Diana Slickman 2012

I found myself without yellow paper this morning. Also without Russ, but I expected that.  I had a quote - two, in fact - from The Bat Tattoo. I had selected the book at random, as is my practice on February 4, and as is my practice, opened the book at random to see what volunteered itself to go out into the world.  The quotes themselves suggested where they wanted to be left, and I agreed.  But I needed the paper!  I took the red line downtown and dropped into an art supply store, where I was pleased to note that while fashions may come and go, art students look the same as they always have, or at least the same as they did when I as in school; desperately, uniformly unconventional. I was cheerfully sold a few sheets of yellow paper and a new pen by the art student behind the till, and I went to a coffee shop to prepare the quotes for their journey.  I still 4Qate by hand.  On one page, I transcribed this:

"I always feel good in museums.  I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long departed Now."

On another paper, this:

"At the corner of Parsons Green Lane I nodded to the two telephone boxes that stood like a pair of lanterns and paused to acknowledge the trees which were still embracing the night.  I admire those trees; fashions come and go but the trees still maintain their original identity, their unfashionable mystery.  They hold last night's darkness like lovers reluctant to let go....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."

I added, as is my custom, to each of these a little addendum that went something like this:

"Russell Hoban, from The Bat Tattoo.
February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday.  This paper, and your finding it and reading it, are part of an annual worldwide celebration of the man and his work."

But this year I had to add, "He passed away in December."

I finished my coffee and headed across the street to the Art Institute of Chicago, a formidable stone building on Michigan Avenue, guarded by two bronze lions, full of high ceilings and footfalls and silences.  I went to buy a ticket, but the young man behind the counter told me that if I waited 15 minutes, I could get in at a reduced rate, as it would be within an hour of close.  That sounded reasonable, so I took myself back outside and headed to a little park one block south.  There, carefully spaced in little plots hemmed in by wide gravel paths, were a few trees accepting what light they could in the shadow of Michigan Ave.'s curtain wall of tall buildings. It was a Russ sort of day: gray, breezy, with a hint of damp. I picked a tree at random, at a corner of two paths, and pinned the tree quote to it.  It fluttered a little in the breeze, as though shaking itself out to settle into the work of being a quote pinned to a tree.

Still with time to kill before the hour of reduced admission, I wandered into the Art Institute's book store.  Vermeer's pearly girl looked pleadingly out of the covers of two or three books.  We regarded one another, acknowledging the lack of Russ in the world.  And then I saw a big handsome volume of Edward Hopper paintings standing at attention on a shelf and I knew my work would be done here.  I opened the book at random, as is my custom, and found there a picture of a woman in a slip, standing at a window, looking out into the morning light.  I put the museum quote next to her and closed the book.

I took the train back home, without going into the museum.

Here's to Russ.
Slick

Photo borrowed from this blog

Diana Slickman  founded the Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE) in 2002.  More info

Twitterers, Facebookers and Bloggers 2011

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

- from Turtle Diary, tweeted by Joe Snow

Place of dismemberment? said Kleinzeit.
Everywhere, all the time, said Hall of Records.

- from Kleinzeit, tweeted by David Dixon

Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don't know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. when I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

- from Come Dance With Me, tweeted by John D here and here

‘A sense of loss pervades the paintings of Peter Diggs,’ wrote the critic Cecil Berkeley about my last show at the Fanshawe Gallery.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by remotevoices

There's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us.

- from The Mouse and His Child, tweeted by Chris Bell

(Bat bowl from the Victoria & Albert Museum that inspired The Bat Tattoo)

Facebooked by Olle Lawson

A Dog shall rise and a Rat shall fall.

- from The Mouse and His Child, Facebooked by Alison Baker

I do not like the way you slide,
I do not like your soft inside,
I do not like you lots of ways,
And I could do for many days
Without eggs.

- from Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs, Facebook-commented by Becky Morgan

I am actually a believer. I have faith that there's nothing that cares about us one way or the other.

- from The Bat Tattoo, tweeted by Danielle Carr

I searched in my A to Z for anything Balsamic but there was nothing.

- from Amaryllis Night and Day, tweeted by Squirmelia

And finally, here's a lovely post on the happy birdaycake blog from 7 February 2011 in which a mother and daughter make a real "Marzipan Pig" - not exactly a 4qation but just as tasty...

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.

Dave Awl 2009

Here amid the ongoing chaos of my life in the midddling-to-latter part of the 00s, I have been very bad at 4Qating in recent years -- and even worse at reporting on it. The Mincery of 4Qation lists my last documented 4Qation as taking place in 2004, such a dizzying long time ago that many people still thought John Kerry might be US president someday and the Doctor wasn't back on the telly yet.

Although most years I have managed to get out and slip a few pieces of yellow paper into the world sometime within a week or so of the fourth, I have rarely managed to get these exploits written up and posted, with or without photos.

One year not so many half-decades ago, I actually organized a little dinner gathering at a restaurant, and placed a folded yellow paper by everyone's place setting. I took pictures of all this. At the moment I have no idea where they might be -- no doubt flotsaming around somewhere in my exobrain. But I certainly never got around to writing the cheery and amusing account of it all that I'd envisioned.

This year, in hopes of keeping both the 4Qation and its documentation more streamlined and therefore more like to make it to the Internets eventually, I limited myself to a single quotation, forbade myself to even think about photography, and for the first time ever hand-wrote the thing on a sheet of yellow paper like Ms. Slickman originally intended instead of typesetting some elaborate handout with multiple quotes like I'd done in the past.

I decided to pick a quotation from a book I'd never 4Qated from before, and something from a relatively recent book (rather than a classic quote from the First Six Novels, which I have mined so heavily over the years).

So I chose this early passage from The Bat Tattoo, which is hands-down my favorite Hoban book of the 00s -- the one I think most deserved a US release and yet inexplicably didn't get one.

Here is what my yellow paper said.

***

February 4, 2009

"Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary -- you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T'ang Dynasty -- their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.

"There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends."

-- Russell Hoban, The Bat Tattoo (p. 3)

Compliments of The Kraken
In honor of Russell Hoban's 84th Birthday
sa4qe.blogspot.com

***

I wrote this out on a sheet of paper at the neighborhood pack-and-mail store, copied it onto roughly half-a-dozen sheets of yellow paper, and then slipped them inside copies of a few of Chicago's alternative weeklies at a couple of different coffehouses in Andersonville (my neighborhood in Chicago). I also slipped a couple between boxes of tea at the neighborhood supermarket.

Thus endeth the 2009 report, submitted only about two months late. Next year my goal will be to get it filed while the sun is still in Aquarius.

Dave

=============================
~~~ http://www.ocelopotamus.com

Antti Savela 2008

Happy birthday Russ!

Antti


If you have any problems viewing the video above try going direct to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7rQo90fHK0

Steve Long 2007

This year's SA4QE began for me when I got hold of a copy of The Trokeville Way. It arrived on Saturday 3rd Feb, and I noticed that Russ had quoted a couple of lines from AE Housman's poem A Shropshire Lad at the front of the book. Things immediately began to slip into place - I had been planning to visit Shropshire on the 4th Feb for some weeks, for another reason. I had seen it as an opportunity to 4Qate somewhere different, but the reference to Shropshire in the Hoban book suddenly made it significant.

On Sunday morning I was running in a hill race on the Long Mynd, a hill above Church Stretton. It was a dry and sunny day, although the ground was still frozen underfoot where it was shaded by the hills. The views were superb. The race over, we wanted to look around Ludlow, an historic old town with plenty of timbered buildings, cobbled passageways etc. We found a market there, a typical Sunday market with stalls of collectibles, bric-a-brac, old books, jewellery etc.

I was looking out for some Hoban symbolism, and saw for example a turtle brooch. Then rummaging at a bookstall I noticed a book by a Norma Ridley, called something like "Northumbrian Approach". The similarity between Ridley and Riddley, Russ's Mr Walker, was too good to miss. The book was in a box containing an assortment of hardbacks including some art history, e.g. on van Gogh, and appeared to be popular with the browsing public. I slipped my yellow paper between Ms Ridley's book and the next.

The yellow paper contained the following text:

He went to the window, looked at the frost-sparkling cars, thought of the seasons revolving inexorably while metal rusted and flesh decayed, thought of trees across the common, now bare, how in the summer dawns they swayed their leafy tops in the early breeze, indifferent to humans who slept and woke and slept again.

from Angelica's Grotto

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman's hand on a necklace, a man's hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, entirely?

from The Bat Tattoo

I like the first quotation because it makes a beautiful contrast between nature's cycles and the more superficial cycles of man. Hoban's words show how nature's cycles have such permanence and reliability in comparison to our own. They highlight how unreliable our actions, and how impermanent we are.

In the second quotation I like the idea that anything touched by us somehow retains a memory of us. Things like hand rails and old stone steps are obvious examples, but Hoban uses much lighter touches, contrasting male and female aspects. This sensitivity and closeness of observation is one of the reasons I like Russ's work so much.

On another stall at the market in Ludlow I happened on a copy of A Shropshire Lad, a 1948 reprint of an 1896 edition, and I bought it.

Best wishes,

Steve

Deena Omar 2007

For some reason, I got stuck in my own stillness on Sunday and spent the day re-reading most of Her Name was Lola and huge chunks of Pilgermann. The latter sent me into a strange dark space as it always does. On Monday, happily, my stillnesses blurred into motion. Can't resist Underground quotes - I love 'em, I sometimes feel like I live on the bloody London Underground, I'm in a long-term dysfunctional relationship with it. Here's my first quote:

Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of the carriage become the rolling passage in the darkness of my mind.

from The Bat Tattoo

This was left under a copy of Metro on a northbound Northern Line tube just before I got off at Kings Cross, and another copy of same was left tucked into the leaflet rack behind a leaflet about Oystercards.

My second choice was:

We are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action.

from Fremder

One copy left on a pile of photocopy paper in my staff workroom, the other amongst leaflets in the waiting room of my audiology clinic where I went to get my hearing aid fixed (only the best people wear them, you know).

All had the sa4qe url, book title and Russ's name on them.

Seem to have wheels on my mind this year.

Both choices were partly inspired by Olaf's gorgeous graphics.

No idea if anyone found them.

Yvonne Studer 2006

Dear Krakenistas

As I have been feeling a little melancholy and middle-aged lately, my SA4QE quotes all had to do with time and they were left in places which reflected or recorded the passing of time in one way or another. I invited my husband Dani to come with me because he knows the best second-hand shops in town. There were two on our way, in case the first one, Brocki Land, a huge shop for antiques, knick-knacks, junk and second-hand records and books in a former basement car park didn't offer a suitable spot for 4qating. But it turned out to be marvellous.

You enter by walking down the spiral driveway that once led down into the car park. There are two levels. On the upper one you can get candlesticks, scales, baskets, toys, golf clubs, tennis rackets, chess boards, vinyl records, video cassettes, cameras and kitchenware, gratings for your fireplace (if you have one) as well as furniture. To go further down, you follow the spiral driveway along picture frames, framed and unframed kitsch paintings hanging on the walls or standing on the floor and chairs of all kinds, light, heavy, made of wood or of metal. On the lower level, there are clothes, shoes, flower pots, demijohns, bottles, wine, water, sherry and schnapps glasses, silver cutlery, china crockery and books, countless shelves of books. I put the first quotation on a shelf with English books which were beckoning and evoking London and Russ at the same time. To be more precise, I placed the folded yellow sheet between a book on Westminster and another one on Russian Icons, in the gap left by a fascinating book titled Secrets of the Inner Mind: Journey Through the Mind and Body, which I bought.

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman's hand on a necklace, a man's hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being?"

from The Bat Tattoo

After leaving Brocki Land, a place teeming with ghosts, we went on to Buecher Brocki, another second-hand bookshop, and even though I had already used up my quotation and had therefore nothing to "give" to the place, I made an amazing find - my own book on one of the shelves side by side with that of a friend who had published a dissertation on texts by early African-American women writers! I guess they were orphans from one of the many local bookshops which have had to close down recently. The books looked new and untouched, and of course I was grateful for this special Russmas Day coincidence and didn't fail to buy them, too.

Then we went into the heart of Zurich to leave a second quotation on a bench on one of the historically most interesting spots in Zurich, Lindenhof.

 Roman ruins, medieval ramparts and the rubble of buildings from all the centuries since Zurich was first settled form an architectural palimpsest underneath a square planted with lime trees. In summer, when their blossoms perfume the air, it's one of the loveliest places in town to spend an evening talking to friends, drinking a bottle of wine, eating food from a takeaway place and looking at the old town and the Grossmunster on the far-side bank of the River Limmat in the twilight. Even now that Zurich is chilly and foggy and utterly uninviting, Lindenhof is the place which preserves flavours and smells of other times attainable only through the mind as well as stories and secrets told long ago in the dusk.

There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind.

from Linger Awhile

The last quotation found its place at the foot of Sankt Peter, the church whose spire contains the clock with the largest face in Europe.

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! (...) 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
(The Moment under the Moment)

You can't possibly ignore the passing of time there, the huge clock face is too imposing. It would be nice to think that Goethe was inspired by it to create in Faust a restless character to whom it is forbidden to linger in a place, for the clock in fact already told the time in 1775, when the German poet visited Zurich and stayed with Lavater, whose vicarage was right opposite the church. The clock was made by Hans Luterer in 1538.

Whether or not it influenced Goethe, it certainly did its duty with me and, after remembering the Some Poasyum and meeting Russ last year, Dani and I put the yellow A4 sheet on a low wall, placed a stone on it so the icy north wind couldn't carry it away and then we left the place, looking forward to a nice hot cup of chocolate at home.

Love and best wishes to all of you, and the very best of best wishes to Russ,

Yvonne x

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

Val Bucknall 2005

It was my first adventure in SA4QE. I took four sheets to Bromley High Street, leaving one on a chair in the Chinese restaurant where we had lunch, one in Bromley library next to a computer, another on a wooden seat in the shopping mall, and one in Smiths, propped up among modern novels. The quote for each was the following:

‘Speak to me,’ I said to Christ. ‘Speak to me as the son of God. Tell me something.’

‘I have nothing to say,’ said Christ. ‘This is all there is.’

‘But meaning,’ I said, ‘there must be meaning.’

‘Reality has no meaning,’ said Christ, ‘it is only itself. I am only myself; I am an image carved in stone. Gilbertus hoc fecit.’

‘That is not a good enough answer,’ I said. ‘You’re being evasive. Ideas are part of reality. There came to me the idea to travel here to see you and it meant something to me.’

‘What?’ said Christ.

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.’

‘I don’t know what this idea meant; sometimes people say they’ve come to see me when they really want to see someone or something else. Maybe God knows.’

‘Are you saying there is a God?’

No answer.

… As I turned to start down the hill the bells shouted, ‘There is a God! Believe us!’

I waved goodbye without turning round…

from The Bat Tattoo

Happy Birthday to Russell Hoban, 80 years old on 4.2.05

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

I was not able to wait and see if there were any responses, but I enjoyed doing it.

I am looking forward to next weekend's adventures now! Thanks to Russell Hoban for the reason to celebrate.

Olaf Schneider 2002-2004

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

Full moon spring tide turtle wind

An evocative extract from Turtle Diary. The Chopin nocturne of animated Hoban quotes.

Wheel of Action

A quote from Fremder with the words animated by a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Be warned, this is very science-fiction-like...

The rolling passage in the darkness of my mind

As thought by Sarah Varley on an Underground journey in The Bat Tattoo. Complete with authentic London Underground soundtrack.

"This is your life"

From the "Memory's Arrow" chapter of Amaryllis Night and Day.

Aristaeus's Story on the potsherds

"Broken pieces want to come together," said the brain, "they want to contain something..."

Another delightful piece from The Medusa Frequency.

Three o'clock in the purple-blue morning

An atmospheric extraction from The Medusa Frequency.

The Flickering

Flicker-film by Gösta Kraken, from Fremder and (in part) The Medusa Frequency.

What a convenience

One of my (many) favourite quotations from The Medusa Frequency.

Golden Windows Homeward

Video sequence from the Turtle Diary film with text from The Medusa Frequency.

The Mouse and His Child Dance

A short film of the original wind-up toy used by Russ at his lecture to the San Diego State University on October 17, 1990.

Nighttrain

An animation based on an excerpt from The Medusa Frequency.

Who left the yellow paper?

Inspired by the hibiscus light of The Marzipan Pig.

An animated Fremder cover

Animation of Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction placed on Fremder book cover; accompanied by Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor, Opus 67, No. 4. Unfortunately it’s not the Ilse Bak recording...

The District Line at Notting Hill Gate

“A poem at its place” from The Last of the Wallendas.

Yellow paper virtually dropped by Olaf at Notting Hill Gate tube station, London.

Judy Tihany 2004

Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in a dictionary - you keep being led astray. There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons and absent friends.

- from THE BAT TATTOO

I placed this quote on a wall between two automatic money-tellers on a bank shopfront in a Sydney suburb called Summer Hill. Afterwards I sat in my car and watched as one man stared at it, then later as a woman didn't seem to see it at all. This quote resonates as (a) I love looking in the dictionary, and (b) I carry my ghosts, demons and absent friends with me always.

Love and much happiness to Russ,

Judy
xxx

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 21/28

14:43

Tiranti’s

(The Bat Tattoo)

At Leicester Square station I caught the Northern Line a few stops northbound to Warren Street, which provided me with a nice sit-down for a few minutes. Warren Street station opened out onto the corner of Warren Street and the northern end of Tottenham Court Road: there were newspaper and fruit and veg vendors nearby and a great shining building in the distance. Warren Street looked grey and rather sorry for itself – quite a lonely place to be, I couldn’t help feeling, of a wet Tuesday afternoon. There also didn’t seem to be that many shops in the road, and I wondered if I’d got the right place.

I walked past some nice mews houses, some of which were being used as offices, and a shop that sold nothing but flutes which reminded me a little of the magic wand specialist in the first Harry Potter book. I came past a junction which led to the very Hobanesque London Foot Hospital, which I thought might come in handy shortly, and probably the best view I’ve ever had, or have ever wanted to have, of the Telecom Tower. Tiranti’s was just past this junction on the left of Warren Street. It wasn’t the sort of shop you would ever pass by accident or expect to be there – which isn’t a criticism; London is full of things like that. More surreally, the shop was right next to a pub called the Smugglers Tavern which had a very unusual sign above it – not only was it a ship’s figurehead complete with a mast wrapped with fishing nets and the front end of the ship it would have been attached to, but the figurehead itself, rather than the traditional mermaid or similar female archetype, was a life-size bearded pirate-type bloke dressed entirely in white with a dagger in his belt and a mismatching hat. The juxtaposition couldn’t have been more Hobanesque, so it was surprising that he hadn’t had Roswell Clark nip in for a pint or two after his mammoth spending spree at Tiranti’s. Then again, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

I took a couple of pictures and had my now familiar nervous dither about where to put the quote. While I made up my mind I decided to venture inside and have a look around. From the book’s description I had expected a huge old shop with dodgy dim strip lighting, stacked to the rafters with equipment including many tiny tools and accessories only Tilman Riemenschneider would ever have had a use for, and run by a quick-minded ninety-three-year-old expert in these matters who chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes held in ochre fingertips. I was surprised therefore to find it was a small, quite sparse shop, brightly lit and run by two trendy guys in their twenties. In the ten minutes I was in there about three or four customers came in, bought something and left, so they were obviously doing pretty well.

A shelf by the window lay covered with leaflets. I picked up a yellow one advertising The Society of Portrait Sculptors FACE 2003 Competition, featuring the Tiranti prize of £500 for the best exhibit from a young portrait sculptor, and giving dates of an exhibition of the winning entries. Feeling perhaps a little more confident now that I’d dropped yellow paper all over London (albeit mostly in phone boxes) and that I’d even gone into the shop at all, I felt like a chat with one of the guys about what I was doing, and perhaps in an effort to make myself out to be less of a freeloader I decided to buy a souvenir. Most of the stock was fairly expensive, exclusive stuff, so I settled on a small plastic tub of something yellow for £2.74. TIRANTI, said the label, SCULPTORS TOOLS, MATERIALS, EQUIPMENT. YELLOW WAX PIGMENT, CONCENTRATED, 50g. Granulated wax for easy dispersion, it continued; Very little is needed – add to suit. Pigments can be intermixed to achieve required colour/shade. Also available in red and blue. I took it up to the counter, paid for it, and fumbling with the yellow paper quote attempted to explain what I was really doing there. “Um,” I began, “you may already be aware, but there’s a writer called Russell Hoban, and he wrote about this shop in a recent novel, and…”

The guy serving me eyed me a little suspiciously but his taller colleague chipped in, “Was that Amaryllis Day and Night?”

“Night and Day?” I said, pendantically.

“Yeah, Amaryllis Night and Day. I read that one.”

“You have? Great!” I said. “The shop is mentioned in his last one, The Bat Tattoo.”

“Oh, The Bat Tattoo, I know, yeah. He comes in quite often to ask questions and do his research.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s his birthday today, and to celebrate, some of his fans around the world are writing out their favourite quotes from his books and leaving them in interesting places.”

“Oh, that’s a really nice thing to do,” said the shorter assistant, warming to the conversation.

“Yes, and I have this passage here about the shop. Maybe you might want to put it up on your notice board or something.”

“Oh, excellent,” he said, looking at it. “Thank you very much. Yeah, no problem.”

“Well, thank you.”

The taller assistant turned to help a woman who’d approached the cash desk. “About this,” I said to the shorter one, holding up the yellow wax pigment, “I actually don’t have a clue what to do with it, I just bought it because of the shop and because I liked the colour…”

“Yeah!” he said approvingly, as if this was as good a reason to buy it as any other.

“What do you actually do with it?” I said.

He did tell me but to be honest I forgot what he said because I was so happy that I’d had the conversation and the guys had been so approachable. My experience of small, specialist shops, or any shops come to that, especially when the proprietors know you don’t know what they know, has so often been exactly the opposite.

Next stop

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 20/28

14:17

Gaby’s Deli

(The Bat Tattoo)

***UPDATE 2012! SAVE GABY'S DELI FROM CLOSURE! MORE INFO - LIKE THE FACEBOOK PAGE - SIGN THE PETITION - FOLLOW ON TWITTER***

As I left the National Gallery I was almost limping. Cursing my choice of shoe for the day, I leaned on the parapet overlooking Trafalgar Square and wondered about my chances of seriously completing this odyssey in one piece. I was disappointed at how quickly my feet had given up on me, especially as the rest of me felt perfectly okay. “Well,” said my feet, “you’re not walking on the rest of you, are you?” I had to concur. “Memory coming up!” said another bit of me, and I was put in mind of a time when I was about eleven when my friend Jethro and I had enlisted for a charity “Fun Run”. I can’t remember how long it was but I was confident that I would do well and had no doubts at all about my ability to complete it. My first mistake was to look upon it as a race, although I suppose most kids would have had the same thought, and my second mistake was to sprint from the start line at such velocity that I wore myself out after about five minutes. I did eventually complete the run, but I ended up losing whatever lead I’d gained from the sheer exhaustion of those first few minutes. I guessed I was already guilty of repeating past mistakes by even thinking of taking on such a huge task today, and to a degree I had sprinted the first section of the schedule. But there was nothing to be done about the past, the present was all I had to work with. I fell back on the approach that has pulled me through any number of dodgy situations before – “Just go, and see how far you get.”

I hobbled around the corner, up Charing Cross Road towards Leicester Square and found Gaby’s Deli on the other side of the road in a row of shops and cafés between two theatres. I had actually been there once before, and even before there was a declared Hoban connection, for a terrific falafel-and-beer dinner with another Krakenite, Sam, who used to work nearby; sadly he hasn’t been around the group for quite a while. When I last spoke to him he was working on his own children’s book; I hoped he’d found some success. Gaby’s looked steamy and warm in the post-sleet street and it was tempting to go and sit inside, but I couldn’t justify it at that moment; it’d have to wait for another time.

Just by me was a black telephone box, where I deposited the quote and gave some serious thought to my schedule. The London Zoo (from Turtle Diary and The Raven) and Islington (Amaryllis Night and Day) locations would take anything up to two hours, meaning the chances were I’d probably get to the British Museum too late to go inside, and I was really looking forward to seeing the lion bas-reliefs, and in any case my feet would be a disaster area from tramping over a part of London I didn’t know very well. That might be an unscientific measurement but it’s psychologically a lot easier to walk a mile you know well than a mile you don’t. I made an executive decision at that point to save London Zoo and Islington for SA4QE 2004 and instead proceed directly to Tiranti’s.

Next stop

Sophia Fabre 2003

Hello everyone, here's what i did for SA4QE2...

At Embrun which is an old Roman city a bit like Canterbury (Ambry is it?), there is a wonderful ex-cathedral which has a gothic porch called the Réal, because it was built by Charles VIII of France in the late 15th century. So i put my yellow paper just inside the great oak doors with two quotes - firstly:

from THE BAT TATTOO

Gislebertus was addicted to stone - he could not leave it alone. Every time he found an empty space of stone he had to let in Heaven and Hell. He was like Thelonious Monk with a chisel and mallet.

i had to put a bit of my RW in too, and since i am dedicated to the Owl and theres a lot of owlishness going on i put this bit:

from RIDDLEY WALKER

There wer the Other Voyce Owl of the Worl. He sat in the worl tree larfing in his front voyce only his other voyce wernt larfing his other voice wer saying the sylents. He had a way of saying them. He said them wide and far where he begun them he said them tyny when they come close. He kep saying the sylents like that in his other voice and when he done it the sylents were swallering up the souns of the worl then the owl were swallerin the sylents. No 1 knowit he were doing it. He wer trying to swaller all the souns of the worl then there wunt be no mor worl becaws every thing wud foller the soun of its self in to the sylents then it wud be gone. what the owl had in mynd were to get it all swallert then fly a way.

No 1 knowit what the owl wer doing onlya kid. He dint have no eyes he lissent all the time. The kid knowit the owl wer trying to say the woal worl away and he knowit wer on him to stop the owl so he begun to lissen every thing back. The kid unheard the souns and they gone back where they livet. The kid were larfing at the owl but the owl dint know it he thot he done a good nites work. But that owl he keaps trying tho dont he. And hewl do it one day too. All it takes is for no 1 to be lissening every thing back. Hewl go the worl away and his self with it and thatwl be the end of it. But may be not for a wyl yet.

So i lissened a bit in the cathedral and was looking for the owl and i think he was there in the silence, because i know owls. Then i picked up my backpack and i thought i better hitch hike back to my house and i gave a copy of my paper to the guy who picked me up, though he was french ; but i told him that the websites were cool :-)

i'm glad there was an owl on the wine.

happy birthday and good lissening Russ,

soph, unhearing the sylents

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 13/28

11:24

Victoria & Albert Museum

(The Bat Tattoo)

I crossed the road from the Science Museum, and feeling in my rucksack for an energy-giving Geobar, headed along the war-damaged wall of the V&A towards the main entrance. In an unused doorway of the bomb-damaged side someone had made a makeshift bed from a green sleeping bag, so I put the Geobar on that and carried on around the corner.

The low-rising steps outside the main entrance to the V&A are where Sarah Varley first meets Roswell Clark: she’s sitting on the steps weeping about a piece in that morning’s Times reporting that Earth has only 500 million years left to live, and he’s on his way in to see a favourite bat-decorated Chinese bowl. I’d wanted to see the bowl myself and perhaps do something similar with my quote that I did with the Klein bottle one at the Science Museum, but I looked at my watch and decided there wasn’t going to be time. In any case, I knew that, as with the Klein bottle drop, once I was inside it would be hard to leave after just a few minutes – personally, more so than the Science Museum, in fact. So once again I fell back on the old SA4QE chestnut of planting the quote in the phone box outside the entrance.

Today there was no white van parked outside the V&A entrance but there was a blue and white coach, empty except for the driver who was eating his lunch under a sign saying NO FOOD OR DRINK TO BE CONSUMED IN THE COACH.

Next stop

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 10/28

10:29

Hammersmith Tube Station

When I got back to Hammersmith Tube station I was distracted from getting straight onto the train for my next stop by the unmistakable, and for me irresistible, odour of toasting bread coming from somewhere inside the shopping arcade. I was in the mood for elevenses, even if wasn’t quite that time yet, so I followed my nose and it led me to Oi! Bagel. Appearances can be deceptive; although I knew the smell of toast well, the Oi! Bagel counter was full of untoasted bagels with savoury fillings not quite up my street. Behind the counter were two women in the uniform of their trade. One of them asked if she could help me. She had a badge with her name and the title DUTY MANAGER; she should know her bagels, I thought. “Have you got marmalade or jam or something like that?” I said desperately. “We’ve got everything,” she sighed, as if having everything was proving to be something of a burden. I ordered a toasted bagel with marmalade which came cut into C-shaped segments and wrapped in an impressively compact cardboard-and-tissue affair. "Have a nice day!" said the duty manager in true New York-out-of-Turnham Green style. I devoured it sitting on a metal bench opposite Claire’s Accessories while the bank bloke in his Next suit continued to struggle to erect his promotional display.

While I waited for the train at Hammersmith to take me to South Kensington, I fingered the sheaf of quotes in my bag and found one I’d chosen with no particular destination in mind – yellow paper suitable, as it were, for dissemination anywhere in the capital. They all were, of course, but I’d chosen some which were more random than others to drop in the truly free-minded spirit of SA4QE. This quote – another of Sarah Varley’s from The Bat Tattoo, about her husband, to whom she was attracted partly because she could see in him someone she could improve and work on – interested me for two reasons: firstly because its philosophical attitude might give a stranger some reassurance, and secondly because I regularly ponder the dilemma myself of whether to change/improve/work on someone or something or simply let he/she/it be him/her/itself. Most of the time I let it go, being a generally non-confrontational or interventionist kind of a guy and usually deeply suspicious of people who thrust strong opinions in people's faces. Sometimes however things come to a head and I get frustrated wondering how long it’s possible to go through life trying so hard not to leave your mark on it. There is obviously a balance to be struck here, but I often feel I’m “tip-toeing around the edges of myself”, as Ted Hughes once put it. Of course, leaving literary quotes in public places was itself an interventionist act, even if when it came to the crunch I resisted being quite as direct about it as I could have been. And certainly, I told myself, with the amount of walking I was doing today, nobody could seriously accuse me of tip-toeing anywhere.

The platform was draughty and the quote wouldn’t stay underneath the public phone, so I wandered into the enclosed waiting room, sat down, read the quote, and then when my train came left it nonchalantly on the seat beside me. I boarded the train quickly, as if I were committing some nefarious act. In the waiting room there had been an old lady sitting opposite me. I looked back from the train to see if she would pick up the yellow paper out of curiosity. She didn’t.

Next stop

Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure 9/28

From Doria Road, I walked back down Parsons Green Lane to the Tube station and waited on the platform with miscellaneous commuters attired to varying degrees of formality, and, in a mysterious black outfit, one Father Marek Sujkowski. I know that was his name because he was wearing a sandwich board saying FATHER MAREK SUJKOWKSI – MEDICAL AID FOR BLIND, DEAF AND HANDICAPPED CHILDREN. The sandwich board had photos of some of the children and he had a collection box in his hands. He was a short man in his fifties, a sliver of white dog-collar showing at his throat. I gave him 50p; he didn’t smile but looked me in the eye and said “Thank you” in a voice that was as dark as his robes. Ahead of him three very well made-up women sat on a bench squinting as the bright winter sun shone in their eyes. The sign said the next train due was for UPMINSTER. After a couple of minutes a train with the destination EDGWARE ROAD arrived. A middle-aged lady with a cherry-red overcoat, bronze hair and loopy gold earrings looked from the sign on the platform to the sign on the train and back again and said as if she was thinking aloud, “I want a train to bloody Upminster.” The train was packed to the gills in any case and neither of us could get on it. We both sat down on the bench that the well-made-up women had now vacated, and shielded our eyes from the sun with our hands. After a few more minutes an Upminster train arrived. I got on, sitting opposite a woman reading a Penguin paperback of Far From the Madding Crowd. “If only,” said her face. In fact, she spent the nextfew minutes reading the newspaper of the man sitting next to her. Fans of the great little book The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd will recognise this particular behavioural oddity as a variety of corfeism. Whenever this happens, I always expect the person whose paper is being read by their neighbour to turn round to them and say, “Would you mind not reading my paper, please?” or words to that effect, but it never happens, and this was no exception.

I got off at Earls Court, went under the underpass for the second time and caught another train back to Hammersmith. At one point Hammersmith station had been a station on its own like all the others but at some time in recent years an enormous shopping centre has grown up around it. I walked past rows of familiar franchises, a jittery man in a chair collecting for a charity and a bloke in a Next suit wrestling with a display for a bank promotion, and paid 20p to go to the toilet. Above the row of urinals were adverts for a specialist vehicle registration firm: WHY SETTLE FOR THE 7-CHARACTER PLATES WHEN YOU CAN HAVE A 5-DIGIT NEW REG FOR LESS MONEY? said one, while another listed a hundred examples of pre-fabricated personalised number plates. If I had the money (or even a car), which would I choose? ORPH 1, perhaps? SA4QE2? Neither was available.

Outside I fumbled in the wind with my sheafs of photocopied maps, the areas of my journey highlighted in yellow, failed to see the sign I needed and worked out that I should head to the right for Dimes Place. I got a little way up Hammersmith Broadway, realised I was going in the wrong direction, doubled back and walked past another jittery man towards King Street, crossing a road where a lot of traffic was creeping round two vans which had pulled over, apparently having crashed into one another. There was no visible damage but it was obvious there had been some kind of vehicular altercation because two blokes in fleecy jackets were standing by their vehicles in the tell-tale attitude of all English drivers when exchanging their insurance details, i.e. trying to write on a piece of paper supported on a vertical surface, all the while maintaining a blank-faced, blokey silence designed to hide any complicity in the incident. (In fact, this entire crash could have been a complete figment of my Bat Tattoo-fired imagination; the blokes could just have been pulling over to keep in touch for any number of reasons that were nothing to do with me.)

King Street is one of west London’s less desirable areas, a long, grimy road filled with cheap shops. Dimes Place was a narrow right-hand turning between a building society and a fast-food restaurant. I followed a sign pointing towards the timber yard; there didn’t seem to be anybody about, so I wandered in. A great shed rose up to the right containing planks of timber of various lengths and woods. Blackboards hung at the front of the shed denoting the woods inside and their cuts, such as:

Iroko, 1”, 1½”, 2”

Mahogany, 1¼”, 1½”

Mahogany 63mm, 38mm

Prepared Russian Redwood, 25x150 par, 25x150 T&G

Russian Redwood 75x225, 50x100 V Sawn; 50x55 V Sawn

The European lime that Roswell Clark buys in honour of Tilman Riemenschneider was at the bottom of the yard, in its own shed as if it was too precious to mix with mere mahogany. The wood was visibly and tangibly different from the others, of a smooth, perhaps slightly feminine pale green compared with the robust, masculine coarse Russian red. The names of the woods, the colours of them, and the strong, earthy smell of the yard mingled with the clear morning sunlight into a whole atmosphere of a rich yellow warmth which I inhaled deeply. A young bloke in a woolly hat popped out of an office up by the entrance to the yard to see what I was doing: I obviously wasn’t a serious customer, and it’d be hard for anyone to sneak off with a length of timber without being noticed, so he went back in again.

View an image of Tilman Riemenschneider's Noli me tangere

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