peter morrison 2012

somewhere along the line, between there and here i think i flickered once or twice too many times. it seems the only logical explanation, the experienced gaps in time that account for the last week, or two...

i had visitors, so found my distracted, unsure what my plans were for the day of fourqating. which left them with a flickering, unsubstantial/unsubstantiated kind of spontaneity.

on my recent re-read of fremder, i had noted page numbers in my phone. so minutes before going out the door for the evening, i grabbed phone, yellow paper, and a fremder. and with those three objects i scrawled out, in huge hurried letters, the following two quotes from that novel:

What I like about Badru is that its so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the darkness of no remembrance.

...

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the 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 stillness per second, making real by an act of retinal attention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lover’s kiss, the shots are fired the horses gallop; but bellow the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

- from Fremder

my brother and i nipped into a book shop, late on in the day, before moving on to the next steps of our insubstantial plan. there i found of books that were on "sale", one piece of yellow paper was thrust into the pages of iain banks' The Steep Approach To Garbadale - which seemed appropriate given he is a scottish writer and these events took place in scotland. (think quick with this logic thing...) the second piece of paper was thrust equally hastily, and sneakily into a copy of ben aaronvitch's Rivers of London. this too seemed appropriate, a curious london novel, for a writer who wrote so much about london. the banks is one of his rare ones i have not actually read, however i would recommend aaronvitch's novel, an enjoyable read.

anyway, that was my belated qatation.
yours flickeringly.
peter

Leonard Roberge 2012

- from Fremder

Posted to Facebook

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

Wesley Paines 2012

There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.

 - from Fremder

Left at the Apáczai Educational Centre, Pécs, Hungary

I had just started reading Angelica Lost and Found when I heard of Russell Hoban's death. It will take some time before I bring myself to finish it, knowing that it will be the last thing by him that I will ever read.

This classic quote from Fremder just about summed up what was going on in December. The snow (now somewhat deeper) could not be more apposite.

Alan Gibson 2012

Here and gone, the music; the mind shielding it from the winds of forgetting, holding what is partly now and partly remembered. Here and gone the whisper of the vox humana in the stones of darkness. On earth and out beyond the Hawking Threshold yesterdays and everydays in the morning mirror, the red glimmer of the Dog Nebula, the unremembrance of flicker dreams, a tawny owl flying low over the heather in the Grampians, great sea-shapen rocks at Portnockie, and the rattle of pebbles in the suck of the tidewash...

- from Fremder

These two quotes were from The Moment Under The Moment, Tottenham Court Rd. This is one of my very favourite long quotes and had to be spread over about three pages - it goes from "The moment will not stay" and continues through Tottenham Court Rd via High Fidelity, watches resistant to the suckers of giant squid, very thin calculators, to radio frequencies, symphonies to a map as large as the land it attempts to represent. A rant of longing, fallibility, want, frustration, human-ness and pure genius. There were others in the sequence but the lamination reflected the flash too much.

Blue-black shiningness, bluish-white shining on the puddles on the football pitch in the rainy night all starred with lamps and windows. Always in November there comes such a night, blue-black and shining and wild with rain and wind and brown leaves blowing. In the morning suddenly the plane trees on the far side of the common are bare winter trees.

Windowed shapes of light on the ceiling, Melanie Falsepercy asleep beside me, Luise rising in the shining dawn in the wild and rainy night.

In the dimness and the shadows of the room I breathed the novembery fragrance of Melanie Falsepercy.

- from The Medusa Frequency

These and other quotes posted around Southampton and to Facebook

Alan has written about the event on his lovely blog: http://theurbaneforager.blogspot.com/2012/02/slickman-a4-quotation-event.html

UPDATE: On 14th March Alan emailed the following:

Just thought you and other Russ readers might like this...

I was rowing on the river Itchen in Southampton yesterday when I noticed something strange in the distance; I was sure that I had just spotted the Head of Orpheus, swimming upsteam...

Fortunately I had my camera with me and managed to overcome my sense of impending strangeness and dread just enough to photograph the mysterious item...

It was quite strange when I saw it - I had seen a seal once before and thought it was a football, now I see a barnacle covered football and think of the Head of Orpheus - I always attain a heightened susceptibility to coincidence when I read Medusa Frequency ;-)

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.

Rich Bailey 2011

I just finished A4Q-ating for the first time. I've known about the the tradition for years, but somehow living in a mid-size southern city where there is no subway and I know most of the people who run around downtown, it just didn't seem right. I moved to New York City last summer, and now it feels right. I left two copies each of the following quotes in swath of lower Manhattan running from Chelsea Market at 9th Avenue westward along 14th and 15th Streets, dipping south into Greenwich Village around Bleecker and 7th Ave, then continuing along 16th Street to Union Square. I did not see the Gom Yawncher man, but I watched some buskers and made a cash deposit in a homeless person's cup.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

- from Fremder

There is a point where pattern becomes motion; the pattern has found me and I must move, must be aware of moving, must be a motion, an action of the Word. Poor bare tuned fork.

- from Pilgermann

To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

We are the children of the mystery that inhabits us and I believe that it wants us to meet it with innocence of becoming; not to meet it is to be a failed child.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

The black howled in the tunnels, the tracks fled before the train. Whatever lived walking upside-down in the concrete put its paws against the feet of the people standing on the platform, its cold soft paws. One two, three, four, walking softly in the chill silence upside-down with great soft cold paws. Underground said words to itself, names. No one listened. Footsteps covered the words, the names.

- from Kleinzeit

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do, HERO, I'll call it. Chapter 1. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

- from Kleinzeit

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

Pablo K. 2010

Quotes dropped around south-east London:

I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

[channelling H.P. Lovecraft]

I had told myself that I was not going to relive the past but of course this is not possible: what we call the present is only the accumulated past.

- The Bat Tattoo (2002)

"You took your time", says Moe.
"My time took me", says Max. "Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph."
He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - Willa Cather, My Antonia

- Her Name Was Lola (2003)

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 anything youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

- Riddley Walker (1980)

Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I'd do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: It bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don't know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one's proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who'd have wanted to know about them? They'd have stayed in the garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they'd have been a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God MADE us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn't done it.

- Pilgermann (1983)

"What's pathetic about trying to understand what happens to you?"
"It's cowardly. Besides which I don't believe you. I bet you're writing it all down trying to make a story out of it. I can tell by the miserable look of you. You're not really living your life, you're pulling the legs and wings off it, one by one. Why don't you take up vagrancy or crime, it's more manly."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

...I must say though lightning strike me as I speak that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I'm being arrogant, and maybe that's why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it's that simply - God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and PFFT! there go a few hundred or a few million X. Ah! To be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.

- Pilgermann (1983)

There is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it; he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it; singers to sing it; lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others.

- Pilgermann (1983)

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 Medusa Frequency (1987)

I think about the dead a lot, their wants and needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it's because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn't; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting...The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day - sometimes I see my hand life a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel the ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names...I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.

- Fremder (1996)

More and more I find 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.

- Fremder (1996)

There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.

- Fremder (1996)

Things don't end; they just accumulate.

- Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (1998)

"Death is longer than life", she said, "and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we're left with, maybe some of us more than others."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

See the slideshow below for all the excellent photos from this report. If you have problems viewing this, you can browse the set on Pablo's Flickr page.

Lisa Jones 2010

Rather than leave my quotes in archetypically "New York" places, I thought it would make a more interesting photographic series to go about my evening normally and put them up randomly along the way, trying to evoke something of the mood and atmosphere of the quotes through the way I shot them.

Sometimes between two people it's as if one is a lock and the other is a key and they take turns being lock and key; but at other times it's as if both are keys or locks and nothing can be done.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

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

In all, I'm very pleased with how they turned out.

Hope you like them! There are lots more in the slideshow below.

Cheers,

Lisa.

If you have problems viewing the above (excellent) slideshow you can view all the photos on Lisa's Flickr page

Ra McGuire 2010

I am surprised (but proud) to see that I am still the only contributor from Canada. Since I am the only one, it is a little embarrassing that I have chosen the same quote as last time for my SA4QE event. I have made up for this, I believe, with the significance and beauty of the location of my yellow paper.
As of this beautiful west coast morning my quote is firmly affixed to the very large and anomalous White Rock after which my city is named.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

from Fremder

I've also posted an SA4QE post on my web site.

Happy Birthday Russ!

Ra McGuire
White Rock BC
Canada

Ruth Bosch 2009

My original Russmuss Day intention was to walk across Paris, from my apartment to the renowned books-in-English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, but the stairway of the local Metro stop gestured irresistibly down towards the coherence of The Underground and it struck me all of a heap that this was the way to go so I did.

The station is being refurbished by nightly wall removal and daily graffiti revival. I was not expecting such an immediate 4quage, but a sign edge spoke to me without any hesitation at all and I responded, slid a quote into the gap, felt oddly invisible, and hoped to blend in with the non-quotation-bearing citizens. There was a quick shift in the space behind me, like that of a beach-dug hole filling instantly with seawater. I turned and saw two women already talking about what they read, very animated, curious, and reading again.



Similar experience at Odeon in terms of an instant audience.



The Metro posters are a constant joy due to the constant amendments inflicted upon them.



I could hardly believe my eyes, but remembered the thoroughgoing Hobanification of the world that I always experience on February 4ths.





I had already looked at the used books on the shelves outside of Shakespeare & Co. the week before, and hoped that the copy of Kleinzeit was still there.



It was.

Juuuust as I reached towards it a black dog appeared right behind me, without a person. I goggled. Or doggled, possibly. The shop door opened and a young man called the dog in. Her name was Colette and I followed her. "Excuse me", I said to them both. "I am part of a group who leaves quotations from the writer Russell Hoban for people to find. We do this every year on his birthday. Black dogs are important to him. I was just about to put a quotation in one of his books out here and your black dog came and stood next to me. Would you mind if I took a picture of her?" "That's incredible", he said as he put her leash on, "yes, of course, but she's not very good, I mean, she probably won't......sit...." and at the word "sit", she sat. Briefly.



Another paper leaving tribe, for variety, on the pavement.



The notice board outside Shakespeare and Co, with a yellow predisposition. It was as if it knew.



Two interior quotation leavings.





There were three Hoban books; you cannot see that the first one is Riddley Walker. The staff recommendation pinned to the shelf below it is for Half Life, by Shirley Jackson, a book about a post nuclear holocaust world.

I crossed the river to Notre Dame and looked for a good place there, but somehow the act of attaching didn't feel quite right, something about Scotch tape and all that stone, and then I saw the moon and approximated as best I could, with fidelity in mind. Always.



A walk along the Seine, past the booksellers' stands...





...and the Velib stable, which offered a surprising visual quotation of Olaf's stellar sonar animation.



One of a pair of guardian lions being well protected in an antique shop window.



I wondered if the first quote would still be hanging there, tapeless, in the homeward reach of the evening, gravity being what it is. But it was.

Gravity being what it is.



Et voila.

Diana's original description of sa4qe mentioned, somewhere in it, that she herself liked the idea because it was small and private. That was the chord that rang for me back then and so I have done my yearly bit on the quiet, with a particular aversion towards documentation, but this year, somehow, the sheer love for all of the rest of you translated into a different chord.

I do not have my books with me here and copied everything from the sa4qe website, an activity I now think of as "echoquation". I printed out a few pages of each quote, carried them in a bag, and, without looking, pulled one out at each place that spoke to me.

They are:

To be and not to be. That is the answer.

from Fremder

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

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Fidelity is a matter of perception: nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

from The Medusa Frequency

At the bottom of every page is written: "This quotation is further evidence of the world-wide birthday celebration that accumulates in rampant appreciation of the writer Russell Hoban. February 4, 2009"

Much Love to Russ, to Everyone,

Ruthie

Paul Saich 2009

This year I was lucky enough that some of my colleagues at school put up quotes for me! My thanks to the English, Music and Drama departments for being so accommodating.

I reused the opening to Fremder AGAIN so I won't reproduce it here. Then also these:-

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. I've certainly never found any way to roll it back so that I could change my actions and the consequences of them. Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions. And lodestones are more frequent than pot-holes on the streets of Used-To-Be.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

My third attempt gave me a feeling of desolation and an old woman posing as a black cat. I'd dreamt her many times before; she looked like the old witch in the Grimm story who sent the soldier down into the hollow tree for the tinder-box.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

And also this one...

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

Bit of a challenge to try to pick things that might appeal to students but I know that at least one went round trying to make sure he saw each of them!

Paul Saich 2008

More disorganised than usual this year as I'd been struggling with a couple of laptop failures that have involved losing a lot of stuff! Monday being work, instead I SA4Qated on Sunday 3rd and late in the afternoon left the following three. First, pinned to the gates of a building site where some new flats are being built:-

When I was in London Judith and I did what we always did - walked and talked, dined in intimate little restaurants, went to concerts, opera, theatre, and films but little by little the flavour went out of it. And more and more I'd wake at night to find myself sitting up in bed and leaning forward into the darkness, listening to the ravens and the dead, waiting like Elijah with his head between his knees.

from Fremder

Next, stuck to a wall next to the ATM of a bank in town,

"...The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water's edge and swayed their tops against the sky."

"There opened to you underworld," I said, "and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping."

"Yes," said the head, "in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld."
Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and silence filled my mind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.

I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I suppose in some way it was still with me.

from The Medusa Frequency

And finally, stuck on a noticeboard by a bus stop:-

"As we get on, you see, the fugal system has a little more trouble spacing out the subject and answer, and if entries come too fast it's rather like Sunday traffic on the M4. And there you jolly well are with a blocked stretto. Now, the only known function of the stretto being to channel entries, it's of no use whatever if it's blocked. You'll feel a little breathless and as if everything is piling up inside you from behind while at the same time you're quite unable to move forward to get away from it. Naturally that's distressing, not to mention the possibility of worse trouble later on. What I say is Do it to stretto before stretto, you know, does it to you."

Dr Pink's voice had become a long and massive Sunday afternoon through which Kleinzeit drowsed like a fly in amber. At the end of his remarks it was Monday morning, a change not necessarily for the better. Kleinzeit felt breathless and as if everything was piling up inside him from behind while at the same time he was quite unable to move forward to get away from it. It's marvellous the way Dr Pink knows exactly how it feels, he thought. I wish I'd never met him.

from Kleinzeit

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.

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

Anthony Davis 2008

I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down - I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him. With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously... oh no, hang on, this is the quote, isn't it? Sorry mate, I thought this was your account of your 4qation! As you were - Ed.

This, on both sides of 13 sheets of genuine gold A4 from Rymans, is what met the light of dawn on my account, 4th February 2008:

Strange is as strange does

I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down - I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him.

With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously through streets glittering with broken glass, islanded with excrement, and odorous with nitrates. There were few people about and those few were all accompanied by large xenophagous-looking dogs, often in pairs. Eventually I saw a man with an introspective-looking Irish wolfhound. When I approached to ask where I could find an off-licence the dog licked my hand and its master offered me his wallet. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take it - I haven’t got a watch or jewelry or anything like that.’

‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for an off-licence.’

‘Down there,’ he said pointing while the dog sniffed my crotch. As I thanked him and walked away he said to the dog, ‘You don’t have to lick everybody’s goddam hand.’

After a while I found a Corporation off-licence and bought a bottle with a label that said WHISKY and nothing else. Being simply a MAN who was going to DRINK in a ROOM I liked that.

I went to the thirty-third floor of the crumbling tower block [...]. As I unlocked my door I felt that little rush of despair that always hits me when I walk into a downtime and breathe in the pong of emptiness and the last occupant. It was a classically existential short-stay dwelling - even the dim grey dusk in it seemed to have been used by too many people.

Without turning on the lights or looking at anything in the room I switched on the air cleaner, set it to HIGH, went to the viewbubble, sat down, and looked out into the rain and the twilight. I wanted to be very careful with the twilight, I wanted to be deep and silvery in it, wanted to hover quietly in the pinky-purple and the dove-grey of it, wanted to drink the Chopin of it and the yearning. The holes of bright emptiness grew small and twinkled in my vision like distant stars; if I held my head right I could lose them in the lights of Oldtown West 81 below me, its glimmers and its colours that flickered in the rainy dusk.

from Fremder
Jonathan Cape, London (1996), pp. 100-102.

* * * * *

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

I can report the distribution of the remaining dozen 4qations as follows (sadly, lack of time, energy and people to ask prevented them all being made on the appointed day, but I'm really not one to bother about rules, and, in any case, it had been my decision, based on a favouritism that stems from my birth-date, to try to 4qate 13 times):

1. Left in the telephone-box in my village where my other bout of 4qating began. However, unlike then and as was known to me from a visit to the scene of the wreckage (at which I was given to understand that it had been brought about at 4.00 a.m. - no, not 3.00 a.m. - on the Sunday before Russ Day), it no longer stood on its base, its top was separate and broken, and it lay near a partly demolished wall. I left the A4 sheet inside, floating it in from where the top used to be, in the hope that someone might see it.

(I have now learnt, courtesy of one of the local free rags, that the story behind what I saw was the theft of the BT cash-box, carried out using a chain and what was thought to be the power of a pick-up truck - whatever vehicle it was pulled the phone-box off its foundations. Since the phone-box was listed, readers will be glad to know that it appears that it will be replaced 'with one of a similar age and style'.)

2. With Blu-Tack®, displayed at the centre point of a large bookcase at the Leisure Centre at Fulbourn Hospital (see item 8, below).

3. Similarly, on the back of the door of the toilet near the patients' bank and pharmacy. (At one point, I turned it over and stuck it up again with the acknowledgement showing, but someone then put it back...)

4. To the attendant at my local Total® petrol-station who sold me some peppermints.

5. To my friend Robert on meeting him for a drink at The Exhibition in Godmanchester (which is named after The Great Exhibition).

6 and 7. To bar staff on the same occasion (the last of the items distributed on 4 February).

8. To my colleague Paul (on Wednesday 6 February), who then told me - as no one else has - that he had read item 2, above.

9. On the same day and with a drawing-pin, attached to a notice-board near the chaplaincy office (also at Fulbourn).

10. Later, to my bemused neighbour Adam on his doorstep.

11 to 13. Put into the post on Saturday 9 February (without identification, beyond the handwritten address, or explanation) to my friends Nigel and Linda, Jo and Ed, and Piers (in the case of whose 4qation, it was first read by my friend Penny and her brother Rob).

QED,

Anthony

Gwenda Hague 2007

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

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

My quote:

"Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?"

"I think everything remembers, Pythia."

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

from Fremder

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

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

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

Paul Saich 2007

A little late with my contribution this year. I was rather rushed on the day for various reasons and didn’t get out until early afternoon. And it being a Sunday I didn’t feel I had long so I left just three quotes. The first was in HMV, nestled between some CDs by The Waterboys. (No significance to that by the way. It was a random choice based on me feeling rushed and on choosing a moment when I thought I wasn’t going to be seen.)

I went to see if she was still asleep. She wasn’t in my bed. She wasn’t in the studio or on the balcony. She wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen. She was nowhere in the house. The night was gone, the day was here; the tube trains were running and the trees on the common were swaying in the cool of a morning that was going to turn hot very soon. Some birds were twittering in a half-hearted way, as if they were working to rule. At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

The next I propped on a shelf in Waterstone’s normally used for promotions, posters advertising for reading groups and upcoming plays. I used the quote last year and thought it could do with another outing…

In the deep chill and the darkness of the Fourth Galaxy, in the black sparkle of deep space, oh so lonely, see a figure in a blue coverall tumbling over and over as it comes towards you: no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. Is he dead? He can’t be alive, can he? What’s in his mind now? Are there pictures frozen in his mind?

from Fremder

Finally I was going to do another bookshop but it occurred to me that I shouldn’t. As I was thinking, I was passing a line of unoccupied tables outside Starbucks (it being too cold for people to sit outside)…and decided that it was ideal. There wasn’t a good way of hiding what I was doing from the people sitting inside. (I’ve no idea why I feel I should be 4Qating unobserved but it seems appropriate!) So, folded under the ashtray on one of the tables, more from Amaryllis:-

We were climbing then, with lots of sky all around us and was that – yes, it was – the sea, just a greyness, a flatness, a Here-I-amness. We parked at the Beachy Head Countryside Centre, a brown national-park-looking place, THE FAMILY WELCOME, Full menu served all day, 11.30am to 10.00pm.

With our sandwiches and thermos of tea we made our way to the view of the white cliffs and the toy lighthouse and the grey and kelpy-looking strand between us while the sea, grey and dimpled, moved far, far below us like a leaden porridge slowed by distance, advancing in sluggish small wavelines to the base of the cliffs. The joyful little brown dog frolicked ahead of us while the black Labrador continued to urge caution. Reaching the edge of the grass the little brown dog flung himself over headfirst and we were afraid to look but it was not the end of him because he reappeared laughing so it had not after all been an edge of no return.

That was six years ago, and when my mind goes back to that dawn it gives me the vampire wedding, the leaden porridge of the sea, and that meditation of crows.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Vernon Ó Heigheartaigh 2007

The remembering sea, at Kilcar and Fintra, Co. Donegal.

"Do you think the rain remembers, Fremder?"

"I think everything remembers, Pythia."

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

from Fremder