Richard Cooper 2012

SA4QE day 2012 being a Saturday, my two boys were off school, so I thought this a good time to introduce them to the wonders of 4qation. Joe (6) had in fact had an early introduction to the activity but I doubt he remembered much about it. I sat him and his brother Charlie, 5, down in the front room with some sheets of yellow paper and read them various poems from The Last of the Wallendas to encourage them to choose a poem or a line they liked and write it down. They found the poems a bit difficult to get into however, so I switched to a Hoban they were more familiar with, Trouble on Thunder Mountain. The book is a favourite one at bedtime, the fantastic Quentin Blake illustrations as much a joy as the beautifully-told short story of a small family of dinosaurs uprooted from their mountain home by a nut who wants to replace it with a plastic one. While I read the book Charlie picked out single words and wrote them down, and Joe did a drawing of his favourite part of the story (we won't hold it against him) when the dinosaurs' mountain is blown up by Mr Flatbrain and his team of robots. After I'd finished reading we talked about the story and agreed that having your home blown up and being forcibly relocated was A Bad Thing, and Joe wrote down this:

"A hi-tech plastic mountain?" said Dad.
"It takes a man named Flatbrain to think of something like that," said Jim.

- from Trouble on Thunder Mountain

I had discovered earlier that morning that today was also, by a lovely coincidence, National Libraries Day, in which people were being encouraged to visit their local library and get a Message across to the Authorities that our society would be the poorer for the closure of these services. Whether I personally feel that some in the UK's coalition government are akin to Mr Flatbrain, I couldn't possibly comment.

So with libraries and books very much in mind, we headed off on a very cold and grey afternoon just on the edge of snow into the town centre. Rugby is fortunate in some ways in that its main library building is also a museum and tourist centre, so is probably unlikely to be among those shut by the Flatbrains.

We went in half an hour before closing time and toured the shelves, picking out books that the boys found interesting, on minerals, stars, Sikhism, the Sahara Desert. I explained the Dewey system and we looked up "cars" in the catalogue and went looking for the relevant shelf number. We looked in the Fiction section for books by Russell Hoban and found a hardback of Angelica Lost and Found. I told them about the painting on the cover and Ruggiero flying on the hippogriff to save Angelica.

As much as I love the internet, and the boys are very web-literate for their ages, this is simply not something you can do online.

Suddenly it was nearly closing time, so we hurried into the children's section and found a leaflet holder on the wall in which - after explaining it was not an act of vandalism - I encouraged Joe to secrete his quote:

Then on the way out I left my own quotes, chosen earlier from The Moment under The Moment, in a good place by the front door (I did actually pop it into the box, which seemed otherwise empty, after taking the photo):

The people who run the world now were children once. What went wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown-ups?

- from Pan Lives (The Moment under The Moment)

In my house of childhood of the mind lives Vol. XVII of the Harvard Classics, the only book in the Five-Foot Shelf much handled; Locke and Hume and Darwin looked as new as the day they were unpacked but Vol. XVII was Folklore and Fable, Andersen and Aesop and the brothers Grimm, and it was in heavy use. Oscar Wilde’s House of Pomegranates and The Arabian Nights live there also. As a child I did much of my reading in the room in our house called the library. It was lined with books in Russian, Yiddish, and English and had a massive oak table. No one else I knew had such a room. I had outdoor reading places as well, and of these my favourite was a big old wild cherry tree where in season I read Robin Hood and ate little sun-warmed black cherries.

- from “‘I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping…’” (The Moment under The Moment)

We went home just as it started snowing heavily, and I tweeted and Facebooked it all.

Richard Cooper 2008

I had very little time to 4qate this year, and the prospect of trying to find a quote (especially one I hadn't already used) from Russell Hoban's huge oeuvre seemed more daunting than ever, so I went back to first principles and tried to think of the main reasons I was initially attracted to his work. These were: a lyrical writing style; a great sense of humour; an ability to make mundane things fascinating; and a refusal to accept the 'limited-reality consensus'. I thought I would try and find a passage that not just represented those but which the average passing stranger might stand a chance of identifying with. With all of this in mind I reached firstly for Kleinzeit: I enjoyed revisiting both the long passages and the one-liners, but somehow it was all a bit too weird to grab the attention of the passer-by. Of course, weirdness is another reason I enjoy Russ's books, and you can divorce hardly any of the best bits within them from a general, all-pervading sense of weirdness. Fighting off a slight sense of futility, then, I remembered this passage - a shining snippet of dialogue between the protagonist Herman Orff and film-maker Gosta Kraken - from The Medusa Frequency, my first and probably still favourite Hoban novel, which met my criteria and also sat well with my intention this year of filming my 4qation for the website.

`What is Luise to you?'
`Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.'
`Don't roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.'
`Seven years ago with my sound man.'
`What do you suppose she heard in him?'
`Other music.'
`And what did she ever see in you?'
`Flickering images.'
`Of what?'
`It doesn't matter, it's the flickering that gives the excitement. 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 betwen the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?'
`Luise saw all that in you, did she?'
`It isn't only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I'm so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman's natural
holding-on reflex.'
`And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.'
`Nothing is for ever.'

from The Medusa Frequency

As it happened, the video is of me reading the passage, but I didn't film the paper-drop itself as it didn't seem terribly cinematic. This was posted on a notice-board outside a nearby village church hall which always seems to be completely empty (both the hall and the notice-board): it was nice to finally see something on there - a Hoban quote especially.

If you have any problems viewing the video above try going direct to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UyzfwgZiq4