Hugh Bowden 2010

These are not happy times to be an academic in Britain, or anywhere else come to that. My job, like that of my colleagues in Arts & Humanities is, technically, at risk of redundancy. At least I have no teaching on Thursdays, so once I had dealt with all the administration that had been piling up in my e-mail inbox and elsewhere I had time to get out of the office and do a brief bit of 4quating. The following exchange seemed to resonate with my mood:

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

- from Pilgermann

I printed it out on yellow A4 paper, added today’s date and the sa4qe.blogspot.com address, and took them off to the college library. It was inevitable that I would leave them in the history section: one on a desk, next to War, a book edited by Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is currently part of the Chilcot enquiry, and the other next to a book called Truth is the First Casualty, on events in the Vietnam War.

Plenty of students there suffering from attacks of history. And the rest of us.

But some can wear 85 years of history lightly: Happy Birthday to one of them.

An Hugh Bis
Dr Hugh Bowden
Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Department of Classics, King's College London

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Hugh Bowden 2009

Full of good intentions, but hampered by the cold (mine and the climate's), I ended up 4qating at home. In my study, on a piece of yellow A4 paper, watched over by a miniature bronze Anubis, resting on a plinth made of a piece of limewood from Moss & Co. above a signed copy of Come Dance with Me, I wrote the following:

Dangling from his beak is a dead rabbit who looks exactly like Peter Rabbit without the blue jacket. Bubo bubo's dreadful amber eyes say simply, "It has fallen to me to do this. It is my lot." His fierce woolly owl-babies huddle before him waiting for their dinner.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, ch. 4
4 February 2009 sa4qe.blogspot.com

Taken one way, it seems to me, there is something of the horror of H.P. Lovecraft in this revelation of the implacable ferocity that lies behind the eyes of an ordinary eagle owl in a zoo. In part it is the juxtaposition of death and feeding with children's literature - consciously in the case of Peter Rabbit, precognitively with Owl Babies, a children's classic yet to be drawn and written in 1975.

Okay, so the only people likely to see this ensemble in the flesh are my wife and children, who will consider it typical eccentricity, but thanks to Gombert and the spirit of SA4QE the photo may get wider viewing. The bronze watcher and his plinth are all souvenirs of the Some-poasyum.

Hugh Bowden 2008

After having failed dismally to 4quate last year (I was on leave, so all the time in the world but never enough time for anything) I made rather more of an effort this year, although I think the result shows a disappointing literal-mindedness. My excuse is that I had been busy trying, and failing, to make sense of the cult of Isis in the Greco-Roman world (as one does), and was not able to think very subtly. My choice of quotation was from the fifteenth chapter of the Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, starting somewhere on the second page (I left out the detail of who was saying the words):

‘Easy enough to see where the sculptor’s sympathies lay. His commission may have been from the king but his heart was with the lion. The king, for all the detail and all the curls in his beard is little more than an ideograph, a symbol referring to the splendour of kings. But the lion!
‘The king is almost secondary. The mortal stretch of the lion’s body meets the length of the spears he hurls himself upon, becomes one long diagonal thrust of forces eternally opposed. That thrust is balanced on the turning wheel and the lion’s frowning dying face is at the centre, biting the wheel. Masterfully composed, the whole thing. The king is secondary, really — a dynamic counterweight. He’s only there to hold the spear, and nothing less than a king would be of suitable rank for the death of that lion.’

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz

There was really only one place to leave the passage, so I printed off five copies, with a picture at the top and 4 February 2008 www.sa4qe.com on the bottom, and headed to the Assyrian Galleries of the British Museum. The museum was full of school parties and tourists, and there was a constant trickle of people through the lion hunt passage. I sat on the bench and looked at the lion biting the wheel - although I actually always find my self drawn to the dead lion to his right, body twisted upside down and his tongue hanging out - and put the sheets of yellow A4 paper on the bench beside me, with my hand resting on them. Feeling more like a character out of a le Carré novel than an Hoban one (but then again, middle-aged academic sitting on a bench in central London feeling that I am doing something vaguely improper - who am I trying to fool?) I waited until the museum attendant had made her slow way through the gallery, and then walked out in the other direction, without a backward glance.

Not really a photo-opportunity, although the scene could be illustrated with the lion biting the wheel. In all probability the paper will have been spotted by a cleaner and rapidly consigned to a bin, but there is always a chance that someone will have picked one up, thinking it an information sheet - which of course it was. I suppose that, had I thought about it more, I could have mocked it up to look like a BM leaflet (although those are mostly full-colour these days) or a school work-sheet, but I don't think that that would be quite in the spirit of the exercise.

Happy Birthday Russ!

An Hugh Bis

Hugh Bowden 2006

Saturday not being a working day (if the division between working and non-working days means anything for academics expected to publish, and therefore to have things worth publishing, and therefore to keep thinking about what is worth writing more or less all the time - other academics on the list will nod in agreement; everyone else will say, 'what on earth is he complaining about? He could always get a real job,' an argument it is difficult convincingly to refute) I was not restricted to SA4Quating in central London as I have for the last two years. But various matters prevented me from roaming too far from home, and anyway, the good people of Finsbury Park might benefit from my spreading the word on yellow paper.

This year I felt that I wanted something musical, so the word on yellow paper was this:

As we watched me tumbling over and over in frozen stillness she advanced the audio beam to its next track and The Art of Fugue, performed by Marie-Claire Alain, came stalking into the room on its centuries-high legs. It was as if Bach had with spells and numbers called forth some cosmic monster that would eat me up, eat up the world with its implacable and insatiable logic.

from Fremder

Someone down the road sings in a choral society, and she advertises concerts by tying posters (A4) to a tree on the pavement, in thin plastic covers. I thought that my contribution would fit there well, so that is where it went, with yesterday's date and the SA4QE URL at the bottom.

An Hugh Bis

Hugh Bowden 2005

There was a policeman standing at the top of Surrey Street, where Harold Klein was almost sexually assaulted in Angelica's Grotto. I could see him from my office window, turning cars away. I couldn't see anything happening on Surrey Street, but it seemed an ominous sign.

I spent Wednesday afternoon reviewing the English Department here. No-one called Melissa Bottomley appeared in any of the documentation, but since the last review of the Department seven years ago more than half the staff have changed. I discovered that the only person present at both the review seven years ago and the one this week was me.

Fridays this term are particularly busy. Broken up by moving from room to room, discussing the same poems with different groups of students. It can make SA4quating a problem. In the end I put up my sheet of A4 yellow paper somewhere in College. The quotation was rather short:

KINESIS/ANAPAUSIS

as written on the Paxos Stone in Angelica's Grotto (Bloomsbury 1999, p. 15)

Motion/Rest, or perhaps Go/Stop. A bit like my day.

I could probably tell this story in a different way.

HUGH'S STORY TOLD IN A DIFFERENT WAY

I have not yet read all of Russell Hoban's books. This does, I suspect, put me in a happier position than those who have read them all, because I still have the thrill of discovery of those that I haven't started yet.

Most recently I read Angelica's Grotto, which seems to me the twisted offspring of two earlier novels. The Odilon Redon Pegase Noir, central to the story, was born from the dark blood of Medusa; and of course Harold, once upon a time, was Kleinzeit. It seems to me a book full of things hinted at, but not said (what are Redon, Gustave Moreau and Antonio Carlos Jobim doing together there?); everything left unresolved - it is a novel of unresolution. And those who know it, and note the address at the bottom of this message, can imagine that it had resonances for me.

SA4QE does not have to be site specific, but sometimes perhaps it can be. Having read the book, I was drawn irresistably to one place. After I finished teaching I went through to the English Department. I 'found buff-coloured bricks, pigeonholes, a noticeboard, NO SMOKING, and a perspective of square illuminations in the ceiling' (interrupted by newly installed, and unpopular, fire doors. 'The door of Room 231 had two narrow vertical windows one above the other.' It was empty, with a sole student waiting nearby to talk to a lecturer who was on the phone, with her door open. I stuck my yellow A4 notice to the door, took a picture of it, and made my escape.

The choice of quotation was, I suppose, self-indulgent: a Classicist finding something classical. It was printed 'in black ink, in Greek letters':

KINESIS/ANAPAUSIS

[Angelica's Grotto p. 15]

But to give the sheet a chance of a slight after life, I added below, in Caslon (a College official font):

The Politics of Language, Room 231

[Angelica's Grotto p. 156]

I will see if it is still there on Monday.

Today would have been Harold Klein's birthday. It is more important that it is Russ's. Happy 80th!

Maybe this all sounds a bit too contrived. In which case there is always another way of telling it.

Hugh Bowden 2004

My first SA4QE... and my first posting to the Kraken, so hello...

A bit of background. I teach half a course on Greek and Roman Myth, and for my half I spend 10 weeks looking at the Orpheus story, from Vergil and Ovid onwards (and indeed back to the Argo and other older things). In putting the course to together I came upon Kleinzeit and The Medusa Frequency, and this reignited my interest in Russ's work which began when I had The Mouse and his Child read to me as a child - I had also read Riddley Walker in the meantime. Researching the course led me to The Head of Orpheus and The Kraken, and I read archived postings there, and learned about SA4QE, which I had by then missed. I also mentioned it to a friend who is a journalist interested in things literary and wise.

On Tuesday the journalist rang and said, 'tomorrow is February 4th'. 'Yes,' I replied, 'and?' 'It's February 4th.' 'Yes.' 'It's Russell Hoban's birthday.' And I decided I ought to add my own tribute. I thought first of finding a site in London from one of the books, but realised that Richard Cooper had done everything so thoroughly last year that I would have to think of something else.

So I took an idea from Hermann Orff, and looked up Orpheus in London in the Electronic Yellow Pages. There were two entries: one was the Orpheus Restaurant & Bar in Savage Gardens, which Hermann Orff (and Richard) had covered. The other was Orpheus Publications Ltd, First Floor, 330 High Holborn. (N.B. native born Londoners pronounce 'Holborn' with the L and R silent.) It seemed to me to be a message.

I went past 330 High Holborn on my way to work. There was no sign of Orpheus Publications Ltd, but opposite it was a branch of Rymans. I went in and bought some yellow A4 paper, photocopier, 80gsm. As I left I noticed in the window a display of personal shredders. Orphic, I thought.

At lunchtime I went back to 330 High Holborn and stuck up the following quotation, chosen because Kleinzeit is the most enlightening commentary on the Orpheus story that I have come across:

Think of the head of Orpheus snuffling in the reeds by the river at night, sniffing out his parts. It's dark, the moon has set. You hear something moving, like a dog hunting in the reeds. You can't see your hand in front of your face, you only hear something moving about close to the ground. You feel the air on your face, you feel with your face the passage of something between you and the river. There is a sighing perhaps, you can't be sure. Someone unseen walks away slowly. He's found his members, said Kleinzeit. He's remembered himself. What is harmony, said Hospital, but a fitting together?

from Kleinzeit

I took a photo of the paper in place (and it was still there 40 minutes later).

There was still no sign of Orpheus Publications. Actually the company's website gives a different address on some of its pages, 138-142 Holborn, so maybe they have moved. It would only be a few yards away, but the address is a level lower.

All of which is a way of saying Hi Hoban, or more properly, Happy Birthday Russ!

Hugh Bowden - profile

Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, King's College London