a very handsome frog."

from La Corona and the Tin Frog (1979)

The wind was howling, the sea was wild, and the night was black when the storm flung the sea-thing child up on the beach. In the morning the sky was fresh and clean, the beach was littered with seaweed, and there he lay--a little black heap of scales and feathers, all alone. All alone he was, and behind him the ocean roared and shook its fist. He lay there, howling not very loud, Ow, ow, ow! Ai-ee!" while the foam washed over him and went hissing away. He was too little to swim very well and he hadn't learned to fly yet. He was nothing but a little draggled heap of fright.
After a while, when the tide went out and the day grew warm, he crawled up on the beach, leaving a wide and messy track behind him in the smooth sand. He crawled up among the big old seaweed-bearded rocks by a tide-pool, and he went to sleep, cheeping softly to himself.

from The Sea-Thing Child (1972)

Alida Allison - profile

Professor, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University

Further info from Children's Literature Program and National Center for the Study of Children's Literature, SDSU