Dave Awl 2012

Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis.

— Russell Hoban (1925-2011)
from his book The Moment Under the Moment
In observance of his 87th birthday and the The Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE)

The photo is from the 2004 edition of the SA4QE, pre-Facebook. (This particular yellow paper was left on the #36 Broadway bus, which is usually just teeming with people who've been riding naked on lions.)

Also posted to Facebook

Dave Awl 2011

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 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

Posted to Twitter via Twitlonger 

My aeons-long sojourn with the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep had made me realize how provincial my outlook had been before.

- from Angelica Lost and Found

Posted to Facebook

Dave's summary of Pilgermann can be found on his Head of Orpheus website

Dave Awl November 2010

Posted to Facebook:

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

* See also the Riddley Walker page on Dave's original Russell Hoban website, The Head of Orpheus.

Facebookers and Twitterers 2010

Yellow paper found its way into various social networking sites in 2010. Here is a selection of the Russell Hoban quotes found on Twitter and Facebook on 4th February.

One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by the Russell Hoban Page

'She said, "Be the world-child with me"' said the head. I will.

- from The Medusa Frequency

Facebooked by PA Morbid

The above from Fremder Facebooked by Tim Haillay

The sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world.

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by Chris Bell

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' from The Moment under the Moment
Facebooked by Lara Hoffenberg

Sometimes I don't know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understading patchy but I have action; I go. I can't tell this as a story because it isn't a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards ...

from Pilgermann
Facebooked by Dave Awl

I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you.

from Riddley Walker
Facebooked by Olaf Schneider

The fog made everything more personal, as if it were taking me aside to tell me a secret.

from The Bat Tattoo
tweeted by Lindsay Edmunds

At three o'clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere.

- from The Medusa Frequency
tweeted by Richard Cooper (at three o'clock in the morning*)
*courtesy of HootSuite's scheduling facility :-)

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!

- from 'Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road' from The Moment under the Moment
Facebooked by Lara Hoffenberg




The above from Pilgermann Facebooked by Tim Haillay

Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself.

from Pilgermann
tweeted by Olaf Schneider

Here's to Art and all who sail in her.

from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi
tweeted by Lindsay Edmunds

There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
tweeted by Dave Awl

The action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.

from Pilgermann
tweeted by Chris Bell

Dave Awl 2009

Here amid the ongoing chaos of my life in the midddling-to-latter part of the 00s, I have been very bad at 4Qating in recent years -- and even worse at reporting on it. The Mincery of 4Qation lists my last documented 4Qation as taking place in 2004, such a dizzying long time ago that many people still thought John Kerry might be US president someday and the Doctor wasn't back on the telly yet.

Although most years I have managed to get out and slip a few pieces of yellow paper into the world sometime within a week or so of the fourth, I have rarely managed to get these exploits written up and posted, with or without photos.

One year not so many half-decades ago, I actually organized a little dinner gathering at a restaurant, and placed a folded yellow paper by everyone's place setting. I took pictures of all this. At the moment I have no idea where they might be -- no doubt flotsaming around somewhere in my exobrain. But I certainly never got around to writing the cheery and amusing account of it all that I'd envisioned.

This year, in hopes of keeping both the 4Qation and its documentation more streamlined and therefore more like to make it to the Internets eventually, I limited myself to a single quotation, forbade myself to even think about photography, and for the first time ever hand-wrote the thing on a sheet of yellow paper like Ms. Slickman originally intended instead of typesetting some elaborate handout with multiple quotes like I'd done in the past.

I decided to pick a quotation from a book I'd never 4Qated from before, and something from a relatively recent book (rather than a classic quote from the First Six Novels, which I have mined so heavily over the years).

So I chose this early passage from The Bat Tattoo, which is hands-down my favorite Hoban book of the 00s -- the one I think most deserved a US release and yet inexplicably didn't get one.

Here is what my yellow paper said.

***

February 4, 2009

"Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary -- you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T'ang Dynasty -- their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.

"There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends."

-- Russell Hoban, The Bat Tattoo (p. 3)

Compliments of The Kraken
In honor of Russell Hoban's 84th Birthday
sa4qe.blogspot.com

***

I wrote this out on a sheet of paper at the neighborhood pack-and-mail store, copied it onto roughly half-a-dozen sheets of yellow paper, and then slipped them inside copies of a few of Chicago's alternative weeklies at a couple of different coffehouses in Andersonville (my neighborhood in Chicago). I also slipped a couple between boxes of tea at the neighborhood supermarket.

Thus endeth the 2009 report, submitted only about two months late. Next year my goal will be to get it filed while the sun is still in Aquarius.

Dave

=============================
~~~ http://www.ocelopotamus.com

Dave Awl 2004

This year, like last year, I found myself arranging a series of quotations into a kind of narrative structure. I chose ten quotations from five different Hoban books, starting with quotations about waking up, and moving on to quotations dealing with how we relate to the waking world. I arranged them in sequence on the page, set them in different fonts, and printed out 12 copies, a limited edition. Next year I'm thinking of numbering them (e.g., "#3 of 12"), like an art print. I'll include the full text of my yellow paper at the end of this report, since it's rather long and I'd rather tell the 4Qation story first.

Since I'd already 4Qated two years running in my home neighborhood of Andersonville, and last year I 4Quated Wicker Park (where I DJ), this year I decided to 4Quate Lakeview, where most of my favorite restaurants, bookstores and music shops are.

I left my apartment a little before 6pm on Hoban Day 2004, provisioned with an ample supply of yellow papers, a disposable camera, and the irrepressible urge to 4Qate. My first stop of the evening was a haircut at my charmingly misspelled local salon, Klassy Kut. I caught the #50 Damen bus down to Foster where the salon was, and briefly considered 4Qating in the rear section of the bus, but decided that since I was only going a few blocks there wasn't enough time to 4Qate properly. I believe that a certain amount of 4Qplay is not only necessary for a satisfying 4Qation, but is every bit as important as the actual moment of 4Qasm itself. So, with pride in my restraint, I delayed 4Qation until after my haircut.

From Klassy Kut I headed down to the Lakeview neighborhood, and a nice Thai dinner at Joy's Noodles on Broadway, where I finally succumbed to the urge to 4Qate for the first time that evening, discreetly in the washroom.

From there I headed a few doors south to Specialty Video, where I 4Qated in the Foreign Film section, leaving a folded yellow paper tucked neatly behind Il Postino.

I briefly considered 4Qating at my favorite bookstore, Unabridged Books, but the place is fairly small and the staff there know me and my ways pretty well, so there was no way to 4Qate without seeming heavy-handed about it.

So I caught the #36 Broadway bus a bit further south. As I got on the bus, I was scanning the back of my bus transfer for the cut-off time to make sure it was still good. "Don't worry," said the driver, "you'll make it." Slight pause, and then, with a conspiratorial grin, "... It's a magic bus."

How thoughtful of the Chicago Transit Authority to send out the magic buses in honor of Hoban Day, I thought. Perhaps there's hope for them after all. Thus encouraged, I 4Qated in the rear section of the magic bus before exiting at Diversey.

Yellow Paper, seated on the magic bus. Below: The tail lights of the magic bus, departing ...

I then entered the demesnes of a large corporate chain bookstore, which I won't name and where I didn't take any pictures, because they get all the advertising they need. But they do attract a lot of readers who ought to be 4Qated unto, so I tucked a yellow paper between two copies of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and then another inside one of the free weekly papers stacked up in the lobby.

I then caught the #22 Clark Street bus down to Tower Records. The #22 bus driver didn't allude to any magical powers, but I like to think he was just being modest. I 4Qated in the rear section again, then exited at Belden and rode the escalator up to Tower Records, where I spent a while browsing before 4Qating three more times: I left one folded yellow paper tucked among the CDs of Leonard Cohen, another among the Thelonious Monk discs, and the final one I left in the custody of Jeff Buckley. Hallelujah.

Having thus 4Qated nine times in the course of about four hours, I figured I'd better call it a Hoban Day before I caused myself a vitamin deficiency or something, so I headed home to rest and reflect. Here's the text of my yellow paper for 2004:

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.

— The Medusa Frequency

I exist, said the mirror.

What about me? said Kleinzeit.

Not my problem, said the mirror.

— Kleinzeit

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.

— Turtle Diary

Is there a story of me? I asked myself. Am I in it?

— The Medusa Frequency

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far.

— Turtle Diary

The year 1933 was full of many things. Showing with King Kong was a documentary film on Hitler's rise to power. In 1933 there was Goebbels officiating at a book burning. 'You do well this midnight hour,' he said, 'to exorcise the past in these flames.' Exorcise the past. Surely that thought alone was sufficient evidence of madness. But more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded. In the train derailment scene in King Kong the engine-driver could not believe his eyes when he saw Kong's face rising through the gap where he'd torn away the tracks but that was just another day in 1933. That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

— Turtle Diary

It is the longing for what cannot be that moves the world from night to morning.

— "Kong and the Vermeer Girl," introduction to the text of The Second Mrs. Kong

Near where William lives there was a dead cat by a bus stop, pretty well flattened out. He looked as if he'd been run over by a lorry. A grey stripy tom he was with a head like a Roman senator, one eye open, one eye shut. His whole corpse seemed expressive of the WHAM! when his life met his death. He looked as if he'd been one hundred percent alive until the lorry closed his account in the flower of his tomcathood and his mortal remains were cheerful rather than depressing. To live with a yowl and die with a WHAM! Thinking about him whilst walking back I stopped and wrote:

Stiff but not formal

A dead cat says hello

This winter morning.

— Turtle Diary

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

— Riddley Walker

Camden Station is the windiest tube station I know. Coming up on the escalator with my hair flying I felt as if I was coming out of a dark place into the light, and I laughed because that's what I was actually doing.

— Turtle Diary

* * *


Compliments of The Kraken — SA4QE 2004

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

~ ~ ~ ~

... thus endeth the 4Qation report.

Dave

Dave Awl 2003

Inspired by the valiant efforts of this year's other SA4QE participants, I decided to kick my efforts up a notch and do better than last year's single yellow paper left in a freezer case at the supermarket. And all in all, the evening of Feb. 4 was most productive: While my journeys weren't nearly as extensive as those of the peripatetic Mr. Cooper, I did manage to 4Qate in four separate locations and two different neighborhoods. (Yes, I've decided that the proper verb form of SA4QE is "to 4Qate" -- pronounced like "fork you ate." I 4Qate, she 4Qates, he 4Qated, we are 4Qating. Can be either transitive: "Oh yes, I 4Qated that cafe last year," or intransitive: "My assistant kept a lookout while I surreptitiously 4Quated in the poetry aisle.") And I got this year's 4Qations on film.

As I started to choose quotations for this year's yellow paper, I found myself drawn to a number of quotations that seemed to revolve around a common axis I couldn't quite articulate -- something about time, history, and one's place (or absence) in one's own story. I got interested in arranging a series of quotations to form a sort of oblique narrative, like finding a story in a sequence of Tarot cards.

Once again I was fussily disappointed by the yellowness of the yellow paper I was able to obtain locally. Compared to the more relaxed and self-possessed yellow paper on which I have letters from Mr. Hoban, the yellow paper I am stuck with seems to be trying too hard, an insincere look-at-me "yellow" as opposed to a quietly thing-in-itself yellow. Never mind, get on with it.

I finally settled on the following six quotations, in this order:

from TURTLE DIARY:

Two of the turtles at the aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a 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 is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from PILGERMANN:

A story is what remains when you leave out most of the action.

from FREMDER:

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 PILGERMANN:

One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ:

There is only one place, and that place is time.

from PILGERMANN:

'Why are you weeping?' said Bembel Rudzuk.

'I am suffering from an attack of history,' I said.

'It will pass,' said Bembel Rudzuk.

I set each quote in a different font and added a footer at the bottom, which read:

Compliments of The Kraken - SA4QE 2003

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

My first stop was the Jewel-Osco supermarket in my home neighborhood of Andersonville, where I left last year's yellow paper among some boxes of frozen macaroni & cheese. There I picked up a disposable camera with which to document this year's 4Qations, and also snapped a picture of the freezer case from last year (see Dave's 2002 quotes below). I was attempting to inconspicuously snap a picture of the front of the store, bustling checkout counters and all, when a Jewel-Osco staffer appeared out of nowhere and issued me a curt "Excuse me" in a tone that clearly translated as "I am onto you, sirrah. It is clear that you are engaged in some kind of Shameful and No Good activity. Be away with you, before I am forced to summon The Law!" She clearly meant business and I didn't relish the idea of trying to explain the SA4QE to that stern countenance -- and besides, it seemed like explaining would be breaking the rules of the game, in a way. I slunk away.

My first official 4Qation of 2003 took place at Cafe Boost a couple blocks south of the Jewel. Once in the door, I realized that since the place is just one open room, and there were people in every corner of it, there was really no way to drop my yellow paper without being seen, and taking a picture without being fingered as Shameful and Up to No Good seemed out of the question.

Fortunately, at that point I discovered what many other Krakenistas may already have realized: washrooms are an ideal place to 4Qate. You can close the door behind you, position your yellow paper artfully on the towel dispenser or tuck it into the frame of the mirror, snap your photo and slip back out again with none the wiser. (Just be sure to lock the door so that nobody walks in on you while you're 4Qating, which would of course be awkward for everyone involved.)

I had a nice lemon-poppy seed muffin to celebrate the evening off to a good start, then moved on to Specialty Video, my friendly neighborhood video rental store. I had decided it would be fun to tuck a yellow paper behind the display box of a film. The shelves of the Foreign Film section formed a nice little semi-enclosed area that would afford me some privacy from the eyes of staff members and other patrons as I 4Qated. Of course, once confronted with the shelves I realized an agonizing decision was before me, as the choice of film would undoubtedly be seen to make a statement. What to choose? I did briefly go in search of King Kong in the "Sci-Fi" section, but its movie box was missing, substituted by a piece of brown cardboard with an amusing marker drawing with labels and arrows to the key elements of the cartoon: "Monkey." "Building." "Airplane." Very entertaining, but it was its own creation and didn't need the accompaniment of yellow paper. So I returned to the Foreign Film alcove and contemplated the possibilities. Wings of Desire? La Dolce Vita? Don't get too precious, now. Just choose a movie that you like, and that other Krakenites would probably like, too. I finally tucked the yellow paper behind City of Lost Children, took a snapshot and made my getaway.

I then whisked up a few doors to my neighborhood's other cozy little cafe, Kopi. After pretending to browse in the candles, incense & dangly earrings giftshop at the back for a few minutes, I made a beeline to the washroom where I 4Qated quickly and efficiently, but not, I hope, without feeling. I left my folded yellow paper perched on the chalk ledge of the blackboard where Kopi patrons scrawl graffiti du jour.

Having thus 4Qated all over Andersonville, I hopped a bus down to Wicker Park, an arty/trendy neighborhood where a friend was DJ-ing at a punk bar later that evening. (Those who saw the shamelessly Americanized John Cusack film version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity will have seen a somewhat cleaned-up caricature of this part of town.) It was virgin SA4QE territory as far as I knew, so I figured I could 4Qate a little and then go hear my friend spin. I decided to drop into Quimby's, an edgy little zine & underground comic book store that displays its immense taste and discernment by stocking What the Sea Means. I considered 4Qating on the shelf with the Robert Anton Wilson and alien abduction books, labelled something like "Paranoia, Paranormal and Psychosis" but that seemed to be putting too fine a point on things. I moved to the shelf of literary journals and placed the folded yellow paper behind the first copy of a quarterly called OPEN CITY. I wasn't familiar with it, but on flipping through it I was greatly entertained to see Parker Posey listed on the masthead. Parker, meet Russ. I asked permission of the woman behind the register to snap a photo of the store, "for a Web site," and when she asked me what Web site, I furbled something about "a literary site called SA4QE." This was strategic on my part. It is part of the code of honor in neighborhoods like Wicker Park that, when confronted with a cryptic and obscure name like SA4QE, one doesn't let on that one hasn't heard of it. She asked no more questions and gracefully gave me permission to photograph. I snapped my final 4Qation of the evening and headed off to a nice Chinese dinner before carousing with friends.

Dave Awl 2002

As luck would have it, I was trapped in my apartment all day on deadline with work on the 4th itself, so my make-up SA4QE actually took place the following evening, on the 5th. Graeme and I were apparently listening to the same muse, the muse of freezer-cases in the frozen food aisles of supermarkets. I left my sheet of yellow paper between two boxes of frozen organic macaroni and cheese at the Jewel supermarket on Clark Street in my neighborhood. I thought the yellow paper went so nicely with the yellow of the cheese on the boxes. Having been privileged to receive numerous communiques from Mr. Hoban on his own yellow paper, I am painfully aware that the paper I was forced to use was a much brighter and sharper shade than the genuine article, and it was 8 1/2 x 11 rather than the slightly larger A4. (Perhaps I should have more properly proposed acronyming the event SYPQE, with YP for "yellow paper"? But then the acronym is devoid of numerals, so much blander somehow.)

Focus. I was also unable to choose only one quotation...I am a person who is incapable of ordering just one thing at a restaurant, I always need a little of this and a little of that. And I generally enjoy the juxtaposition of things more than the things themselves. So I went ahead and catered to my Gemini side, and printed out the following troika:


~~~~~~~

from PILGERMANN

When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened – whatever that thing might be – that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.

from FREMDER

Perhaps this world that's in us, this world that we're in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it's only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

from A BIRTHDAY FOR FRANCES

"That's how it is, Alice," said Frances. "Your birthday is always the one that is not now."

~~~~~~~


...and into the freezer it went.


Dave

Dave Awl - profile

Writer, actor, director, DJ, Head of Orpheus webmaster, freelance surrealist, renaissance man, blogger – Chicago