Diana Slickman 2012

I found myself without yellow paper this morning. Also without Russ, but I expected that.  I had a quote - two, in fact - from The Bat Tattoo. I had selected the book at random, as is my practice on February 4, and as is my practice, opened the book at random to see what volunteered itself to go out into the world.  The quotes themselves suggested where they wanted to be left, and I agreed.  But I needed the paper!  I took the red line downtown and dropped into an art supply store, where I was pleased to note that while fashions may come and go, art students look the same as they always have, or at least the same as they did when I as in school; desperately, uniformly unconventional. I was cheerfully sold a few sheets of yellow paper and a new pen by the art student behind the till, and I went to a coffee shop to prepare the quotes for their journey.  I still 4Qate by hand.  On one page, I transcribed this:

"I always feel good in museums.  I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long departed Now."

On another paper, this:

"At the corner of Parsons Green Lane I nodded to the two telephone boxes that stood like a pair of lanterns and paused to acknowledge the trees which were still embracing the night.  I admire those trees; fashions come and go but the trees still maintain their original identity, their unfashionable mystery.  They hold last night's darkness like lovers reluctant to let go....Sometimes I am astonished that there should be buildings built and institutions maintained to string out the brevity of human life over successive generations; trees don't do that, they just hold on to the darkness and accept the light night after night and day after day without pretensions to permanence."

I added, as is my custom, to each of these a little addendum that went something like this:

"Russell Hoban, from The Bat Tattoo.
February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday.  This paper, and your finding it and reading it, are part of an annual worldwide celebration of the man and his work."

But this year I had to add, "He passed away in December."

I finished my coffee and headed across the street to the Art Institute of Chicago, a formidable stone building on Michigan Avenue, guarded by two bronze lions, full of high ceilings and footfalls and silences.  I went to buy a ticket, but the young man behind the counter told me that if I waited 15 minutes, I could get in at a reduced rate, as it would be within an hour of close.  That sounded reasonable, so I took myself back outside and headed to a little park one block south.  There, carefully spaced in little plots hemmed in by wide gravel paths, were a few trees accepting what light they could in the shadow of Michigan Ave.'s curtain wall of tall buildings. It was a Russ sort of day: gray, breezy, with a hint of damp. I picked a tree at random, at a corner of two paths, and pinned the tree quote to it.  It fluttered a little in the breeze, as though shaking itself out to settle into the work of being a quote pinned to a tree.

Still with time to kill before the hour of reduced admission, I wandered into the Art Institute's book store.  Vermeer's pearly girl looked pleadingly out of the covers of two or three books.  We regarded one another, acknowledging the lack of Russ in the world.  And then I saw a big handsome volume of Edward Hopper paintings standing at attention on a shelf and I knew my work would be done here.  I opened the book at random, as is my custom, and found there a picture of a woman in a slip, standing at a window, looking out into the morning light.  I put the museum quote next to her and closed the book.

I took the train back home, without going into the museum.

Here's to Russ.
Slick

Photo borrowed from this blog

Diana Slickman  founded the Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE) in 2002.  More info

Diana Slickman 2011

I dropped this at my longtime local bar, The Hopleaf.  I've been drinking there, off and on, for 20 years.

"You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life.  At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story.  Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn.  Fremder means stranger in German."

- from Fremder

I added: This yellow paper was placed here on February 4, 2011 as part of a world wide event in honor of Russell Hoban’s birthday.  Your finding this and reading it makes you part of the celebration. Cheers!


Diana is the founder of the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. Read about the genesis of SA4QE here.

Diana Slickman 2010

I picked a quote more or less at random from The Medusa Frequency this year. It was at the top of the Hoban pile for no particular reason. Here's what I wrote out on to the yellow paper for this year's SA4QE:

It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.

I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadows first before me, then behind. 'Nothing to declare,' I said.

I crossed the common and headed down to the New King's Road. The Belisha beacons clicked as they blinked in the coldness of the morning. Cars at intervals hissed past me, in each one a face as questionable as the faces on the tin windows of toy cars from Japan. The shops stood like sleeping horses.

The lamps on Putney Bridge were still lit, the bridge stood in simple astonishment over the water, a stonelike creature of overness, of parapets and ghostly pale cool tones of blue, of grey, of dim whiteness in the foredawn with its lamps lit against a sky growing light. Far below lay the river; slack-water it was, turn of the tide, the low-tide river narrow between expanses of mud, the moored boats rocking on the stillness.

A sort of singing filled my head; it seemed an aspect of the particles of light and colour that made in my eyes the picture of this time just before dawn. I thought of the dew on the grass where the olive tree stood. There seemed to be a question on the air.

'Yes,' I said, 'I will.' I spoke aloud because I wanted my answer to be recorded on the early air.

At the bottom I wrote:

- from The Medusa Frequency
by Russell Hoban

This paper was placed here on 2/4/10 as part of a world-wide celebration of Russell Hoban's birthday. Your finding it and reading it is part of the party.

I folded this up to about two inches square, wrote "SA4QE" on the outside and put it in my pocket. Left the office. I had an errand I had to run; I went to The Spice House in Evanston, not far from my office. I had to get refills for my empty bottles of ground cumin, chili powder, and red-and-black pepper. The Spice House is a wonderful place, but it quickly overwhelms me with all the possibilities - all the things that could be made with all the spices and herbs and extracts and salts and peppers. When I leave, I leave a little sad that I'm not using more spices, and I leave smelling like a pumpkin pie - spicy and warm. I wandered around looking for the right place for my packet of words and finally settled on a little basket attached to the west wall of the store. In it were small, clear packets of seeds labeled "Grains of Paradise". I nestled my yellow packet among the clear ones and drifted off to make my purchases. Went back to the office. And back to work.

Happy birthday, Russ!

Diana Slickman 2009

A bright, clear, cold February 4 in Chicago! Another in a long line of bitterly cold days we've been having since the new year began. They say - they, the people who say such things - that it's going to be in the 50s (Fahrenheit) by the weekend. I'll believe it when I'm in it.

Because it's cold and because I'm at work, I wasn't inclined to venture out until absolutely required and so I waited until I had some business out of the office to combine with this year's 4Qation. I went to the post office.

The P.O. we take our mail to is a large, rather shabbily grand structure in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago that butts right up against the northern edge of the city proper. It was built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, or the last great depression, and has ceilings that are ridiculously high and a gold-leafed sculpture of a postal carrier above the service windows. I think of it as The Church of Mail.

I left my yellow paper on top of a stack of priority mail envelopes that (for those of you not acquainted with the U.S. postal system) are provided free to postal customers.

As usual, I picked this year's quote by random selection - I opened The Moment Under the Moment and here's where my eye fell. I found another quote that I might post elsewhere later this evening, but this is what I left at the P.O.:

If the human mind is still evolving, as I believe it is, if our mind/soul capability is still developing, then the pattern of our mental intake and sorting and storing is not static but changing. It may well be that we shall learn to let go rather than hold on, that we shall become capable of being with the world rather than attempting to consume it.

from “Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road”, The Moment Under the Moment

February 4th is Russell Hoban’s birthday. This piece of yellow paper, and your finding it and reading it, are part of a world-wide celebration of the day.

Happy Birthday, Russ!

Diana Slickman 2008

Monday! Busy. Cold, windy, rainy. Winter in Chicago! My standard MO on Hoban Day is to open a book and see what presents itself. The Medusa Frequency being at hand, I opened it up and here's what it yielded:

Dr. Carnevale looked into the room and called my name and I followed him into his office. 'Pains in your chest and left arm?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'At first it was like an iron fist, but now it's as if I've swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.'

'Let's have your shirt off.' He unlimbered his stethoscope. 'Guess by now you've finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year.
Breathe in.'

'No, actually I haven't.'

'Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I'm told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell?'

'No. Is he a novelist?'

'Undertaker. He says they don't last as long as journalists.'

'Undertakers?'

'Novelists.'

'Why is that?' I said, as he took my blood pressure.

'Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?'

'Well, I can't be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.'

from The Medusa Frequency

This I copied out on to yellow paper and took with me to the grocery store. Monday nights I play cards with a group of interesting and intelligent women; February 4th was my night to host; hosting means making dinner. And so to the store. I slipped this, folded, between two bottles of Sauternes, which seemed fitting.

At lunch time, I opened up the book again and this is what I copied out of it this time:

"Being is not a steady state, but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?"

from The Medusa Frequency

Out I went, to get some lunch and to find the right place for the yellow paper. I went into a book store: big, impersonal, lit like an operating room. I walked purposefully about, but I didn't know where I was going. Then I saw a book of movie posters from the 1930s on a shelf-end display and flipping through found a spread of two King Kong posters. I slipped my yellow quote in between them and replaced the book. Up the elevator to the fiction and literature shelves. "H" went straight from Hillerman to Hoeg. I went back to work.

On both of these pages I cited the work and the author along with my standard tag line, something along the lines of "February 4 is Russell Hoban's birthday. By finding this yellow paper and reading it, you are involved in a worldwide celebration of the day."

Happy birthday, Russ!

Diana Slickman 2007

Happy birthday, Russ!

It was a bright, frigid February 4th in Chicago. So cold that were it not for Russ having been born on this day, I'd not have left the apartment. The night before, the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong was on the TV machine and though not much interested in it, we watched it. Kong always puts me in mind of Kong and the quote I chose for this year was a tip of the pith helmet to the idea of Kong. I placed my quote, neatly folded, in my local video rental shop, Specialty Video, over the plastic sleeve that one must take to the counter to get the DVD of King Kong (1933). Most of the other sleeves contain the artwork that comes with the DVD, but the one for King Kong '33 contained, to my delight, someone's idea of Kong. On a piece of plain cardboard in black marker was drawn a small Empire State Building with a rather impressionistically rendered ape atop it. Little airplanes, like flies, buzzed around the building and in the ape's hand, in an altogether different scale, was a figure in a dress. I may be embellishing now, but there may have been a speech balloon coming out of the figure that said "Help!" I can't tell you how pleased I was.

Here's what the yellow paper said:

I live in a state of surprise much of the time; things others take for granted suddenly amaze me. Moving toward the ever-receding vanishing point I was struck by the frailty of what humans have put together like something out of a box: houses; shops; roads: street lamps; trains and railway stations; aeroplanes and airports. I imagined a gigantic foot stepping on it. Crunch. Of course film-makers imagine that all the time, and build monsters on to the feet.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Added to the sheet was: "February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and this quote was left for you to find as part of a world-wide celebration."

Diana Slickman 2006

It is a Hobanesque day in Chicago this February 4th. The sky is low and precipitating slightly - sometimes rain, sometimes sleet, sometimes snow.

It's grey, cold, and things feel close. I wandered around my neighborhood, yellow paper in my coat pocket, looking into the shops and eateries to see which one wanted to be part of the SA4QE. There's a resale shop that just moved into an old theater close to my house on Clark Street. The theater was called Calo and for a long time it was the home of the Griffin Theater company. The resale shop is called The Brown Elephant, as the sales from it benefit the Howard Brown Clinic. My OED tells me that "calo" is a Latin word for a camp servant, and also the combining form of a Greek word meaning beautiful. So here is a beautiful servant formerly of the performing arts camp, with two powerful beasts in her life. In I went.

One of the things I like about this celebration is its covert nature. I get to feel like a spy for a little while, as though I am making an important drop for another operative to pick up later. I circled around the shop for a while, again waiting for inspiration to strike or for fate to show her hand. Finally I decided that hiding the thing in plain sight was the sneakiest thing to do, so I unfolded my yellow paper, laid it on a wooden end table, and casually strolled away. Mission accomplished! Happy birthday, Russ!

Here's what the paper said:

Running today, said the morning looking in at Kleinzeit's window.
Kleinzeit got up. Running today, he said to the bathroom mirror.
Not me, said the mirror. No legs.
Kleinzeit put on his new tracksuit, his new running shoes.
Let's go, said the shoes. Motion! Speed! Youth!
No speed, said Kleinzeit. And I'm not young.
Shit, said the shoes. Let's get moving anyhow.

from Kleinzeit

February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and if you've found this yellow paper, you're celebrating it with him.

Diana Slickman 2004

I'm finally getting around to posting my activities on Hoban Day, 2004. I'm amazed and delighted by the lengths some of you go to; my own efforts are more modest.

I launched two quotes this year. The first I copied on to a postcard of a landscape by Rembrandt and mailed. It wasn't A4 sized and it wasn't yellow but it was at hand, and overlaps nicely with my current project to dispatch one postcard every day for a year. The postcard was chosen at random from a drawer-full I've accumulated over the years, and it was sent to an address chosen by opening the Chicago phone book and pointing with closed eyes. Likewise the quote was pulled from The Moment Under the Moment by letting the book fall open and seeing what was on the page that presented itself. Here's the quote:

The people who run the world were children once. What went wrong? What is it that with such dismal regularity goes wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown-ups? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make any sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.

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

The second quote is one of my longtime favorites from Turtle Diary. This I wrote on a yellow Post-it note and stuck on the third or fourth page of a yellow legal pad in the school supplies aisle of my local grocery store. It was a Cambridge brand pad, a good one with good thick strong back and a dark blue sort of cover on it. Here's what some unsuspecting legal pad purchaser will find after a while:

I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.

- from Turtle Diary

Here's to everything success and better tomatoes!

Diana Slickman 2003

I spent Russ's birthday in Rochester, NY this year. By accident, not by design. I am here in Rochester, still, performing with the theater company with which I have long been associated, the Neo-Futurists. February 4th was a very windy day here on the banks of the Genessee river, mostly overcast and snowy. I and a couple of my fellow-performers had a little outing and visited the George Eastman house which, if I may say with apologies to our host city, is one of Rochester's few attractions. It was the home of the late film-and-photographic-equipment mogul (as in Eastman Kodak), and now houses a large cinema and photographic archive. We saw an wonderful exhibit of photographs by the great renaissance man Gordon Parks and wandered around the house marveling at the number of ashtrays and curios made from animal hooves contained therein. I had my yellow paper in my back pocket the whole time, waiting for its opportunity. In the gift shop I slipped the quote in next to a book of photos by Lewis Hine, whose portraits of sweatshop children have that same quality that Vermeer's turbaned girl has, of the thing itself looking out from their eyes. The bookshelf was tightly packed, crowded with books on all manner of subjects photographic and if there was an order to it, it eluded me. Here is the quote that chose itself this year:

from PILGERMANN

To me everything is extraordinary and nothing is. Aeschylus was killed when he was hit on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle but that's not extraordinary when you consider that he was sitting directly below the eagle when it dropped the tortoise from a considerable height. On the other hand, that there was Aeschylus, that to me is extraordinary: that the world appeared in his eyes, that the world lived in him like the light in a lantern, that there are continually new lanterns for the world to live in, that you and I are two of them, yes, that to me is extraordinary.

Here in Rochester, I am at the mercy of library computers for my internet and e-mail access, but I look forward to going back to Chicago and reading at my leisure all of the correspondance re: this year's event. I'm so pleased that this fledgling idea has taken flight so successfully. Here's to many more!

Diana Slickman 2002

from RIDDLEY WALKER

The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.

I left this in the Chicago Cultural Center. The Cultural Center used to be Chicago's main library and is probably the closest thing the city has to a secular cathedral. It was built after the Civil War, by the Grand Army of the Republic, for the dual purpose of housing the city's library and honoring the veterans of the Union Army. It is kind of shabby and magnificent at the same time. Now it serves many functions: it holds the offices of the city's department of cultural affairs, houses the Museum of Broadcast Communications, has several gallery spaces, a couple of lecture/theater spaces, a concert hall, an informal performance space, a café. People from all strata of Chicago's population go there, from the homeless to the well-heeled (or well-healed, if you prefer). To arrive at the main hall, one climbs a staircase of white Carrera marble, encrusted with glass and gold mosaics in geometric patterns. The hall itself has a huge stained glass dome and high on the walls are quotes from authors of different countries and literary traditions, carved into the marble in their original languages. When I went there on Monday, a man was in this room playing a grand piano; practicing to rows and rows of empty chairs. A woman sat on a wide low window ledge and looked out on to Michigan Avenue while he played, but otherwise the room was empty. I sat down to listen for a minute, clutching my yellow paper. Suddenly the man stopped playing and picked up his cell phone which was sitting on the piano. He examined it while it bleeped, but did not answer it. I unfolded my yellow paper and slipped it on to the seat in front of me, feeling very sly. The man resumed playing; I listened a little longer and then went back to my office to eat my lunch.

Diana Slickman - profile

SA4QE founder and Neo-Futurist writer/director/performer, Chicago, USA