John Hand 2012

Hello Gombert & all you weirdos...

My SA4QE experience this year kinda spiralled out of control wonderfully.... I apologise in advance for the length of this.

First, I thought the student/hipster/muso/street-art community in Melbourne might appreciate this kind of enlightened vandalism, so I aimed to get a bit of copy on SA4QE in the Arts section of the city's premier street newspaper, Beat Magazine, with a circulation in excess of 30,000. However, with the help of the irrepressible people behind that publication, it soon became the following full-page spot:

I was really chuffed with that, and cannot thank the editors enough for their enthusiasm. The first February edition carried the spot here: www.beat.com.au/arts/slickman-a4-quotation-event

Then I became a bit anxious... Does that kind of thing violate the spirit of SA4QE - the DIY ethic - the personal passion? So I planned to flagellate myself with something of a personal evangelical broadside on the town: I had 44 4qations to 4qate. (DISCLAIMER: in actuality it was only 11 quotes each 4qated 4 times, so Mr Cooper's one-day record still stands well clear of the pack.) It was a long, excellent day, and the following eleven quotes will stay in my mind forever:

24 January 2003. I don’t think of my daughters very often. Wherever they are, they have done alright, that I know. Sometimes I think of Elias because there are things I want to tell him. These things he knows maybe, maybe not.

...

Everything is twice itself, this I often think. Things are what they are every day, but then sometimes they are not. Sometimes I see people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. Suddenly it is like TV with the sound turned off and I see that this is really Death dressing himself up as these people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. So that is what is really happening, no?

...

But who am I that I should say this? My mind is like a top that spins crazily just before it falls over.

- from Come Dance With Me

Learn the speech of ravens and they will feed you.

...

    ‘Piss off.’
    ‘Make me.’
    The colours of my craziness roared and bellowed in my ears.

- from Fremder

  

        ‘I’m lost,’ said Klein.
        ‘In what sense?’ said Dr DeVere.
        ‘In the sense of I don’t know where I am.’
        ‘Can you elaborate?’
        ‘I am of a people who have always been fearless navigators of the mind. The dead sail with us as we make our way from idea to idea, steering by the stars and sea-marks named by those before us. Such a wide, wide ocean! But you always know where you are by the waves, by the swells, by the loomings and the stars. Then one dark night the waves change, and the swells; the winds blow from not the usual quarters. Black squalls come, and heavy seas, the stars are blotted out, the wind moans in the rigging. You suddenly realise that you might never make your landfall, you might drown. A great wave hits the boat and takes you with it, you feel yourself going down, down, down and then you don’t know any more which way is up and you can’t hold your breath a moment longer and the wild wide ocean fills your lungs and then you’re gone: down among the dead men.’
        Dr DeVere kept respectfully silent for a few moments. ‘It’s good that you could get that out,’ he said.

- from Angelica’s Grotto
    

By their in-your-face humble posture I [Angelica] recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.
       ‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’
       ‘How do you do,’ I said.
       We shook hands.
       ‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’
       ‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.
       ‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.
       I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’
       ‘But that’s imaginative displacement,’ I said, ‘and believing that wishing will make it so. It’s a Ghost Dance!’
       ‘Say what?’ said Ruthany.
       ‘Wovoka, the Paiute holy man from Nebraska, in 1888 had a vision during a solar eclipse, and he started the Ghost Dance Religion.’ I read off my computer printout: ‘ “He claimed that the earth would soon perish and then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state, replete with lush green prairie grass, large buffalo herds and Indian ancestors.”
       ‘He told the Indians how to earn this new reality, with prayer and meditation and especially dancing “through which one might briefly die and catch a glimpse of the Paradise to come”.
       ‘The government banned the Ghost Dance, the Indians didn’t stop, so on the morning of 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, the soldiers killed a hundred and fifty Indians and wounded fifty, all of them wearing Ghost Shirts to stop the bullets.’ By this time I was crying again.
       ‘She’s upset,’ said Jonathan to Ruth. ‘We’ll talk about this another time,’ he said to me as I sat there in my Ghost Shirt, weeping by the rivers of Babylon.

- from Angelica Lost and Found

    ‘And what did she ever see in you?’
    ‘Flickering images.’

...

The idea of a club of people eating lunches was frightening to me.

- from The Medusa Frequency   

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

- from Riddley Walker

VIRGIN STATUE WEEPS, said the headline at the newsstand outside the station. ‘As well it might,’ said Klein.
...

Klein thanked her and walked home, still seeing Lucifer in pinks and greys and greens.

- from Angelica’s Grotto

When she told me that her name was Bertha Strunk I said, ‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s Box?’
‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes,’ she said.

- from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

All in all it was a perfectly strange day. My only regret is not catching up with fellow Melburnian 4qaters, KP & MS, but time is a sphere.

Click to open a PDF of some of John's quotes

John Rowbottom 2012

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

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

Left in the Centro shopping centre, Mandurah, Western Australia.

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)

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

Lorna Elsewint 2010

THE QUOTE:

When we gone out thru the gate there wer a kid up on the hy walk sames I use to be up there all times of nite when I wer a kid. 7 or 8 he wer may be. Sharp little face liting and shaddering in the shimmying of the gate house torches. Sharp littl face and he begun to sing:

‘Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back.’

Now whered that kid ever hear of Drop John and what put it in his mynd to sing that of me? Why dint I ask him? I dont know. May be I dint want to know.

Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he always kil the babby if he can? Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.

Riddley Walkers ben to show
Riddley Walkers on the go
Dont go Riddley Walkers track
Drop Johns ryding on his back.

Stil I wunt have no other track.

- from RIDDLEY WALKER, final page

THE DROP: Through the streets of Thebarton and Mile End, Adelaide South Australia. Mouse over the pictures below for location/caption:

ME: Lorna Elsewint, Tel Woman.

John Hand 2010

I 4qated the following in drizzling Melbourne:

'Stupid,' he said. 'I'm not going to stab anybody.' He moved a little way up Surrey Street towards the Strand, muttering to himself, 'For the first time I think of time as a sphere, as a globe on which, at various intersections of latitude and longitude, all things past and present are located, some near, some far from where I am. I'm thinking of Crazy Horse. On that great globe of Time, in western plains across the ocean, herds of long-gone buffalo make the ground shake and shadow hoofbeats sound down endless trails of sleep. Who am I that I should think of that strange one, the mystic, the great warrior who painted himself with lightning and hail and wore a little stone behind his ear? Riding into battle he shouted, "Hoka hey! It's a good day to die!" Now in the long yesterday of the place that once was his the visions flicker but there is no one to see them. In Paris at the Crazy Horse Saloon the naked dancers shake and wiggle for the tourists.

Wow. It's from Angelica's Grotto, which is wholly brilliant. Madness has never been so natural - hoka hey!

I blu-tacked the 4qation onto the underside of this strange sculpture titled *Vault*, which itself looks like a tribute to yellow paper and hence Russell Hoban. It was originally erected in central Melbourne but the public weren't ready for it, though it's now beginning to slowly gain the recognition and love it deserves....

Happy birthday, and thank you, Russ. Thanks Gombert for your efforts, too.

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.

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.

Mike Shuttleworth 2009

Here's my 4qation, left in the State Library's La Trobe Reading Room. I chose this piece because of the way it plays with ideas about language, creativity and time. The little scene takes place at night time and I would like to have to had a photograph to match the mood. You will therefore supply your own internal image of night, a quiet room and toys restless with their lot in the universe.

"Burning to say something! shouted the night watchman. "It is in me, something to say!"
"You simply don't know how it is with literary people like me," the crocodile went on. "The waiting, waiting, waiting for that perfect time!"
The night watchman had burned more incense than usual that evening. He was giddy with the fragrance and the heat of it, words danced in his head. In all the words of his own language he found nothing to say, but as the hours passed his mind became full of the sounds of the language the crocodile spoke so flowingly. Unknown words danced in his head. Eleven o'clock came, half-past eleven. Then it was midnight, and there was that tiny buzzing pause while his clock gathered itself to strike twelve times.
"NOW IS THE ONLY TIME THERE IS!" shouted the night watchman. He shouted in the crocodile's language, in words he did not know the meaning of.
"What's that?" said the startled crocodile as the clock finished its twelve strokes.

From La Corona and the Tin Frog by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Nicola Bayley
London, 1979

*****

See also Mike's 4th February blog post - Ed.

John Hand 2008

Hello Gombert (and to whomever owns the eyes Gombert is looking out from),

I participated in the SA4QE this year, in Melbourne, Australia. Russell Hoban's work picked up my little life and threw it into a satisfyingly confused and scared dimension, so I had to jump on board this tribute. I left a piece of yellow A4 bearing a quote from The Medusa Frequency in my uni library. It was the beginning of Herman's first chat with the Head of Orpheus -- I chose it mostly because it represents so much of what I love about Russell Hoban's work, but also because anybody who came across it would have to be made of stone to not want more.

It was an eyeless and bloated human head, sodden, covered with green slime and heavy with barnacles. I took it in my hands; where the flesh had been eaten away I could feel the ancient skull.

I could feel the head humming and buzzing in my hands, then it began to speak. Its voice was more elemental, more profound than human voices are; the way it spoke seemed more animal than human; it was as if speech had suddenly become possible for an animal, as if the creature were for the first time putting thoughts into words. 'Who are you?' said the head.

'Nobody, really. Nobody you'd know.'

'You wouldn't be seeing me if I didn't know you. What's your name?'

I didn't want to tell it my name.

'Speak up!' said the head. 'What are you afraid of?'

'Everything.'

from The Medusa Frequency

Unfortunately I couldn't take a photo because my camera insists on making a loud digital shutter noise and I was 4qating in a library.

Thanks for doing this, it adds yet another twist to the twistedness of Hoban fandom.

Kerry Power 2008

On yellow paper, placed in Parliament Station, platform 4, Melbourne Underground:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most a writer can do - and this is only rarely achieved - is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

from The Moment under The Moment
(foreword)

Mike Shuttleworth 2007

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay 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 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 s the source of his or her own kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary

Why this text, why this place?

I've been thinking a lot about turtles lately, not least because a good friend of mine has been involved in writing an environmental impact report that opposed a billion dollar gas processing plant being built right on the nesting grounds of the flat-back turtle in north west Western Australia. Seems that when the report landed on the desk of the West Australian premier Alan Carpenter he announced, hand on heart, "I will do whatever it takes to get that gas plant built". Maybe a copy of Turtle Diary should have been sent to him. So with a few million bucks slung out by the developers to the government, guess what, suddenly the problem goes away. Just the turtles, I'm thinking.

Anyway, I love the way that William G is perplexed by his own identity throughout Turtle Diary. What is it one must do in order to define who (or what) one is? I have placed the quotation on the table of Mr Tulk, the cafe attached to the State Library of Victoria. You can see the old W-class tram in the background. Books, cities, people, journeys, questions. What I love about the work of Russell Hoban.

Gwenda Hague 2007

I discovered Russell Hoban during my hippie years in the 70's and Turtle Diary, dog-eared, the pages turning yellow, my favourite passages underlined in orange felt tipped pen (how gross) travelled the world with me for years as a kind of easy little bible. Taken out in times of traveller's loneliness, when I wanted to initiate a conversation, as a dreamstarter, to look engrossed when feeling uncomfortable and to kickstart my heart if it ever was in threat of stopping. I loved it like a baby loves its comfort blanket. (Still do.) I thank Russell for this. In later years I have found and read many of his other titles, he never lets me down.

On a day full of cicadas airbrushing the day with their joy I send my happiest birthday wishes to Russell Hoban. I am a silent Kraken member better to let the cicadas do the talking. This year I have joined in the SA4QE homage! My quote - is the Fremder rain quote......a little sad since we in Australia are fast in the jaws of one of the worst droughts on record. Does the rain remember how to rain???? Ahhhh!! The cicadas still believe!

My quote:

"Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?"

"I think everything remembers, Pythia."

"…especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings."

from Fremder

I have taken photos of my yellow paper - it was left at the local library at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Libraries are good houses, "Safe Houses", and there is a chance that someone will take their curiosity on a great journey.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUSSELL HOBAN.....4TH FEBRUARY 2007
SPRINGWOOD, NSW AUSTRALIA

Postscript: The day I SA4QEED the Springwood Library with the Fremder quote, the sky began to throw a few clouds around. By Monday the heavens opened up and a deluge ensued, water ran down streets and eddied and swirled. As it was cascading down some outdoor stairs I heard a little girl call out in absolute wonder - "look a waterfall". The rain had remembered how to rain, the cicadas were right to believe. Did the quote somehow precipitate the precipitation? It did not break the drought but it bucketed in the catchment area and the sky is still frowny. It is a beginning and an end and that little girl's waterfall is now mine.

Kerry Power 2007

This year I chose the opening paragraph from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. It is somewhat special as it is the first paragraph of Russ' adult books I ever read. It is quite beautiful.

There are no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind - tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-coloured moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Left on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.

Kerry Power 2006

This year I chose a quotation from The Mouse and his Child:

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

Yearly trek down to the Melbourne underground, Parliament Station, the bench seat, Platform 4.

Andrew Simmons 2005

A very happy birthday, Mr Hoban.

My SA4QE lies in Queen's Park, Toowoomba, Australia and is simply:

Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding?

from Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary found me at a time of great misery through a series of astounding coincidences (but then, there are no incidences) and retains a personal significance beyond words. I have bought and given away my copies many times.

Thank-you Mr Hoban, and have a wonderful day.

Paul Gough 2005

I've been a fan of Russell since I discovered Riddley Walker by accident in a 2nd hand book store in 1988 and became obsessed after that. Especially after Kleinzeit.

I could go on at length....I remember reading about SA4QE and then promptly forgetting, only to be chuffed when at my local fruit shop in Sydney in 2002 or 2003, I found a page with a quote from Kleinzeit. Basically I was hurrying home after shopping at the Broadway Shopping Centre and it was stuck to a pylon. I can recall that when I saw it I was aware of SA4QE and I left it there for others to enjoy too. The exact quote shall remain unknown, a part of the waves and particles of words that float endlessly on.

Each year I've tried to remember to participate and FINALLY! this year I'm on the money.

So, this morning, I purchased 10 fresh yellow A4 pages. I work for the ABC (sister to the BBC) and I ended up putting 5 copies at work, 3 near lift entrances but the other 2 which may be unspotted for a while are a series of 'Emergency Buidling Exit' signs. Imagine 3 laminated A4 cards in a plastic wall bracket close to the entrance of an office space, one is coloured white, one red and one yellow. I slipped the yellow A4 in the place of the other one and given most people probably ignore it, eventually it will hit them. Perhaps some observant people will notice straight off the bat.

Of the other 5 I put one in a local bank who uses yellow as it's main colour, it lasted 1 minute before an eager employee picked it up at took it inside the security area! I placed one in a supermarket near my kids' school, and also put one in Summer Hill in memory of Judy Tihany, who I never knew, though I know the music of Mic Conway.

I'll try and send you a photo of them. I've chosen a selection of quotes - as I'm in the middle of moving house, the books aren't easy to find. I chose some quotes that have been already used, but I loved. The only Hoban book not packed was The Medusa Frequency, I used one quote "Being is not a steady state..." [probably my favourite] but wanted to choose something else as well. I settled for this:

There's no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is.

There is an endless surging and undulating of me, an endless cycle of ebb and flow; that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.

from The Medusa Frequency

Sorry to ramble. Just wanted to finally say hi and thanks for the site and I hope you enjoy the Some-Poasyum next weekend.

regards

Paul

P.S. I create abstract electronic music under the name pimmon, my first CD was called 'Waves and Particles'. One track was called 'the black that we crave', but out of context I think some people were a little unsure of what I meant. I wrote to Russell via email around 1999 and got a very nice reply and I sent a CD of some early work. I'm sure it wasn't to his liking, but I just wanted to say thanks for all the wonderful creative output that has given me a jolt quite often.

Bill Rodgers 2005

Hi,

Thanks for the fab SA4QE site. I don't know whether it's too late to submit an entry... hope not. Joined the Yahoo-Kraken group yesterday and look forward to participating in the discussion.

I live in Stanthorpe (a small rural town in South east Queensland, Australia), where I teach kiddies how to use computers in the local primary school.

I went to Brisbane (Queensland's capital) on the weekend of Mr Hoban's Illustrious Birthday (Hip Hoorah!), and placed the yellow page in the centre of the West End Community gardens. It nestled underneath some large dandelions - looking at home and beaming in a friendly way behind the flowerheads.

There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind--tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-coloured moon shivered to the silence of a ghost roar on the rising air.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Didn't manage a photo this year - will definitely do it next year...

Kerry Power 2005

Hi,

I have included two quotes this year. The first from Fremder. I love the idea of the mystery in the spaces of black between the pictures.

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

The second quote is the opening line of Riddley Walker. I have included it because so many people have discovered Russ through Riddley Walker. This opening line is such a challenge. You can choose then and there to stop (eg., its too hard at first glance) or to read on...and so begin a journey of wondrous discovery.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

from Riddley Walker

Once again (four years in a row now) I descended to the Melbourne Underground, and left the yellow A4 on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.