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

Chris Lilly 2012

When I got home I opened the door, took a deep breath of silence, turned on some lights, ... and settled back to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred by himself has never interested me much despite the wonderful things he could do; the enchanting Ginger, however, as a partner of independent spirit, gave him importance and validated his masculinity by acknowledging his mastery and following his lead...When they were alive I was glad to know that somewhere they were among us; when they departed this life they left the world poorer. 

 - from Come Dance With Me 

Left opposite the O2 Arena, London, and posted to Facebook and Twitter

Twitterers, Facebookers and Bloggers 2011

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

- from Turtle Diary, tweeted by Joe Snow

Place of dismemberment? said Kleinzeit.
Everywhere, all the time, said Hall of Records.

- from Kleinzeit, tweeted by David Dixon

Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don't know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. when I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

- from Come Dance With Me, tweeted by John D here and here

‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by remotevoices

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

- from The Mouse and His Child, tweeted by Chris Bell

(Bat bowl from the Victoria & Albert Museum that inspired The Bat Tattoo)

Facebooked by Olle Lawson

A Dog shall rise and a Rat shall fall.

- from The Mouse and His Child, Facebooked by Alison Baker

I do not like the way you slide,
I do not like your soft inside,
I do not like you lots of ways,
And I could do for many days
Without eggs.

- from Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs, Facebook-commented by Becky Morgan

I am actually a believer. I have faith that there's nothing that cares about us one way or the other.

- from The Bat Tattoo, tweeted by Danielle Carr

I searched in my A to Z for anything Balsamic but there was nothing.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by Squirmelia

And finally, here's a lovely post on the happy birdaycake blog from 7 February 2011 in which a mother and daughter make a real "Marzipan Pig" - not exactly a 4qation but just as tasty...

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.

James Poolos 2008 (4)

Fortunately, I did take part in SA4QE with that very quote. In fact, I was so thrilled at the subversiveness of it all, I posted it twice (on the bulletin board at my kid's school in San Francisco and on the front door of Dr. Insomnia's coffee house in Novato).

Sometime now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I do not know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. When I wake up, it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

from Come Dance With Me

Lindsay Edmunds 2008

The morning began with an irritating crowd of chores such as getting information together for my tax preparer, attending to old emails, etc. By the time I settled down to find a suitable quotation, I was not optimistic I could do anything wonderful on this rainy Monday.

But I found one right away, from Come Dance with Me. (Thanks, Russ, for being so good at what you do.) I wrote it out, slightly abridged for length, on yellow paper and drove the yellow paper and myself to the local Barnes & Noble, where I put the quotation prominently in the Dance section of the bookstore. Because Anthony's tag line is elegant and concise, I used it almost verbatim. No photo ops here -- but a bit of grace in the middle of the day.

“When I got home I opened the door, took a deep breath of silence, took my coat off, got Top Hat off the video shelf, poured myself some cask-strength Bowmore Islay Malt, added water judiciously, and settled back to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred by himself has never interested me much despite the wonderful things he could do; the enchanting Ginger, however, as a partner of independent spirit, gave him importance and validated his masculinity by acknowledging his mastery and following his lead. . . . Their dancing was real. Unlike western stars who perform impossible feats with handguns and western presidents who command hundreds of thousands of expendable stuntmen and women, Fred and Ginger actually did what they did.”

from Come Dance With Me

Bloomsbury Publishing, London (2005), pp. 88-89

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

James Poolos 2008

Google Blogs Alert for: "russell hoban"
russell hoban no. 2
By Poolos on Moleskine Monday, a catalog of journal entries comprising passages from my library and other less papery sources.

Yvonne Studer 2007

Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas, and dear 6th-form students from HoPro Zürich

On my very first SA4QE tour in 2003, I half-secretly 4qated the school where I work by hanging up quotations on various pillars and on a pinboard over the photocopier by the entrance to the school library. Half-secretly, because I told the deputy headmaster and also the librarian about my doings and met nothing but support and big smiles.

'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang.
(Kleinzeit, 1974)

The photo of the photocopier was used in the collage on the 2007 SA4QE homepage. This year something more effective was wanted, not least because it's also the fifth anniversary of SA4QE. So I decided to read one of Russ's books with my sixth form and somehow involve my students in this year's celebration of Russ's 82nd birthday.

Originally, the book was to be Turtle Diary, but as this novel is still out of print, Kleinzeit took its place and I'm happy to report that it is the highlight of my working week when I can go into my English class to "teach" Russ's novel rather than, for instance, the elusive differences between the 1001 ways of expressing future time in English...

As my students are very hard-working young people and since this time of the year is particularly stressful for them, I didn't want to ask them to go 4qating with me today. Instead I chose an individual quotation from Russ's works for each of them, printed it out on a sheet of yellow A4 paper and gave them the sheets on Thursday, 1st February. Of course I first told them about the project (they were properly introduced to the verb "to 4qate", including its pronunciation "fork-you-ate") and I also showed them a few examples of past 4qations so they could see what good company they would be in when I made them part of it all.

These were the quotations:

The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us! (...)
We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.

from "Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road", The Moment under the Moment, 1992


~ ~ ~ ~

Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973


~ ~ ~ ~

Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off.

from Linger Awhile, 2006


~ ~ ~ ~

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

from Turtle Diary, 1975

~ ~ ~ ~

'That's it,' said Serpentina. 'Nothing is the ultimate truth.'
'Nothing?' said the child.
'Nothing,' repeated Serpentina. ...
'I don't believe it,' said the mouse child. ... 'I wonder what's on the other side of nothing?' he said.
'Tiny upstart!' said Serpentina.. 'Who are you to seek the other side of nothing?'
'If I'm big enough to stand in the mud all this time and contemplate infinity,' said the child, 'I'm big enough to look at the other side of nothing.' ...
'Ah,' he said, 'there's nothing on the other side of nothing but us.'

from The Mouse and His Child, 1967


~ ~ ~ ~

'Con este tango nacio el tango,' she sang, 'y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo' (With this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum, seeking the sky).' ... Klein had no Spanish, didn't know what the words meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of life in the darkness...
'I can't actually put canyengue into English,' said the Argentinian translator Klein found in the phone book the next day. 'It's a lunfardo word,' she said. 'Lunfardo is a local vocabulary in Buenos Aires and it's used a lot in tango lyrics. Canyengue carries the idea of the suburbs and the common person of low social condition whose manner of dancing the tango is earthy and full-blooded with no added-on refinement; canyengue in the hips means dancing with the real feeling of the tango.'
'Canyengue,' said Klein to himself later. 'Canyengue in the mind, from the outlying districts of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Either you have it or you don't. Right...?'

from Angelica's Grotto, 1999


~ ~ ~ ~

I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. ...
Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

'Sometimes there's good news when you least expect it,' he said.
'So tell me,' I said.
'Have a look.' He folded the paper as necessary and passed it to me. ... There was a one-column item with a colour photograph of an upside-down bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup sporting a right-side-up label. SAUCE FLIPS TO GO WITH THE FLOW was the headline.
[Heinz] has spent millions of pounds and three years on research to come up with an upside-down bottle with a cap and valve in its bottom. It is a solution that customers hit upon years ago - seven out of ten say they balance their sauce bottles on their tops.
'How's that grab you?' said Selby.
'It's definitely good news,' I said.

from Come Dance With Me, 2005


~ ~ ~ ~

The world-child has been told that this is a world, ... 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.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987


~ ~ ~ ~

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987

~ ~ ~ ~

'Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.'

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973

I'd be delighted if the yellow sheets were 4qated further but there is no need for them to wander on as I know they are in good hands where they are now. The only thing I asked my students to do is to pose for a picture with their yellow sheets and their copies of Kleinzeit, which they all did, and I'd like to thank them once again for being game.

Happy Birthday, Russ, love and all the best to all of you,

Yvonne x

Roland Clare 2005

SA4QE, Bristol 2005: the first text I used was ...

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

This quotation made cameo appearances at the following locations:

A lamp-post was pre-equipped with cable-ties, just asking for an SA4QE addition. This page bears a different text, the opening of Dream Woman from The Moment Under The Moment:

Every teaching lesson today was devoted to Russ and his writings. I carried around a box filled with his works and operated a kind of Hoban jukebox (the smaller box in the picture below contains a Riddley Walker mug). My Year 10 class in particular spent a happy session hearing about SA4QE and the Some Poasyum and reading this:

Dream Woman


The dim light, the faceful shadows murmured, tinkled, gleamed. The steady flame of the candle on the table made a globe of stillness around the two of us, a warm bright globe of stillness in which she raised her glass and the luminous rosy wine made a smaller bright globe, a little world of the poised wine of this moment. She tilted the glass, the wine poured out, its brightness in the candlelight falling, falling. With an indescribable smile she looked at me and poured out the wine and never said a word, saying with her smile that she knew herself to be a dream and lost to me. That was how the first time ended.

The next time I saw her she said straightaway, 'Why do you bother when you know I'm not real?'

'I don't know that. I refuse to know that.'

'How am I real then? You know I'm only a dream.'

'What is that? What does it mean when you say "only a dream"?

'I'm only in your mind,' she said.

'What does that mean? The whole universe is only in the mind of God and nobody says the universe isn't real. '

'Maybe your mind isn't as real as God’s mind. In any case you'll have to go back, you can't stay here. Why should I begin something with a man who can’t stay?'

'You're in the world that's in me,' I said. 'I'll find a way to stay.'

'For me there's no future in this. I've seen it happen before with dream women and realies and it never works. '

'Is that what they call us? "Realies"?'

'Yes, and it never lasts. They see the man a few times, and that's the end of it. Sometimes they're left with a child. It's hardest on the children I think - it's like growing up in whorehouse. '

'But you're not a whore. You're not here for anyone else, are you?'

"'Not here for anyone else"! You amaze me. I've seen you once before and for all I know I'll never see you again and you want me to keep myself pure for you. You're not even young: in a few years you'll be dead and this world in your head will still be here in other heads and I'll still be in it. What am I to do then, wear black and live on memories?'

'You're saying you've been with other men,' I said. 'Other realies.'

'You don't seem to have a very quick mind. How do you suppose I occupied myself until you turned up? With needlepoint? How would you like to live in this awful tatty place where nothing ever works properly? You go to the bathroom to wash your hair and maybe there's a sink and maybe it's the front half of a crocodile. Whole neighbourhoods disappear overnight without a trace, you're lucky if you can find the supermarket two days running. And in between times you sit around waiting... '

From The Moment Under The Moment

(pp 61-62)

A new Child Protection directive means that we mayn't show their faces in photographs without written parental permission ... I can assure you they are all smiling nonetheless. These documents will be dropped in twenty choice locations by the end of the day.

Graeme Wend-Walker 2005

My quotes; a few from Come Dance With Me to help it on its way into the world:

What is the world but little pieces of pictures and who can see a whole one?

(p35)

~ ~ ~ ~

Django was craning his neck to see out of the window. 'Are there sharks down there?' he asked.

'All kinds of things,' I said. Such a deep dark blue, the water below us, then a fringe of white surf as Kahului Airport came into view back in 1993. The palm trees were moving a little as if they didn't care one way or the other. It was a dull day and those trees put a jungly smell in my mind.

(p144)

~ ~ ~ ~

I can never get used to the passage of the self through time and space and the passage of time and space through the self. The years in me surged up like acid reflux to mingle with the travel hours I was trying to digest while the miles lay like a lump in my stomach and half-forgotten songs spun in my head...

(p178)

Masterful, all of it.

Graeme