Roland Clare 2012

A quick report on a gruelling afternoon SA4QEing in snowy Bristol.

I posted this quotation:

‘… theres something in us it don't have no name […] Its looking out thru our eye hoals … 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. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way […] We aint a naturel part of it, We dint begin when it begun we dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I don't know what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to it or boyls on the arse of it I don't know.'

 - from Riddley Walker

at the Arnolfini café:

at the Colston Hall:

and a gloomy staff workroom at Bristol Grammar School:

I also posted three quotations from Soonchild (I hope that is not contrary to the spirit of SA4QE, since the publication date is so close!):

… the living are the link between the dead and the unborn and the dead have to work all the time to pass along to the unborn all the things they're going to need […] maybe you think you're doing it all by yourself but it's the dead working in you. They simply have no rest, the dead. Life is hard and death is hard, nothing is easy.

- from Soonchild

at The Lord Mayor's Chapel [on the monument to Lady Margaret, 1610–35, wife of Sir Baynham Throkmorton]:

at Bristol Guild of Applied Art:

and Fopp Records and Books (top of report).

Inclement weather put paid to my slightly ambitious plan to paint the A4 yellow, just where it comes into Bristol from Bath. Maybe another year …

Roland Clare 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Second quote:

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

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

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

Tucked inside the Richer Sounds catalogue...

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

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

Roland Clare November 2010

This was the first time I've ever 4quated in the dark and the driving rain; the photographs below reflect all that Novembering.

I said, 'No 1 ever starts his self.'

He said, 'Yes they do. You dont start the life in you thats like a rivver running in you stil there comes a time when you push your oan boat out in to the middl of it.'

(page 182)



Behind the grille that protects the glass of a very distinctively run-down, military memorabilia shop that has finally folded after occupying a conspicuous corner-site near the centre of Bristol for a good sixty years



Similarly, my Riddley quotation peeping from behind a grid: here it's in front of some posh offices built inside a mediaeval building, St Bartholomew's Hospital, in the centre



A longer shot of the same



Self-explanatory ... lots of people will have seen this one, I imagine



The old telephone-box gambit is getting a bit hackneyed by now ... though the boxes are getting harder and harder to find

Roland Clare 2010

Here are some Bristolian SA4Qations perpetrated in the noontide gloom not far from my workplace. The text is from Turtle Diary … a chapter that has always made me laugh out loud, and yet links so interestingly to later work like The Raven (from The Moment under The Moment):

… The Original Therapy lady was a rampant-looking woman of about forty. Shiny red hair in the style of old musical films, tight white trousers, gold sandals, silver toenails, bursting purple silk blouse. Swarthy boyfriend with a St Christopher medal and a racing-driver watch strap.

Her name was Ruby and she sounded as though she lived in a caravan, her voice and her way of talking. She began to tell us about her therapy while some of the people in the room sat in lotus positions with very straight backs and others held their heads. One girl wailed a little now and then, another muttered the whole time.

She was American, this Ruby. Told us how she’d knocked about, been a rodeo rider, done roller derbies, wrestled, had three husbands and all kinds of troubles. Discovered her Original Therapy whilst wrestling one night. Another lady had a scissors grip on her and was squeezing very hard, got a bit over-enthusiastic and wouldn’t let go. Under the pressure Ruby experienced a strange alteration of consciousness.

“I was seeing all kinds of coloured lights and shooting sparks,” she said, “and the sound of the crowd was beginning to come and go like the roar of surf far away. Something began to happen to me. I could feel myself going way way down and way way back, like thousands of years, millions of years, glaciers coming and going and the dinosaurs sinking into the swamps and the primitive trees being crushed into coal. Farther back than that even, crawling out of a warm ocean and gasping on the beach and beyond that back to the sea and smaller and smaller, all the way back to a single cell. And back beyond that to nothing, just the warm sea, what they call the primordial soup.”

Ruby went farther than the soup even, she got to a point where there was nothing, no time, no her, no anything. Then there came something like the idea of a question, a kind of original YES? or NO? It put itself together as YES. There was a mystical green pattern with no sound, then a red explosion in Ruby’s mind and the people in the ringside seats were picking the other lady wrestler out of their laps. That was the turning point in Ruby’s life, going back to the origins of life and finding the big YES, and she was going to show us slides and then demonstrate her therapy …

The slideshow below shows:

(1) A bit of Turtle Diary on the bench outside a suitably Hobanesque café.

(2) Hobanised yellow paper left amid virgin yellow paper in stationery shop.

(3) The ‘Pedestrians’ sign seemed like a ready-made notice-board.

(4 & 5) Hoban quotation obscuring ‘All the stuff you need to know’ at a well-used info-terminal near the city centre.

(6 & 7) Stuck to a random door, because I liked the ‘doorbell’ there.

(8) Yellow sheet left in a derelict refrigerator on waste ground … something for the low-budget drinking community to enjoy, perhaps.

Roland Clare 2009

Each time I chose a passage for this year's SA4QE, I checked on Gombert's fab new site ... and found that some fellow 4qator had had the same thought in previous years. So I approached the bookshelf with eyes shut, groped for the first Hoban novel that came to hand, and opened it at random. Scarcely surprisingly, it was a lovely bit – and amusingly it mentioned a Bristol landmark. Sadly, though, I couldn't get to the Clifton Bridge during daylight ... so I set out on an arbitrary half-hour's walk to see where the copies would end up. Text and pictures below ... click to make the latter large enough for reading the former.

Russell Hoban • My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
(Bloomsbury, 2007; pp 91–93)

I had a shower, put on fresh jeans and a sweatshirt, thought about going to Phil’s place, then decided not to just yet. I put on a jacket and went out to look for Hope of a Tree. WH Smith didn’t have it so I went back to the Fulham Road and over to Nomad where I bought the one copy they had. ‘How has this been selling?’ I asked.

‘We had two copies,’ said the woman at the till. ‘Sold the other one a couple of weeks ago.’

I didn’t want to go directly home so I went past the North End Road to Caffè Nero at the corner of Vanston Place. It was busy but I got myself an Americano and found an empty table by the window where I could start Hope of a Tree while drinking my coffee. The day was sunny and the Fulham Road was thronged with people doing their Saturday things. With my book and my coffee I felt as if I was in a little island of no hurry and no bother where I could let my mind be quiet for a while.

I opened the book. The dedication was To the memory of my father, J.B. Ockerman. The epigraph was from Job 14:7 –

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.

Well, I thought, that’s optimistic. Then I started Chapter 1 and there’s Cynthia on Clifton Bridge thinking about jumping and here comes Sam to talk her out of it. OK, I thought, you can get a good love story out of a beginning like that. Then I noticed a woman who’d just sat down at the next table watching me. She was about my age, not bad looking, maybe a little too much jaw, dark brown hair in a Louise Brooks cut. Black polo neck, little pink leather jacket, black trousers and a Birkenstock. Very sleek, very cool and sure of herself.

She gave me a sort of knowing leer and said, ‘Enjoying it?’

‘Just started it,‘ I said. ‘Have you read it?’

‘Had to,’ she said. ‘I was married to the author.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Do you know him?’ she said.‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘I’m his girlfriend.’ I was surprised to hear myself say that but I tend to take against sleek women on sight.

‘Really!’ she said. ‘He usually goes for the intellectual type. Which you don’t, at first glance, appear to be.’

‘It could be that he’s looking to change his luck,’ I said.

‘Which way?’ she said.

I stood up and took half a step towards her. She suddenly looked less sure of herself. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘You’d like to continue this discussion outside?’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Phil has come a long way down the female evolutionary ladder. This conversation would seem to be at an end. I suggest that you go back to your book and I to my cappuccino.’

‘While you still have your teeth,’ I said. She stayed quiet then, and when she picked up her cup it rattled in the saucer. I was amazed at my behaviour and quite pleased with it. Ms Ex-Wife finished her cappuccino quickly and left, avoiding eye contact the whole time.

Celebrating the great novelist’s 84th birthday • http://sa4qe.blogspot.com

Photos appear in the slideshow above. Commentary (in the same order):

Since my extract mentions Caffè Nero, I thought I'd
leave a copy outside the Clifton branch of the same

It doesn't mention dinosaurs, but nonetheless I went into
the Museum and gave a copy to the Plateosaurus

Another ended up in the Visitors' Comments book

'Do not leave anything valuable in this locker,' said the locker

Tawny extra perhaps

Here it is as a Borders Essential (not sure what happened to the apostrophe there)

Nice to find a copy of My Tango with Barbara Strozzi in Borders: I slipped it in to the
right page, as a kind of meta-bookmark. Riddley Walker was the only other Hoban there

I thought a copy might cheer up the chilly motorist who
would eventually have to defrost this windscreen

Time was running out so I gave the remaining copies to a very helpful
Big Issue seller ... let's hope Russ picks up plenty of new fans this way

That's all, folks ... Happy Russmas to all!

Rowan Evans 2009

Hello,

I've been working on an essay on Riddley Walker for the past few weeks; the book and two wonderful telephone conversations with Russ about his work have affected me greatly. This is one of my favourite of Riddley's meditations:

Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it? Rottin leaves and dead branches and naminal shit and that it all makes live earf on the dead groun and if you look at woodlings edge all roun the barrens youwl see the runty coming up where skin of earf growit back on nekkit groun. Nekkit groun what ben the bloody meat and boan of Bad Time covering its self with skin of earf and grass and woodlings. I thot: What ever it is its my groun. Here I stan.

from Riddley Walker, Chapter 17

Here are photos of two of the five locations I left yellow paper in: a patch of 'barrens' up on Brandon Hill near my school in Clifton and on one of the ornithological display cases in the Natural History section of Bristol City Museum. Happy Birthday Russ.

Thomas Lipscomb 2008

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s fifth novel and dropped on 4 February 2008:

We are, for example, clever enough to know that a year is a measure of passage, not permanence; we call the seasons spring, summer, autumn, and winter, knowing that they are continuingly passing into one another. We are not surprised at this but when we give to seasons of another sort the names Rome, Byzantium, Islam, or Mongol Empire we are astonished to see that each one refuses to remain what it is.

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.

‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

from Pilgermann

Jonathan Cape 1983, pages 116-117

Charlotte Amor 2008

“The fact that you’re alive means that someone cares about you.”

from Amaryllis Night and Day
Bloomsbury, London (2001) p68

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s ninth novel and dropped on 4 February 2008
In celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Rosie Harrold 2008

I am one of Roland's students. We have been studying Mr Hoban's work as part of our AS course and decided to participate in the sa4qe.

“Thursday. Grey and rainy. That was a help, sunny blue-sky days always look like bad luck to me.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

“There’s nothing like a little physical violence to make a man feel young again.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4th February in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Roland Clare 2008

I chose a bit of Barbara Strozzi that I liked – wish I'd thought to leave a copy in the Coroner's Court. As it was, one copy went in the National Gallery Touring Exhibition entitled 'Love' in Bristol Museum, which seemed a suitably Hobanesque location, while the other went into the leaflet dispenser at Bristol's Folk House where I rather hoped there would be Tango lessons afoot, though a quick inspection didn't reveal any. Maybe somebody will be moved, by the novel, to initiate such classes ...

The Coroner’s Court in Fulham is shaped like a large telephone box, and my thoughts rose up vertically both inside and outside of it. The clear grey light that came in through the windows was cool and sceptical. Possibly it had heard too many lies to take anything for granted. Ten Bibles in the jury box, two more by the witness box. There was a poor box by the door. Behind the Coroner the royal arms said DIEU ET MON DROIT.

As all the persons having anything to do etc. drew near and gave their attendance we were sworn in and testified that everything had happened the way it had happened. Then the Coroner returned a verdict of accidental death, Bob was our uncle, and there we were out on the street blinking in the sunlight.

Barbara and I were looking at each other as if our mouths had forgotten how to form words. Eventually we both spoke at the same time: ‘Maybe …’ was our joint utterance.

‘You first,’ said Barbara.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘we could have dinner one evening?’

‘That’s what I was going to say.’

from My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
Bloomsbury, London (2007), page 158

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s most recent novel and dropped on 4 February 2008

in celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Chloe Quinn 2008

Happy Birthday Russell Hoban!

“Always and always out into the dark and the dark coming in, Fremder, that’s what it is to be human. The dark needs your humanness.”

from FREMDER

JONATHAN CAPE LONDON (1996)

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s seventh novel and dropped on 4th February 2008 in celebration of his 83rd Birthday.

Daniel Potter 2008

I am one of Roland Clare's students. Here is my first SA4QE contribution.

actually he’s not properly a he and he’s nothing you could picture in your mind. what we’re talking about here is a space-time singularity which is in fact a neuron of the cosmic mind to which the universe has occurred. similarly the great snyukh is a simplification of a cusp of negative probability. once inverted it reverses its polarity and becomes an accelerator of event.

from The Medusa Frequency

Picador, London (1987), page 132

She spoke of Amerikanischer Imperialismus enchantingly and unmaliciously, and she finished each news item with a rising inflection in which one could hear her tidy small pleasure. Her voice made in the crackling and whispering of the evening airwaves a quiet place of its own. Knowing hardly any German I was able to let go of all comprehension so that she came to my ear naked, giving me, unvitiated by any surface meaning, the sound that signified only herself. Whenever she paused for breath I was shocked by the intimacy of it. It was just such a voice as the Vermeer girl might have spoken with.

from The Medusa Frequency

Picador, London (1987), page 78

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s sixth novel and dropped on the 4th February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

James Fowler 2008

Goodparley and Orfing had a red and black stripet fit up it bens tanning there ready to go and little kids creaping in and out of it wylst we ben doing the scar take. Orfing cleart the kids out he tol them ther heads wud tern to wood if they dint come out of it quick.

from Riddley Walker

Jonathan Cape 1980, page 44

Kieran Boden 2008

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.

from Fremder

Jonathan Cape 1996, p.32

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s seventh novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Jessica Bishop Bunn 2008

Ok, it was all in my mind but so is everything else. Perhaps I fainted, I don’t know. I didn’t fall down but it was a Road-to-Damascus kind of thing. A girl of twelve or thirteen and her mother approached as I stood there. ‘That man has an erection,’ said the girl.

‘Nonsense,’ said the mother as they moved on. ‘It’s probably his iPod.’

from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

Bloomsbury, London (2007), page 4.

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s most recent novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Georgia Murley 2008

from The Medusa Frequency

“The world-child has been told that this is a world,” said the head, “and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love.”

“Who told the world-child all this that it now believes?” I said.

“Each thing told itself to the world-child: the tree; the mountain; the ocean; the woman; the man. You and I, we have told ourselves to it.”

“And the idea of love? Who told that to the world-child?”

“It didn’t have to be told,” said the head. “This idea arises of itself from that energy of belief that keeps the mountains from exploding and the seas from going up in steam. It’s only a kind of cohesion that binds together possibilities that have spun together out of the blackness.”

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday [visit www.sa4qe.com for details]


Happy Birthday Russ!

Amanda Moorghen 2008

I am in Mr Clare's lesson and we are all sa4qe-ing. Here is mine. I'm planning to leave it somewhere in the art block at school.

All the best,

Amanda.

“And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1977), page 45

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Caroline Cook 2008

I am studying English at Bristol Grammar School for A levels. We have been using Kleinzeit as our coursework novel this term.

‘There’s a sorrow in you,’ I said, ‘just as there is in all of us. This sorrow clothes itself in various memories. I find it’s best to let the thing get on to the paper. You can always tear it up later if you want to.’

from My Tango with Barbara Strozzi

Bloomsbury, London (2007), page 124

I tried to understand what it is that’s between Phil and me. If anything. No, I can feel something. Mirrors. Planets. Are we like two planets circling each other? No, one would be in orbit around the other. The smaller one. Is Phil in orbit around me?

from My Tango with Barbara Strozzi

Bloomsbury, London (2007), page 51

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s most recent novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Roland Clare 2007

SA4QE from Bristol ... Two texts left variously on a fence at the Sea Walls overlooking the Avon Gorge (above), and in other locations (see below).

The two quotations are close neighbours in Turtle Diary. Neither is the bit I was actually planning to use, which was the satirical tale of the rich shark-diver and his rubber-clad brothel experience: in the end I thought that was bit long for people to read in a high wind or a crowded shop.

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

It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.

from Turtle Diary

The other locations were:

among the 'forthcoming events' at the Redgrave Theatre ...

... in the loo at Bristol Zoo ...

... among the children's books for sale in the Zoo bookshop ...

... and fastened to a spavindy bench frequented by bird-watchers:

Here are some passers-by inspecting the Sea Walls 4qation.

Roland Clare 2006

"I bet the stories you could tell would make a hell of a book," I said, "If only you knew how to get them down on paper."

He shrugged. "Not everything needs to be written down."

from The Man With The Dagger
(The Moment under The Moment)

from top: Framed in the broken window of an electricity sub-station, content for a plastic storage-box for sale on the pavement outside a shop and amid the travel brochures: preferable to an expensive flight to Florida

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

from Pilgermann

from top: Among the floral bouquets on sale in a shopping precinct, in a shopping precinct in the Xerox machine at a 'Convenience Store' for those with nothing of their own to copy, and jutting from an ornamental urn in the graveyard