Russell Hoban at the Serpentine Map Marathon, 16 October 2010

Russell Hoban onstage

Last weekend Russell Hoban made a rare public appearance - an onstage interview for Map Marathon: Maps for the 21st Century, a multimedia event featuring dozens of writers, artists and academics hosted by the Serpentine Gallery at the Royal Geographical Society, London. During the interview Russell talked about the "mystique" of maps and the part they have played in his work, and his new novel Angelica Lost and Found. The SA4QE event and The Kraken Hoban community also got a mention. A number of SA4QE/Kraken stalwarts were in attendance including Anthony Davis, who takes us back there now. A transcript of the interview is included below.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER MORRISON

Travel difficulties / delays apart, and despite being without a MAP at the crucial moment requiring a circumnavigation of the Royal Albert Hall, all turned to the good! Peering into the dark of the RGS's lecture theatre soon revealed the features of some well-known Krakenites, and I even had a seat reserved where I could witness Gilbert and George, rather tangentially, reading their 'mapping' of postcards that, to their eye, featured the Union Flag (they know so much better than to call it the Union Jack!), i.e. a list, in alphabetical order, of the largely arbitrary - and not without a comic bent - titles that they had given to these cards whose collection they had so dutifully curated; likewise their mapping of 'telephone [box] cards', but only those that - to their mind - left something to the imagination.

For me, seeing these icons of the gay art world and hearing them talk about their maps of county towns and seaside resorts was a very fitting prelude to Russ's own session, and one which made the whole protracted jurney (sure some Riddley?) quite worthwhile, as, of course, did seeing Russ again and a no. of Hobanites, old and new.


Eleanor Bron started the session with a lovely reading from the start of The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, although I really don't know how she kept her composure with the noise and bustle of people re-taking their seats, and generally milling around the lecture-space as if no thought-out and sensitive rendition were being given. [The reading is available from Thoughtcat as a 3mb mp4 audio file; you will need to turn up the volume as it is quite soft.] Russ was then helped, with the support of a clearly much-needed arm (that of his would-be interviewer and host, Hans Ulrich Obrist), down, across and up to and into one of the padded chairs to the right of the lectern: his physical frailty was patent, and I'm sure that everyone watching (not just those who knew him) must have felt for the effort that he was making just to be present at this event.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (l) with Russell Hoban

So much was Russ enjoying being there, though, that it was evident not only in his mental liveliness, but also in his quirkily engaging quality and character of speech, which were immediately to the fore in his first answer. Coupled with these was the comfortable way in which he was clearly sensing the room and its occupants, as the professional communicator that he is. (In fact, he could be seen, once settled into his chair, already putting out what one could call tentacles or feelers for this purpose.)

After first answering a question about Lion that arose from the reading, Russ had politely, but definitely, to decline to address the second one put to him [of whether he thought that the "master map" that Jachin-Boaz wanted to make for his son to "show him where to find whatever he might wish to look for" was a kind of precursor to the Internet; "Can I dodge that question?" Hoban responded, to the delight of much of the audience]. I felt this exchange spoke volumes about the lack of preparation on the part of the interviewer, in establishing a rapport with Russ: I am guessing that, otherwise, he would not have offered a lead that was felt to be so inappropriate that Russ seemed quickly to have decided that he would prefer to answer a different question and volunteer some information.

I'm not definite about this, because I obviously imagined that the question asked was going to be turned to, and Russ then talked about something else, but I think that what he had been presented with was a too circumscribed way of inviting him to share feelings about his works and their genesis: I believed at the time, and still do, that overstepping a question to present material that one would have one's audience hear, rather than just the response to some tired or otherwise vexing or uninteresting enquiry, must have been the right one. (I know from talking to Russ that he, rightly, does not reward poor questions with his attention, and I think that it is because he simply doesn't find any life in them, and so the questioner is punished, in a way, with an impoverished answer.)

I had been glad to learn, from his answer to a question about Riddley [see below], that he had used maps in writing it, both an early Ordnance Survey map of Kent, and one, of a futuristic nature, that projected that a former channel of water would reopen, separating the rest of the county from an area that he called The Ram. For me, this fuels an existing desire to be guided around the lands over which Riddley roams (and from which others have come), and to do so in, on and around a vehicle with a like-minded crew, willing to absorb the sights, sounds, drinks and other delicacies in a joint exploration of what this very different county tells us about the places in which Russ placed the unfolding of his story. 

The interview

The following is a transcription of the interview from an audio recording by Richard Cooper. The recording started in the middle of the answer Russell Hoban was giving to the above "dodged" question about maps and the Internet.

Map from Treasure Island (Wikipedia)

RH: ... As a boy I used to send away to the Canadian-Pacific Railways for their maps and they sent me these wonderful maps with the provinces and the states in different colours and blue for the oceans, and maps are a - how can I say... er, take Robert Louis Stevenson's book Treasure Island - every edition, whether hardback or paperback, has that map in the front, and you look at that map and you know good things are in store for you. [laughter] And that is more often that not connected to action - you look at a map because you want to get somewhere to do something. Sometimes it's just you look at a map to know where you are. And when you first approached me about this stuff I began to think about maps and it hit me all of a sudden that maps were the precursor of language. And I was thinking - we don't know whether prehistoric man, Cro-Magnon man, had language or not, but I was imagining a couple of Cro-Magnon guys, and one of them wants to tell the other where he saw a herd of mammoth. And first of all he would have to establish the man he was talking to himself, so maybe he marked something in the dirt with a stick, make a stick figure or maybe just some kind of a mark, and then he would have to indicate time somehow - it was time behind him, it was yesterday, he saw the herd of mammoth by a river and there was a big rock. And so then he would scratch in the dirt the river and something that indicated the passage of time, say the sun going up and down, and that would be the first map. And from that map he had language. And now you get into a taxi and the driver has a satnav, and [inaudible] maps of the heavens, so it all began with a guy drawing with a stick in the dirt.

HUO: What about your own maps? Do you have a collection? Gilbert and George talked about the huge collection they have of maps, do you collect maps?

RH: I have often used maps. When I wrote Riddley Walker I had a copy of the first ordnance map, I think it was the very first one which was during the Victorian period, and I also had a put-together composite of the ordnance survey maps for the area that I was working in, and I had this up on the wall, it's a big thing, and I also had a chart of the Thames Estuary, which indicated places that I needed to refer to. And I have smaller maps that showed parts of Kent that I was working in. And the maps are always a strong support and a kind of inspiration - as I say there is a mystique about maps that I have responded to all my life, and working on those maps, with those maps, I got Riddley Walker done, and I also drew a map of my own which I put together with the help of - I forget the organisation they were with, it might have been an agricultural college, I don't know - who showed me how in the future the Wansum Channel between one part of Kent and the other would probably open again, so there would be water flowing between the main body of Kent and the other part, which in my book is called The Ram.

HUO: Are there other books of yours with maps?

RH: Well, The Mouse and His Child has a little map in it, and The Trokeville Way has a map in the front. Oh and I'm also thinking apropos of Stevenson's map in Treasure Island, in Edgar Allen Poe's story The Gold Bug I believe there was a map too. And maps are frequently used in thrillers, you know, where the bad guys are after the map that the good guy has, and there are... I think that as a boy we may have sometimes played chase games in which one person had a map.

HUO: I am curious to know about your latest novel, Angelica Lost and Found. Any connection to maps there? If not, I am curious to know anyhow, it would be great to hear about your new book.

RH: Well [laughs], it's a funny thing, when I wrote the book, it didn't seem out of the ordinary to me. It happened to be about a hippogriff who falls in love with a flesh-and-blood woman. The hippogriff is an imaginary animal, and this imaginary animal falls in love with the flesh-and-blood woman, and they achieve intimacy [laughter], and one thing leads to another all through the book, and the imaginary animal has a voice in the narration. And as I say, when I wrote it [there was] nothing remarkable about it, and then I'm trying to figure out where it was coming from. And in 1997 having read Barbara Reynolds's wonderful, wonderful translation of Orlando Furioso I wanted to do something with the characters and the ideas that were in it. And I tried to do something with the hippogriff, whom I called Volatore, and it went on for two pages and fizzled out, and I couldn't see what to do with it. And then a couple of years ago I took out a folder I had called Ariosto Revudebus[?] - I looked at my notes and there was nothing there, and I began to think of another way of doing it, so that's when I started writing Angelica Lost and Found, and that impetus carried me along to the end of it. I might say that the main stimulus that got me started on it was a painting which is reproduced on the cover of the Italian edition of Orlando Furioso, and the painting is by Girolamo da Carpi, a 16th-century Italian painter, and it shows Ruggiero mounted on a hippogriff rescuing Angelica from the sea-monster called Orca. And this painting is interesting because - it's on the cover of the book Angelica Lost and Found - the painting is interesting because first of all it differs from previous paintings by da Carpi, like his Madonna and Child: this painting is almost naive in its rawness, and oddly Angelica is squeezed into a corner held behind a rock, and you can't even see her whole body, you can't see her too clearly, and over here in the sky is this hippogriff with Ruggiero sitting on it and raising his sword. And that painting stayed in my mind. And that was how I got started thinking about what to do with these characters, Ruggiero, Angelica and the hippogriff, and that's the novel.

HUO: I have one more question and that is, I hear a rumour that every year on your birthday, your many fans, also known as the Kraken Club, leave quotes from your work on yellow paper in many places they hope will be picked up. I read also that one member left 33 quotes in 29 locations all across London, which is almost connected to mapping. Can you tell us about this fan club?

RH: Well I don't remember how The Kraken came into being [we do! - Ed], but it did and as you say they ... select quotes from my books and they type them on yellow paper. I use yellow A4 - people ask me why it's yellow A4, and it's because when I was in America I would read many books that would say "The man had a plain deal table on which was a ream of ordinary foolscap". I thought what was foolscap? Maybe it's a kind of paper they make fools' caps[?] out of*. When I got to London I found out foolscap was a size, but I still thought of it as being yellow paper, and that is why I write on A4 yellow paper.

HUO: Thank you so much Russell, thank you very much. [applause]


* Richard notes: This bit of the audio was difficult to hear and the connection with foolscap and yellow doesn't really make sense; there is more information on the SA4QE FAQ page about Russell Hoban's choice of paper. Coincidentally though a Google search I did to try and shed light on this turned up this curious Fool’s Cap Map of the World.

Following Russ's appearance, the attendant Hoban fans filed out of the auditorium in an effort to say hello to their man. Anthony takes up the narrative again.

Anthony provides light for Russ to sign

One of the photographers for the event had asked Russ if he could walk 100 metres to where a studio had been set up, and he had had to decline to take those steps (pun intended). Instead, then, some shots were then taken of him in front of a temporary - and easily overlooked, by those such as I - barrier between the public areas and the stage door [see the result on the Serpentine's Facebook page], so, at this point, Gundula [Russell's wife] said that Russ was in need of a glass of something. When she said that the whiksy (hic / sic!) that I happened to have about my person would be too much, investigating the environs allowed me to rustle up (pun intended!) a glass of Merlot. It was then decided that occupying a free table in the bar was the best way around giving 'hospitality space' to Russ, which had not otherwise been forthcoming, and also to his guests.

Gundula and he had been so kind, and had bought wine for everyone (two bottles each of red and white from the bar - I should rephrase that: they weren't buying two bottles of wine for each person, but four bottles to serve us all!).

Russ and I had a chance to talk about a few things [and he also chatted to the other Hoban fans present and signed books they'd brought]. Maybe / maybe not (in a flicker sort of way) you weren't there yourself - but had you thought that you might have been there on a map that Russ might compile of all of us here to keep us close and near, which he might have in his breast-pocket, or even in his heart...?

See the full set of peter morrison's photos on Flickr (also featuring several other contributors to the Map Marathon)

Anthony Davis 2009

from Angelica's Grotto

32: UNDERWORLDS

Klein walked Melissa back to King's College, then headed for the tube. As he passed the Arthur Andersen entrance on his way down Surrey Street he encountered a sixtyish man leaning against a white TNT Courier van and swinging his left leg back and forth. 'Trying to restore the circulation?' said Klein. '
Hip's giving me bother. It's worse in cold weather.'
'That building on the other side, up towards the Strand, the one that says PICCADILLY RLY - I've been trying to figure out what the RLY stands for. Would you happen to know?'
'I believe it's an old defunct railway station that was probably built between the two wars,' said the courier, 'around 1920, something like that.'
'Railway! I've never seen it abbreviated that way before. Was it a Main Line station?'
'No, it'd be one of the Underground stations; they've probably diverted the line since then - I don't think it's in use now.'
'Tunnels underneath where we're standing, and empty tracks going nowhere!'
'Could be, unless they've torn up the tracks. Who knows what's down there by now, eh?'

* * * *

27: 30,000 FEET UP

[...] The phone rang; it was Melissa. 'Yes?' he said, immediately ready for whatever she might suggest.
'Prof dear, around ten this evening could you go to Gallery 7 at my site, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on YES for a one-to-one? Thanks. Must run. Kisses from you-know-where.'
When he was at his desk he worked on notes for the Klimt book. 'Pornography has always been part of the visual arts,' he wrote. 'I don't recall any pornographic cave drawings but their art was more elemental, more religious - Mother-Goddess figures, fertility symbols - procreation and survival - huge breasts and buttocks - Venus of Willendorf. And the Greeks! Raunchy Athenian red-figure vase-painters drew the line at nothing. Oral sex? Can't recall. Everything else, certainly, one-on-one and in combinations. What would those vases fetch at Sotheby's now? The Romans weren't far behind, look at Pompeii: probably half of them were in flagrante when Vesuvius blew. X-rated petrified corpses. India - they couldn't get enough of it. They would have had to do Advanced-level yoga before they could even manage those positions. Krishna and the cowgirls. And the Europeans: Rembrandt did it - Vermeer? He did a brothel scene with a madame and some punters fully dressed but no hardcore. Vermeer painted moments in arrest. What would he have done with some of the ANGELICA'S GROTTO activities? The mind boggles. An authentic Vermeer of a woman in period underwear accommodating five men would set an all-time auction record. All the recent masters put their hands to pornography: Daumier, Millet, Lautrec, Picasso, Pascin. The B-List masters too: Felicien Rops and his giant willies; Bruno Schulz and the naked woman with the stallions and the little eunuch - no penetration except in the cerebral cortex. How am I going to get through the day? 'I have a craving that can only be satisfied by a disaster film - air, sea, or submarine, I don't care which; but preferably one where somebody survives through sheer pluck and resourcefulness plus maybe a little help.' [...]

Anthony Davis 2008

I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down - I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him. With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously... oh no, hang on, this is the quote, isn't it? Sorry mate, I thought this was your account of your 4qation! As you were - Ed.

This, on both sides of 13 sheets of genuine gold A4 from Rymans, is what met the light of dawn on my account, 4th February 2008:

Strange is as strange does

I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down - I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him.

With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously through streets glittering with broken glass, islanded with excrement, and odorous with nitrates. There were few people about and those few were all accompanied by large xenophagous-looking dogs, often in pairs. Eventually I saw a man with an introspective-looking Irish wolfhound. When I approached to ask where I could find an off-licence the dog licked my hand and its master offered me his wallet. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take it - I haven’t got a watch or jewelry or anything like that.’

‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for an off-licence.’

‘Down there,’ he said pointing while the dog sniffed my crotch. As I thanked him and walked away he said to the dog, ‘You don’t have to lick everybody’s goddam hand.’

After a while I found a Corporation off-licence and bought a bottle with a label that said WHISKY and nothing else. Being simply a MAN who was going to DRINK in a ROOM I liked that.

I went to the thirty-third floor of the crumbling tower block [...]. As I unlocked my door I felt that little rush of despair that always hits me when I walk into a downtime and breathe in the pong of emptiness and the last occupant. It was a classically existential short-stay dwelling - even the dim grey dusk in it seemed to have been used by too many people.

Without turning on the lights or looking at anything in the room I switched on the air cleaner, set it to HIGH, went to the viewbubble, sat down, and looked out into the rain and the twilight. I wanted to be very careful with the twilight, I wanted to be deep and silvery in it, wanted to hover quietly in the pinky-purple and the dove-grey of it, wanted to drink the Chopin of it and the yearning. The holes of bright emptiness grew small and twinkled in my vision like distant stars; if I held my head right I could lose them in the lights of Oldtown West 81 below me, its glimmers and its colours that flickered in the rainy dusk.

from Fremder
Jonathan Cape, London (1996), pp. 100-102.

* * * * *

This extract from his eighth novel is distributed on 4 February 2008
in celebration of his eighty-third birthday

I can report the distribution of the remaining dozen 4qations as follows (sadly, lack of time, energy and people to ask prevented them all being made on the appointed day, but I'm really not one to bother about rules, and, in any case, it had been my decision, based on a favouritism that stems from my birth-date, to try to 4qate 13 times):

1. Left in the telephone-box in my village where my other bout of 4qating began. However, unlike then and as was known to me from a visit to the scene of the wreckage (at which I was given to understand that it had been brought about at 4.00 a.m. - no, not 3.00 a.m. - on the Sunday before Russ Day), it no longer stood on its base, its top was separate and broken, and it lay near a partly demolished wall. I left the A4 sheet inside, floating it in from where the top used to be, in the hope that someone might see it.

(I have now learnt, courtesy of one of the local free rags, that the story behind what I saw was the theft of the BT cash-box, carried out using a chain and what was thought to be the power of a pick-up truck - whatever vehicle it was pulled the phone-box off its foundations. Since the phone-box was listed, readers will be glad to know that it appears that it will be replaced 'with one of a similar age and style'.)

2. With Blu-Tack®, displayed at the centre point of a large bookcase at the Leisure Centre at Fulbourn Hospital (see item 8, below).

3. Similarly, on the back of the door of the toilet near the patients' bank and pharmacy. (At one point, I turned it over and stuck it up again with the acknowledgement showing, but someone then put it back...)

4. To the attendant at my local Total® petrol-station who sold me some peppermints.

5. To my friend Robert on meeting him for a drink at The Exhibition in Godmanchester (which is named after The Great Exhibition).

6 and 7. To bar staff on the same occasion (the last of the items distributed on 4 February).

8. To my colleague Paul (on Wednesday 6 February), who then told me - as no one else has - that he had read item 2, above.

9. On the same day and with a drawing-pin, attached to a notice-board near the chaplaincy office (also at Fulbourn).

10. Later, to my bemused neighbour Adam on his doorstep.

11 to 13. Put into the post on Saturday 9 February (without identification, beyond the handwritten address, or explanation) to my friends Nigel and Linda, Jo and Ed, and Piers (in the case of whose 4qation, it was first read by my friend Penny and her brother Rob).

QED,

Anthony

Anthony Davis 2007

Here, thanks to the processing power of the mighty Samuel IV, is what was printed on ten sheets of yellow A4 (card) in the early hours of Russ Day:

Orff we go!

`My name is Hermann Orff and you've never heard of me.'
`Oh, but I have. Luise has mentioned you several times.'
There was an upholstered bench behind me. I sat down on it.
`Luise,' I said, `has mentioned.'
`You. More than several times, reverberantly and with plangency.'
`What is Luise to you?'
`Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.'
`Don't roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.'
`Seven years ago with my sound man.'
`What do you suppose she heard in him?'
`Other music.'
`And what did she ever see in you?'
`Flickering images.'
`Of what?'
`It doesn't matter, it's the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black betwen the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?'
`Luise saw all that in you, did she?'
`It isn't only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I'm so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman's natural
holding-on reflex.'
`And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.'
`Nothing is for ever.'

From The Medusa Frequency, Russell Hoban, Jonathan Cape, London (1987), pp. 87-88.

No doubt I've broken all the rules, but even the early-morning experience with the local phone-box (which no one uses, I guess - I checked, and the card was still there, at any rate, when I drove back from the station yesterday) made me start to feel that all this leaving 4qations amongst the groceries just didn't gel with me.

Accordingly, I was glad that, when having an ice-cream with my ex-sister-in-law en route and showing her the Longrow bottle, a chap at the next table was interested, and got involved in my explanation to her of my impending visit to a certain (as of 3.00 a.m. on Sunday, I gather) 82-year-old of our acquaintance. So what could be more natural than to pass him one of my 9 cards with the Medusa text - I gather that others have disseminated multiple texts, but heigh-ho! - for him to read.

What, equally, could be more natural than for him to hand it to his lady partner when she returned, from the loo (I think), and for her to read it, and be told about the novelist and his gift of whisky - quite reasonably, she read it, folded it in two, and put it in her bag...

So the scene was inevitably set for the following 8 distributions (of which, needless to say, there are no photographs - I'm not *that* strange):

1. After a refusal by my neighbour on the Piccadilly Line, to a woman next to me on the District Line who was reading a book (she asked if I had written the piece - I said that I hadn't and briefly explained).

2 & 3. To the two female staff on duty at Auntie Anne's cookie outlet at Fulham Broadway - they wanted one each.

4. To the vendress of nuts and the like under the name of Cranberry who sold me 50g of cashews.

5. To the saleswoman at Virgin® (where I bought The Rutles for Russ - he didn't know of it, so I described it as a piss-take of The Beatles).

6 & 7. To the two female bar staff, post distribution, to whom I was attempting to explain that others clutching Hoban books and/or A4 of a certain hue might be looking for me.

8. Finally, to the attractive woman with a shawl who was keeping her friend company on her birthday (yes, 4 February) at a table nearby, who, unlike her friend (who said that she was too drunk to read it), read the piece and thought that what she described as Russ' 'punctuation' was odd. (Questioning revealed that she had (a) not understood the shocked incoherence of Orff in context when he reports saying "`Luise,' I said, `has mentioned.'", and (b) that she meant the slashes when Kraken says 'there / not there / there / not there'...)

Unorthodox, maybe, but for me it was a far more human experience than skulking amongst the fruit and veg - and I could never do it any other way, whatever the rules. Sorry to shock you all, but no!



Anthony was the Kraken's 2007 'Birthday Bottle' czar, or the member who volunteered to co-ordinate the purchase and delivery of the group's birthday gift to Russell Hoban. This is his account of said delivery:

I can't guarantee that Russ will have broached the capsule of what he and I referred to when I handed it over as 'the gurgling stuff' by now and tried it, but he did say that he would look at the tasting notes first - I provided a copy for him in the presentation-box, on yellow A4 [card], of my posting to this group.

I can tell everyone that he also received (in no particular order):

1. The bluebird card as chosen, which contained the £20 Amazon voucher (as well as an allusion to pp. 71-73 of Gene Brewer's novel K-PAX, where 'the bluebird of happiness' makes its appearance). (Wording of card and voucher [of which there may be one, if the old film-stock permits] to follow...)

2. The Rutles on DVD from me, as I had seen it in Fulham Broadway's Virgin® - whilst I was biding my time - at a knock-down price (along with Dirty Harry, which, likewise on impulse, I kept for myself).

3. The attendance of a gentleman with a laptop who was doing a MORI poll when I arrived, but who obligingly allowed Russ to sign Her Name Was Lola and The Bat Tattoo for me, as well as adding the injunction 'BE STRANGE!' to my already signed copy of Fremder (on the basis that I sought words suitable to its impending re-reading). Let it be said that I have been VERY STRANGE to-day, mostly before I was encouraged to do so, which turned Russ' words into a sort of blessing or benediction on what happened, as well as a sanction for future strangenesses...

4. Sundry phone calls from family members who were busily rehearsing their renditions of the usual birthday song for when he should be free to hear them.

5. A copy (inscribed for him by me) of Italy, My Italy (or Italy! Italy! Italy!), that well-known compendium compiled by Thomas M. Phear PhD (with the assistance of Dr Pauline Sentence) - Belston Night Works, 1997 (0 907795 91 9).

I think that the list is properly concluded, save to say that Russ took all that was offered in good spirits and stead, and wished his best to The Kraken one and all, leaving me to go on my merry way to The Pelican for (what turned out to be) a less-than-Hobanesque, yet still SA4QE-oriented, few drinks, soup and Caesar® salad...

It was, though, a shame only to have the company of Nicole's apologies and Steve's bid at bi-location - unless there were other Hobanites there whom I failed to detect (but I don't really think so). Heigh-ho for the SA4QE drink! (Needless to say, I downed a Laphroaig® for the benefit of and in honour of the absent (and refused to-day's ever-present offer of the abomination of ice).)