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

peter morrison 2010

You’ll notice that i don’t call It by its right name. speaking its name might not actually bring it on but why take foolish chances. I’m talking about a certain sort of stoppage or ungoing, not infrequently an ongoing ungoing, that sometimes afflicts those whose trade is the writing of fiction. One of the strange truths about fiction is that practitioner writing with no difficulty on Monday may be utterly incapable of doing it on Tuesday. The poor blighter is suddenly rocked. ‘How’s it going?’ one’s friends ask cheerfully. ‘It’s not,’ one replied.

Can you pick it up from casual liaisons? Yes. From toilet seats? Yes. From reading the Sunday supplements? Watching The South Bank Show? Yes, yes. There are more ways of picking it up than not.

Various writers deal with it in various ways’ alcohol and frequent snacks, the traditional folk-remedies, do little to relieve the blankness of the page. Jogging has been known to result in the odd paragraph and a fair number of heart attacks. Hot baths and cold showers, travel and other forms of escape are unproductive.

One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect; certainly, in the mind-to-paper process, one’s choice of paper is important. I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into, isn’t It. While at the same time making a modest living if possible. Yellow paper definitely has less word resistance than blue; yellow-paper molecules are happier with blank-ink molecules than the blue paper ones are, and more susceptible to Brownian or even purpureal motion. I never use white paper - to intensity the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.

from "Blighters Rock", The Moment under The Moment

the picture shows this year's quote on my work monitor, with post-it to prompt the sourcing of yellow paper.... the quote itself was then tweeted (in a chopped up, unfortunately messy fashion), though was one of those days where i went to work and had dinner at friends, so had little other option. and would help if twitter weren't blocked from work....and all the parts had actually gone in from my phone. so it goes.

peter morrison 2008

i am so badly organised this year. but managed to leave the following quote in GFT in glasgow. it was gone when i came out of film. never sure what that means. i wonder... what happens to the sheet of yellow paper?

Max stands there for what seems a long time. The shapes of black keep moving and changing. The way they do it scares him. He'd like to think it's his mind playing up but this feels as this is coming from somewhere else. The black shapes are as sharp as razor blades. Max fears that if he makes a wrong move blood will come out of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. What would be a wrong move? A wrong thought? He plays close attention to the shapes of black. The distances between them are not always the same. A Woman He can't see touches his arm and says, 'Are you all right?'

'I'm OK, Thanks' he says. 'I was just trying to remember if I turned off the cooker.'

'And did you?'

'Not sure but I'll find out when I get home.'

'Good luck,' says the woman, and she's gone.

Is one of the black shapes moving away from the others? Is it something recognisable? Suddenly the world comes back. With a stench of desolation. It smells like a backed-up toilet in an empty house with broken windows. Out of the corner of his eye Max sees something following him. Is it a dog? A cat? It's a little man, black as ebony, long body, very short arms and legs, large head, big ugly baby-face. He's inching along on his belly like a dog that's been run over. Max looks around. Lots of foot traffic but no one's stepping on the dwarf. Nobody is taking any notice at all. The smell is almost making Max throw up but he wants to do the decent thing. He says to the dwarf, 'Are you all right?'

'Closer,' says the dwarf. His voice is like dead leaves skittering on the floor of that empty house with the backed-up toilet.

from Her Name Was Lola

Emmae Gibson 2007

You live in the country now. You lived in the country before, but this is the real thing. Mountains, stones and oceans, trees, green islands and untrodden valleys, and shortly before the 4th February you realise in panic that successful 4quating is an urban activity.

For a start, deer don’t read. Just have no idea.

Secondly, the amount of horizontal rain here lately would wash the profundities of Kleinzeit deeply underground.

Thirdly, you did bus stops last year.

Land and seascape so pristine, a shred of paper of any colour gets dirty looks from green people. Of which you are one, naturally. Yellow paper with black capitals fluttering on a tree trunk? Looks fine in a romantic movie, but you could get your name in the local newspaper; think of the ignominy in the same column as ‘Man Bites Diggs,’ you’d be ‘Woman Accused of Yellow Loitering.’

Out on the waves? Now there’s a pretty thought, a Riddley message in a bottle bobbing, bobbing. But - plastic or glass - Coke or Glenfiddich? Both death to turtles. You dare not.

So you find yourself in the city with your man, who’s always on business, the Saturday night before the Sunday 4th February morning, on the fifth floor of the Thistle Hotel, listening to the raucous voices of party-goers in the street below long after 3.a.m. In New York all you could hear were sirens; at least Glasgow still has its well-documented, human element.

You brought a carrying book, a spare paperback copy of the first Hoban you ever read. You remember another hotel, the one where you read it, how it took you by surprise on the long way home. You could throw it out of the window now and surprise someone else. Not exactly A4 in its presentation, not yellow in deed, but yellow in thought.

But no, it might hit someone and how user-friendly is that?

You go back to sleep. The yellow paper waits written and folded inside the book of surprise, with the golden words:

‘The ends of things are always present in their beginnings…. the ends are actually visible in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again…. some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again, no matter how the seeing changes in between.’

from Turtle Diary

In the morning you go down to breakfast with your man and your book. You don’t leave it on your table for the waiter. You don’t leave it in the room when you check out, or at reception; no, she’s not the one. By now you’re getting desperate. You’ve failed to 4quate, you’ve let the team down, and soon you’ll be back in the car speeding guiltily towards useless, wide-open spaces again. Man asks if you’re okay - concerned - was it the steak last night?

You’re the one with the car park ticket and the money.

“No charge, hen,” says the man in the kiosk with the another-boring-sunday face. “Residents free!”

“Oh?”

You pause for a second as he turns away from his little window, to yet another-sunday-paper. The car starts to slide away. You know he’s the one. You slide the book on to his window ledge, the yellow folded bookmark sticking out.

You could have said something, given it to him, explaining, but that’s not 4quating, is it?

It has to be surreptitious. More fittingly Hobanesque, for the recipient, for the bored man in the green luminous jacket, you have to give him the element of discovery, surprise, the change of face.

You’re sure he was the one.

peter morrison 2007

the first paragraph below i left on paper in the arches in glasgow, and posted the full thing on my blog/journal here and here.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. 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.

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they're swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can't believe they'd swim, 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can't shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.

Mr. Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I'd got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we'd subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.

It's hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he's about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that's what penguins do on overland journeys. They're big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be, swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can't see the sun, what then? Their vision isn't good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

i've only been reading hoban for a few years, think this is my 3rd sa4qe? i worked my way through all the bloomsbury books with the matching covers, not really realising turtle diary would become hard to get. but by the time i was ready to just get it despite it not matching the others, the only copy i had actually seen in the shops was gone. so i finally got round to buying it second hand about a month ago, and read it in the last couple of weeks. normally its the humour, the sense of the weird that creeps in that gets me with russell's work, though i acknowledge the darkness in his work. reading turtle, i guess it hit me in the rut, and turning that last page i was left with a sense of melancholy, a need to release my own turtle. since reading it the whole idea of "soup" has become a running gag between me and a friend - you have a choice, accept new ideas and keep moving, or become soup.

i avoided reading the related posts before i went out, not entirely sure why, but i didn't want it to influence me. very weird to then find that the same quote has already been used. and to think i nearly went for the one about the playboy in the shark cage and the parallels between fetishism, or william g's speculations about shamanism and the turtle as his spirit animal.

anyway, a good day to you all, and may you avoid being soup good and long!

peter morrison 2006

hello all. happy russ's birthday.

i sat last night and wrote out my SA4QE on one of the nice sheets of yellow paper i liberated from work. carried it around all day with me. took me awhile to decide where to put it. then as i headed towards HMV it hit me. leave it in the world cinema section, and given the nature of my quote, preferably with a horror film. i opted for the japanese ring trilogy box set, i felt given the themes of linger awhile that was a very appropriate place to leave a quote about a video-generated hopping thing...

Everything was going round and round with the ground sometimes tilting up and sometimes down while out of the corner of my eye I saw some great big hopping thing coming after me. I sprinted down Cecil Court, dodged through the traffic in St. Martin's Lane with the thing close behind, made a sharp right towards the Coliseum, then left and left again and so on trying to lose it but when I reached the lab it was still hot on my heels. Once I got inside I phoned the police while the hopping thing did its best to come through the wall. Scared? I didn't know whether to shit or go blind so I just closed one eye and farted and hoped for better times. It took about an hour and a whole lot of black coffee before the thing left off thumping and squelching and went back to wherever it lives.

from Linger Awhile

peter morrison 2005

i left the following quote at the UGC, Renfrew St, Glasgow, left in a cup holder during a showing of the film Closer:

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

-that is actually a somewhat apt quote for Closer, though on reflection, i can see it being the perfect choice of film for Russell, being so london based, but while watching it i became struck of the parallels with her name was lola. the opening sequence of the film shows a writer dan (=max; also in search of "page one") spotting his destiny girl alice (=lola), but then he is distracted by anna a photographer (=lula mae in a gallery), and then there is nice reliable dr. larry in the background (=basil lawyer). really it is a vague comparison, but for me the core idea really is the discovery of dan's destiny girl and his subsequent inability to hold on to her and remain true to her.

which is perhaps ironic given that my second quote is from her name was lola, though this is a virtual quote rather than physical quote, so that might be cheating?

He's looking for page one.

This is a bit like trying to retrieve a coin that's

fallen down a grating.

Is that it, that faint gleam in the darkness?

Not sure.

He lowers weighted strings and chewing gum and brings up bottle caps.

'Blighter's rock?' says Max's mind.

'I am not rocked,' says Max.

He avoids the proper name of that condition in which writers are unable to write.

from Her Name Was Lola

which should have been posted on my blog as a nice yellow back grounded image that I made specially. However, thanks to my poor internet/modem connection, I've had to opt for just a text post for now - but I am determined to post this image at some point! Anyway - its posted here for the moment (and my review of lola for anyone interested is posted here) and was posted while my image loading doo-daa was working...)

happy birthday russell

peter


ps: i also found this comic strip on the 4th appropriately enough - and thought they might be a suitable gift for celebrants of tentacles:

http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her2.html

http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her61.html

-enjoy :)