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.

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

Lara Hoffenberg 2007

Just to add my little bit to Lisa Greenstein's tale of our 2007 4qation .... I never thought I'd 4qate a gym! Never thought I'd be the kind of person who went to a gym, in fact. So the issue of what's-possible, what's-in-you-but-not-of-you, fascinates me at the moment. I left my yellow paper in a locker, between the mats stacked by the huge exercise balls, and hidden in the health-food menus. This was my choice for 2007:

'Think of it," his father used to say - "in a thousandfold dilution, the memory of a single drop of medicine persists and works its cure. Only the memory! In a single cell of a human being is the memory of the whole design. In each of us is the memory, however inaccessible, of the beginning of the universe. We are the memory of the dust of stars." He would press his forehead against Max's. "In you," he said, "there must be memories inherited from me. I know I have these from my father - black trees, the smell of snow, the sound of cossacks. Ravens."

from Her Name Was Lola

Happy birthday Russ!

Lara

Paul Saich 2006

I discovered this site a few days after the Some-Poasyum event last year so didn’t take part but I made a mental note to remember it – then forgot about it. A couple of weeks ago in chatting with a friend who travels on the Piccadilly line to Russell Square I suddenly remembered that there was something I was supposed to be doing – and fortunately was a few days ahead of myself.

A few words about the choices of locations and quotes.

Locations – no plan. Any plan I might have had (which was rather vague and involved travelling to South Ken and the Science Museum on the tube and then meandering back to Liverpool St on foot and by bus) went out of the window with the news that much of the Circle was out of action, no Metropolitan, and no Piccadilly. So I went for a bit of a walk and let locations crop up as and when.

For the quotes – I chose five. (I was trying to make up for missing last year but also I just couldn’t choose between them.) One is from Fremder, three from Amaryllis Night and Day and one from Her Name was Lola. I tried to find things that might strike a chord for people. The quotes were all chosen as examples of different sorts of romance (and there’s plenty of that!) Russ’s books all seem to me to be love stories – rather romantic, all the better for being eccentric – and all make me feel different about the world as I read them. For that reason, I’ve deliberately not read them all – I’ve a few that I’ve not started as I suppose I am saving them up for when I need refuelling. I think Amaryllis might be my favourite. And I had to choose something from Her Name was Lola seeing as Max travels in on the Piccadilly Line to Russell Square, which was the start point for me in taking part this year.

I was up at 7am on the day but due to a few distractions, didn’t get out of the house until about 9.30am. The train to London stops at Stratford so my lack of a plan was itself derailed when I decided at the last minute to get off there and leave something on the Central Line – to float across London from East to West. However people kept asking me questions about tube stations – I didn’t realise I looked especially tube-informed! – so instead of leaving anything I got off at Liverpool St and left the first quote on a seat near the platform.

As always, her face came to me half-turned-away. Probably she wouldn’t want to be taken for granted after last night’s glim. With that in mind I went to the first place where we’d seen each other in the unglim world: the Klein-bottle display in the Science Museum. There I waited as I’d done at the town library when I was fourteen and hoping for a glimpse of a girl I hadn’t yet dared to speak to. I seemed to have a lot of breath in me and I had to keep exhaling.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

And then, stuck on the information board of a public phone on the concourse at Liverpool St station, the opening of Fremder:-

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

When I first read Fremder it took me quite a while to get through the first few pages as I kept stopping and returning to what seemed to me to be an impossibly cinematic and romantic start to a story.

Liverpool St was supposed to be the start point of my half-baked plan but it was here that the plan unbaked entirely when I discovered the disruptions on the tube. I’d had notions of leaving quotes circulating around London by leaving a lot on the Circle Line – not today, mate! Well maybe if I walked to Holborn and got the Piccadilly Line to – Nope! Back to the Central Line, I went as far as Chancery Lane. Before leaving, I taped to the inside of the sliding doors:-

‘But I need you to stay with me longer than that, I need you not to wake up too soon.’

‘ “Not wake up too soon!” I don’t think I’ve been asked that before. You need me to stay with you in a dream? I don’t understand that. And I don’t understand how you managed to get into my dream when I’ve never seen you before in my waking life.’

‘It wasn’t your dream, it was mine. I brought you into it because I tuned in to you. I wasn’t sure I’d connected, though, until you turned up at the Balsamic.’

‘You call it “the Balsamic” as if it’s a place you’re very familiar with.’

‘Too true.’

‘You often wait there for the bus to Finsey-Obay?’

She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders as if she were cold. ‘More often than I’d like,’ she said, looking past me.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Off the train, out and into the world above. Along High Holborn I taped the Fremder quote to a wall near a cash point and then the following to the central reservation of the crossing with Southampton Row:-

How quickly the strange becomes the usual! I was in love with a woman who was most responsive to me when we were both asleep. Between the glim and the unglim, where was reality? I went out on the balcony and looked to the west. There was the moon, one night past the full, sailing serenely in and out of the cloud-wrack. Perhaps Amaryllis too was looking at it now. It was 01:35.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Next stop Shaftesbury Avenue. I’d planned to leave this in a phone box:-

‘A notable show of restraint,’ says Lola. ‘Would you like to help me out of this corset?’

‘Yes,’ says Max in his bed in Poole Hospital. The essence of Lola is feeding into him as it were intravenously. Never until now has he felt the charm of her, the strangeness, the sweetness and the pathos of her running in his veins like this. ‘Lola, Lola, Lola,’ he whispers.

‘Did you call me?’ says Nurse Laura, approaching on sturdy footsteps.

‘Just talking to myself,’ says Max.

from Her Name Was Lola

I wasn’t entirely sure about taping a quote mentioning corsets and nurses over ads for the various “services”… and at the last moment changed my mind. Instead I taped it to the side of a building near a phone box. As I emerged from behind the pillar, I nearly bumped into an enormous policeman who seemed as startled as I. I had half a mind to explain myself but didn’t – I just continued down the street. I saw him glance at it but I’ve no idea if he read it or took it down or did anything at all about it. The Chinese lanterns around Gerrard Street obviously reminded me of Amaryllis! Not part of the non-plan and it was nice to be caught off-guard.

There wasn’t a colossal amount of thought going into the rest as I’d had a tiring and odd few days. So – Piccadilly Circus and then a cafe nearby for coffee and on leaving I taped a quote to the table. Went for a wander back along Regents St. It sounded as though there was some sort of disturbance at Oxford Circus. Two of the quotes I left in a branch of Waterstone’s in Oxford Street, and two in the HMV opposite Bond St tube. Carried on wandering west but then at some point decided I’d gone far enough so I crossed the street to make my way back. At Oxford Circus there was a woman talking about God and having a fulfilling life. There was lots of fulfilment. She was very insistent. She also had a loudhailer.

I bought Come Dance with Me in Borders on Oxford St (as well as a new copy of Kleinzeit – no idea where the old one is) and left the “How quickly the strange becomes the usual…” quote folded up into a display copy of Ian McEwan’s Atonement as I was leaving the shop. Then went for a quick (1pm) drink at the Pillars of Hercules. Just tomato juice (on the grounds of overdoing it the night before) but it was one of those pre-mixed ones that was over-sauced. I’m not convinced I felt any better on leaving the pub than I’d done on entering. I left the “bus for Finsey-Obay” quote from Amaryllis on a table near the back of the pub where it’s quite dark.

Nearly at the end. I left the Finsey-Obay quote in a display copy of the new Hilary Mantel book in Borders on Charing Cross Road, Fremder in Virgin on Oxford Street (in between copies of the new Franz Ferdinand CD). Taped one to the front of a vending machine on the Central Line platform at Tottenham Court Road tube, then went back to Liverpool St. The one I’d left by the public phone earlier was still taped there so it lasted at least two and a half hours! A quote folded into a book in Waterstone’s in Chelmsford, and a quote into a copy of the new Murakami. Then – that was that! Off to chat to a friend, watch the rugby with people, etc. Coincidentally I was out at a birthday bash (for two people) in the evening.

A belated Happy Birthday!

And happy birthday to all the rest of you… whenever the solar system gets around to making it your day. It’s been really nice hearing your thoughts.

Cheerio,

Paul

Lisa Greenstein 2006

My first choice got tucked between the red velvet cushions at a bar called Joburg, where the barman said he'd run out of juice but could put together something tall and cool (and he did):

Whoosh! High in the sky goes Rocket Max. Showers of stars explode over the Coliseum, it's like a movie. The stick falls back to earth in St Martin's Lane. "This is it," he says to his mind. "This is the real thing. This is my destiny woman." All through the shop heads turn. "Did I say that out loud?" he says.

"Audibly," says Lola. Blushing.

"What do I do now?" says Max.

from Her Name was Lola

I left another copy on the chair of the next table in a burger bar called Royale Kitchen. The waitress (picture Amaryllis with an Afro and an apron) found it, and read it as she rolled cigarettes in the back of the restaurant. 'It's a quotation,' she told me as I walked past to the toilets.

Where I left the other:

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him.

The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being. The wheel had been when he ran tawny on the plain, printing his motion on the grateful air. He had died biting the wheel that went on and left him dead. The wheel continued, the lion continued. He was intact, diminished by nothing, increased by nothing, absolute. He ate meat or he did not eat meat, was seen or unseen, known when there was knowledge of him, unknown when there was not. But always he was. For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him back to death and life again.

Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Happy birthday Russ!

Love Lisa

Olaf Schneider Christmas 2005

Interactive animations inspired by Russell Hoban writings

NOTE: Be sure to have the sound turned on for these Flash animations, and to give them a few moments to load. All open in a new window as they are hosted externally. You need to have installed Flash version 5 or later to view them. If you don't, download it for free.

Enjoy! - Olaf

Voices of the Starfield

Max and Lola, Lola and Max... a beautiful new animation based on a key scene from Her Name Was Lola, created specially for Christmas 2005.

The Pigeons of Trafalgar Square

An epic journey through the London landmark, as celebrated in Amaryllis Night and Day. Another Christmas special.

Alida Allison 2005

HAPPY 80th birthday, RUSSELL HOBAN

Feb. 4, 2005


Quotes from two of his many books:

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.

from The Bat Tattoo, London: Bloomsbury, 2002, p. 60

~ ~ ~ ~

The almost-full moon rises and looks down on the banks and ditches of the hill-fort, the labial configurations at either end meant to baffle invaders or possibly honour the white goddess. Despite the paling of the sky the stars are clearly visible, brighter than in London. Burning and flickering, they send their light down from before the age of dinosaurs, the Babylonian exile, the fall of Rome, the sack of Jerusalem.

from Her Name Was Lola, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, p. 91

Here are the photos of strategic yellow paper placements. Only one needs a bit of explanation - Feb. 4 we had a big Children's Theater Festival on my campus at which children's books were being sold. You can see some Frances titles--I had great fun slipping yellow paper into the books as a surprise for those wise enough to buy Hoban books. The other sites are on campus, too.

Best, alida

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 :)

Eli Bishop 2004

Stuck to a lamp-post at the top of a hill in Dolores Park, San Francisco - too urban a setting maybe, but at least a romantic scene did take place near there, what seems like ages ago:

Here is the ribbon she tied to the grass stem. It's blue, fluttering in the same wind. It's realer than it was when she put it there, it's more than itself. 'What is it?' Max says to his mind. 'Is it that reality isn't real to me the first time around?'

'What it is,' says his mind, 'is that you aren't always real the first time around.'

- from Her Name Was Lola

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 25/28

18:03

Istvan Fallok's little alley in Soho

(The Medusa Frequency, Her Name Was Lola)

In the paragraph immediately before this one (from Medusa), Herman Orff describes his walk from Oxford Circus Tube to Istvan Fallok’s studio-cum-neurology lab where he takes his HEAD FOR IT treatment. From a map of Soho it was easy enough to locate the real streets but the location of Fallok’s office itself was not stated. It wasn’t strictly necessary to find it, as there were any number of streets around and about this labyrinthine, dusky quarter which would easily suit Fallok’s purpose, but following the directions led me to a cul-de-sac off Broadwick Street called Dufours Place which could easily have accommodated such shenanigans. This was a cobbled square surrounded by smart office buildings and although there was no scaffolding today, there were steps leading down into a basement office and a window with a lamp in it twinkling in the night, where it was easy to imagine Herman getting hooked up to Fallok’s ECG-Fairlight combination and, more recently, Max Klein from Her Name Was Lola playing Fallok the mysterious CD that arrived through his door in similar fashion to the Medusa HEAD FOR IT flyer. Accordingly I put the quote through the letterbox on the ground floor level door and went back out into Broadwick Street and Oxford Street for the final section of my journey.

Postscript: Istvan Fallok resurfaced in Linger Awhile (2006). Herman Orff also had a walk-on part.

Next stop

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 8/28

08:57

Doria Road

09:05

New Kings Road

(The Bat Tattoo)

Doria Road was implicitly the home of Sarah Varley from The Bat Tattoo: on page 59 she walks from it into New Kings Road, commenting on the shop window displays and the feel of the early morning. The accuracy of the description in the book again made me wonder if Russ had been inspired to locate her there by a visit to the area, or whether he knew by heart what the locale looked like and had decided from his desk that this was where Sarah should live. It was a chicken-and-egg conundrum: which came first, the road or the character? Again, irrelevant (because “any part of it contains the whole of it”) but interesting to wonder where stories and characters first declare themselves in a writer’s imagination.

But, I digress. Doria Road is a very smart road indeed, wall-to-wall with white-painted semi-detached and terraced Victorian houses. Clearly Sarah Varley had done quite well for herself over the years, or had at least bought her home several years ago before house prices went from the sublime to the ridiculous. You couldn’t look at the houses in that road and its location just past the delightful green and not wish to live there.

It was impossible, however, for me to find a suitable spot in that quiet residential street to leave a sheet of yellow paper. I was actually beginning to wonder if I hadn’t been over-reaching myself with the yellow paper idea for the trip; it would have been just as good simply to visit these places and take a few pictures. As I walked back towards the Tube however I noticed the pair of telephone boxes which Sarah Varley. I put this quote on the shelf in one box, and the previous one about the shop windows in New Kings Road, in the other.

Next stop