Andrew Middleton 2012

This year I managed two yellow paper drops, featuring quotes from Russell's first two novels. It felt appropriate to mark the end of Russ' life by starting at the beginning. I placed a quotation from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz at the Vittles Cafe in Broomhill, Sheffield.

It goes like this:

A map is a dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn child of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.

And secondly a quotation from Kleinzeit which I can easily recall without having to look it up. This was left on the seat after watching a play at the Sheffield University Drama Studio:

"I exist," said the mirror.

"What about me?" said Kleinzeit.

"Not my problem," said the mirror.

Whilst there I also recommended Russell Hoban to a (I think) German student, along with another of my favourite authors, Angela Carter.

John Rowbottom 2012

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Left in the Centro shopping centre, Mandurah, Western Australia.

Lisa Greenstein 2012

Along with the dream life there is the life of ideas and half-ideas, of glimmerings and flashes and indescribable atmospheres of the mind. What we actually do in what is called the real world depends largely on how we live this unseen life in our inner world of words and images, songs and bits of poems, names and numbers and memories and dreams remembered and unremembered. Whether the song in our heads is Michael Jackson or Franz Schubert it is fitting itself to and reinforcing something in us that comes forward to meet it. That’s how art affects life; we use it to be more what we are and to become what is in us wanting us to become it.

- from The Moment under the Moment

He was almost on the point of crying, but he began to laugh.

    “And that’s funny to you?” said the father.

    “You don’t know what I’m laughing at,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Nothing is smooth and easy for me, and my life isn’t one girl after another — it seems to be one father after another. And how would it help you if I had a wrinkled face and clouded eyes and short hair? Would your daughter then become a nun?”

    The father’s face relaxed behind the beard and the glasses. “It’s hard to let go,” he said.

    “And it’s hard to hold on,” said Boaz-Jachin.

    “To what?” said the father.

    “The wheel,” said Boaz-Jachin.

    “Ah,” said the father. “I know that wheel.”

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Posted to Lisa's blog, Facebook and Twitter

David Johnson 2012

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it don’t have no name.'

I said, 'What thing is that?'

She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you don't take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up sudden in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'
....

Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since then it seams like they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben allways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it don't think like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.

Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome. 

 - from Riddley Walker

Webmaster's note: The first part of this quote was voted Russell Hoban fans' all-time favourite in SA4QE's 2012 Russell Hoban reader survey.

Her no-question-asking stalked through the flat like a tall silent creature that stared at Jachin-Boaz all day.

 - from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz 

Posted to Facebook and Twitter

Saying goodbye to Russ

SA4QE was honoured to be invited to the funeral of Russell Hoban in London last Wednesday, along with a number of Russ's associates, fans from the online community The Kraken and of course family and friends.

The service took place at Mortlake Crematorium, right on the banks of the River Thames. The weather was appropriate, turning Russ's favourite grey and rainy as the mourners gathered.

The chapel was light and peaceful. Among the mourners was celebrated writer and broadcaster Will Self, who had recently conducted a wonderful conversation with Russ at the British Library and described him as "my hero" in a Guardian tribute. The order of service was printed on folded sheets of yellow A4 paper, with a lovely photo of Russ on the front, dressed - one must say atypically - in a shirt and tie, with a Panama hat and cane, looking very happy. Underneath the photo it read:

Russell Conwell Hoban

4 February 1925 - 13 December 2011

I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?

This most appropriate quote is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and has been chosen by SA4QE contributors a number of times.

Mortlake Crematorium

Inside the order of service were three quotes from other writers:

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -- the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort -- to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust...

- Joseph Conrad, Youth

Though it will die soon
The voice of the cicada
Shows no sign of this

- Basho

The lofty shade advances,
I fetch my flute and play:
Come, lads, and learn the dances
And praise the tune to-day.
To-morrow, more's the pity,
Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.

- AE Housman, Fancy's Knell

On the back of the service was this illustration by Caspar David Friedrich:

Landschaft mit Grab Sarg und Eule (borrowed from here)

Russ's coffin, made in wickerwork and laden with pink roses, iris and small yellow flowers, was borne into the chapel and the service started with a period of silence followed by Haydn's Die Schöpfung: Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde, a piece which starts off quietly and suddenly blasts into life:

There was no minister. The eulogy was given by Dominic Power, an old friend of Russ's who has a walk-on part in several of his later books as "Seamus Flannery". Delivered in hushed tones, the speech paid tribute to Russ's many achievements as a writer but also to his friendship: "I don't think I laughed so much or for so long when I went out for lunch with Russell... If you were feeling depressed about something before you met up with him, by the end of your time with him you would be feeling that life was worthwhile."

Russ's son Jake Hoban then took the stand. "This was written by my dad in 1989," he said by way of introduction to a short piece called North from The Moment under The Moment. The vivid, wintry piece is not about the north of England but

the north where one goes in fear, the north that the compass cannot find, the north that is the cold and implacable truth from which one doesn't always return.

Later Jake said he chose it partly because it includes some themes developed in Russ's new book Soonchild due to be published in March.

Russ's eldest daughter from his first marriage Phoebe Hoban then read an appreciation of her father and his work. Her brother Brom then produced two sheets of yellow A4 and recited the Kaddish (echoing his and his father's Jewish upbringing), which Brom described as "a request for peace", and a poem of his own composition inspired by watching, when a child, his father paint a canvas called The Boxer. (Russell Hoban was a professional graphic artist at the time of Brom's childhood; there is more information on this period of his career in Chris Bell's excellent blog post from July 2011.)

The service closed with another piece from Haydn's Die Schöpfung, Holde Gattin, dir du Seite - both pieces were chosen by Russ himself:

The family members then paid their last respects at the coffin and the congregation filed out.

The family greeted the mourners outside the chapel and we walked the short distance along the Thames towpath to The Ship, a lovely old pub also overlooking the river. 

The wake was very pleasant and the family endlessly hospitable and it was great to be able to chat to old Kraken friends, SA4QE contributors and other people who knew and loved Russ. 

Phoebe Hoban with SA4QE contributors Eli Bishop (right) and Richard Cooper

The Kraken were among the last to leave; we stayed about three hours. It was a great privilege to be there and see Russ off and we would like to take this opportunity again to thank the family for inviting us. All of us at SA4QE and The Kraken will miss Russ terribly, while of course remembering the many, many hours of pleasure he and his writing gave us all.

Photos by Roland Clare and Richard Cooper

Read the messages posted to the SA4QE Book of Condolence

Steve Long 2011

I chose my quotation from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz this year because it has somewhat to do with maps and maps are playing a large part in my life at the moment. I'm setting the courses for a large orienteering event due to be held near Henley-On-Thames in Buckinghamshire next month. As you may know orienteering is a competitive running sport using map and compass for navigation on specially drawn maps in areas of forest or other open land. There is a tendency for orienteering maps (as with all maps) to go out of date very quickly and the quotation I chose echoes this, as it echoes life:

‘For years I have sighted and measured and located this point and that point on the face of the earth,’ said the surveyor, ‘and I have gone back to the same places to find my stakes pulled out as the boundaries waver and lose accuracy. I sight and measure and I plant the stakes again, knowing they will be pulled out again. It is not only the stakes and boundaries that are lost – this is what there is to know about maps, and I tell you what I have paid years to learn; everything that is found is never lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that? You’re still a boy, so maybe you can’t. Can you understand that?’

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

On the 4th I spent the afternoon in the forest checking various things to do with the event and afterwards went to Henley to 4Qate. I don't know Henley very well but I know a good second hand book shop and in the poetry section at Richard Way I came across a book entitled "The Clever Daughter" by Susan Wicks. I liked the connection with Russ's book Fremder, and left the yellow paper on the shelf there and bought the book.

After some wandering I went into the Helen and Douglas House charity shop and upstairs they have a book section and a coffee maker and a few chairs. The area seemed a little under-used, but I left my second yellow paper in a rack of leaflets on the coffee table hoping it would be found by sooner or later.

Finally, after much wandering around the streets I left the last one in a rolled up property paper in a rack outside an estate agent. I wanted my yellow papers to be found by people with time to look at them. Hopefully I succeeded!

Melanie 2011

My friend Peter enticed me into joining in with the posting of yellow notes to celebrate Hoban, so as of 4/2/11 there are yellow notes with Hoban quotes all over the Austrian public library. It was awesome fun and nobody seemed to notice my note sticking and picture taking!

She said, ‘Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals ... It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’

- from Riddley Walker

"What are you, a snulture cob?"

- from Amaryllis Night and Day

I have gone to look for a lion.

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

These photos were posted initially on Melanie's Flickr stream

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

Kerry Power 2009

My quote this year is from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz:

‘Everyone in the world is looking for something,’ said Jachin-Boaz to Boaz-Jachin, ‘and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again’....

‘If everything that is found is never lost again, there will be an end to finding some day,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Some day there will be nothing left to find.’

...on Yellow A4, Platform 3 Parliament Station, Melbourne.


Webmaster's note: apologies to Kerry for the late posting of this 4qation.

Ruth Bosch 2009

My original Russmuss Day intention was to walk across Paris, from my apartment to the renowned books-in-English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, but the stairway of the local Metro stop gestured irresistibly down towards the coherence of The Underground and it struck me all of a heap that this was the way to go so I did.

The station is being refurbished by nightly wall removal and daily graffiti revival. I was not expecting such an immediate 4quage, but a sign edge spoke to me without any hesitation at all and I responded, slid a quote into the gap, felt oddly invisible, and hoped to blend in with the non-quotation-bearing citizens. There was a quick shift in the space behind me, like that of a beach-dug hole filling instantly with seawater. I turned and saw two women already talking about what they read, very animated, curious, and reading again.



Similar experience at Odeon in terms of an instant audience.



The Metro posters are a constant joy due to the constant amendments inflicted upon them.



I could hardly believe my eyes, but remembered the thoroughgoing Hobanification of the world that I always experience on February 4ths.





I had already looked at the used books on the shelves outside of Shakespeare & Co. the week before, and hoped that the copy of Kleinzeit was still there.



It was.

Juuuust as I reached towards it a black dog appeared right behind me, without a person. I goggled. Or doggled, possibly. The shop door opened and a young man called the dog in. Her name was Colette and I followed her. "Excuse me", I said to them both. "I am part of a group who leaves quotations from the writer Russell Hoban for people to find. We do this every year on his birthday. Black dogs are important to him. I was just about to put a quotation in one of his books out here and your black dog came and stood next to me. Would you mind if I took a picture of her?" "That's incredible", he said as he put her leash on, "yes, of course, but she's not very good, I mean, she probably won't......sit...." and at the word "sit", she sat. Briefly.



Another paper leaving tribe, for variety, on the pavement.



The notice board outside Shakespeare and Co, with a yellow predisposition. It was as if it knew.



Two interior quotation leavings.





There were three Hoban books; you cannot see that the first one is Riddley Walker. The staff recommendation pinned to the shelf below it is for Half Life, by Shirley Jackson, a book about a post nuclear holocaust world.

I crossed the river to Notre Dame and looked for a good place there, but somehow the act of attaching didn't feel quite right, something about Scotch tape and all that stone, and then I saw the moon and approximated as best I could, with fidelity in mind. Always.



A walk along the Seine, past the booksellers' stands...





...and the Velib stable, which offered a surprising visual quotation of Olaf's stellar sonar animation.



One of a pair of guardian lions being well protected in an antique shop window.



I wondered if the first quote would still be hanging there, tapeless, in the homeward reach of the evening, gravity being what it is. But it was.

Gravity being what it is.



Et voila.

Diana's original description of sa4qe mentioned, somewhere in it, that she herself liked the idea because it was small and private. That was the chord that rang for me back then and so I have done my yearly bit on the quiet, with a particular aversion towards documentation, but this year, somehow, the sheer love for all of the rest of you translated into a different chord.

I do not have my books with me here and copied everything from the sa4qe website, an activity I now think of as "echoquation". I printed out a few pages of each quote, carried them in a bag, and, without looking, pulled one out at each place that spoke to me.

They are:

To be and not to be. That is the answer.

from Fremder

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

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Fidelity is a matter of perception: nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

from The Medusa Frequency

At the bottom of every page is written: "This quotation is further evidence of the world-wide birthday celebration that accumulates in rampant appreciation of the writer Russell Hoban. February 4, 2009"

Much Love to Russ, to Everyone,

Ruthie

Len Trimmer 2009

Deposited at an international market in Fairfield, Ohio:

"Empty space," said the driver. "There's a funny thing to think about. The back of the van is full of empty space. I brought it from my town. But I've opened the doors several times since I left. So is it still empty space from my town or is it now several different new empty spaces? This is the sort of thing one thinks about sometimes. If the back of the van were full of chairs the question wouldn't arise. One assumes that the space between the chairs remains the same all through the trip. Empty space, however, is something else."

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Steve Long 2008

I have a photo of a large lion taped up on a partition by my desk, because I like the lion and because of the Hoban connection. I say the lion is large, well it is, literally huge. At Whipsnade zoo, not far from my home, they carved a lion shape in the chalk of the hillside some years ago, in the tradition of ancient and not-so-ancient chalk figures in the landscape of southern England. In recent years the zoo people have taken to illuminating the lion's outline at night, and last spring I attempted to photograph it. I don't have a fancy camera, and what I ended up with, flash turned off, camera zoomed right in and held as firmly on the top of a gate as I could manage, was a somewhat blurry but (what I think of as) atmospheric photo of the lion. There are better photos of it on the internet, but I like mine. There is a sense of movement in the photo (maybe even motion/stillness to use a Russ-ism), that for me gives it an interesting quality.

That was the inspiration for my SA4QE this year. Being tight for time I thought the least I could do was 4Qate at work, and I printed the following quotations on the regulation Ryman "gold" paper and taped it up below the lion photo. Both are taken from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.

Jachin-Boaz… took the master map out of a drawer and spread it on the counter for his son to look at. "I have been working on it for years," said Jachin-Boaz, "and it will be your when you are a man. Everything that you could wish to look for is on this map. I take great pains to keep it up date, and I add to it all the time."

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, at the cities and towns, the blue oceans, the green swamps and grasslands, the delicately shaded brown and orange mountains, the clear lines in inks of different colours that showed where all things known to his father might be found by him. He looked away from the map and down at the floor.

"What do you think of it?" said Jachin-Boaz.

Boaz-Jachin said nothing.

"Why won't you say anything?" said his father. "Look at this labour of years, with everything clearly marked upon it. This map represents not only the years of my life spent upon it, but the years of other lives spent in gathering the information that is here. What can you seek that this map will not show you how to find?"

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, then at his father. He looked all around the shop and then at his father, but he said nothing.

"Please don't stand there saying nothing," said Jachin-Boaz. "Say something. Name something that this map will not show you how to find."

Boaz-Jachin looked around the shop again. He looked at the iron doorstop. It was in the shape of a crouching lion. He looked at his father with a half smile. "A lion?" he said.

"A lion," said Jachin-Boaz. "I don't think I understand you. I don't think you're being serious with me. You know very well there are no lions now. The wild ones were hunted to extinction. Those in captivity were killed off by a disease that travelled from one country to another carried by fleas. I don't know what kind of joke that was meant to be." As he spoke there opened in his mind great mystical amber eyes, luminous and infinite. There blossomed great taloned paws, heavy and powerful. There was a silent roar, round, endless, an orb of reflection imaging a pink rasping tongue, white teeth of death. Jachin-Boaz shook his head. There were no lions any more.

[...]

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

At the bottom I simply put the SA4QE web address, because if anybody wanted to know more they could just ask me. Shame that nobody did. Possibly just too weird in an engineering R&D department!

I like the first passage just because it makes me think about the relationship I had with my father as a young adult. Russ has captured that difficult time when I wanted to be independent, and anything Dad did or told me was of no interest to me, and the frustration Dad no doubt felt at my rejection of his attempt to pass down to me the wisdom of years. Perhaps this is typical of many father / adolescent son relationships, but I shouldn't make that assumption.

I like the second passage simply because it is Hoban as his best, his most articulate and powerful. The words are a joy to read.

All the best,

Steve

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

Deena Omar 2008

I 4quated all over the District Line and Fulham! The first yellow sheet was given directly to the amenable woman in the coffee shop at Fulham Broadway tube station who guarded Gundula's bouquet while I went to the lav. I placed it on her table just before I left and didn't hang around to see what she did with it. The second in the lavatory of the Metro tapas bar on Effie Road (in which Adrian and myself raised a glass or several to Russ and his past, his present, his future and the moment in the moment and all of the moments that will be - in the bar that is, not the lavatory). The third on a leaflet stand outside Nicolas Off Licence on Harwood Road. The fourth on the District Line platform at Earl's Court on one of those metal boxes that sit there (don't ask me what's inside them; one of the many mysteries of the London Underground). The fifth on an eastbound tube, tucked into the edge of the window frame. The sixth was back in Camden, near a checkout in Sainsbury's. At that point, I reflected on my 4quations and felt jolly pleased with them. I declared the seventh 4quation one of rest and and irreverence; I tucked it inside My Tango with Barbara Strozzi which I dropped into Adrian's workbag when he wasn't looking.

There is only one place, and that place is time.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Yvonne Studer 2008

Dear all,

With the Sun squaring Neptune today, my daily horoscope (at www.astro.com) advised me to use my "common sense even about ideals, and above all, deal with the real world as it is" and not as I would like it to be. All this while feeling depleted of energy! But if I made an effort, there might be a reward. The horoscope said, "You can work to make it [the world] what you want, but don't assume that it already is."

The world today meant a full day at school with report meetings taking place from early morning till late in the afternoon, a bit of teaching in between and no time to go to scenic places to spread the word, much as I would have liked to.

Anyhow, I opened a bottle of emergency Joie de Vivre so "feelings of inadequacy or futility" couldn't even begin to tempt me "to avoid direct confrontations with people and even to take more devious courses of action than usual." And then I carried out my very commonsensical and energy-friendly plan for this year's SA4QE and approached some of my colleagues at school to give them the five sheets of yellow A4 on which I had printed quotes from Russ's books. Some quotes had been chosen with the future recipients in mind, others were general enough to be given away spontaneously. I had to place two of the sheets in pigeonholes, because my colleagues were busy or had already gone home. But handing over the three other sheets definitely accounted for the most enjoyable and carefree moments of the day, and as usual, 4qating made me go home with a smile.

Here are the quotes:

"Reason is not sufficient; I know what I cannot explain."

("Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road", The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

"The stranger it took me the mor I fealt at hoam with it. The mor I fealt like Iwd be long where ever it wer widening me to."

(Riddley Walker, 1980)

"Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed."

(The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973)

"Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis."

('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

"This house that childhood builds in the mind is a learning place and a place where we test words and images and ideas to find out what rings true. Also it's like a safe house in a spy film: in it the secret agent that is the child's mind can stay hidden until ready to venture armed into the hostile city. It isn't the world that is hostile – the stone and the leaf and the door of the world beckon and welcome – it's the grey city of the world that threatens, the grey city of the failed children of the world, the dry thinkers, the juiceless minds, the poison skulls that dream in numbers and megadeaths. They run the world, these failed children; they speak in all languages and in all languages their speech is vile."

('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

Happy birthday, Russ, and all the best to everyone else!

Yvonne x

Kerry Power 2007

This year I chose the opening paragraph from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. It is somewhat special as it is the first paragraph of Russ' adult books I ever read. It is quite beautiful.

There are no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind - tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-coloured moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Left on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.

Yvonne Studer 2007

Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas, and dear 6th-form students from HoPro Zürich

On my very first SA4QE tour in 2003, I half-secretly 4qated the school where I work by hanging up quotations on various pillars and on a pinboard over the photocopier by the entrance to the school library. Half-secretly, because I told the deputy headmaster and also the librarian about my doings and met nothing but support and big smiles.

'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang.
(Kleinzeit, 1974)

The photo of the photocopier was used in the collage on the 2007 SA4QE homepage. This year something more effective was wanted, not least because it's also the fifth anniversary of SA4QE. So I decided to read one of Russ's books with my sixth form and somehow involve my students in this year's celebration of Russ's 82nd birthday.

Originally, the book was to be Turtle Diary, but as this novel is still out of print, Kleinzeit took its place and I'm happy to report that it is the highlight of my working week when I can go into my English class to "teach" Russ's novel rather than, for instance, the elusive differences between the 1001 ways of expressing future time in English...

As my students are very hard-working young people and since this time of the year is particularly stressful for them, I didn't want to ask them to go 4qating with me today. Instead I chose an individual quotation from Russ's works for each of them, printed it out on a sheet of yellow A4 paper and gave them the sheets on Thursday, 1st February. Of course I first told them about the project (they were properly introduced to the verb "to 4qate", including its pronunciation "fork-you-ate") and I also showed them a few examples of past 4qations so they could see what good company they would be in when I made them part of it all.

These were the quotations:

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, 1992


~ ~ ~ ~

Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973


~ ~ ~ ~

Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off.

from Linger Awhile, 2006


~ ~ ~ ~

Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding?

from Turtle Diary, 1975

~ ~ ~ ~

'That's it,' said Serpentina. 'Nothing is the ultimate truth.'
'Nothing?' said the child.
'Nothing,' repeated Serpentina. ...
'I don't believe it,' said the mouse child. ... 'I wonder what's on the other side of nothing?' he said.
'Tiny upstart!' said Serpentina.. 'Who are you to seek the other side of nothing?'
'If I'm big enough to stand in the mud all this time and contemplate infinity,' said the child, 'I'm big enough to look at the other side of nothing.' ...
'Ah,' he said, 'there's nothing on the other side of nothing but us.'

from The Mouse and His Child, 1967


~ ~ ~ ~

'Con este tango nacio el tango,' she sang, 'y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo' (With this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum, seeking the sky).' ... Klein had no Spanish, didn't know what the words meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of life in the darkness...
'I can't actually put canyengue into English,' said the Argentinian translator Klein found in the phone book the next day. 'It's a lunfardo word,' she said. 'Lunfardo is a local vocabulary in Buenos Aires and it's used a lot in tango lyrics. Canyengue carries the idea of the suburbs and the common person of low social condition whose manner of dancing the tango is earthy and full-blooded with no added-on refinement; canyengue in the hips means dancing with the real feeling of the tango.'
'Canyengue,' said Klein to himself later. 'Canyengue in the mind, from the outlying districts of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Either you have it or you don't. Right...?'

from Angelica's Grotto, 1999


~ ~ ~ ~

I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. ...
Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

'Sometimes there's good news when you least expect it,' he said.
'So tell me,' I said.
'Have a look.' He folded the paper as necessary and passed it to me. ... There was a one-column item with a colour photograph of an upside-down bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup sporting a right-side-up label. SAUCE FLIPS TO GO WITH THE FLOW was the headline.
[Heinz] has spent millions of pounds and three years on research to come up with an upside-down bottle with a cap and valve in its bottom. It is a solution that customers hit upon years ago - seven out of ten say they balance their sauce bottles on their tops.
'How's that grab you?' said Selby.
'It's definitely good news,' I said.

from Come Dance With Me, 2005


~ ~ ~ ~

The world-child has been told that this is a world, ... and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987


~ ~ ~ ~

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987

~ ~ ~ ~

'Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.'

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973

I'd be delighted if the yellow sheets were 4qated further but there is no need for them to wander on as I know they are in good hands where they are now. The only thing I asked my students to do is to pose for a picture with their yellow sheets and their copies of Kleinzeit, which they all did, and I'd like to thank them once again for being game.

Happy Birthday, Russ, love and all the best to all of you,

Yvonne x

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

Bill Rodgers 2005

Hi,

Thanks for the fab SA4QE site. I don't know whether it's too late to submit an entry... hope not. Joined the Yahoo-Kraken group yesterday and look forward to participating in the discussion.

I live in Stanthorpe (a small rural town in South east Queensland, Australia), where I teach kiddies how to use computers in the local primary school.

I went to Brisbane (Queensland's capital) on the weekend of Mr Hoban's Illustrious Birthday (Hip Hoorah!), and placed the yellow page in the centre of the West End Community gardens. It nestled underneath some large dandelions - looking at home and beaming in a friendly way behind the flowerheads.

There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind--tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-coloured moon shivered to the silence of a ghost roar on the rising air.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Didn't manage a photo this year - will definitely do it next year...

David, Veda & Josh Johnson 2004

They say the family that 4Qates together stays together .... or if not they should have said it.

This is my first year to be able to 4Qate and we decided to involve the entire family. Due to a brilliant stroke of serendipity I was laid off from my job last Friday and therefore had the day free to travel around the Dallas area 4Qating at will. The morning, of course was spent preparing our yellow missives. Then a battle plan was drawn and we were off.

My first quote was from Amaryllis Night And Day (pg 56):

After the pizza we went to the sitting-room for video time. Amaryllis ranged the shelves, considering and rejecting various films until she settled on Notorious. 'This is the one I want,' she said. 'Every time I watch it I'm so afraid that they won't get away in the end.'

'I've seen this film many times,' I said, 'and so far they've always made it; after all, the taxi's right there ready to go; it isn't as if they have to hang about waiting for a bus.'

She leant against me briefly. 'I don't take anything for granted any more.' She shook her head. 'Ingrid Bergman was so adorable in this one and now she's dead of cancer.'

'Cary Grant's dead too, and Claude Rains; Alfred Hitchcock as well,' I said. 'It's mainly a dead-people film but there's a lot of life in it.'

'Ghosts,' said Amaryllis. 'And yet sometimes when I'm watching this film I think it's realer than I am.'

'Feeling unreal is part of reality.' I gave her a little hug, just with one arm, delicately.

This was left folded neatly next to a faced out copy of the 'Notorious' DVD at a local video store.

The next quote was also from Amaryllis Night and Day (pg 56) and is the sentence immediately preceding the above passage:

Happiness can be unsettling, like catching a baby that someone has thrown out of a window.

This was left in a stack of free weekly newspapers at a local café (with a headline that discussed "Happy Shiny People").

My third quote was from Riddley Walker (pp 6-7):

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it don’t have no name.'

I said, 'What thing is that?'

She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you don't take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up sudden in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'

....

Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since then it seams like they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben allways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it don't think like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.

Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.

This was left standing in front of a book on the nature of reality and Spinoza in the philosophy section of a very large used book store.

Finally, my fourth 4Qation came from Fremder (pg 32):

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.

I flickered out and back as the job required and felt a little fuller of emptiness each time. There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs. Things between Judith and me dwindled month by month until we were no longer part of each other's reality. After half a year of not hearing from me she sent me a photocopy of a pencil-and-sepia drawing by Caspar David Friedrich: a burly eagle owl (Uhu in German) sitting on a coffin that rested on boards laid across a freshly-dug grave. A child's coffin it was, not fully grown. There was no note, that was the whole message and it arrived the day after her suicide was briefly mentioned in the newsfax.

I still think of that child's coffin and the Uhu. Sometimes I see them tumbling over and over in deep space with that figure in the blue coverall. And sometimes when evening comes and that little tribunal of the dusk I remember how, when I first saw Judith, I needed to penetrate her sadness that waited with its face between its knees for the rain.

Each of us have one quote that we saved for a location we could not get to on the appointed day, this was mine and it will be left tomorrow in a large chain bookstore (either Borders or Barnes & Noble).

~ ~ ~ ~

As I mentioned, we decided to make this Hoban Day celebration a family affair. What follows are the quotes chosen by my wife (Veda Johnson) and my son (Josh Johnson).

My wife's first quote was from The Medusa Frequency (pg 16):

There's a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it:

I trusted you with the idea of me
and you lost it.

This was left inside the same local café as one of my quotes.

She then decided to "stage a scene" for the next three quotations. We proceeded to the largest used bookstore in town and she collected copies of Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker and Angelica's Grotto and set them in a stack on a table. She then stacked the three following quotes next to them, handwritten on the signature yellow paper and left them, the books and her pen in hopes that someone would become curious after a time.

Kleinzeit got out of the train, poured into the morning rush in the corridor. Among the feet he saw a sheet of yellow paper, A4 size, on the floor, unstepped-on. He picked it up. Clean on both sides. He put it in his attaché case. He rode up on the escalator, looking up the skirt of the girl nine steps above him. Bottom of the morning, he said to himself.

- from Kleinzeit

Her no-question-asking stalked through the flat like a tall silent creature that stared at Jachin-Boaz all day.

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

I don't think I've ever seen anyone pick up a box of matches without shaking it. Curious. It takes more time to shake the box than it would to open it straight away but it's less effort. It's pleasant to hear a lot of matches rattling in the box, one has a feeling of plenty. No one wants to open a matchbox and find it empty.

- from Turtle Diary

An interesting editorial note. In The Russell Hoban Omnibus the above quote from Turtle Diary actually says "It's pleasant to hear a lot of marches rattling...." instead of matches. I cannot locate my copy of Turtle Diary to make sure it really is a typo in that edition and not an intentional changing of words, but I am assuming it was an error and have corrected it here.

Her final quote, which also will be left in the same large chain bookstore tomorrow is from The Medusa Frequency (p 75):

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.

~ ~ ~ ~

My son Josh is 12, and as such has not had the opportunity to read most of the novels that his mother and I have enjoyed. He has read a couple and chose 4 quotes to 4Qate. He also chose where they would be left.

His first quotation is from Trouble on Thunder Mountain:

'A hi-tech plastic mountain,' said Dad.

'It takes a man named Flatbrain to think of something like that,' said Jim.

This was left curled around the trunk of a tree in a large planter in the lobby of the Dallas City Hall. His reason for choosing this location was "There are a lot of 'flatbrains' at City Hall" and "a tree in a planter inside a big concrete building seems very plastic mountainish to me."

His second quote was from Jim Hedgehog's Supernatural Christmas (pp.23-24):

The next scene was a deserted street late at night. The fog was so thick that the street lamps only made a feeble glow. Now there was no music, only a sound like the beating of a heart.

Something was coming but it wasn't visible yet. It was coming closer, closer, closer.

SUDDENLY here it was. Jim jumped back and ate the cold baked potato and the peas and carrots and salad without noticing.

This was left in a bin of stuffed toys in the Children's book section of the large used bookstore.

His next quote was once again from Trouble on Thunder Mountain:

Dear Family O'Soupus,

This garbage dump has been reserved for you. We hope you will be pleased with this impravement.

Betterly yours,

A. Worser

Worser could do better with his spelling,' said Jim.

This was left sticking out from between several spelling workbooks at the same used bookstore.

His final quote, which will, per his instructions, be left at a nearby McDonald's Restaurant tomorrow is one more from Jim Hedgehog's Supernatural Christmas (pp.27-28):

'HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF THE SUPERNATURAL?'

'You're too fat to be supernatural,' said Jim.

'I'M SUPERNATURALLY FAT,' said the Blob. 'WHAT ABOUT YOU?'

Overall we had a great day of 4Qating and look forward to making this an annual family outing.

Happy Birthday from Texas Russ,

David, Veda, and Joshua Johnson