Malgorzata Snigurowicz 2012

The above location was outside the Pałac Kultury i Nauki [Palace of Culture and Science]:

There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them anymore.

- from Turtle Diary

This piece was left in the Warsaw underground:

I said, "Yes it mus be hard for you with no eyes, you can't even see what youre going in to." He said, "No 1 can. Onlyes diffrents is them with eyes they think they can."

- from Riddley Walker

The third one was on a telephone booth at ul. Foksal [Foksal Street]. By the way, the street was originally named after Vauxhall in London - isn't that a coincidence? 

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. 

- from Riddley Walker

All the photos were taken in Warsaw, though I don't live there, I was just visiting a friend. In return, she gave me a dog she had found a week earlier. Now that I think about it I should've named him Russell or Riddley - it's all somehow connected in my head. It was freezing cold, so running around the town with yellow paper was somehow extreme, but I couldn't give up!

The slips were spread around Warsaw, but it's Opole where I'm from and where the whole idea of taking part came into being (also where RH's books were read).

Also posted to Facebook

Sara Miller Acosta 2012

I remember being a child out of doors in the dark of summer evenings, winter evenings, late dark and early. One saw perfectly well, it never seemed really dark until I came in the house. Then the night outside the windows would be very black.

- from Turtle Diary

Posted to Facebook

Emmae Gibson 2011

Once upon a time in February I wanted to see turtles, giant, green, sea turtles, chelonia mydas, loggerheads would do.  I didn’t know I wanted to see them until I got there.  There, was a very long way away, not in my mind yet; I don’t live in London or near a zoo, don’t keep cats, birds or tropical fish and never fancied turtle soup.  Fate had her own agenda, though, it seemed I would be 4qating in another country whilst engaged in a geographical, nostalgic odyssey.

So we landed, drove from Melbourne to Adelaide, to somewhere in the middle and marvellous dusty places in between, across the Snowy Mountains to Bateman’s Bay, to Sydney to Toowoomba to Goomeri to Monto to Mount Larcom to Gladstone ... chasing memories of childhood farms, departed relatives in sepia, snakes under the porch, nuns with hard rulers, rodeos, dynamite, cattle sheds with cows’ names, men dying doing men’s work, immigrant homesickness.  We found all of them, and gratifyingly, much  more.  People, who knew and remembered.

Then as if serendipity hadn’t done enough to link the decades, the sat-nav drew our wagon to Bundaberg on the Queensland coast, near Mon Repos beach.  That’s like arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon and suddenly remembering it’s where Shakespeare was born.  Until then I’d failed to pay attention to the shadow of the thought that was trailing me – it was close to one of the nesting grounds in the world.  Where female turtles come ashore at night at certain times of year, to dig pits and lay their eggs, spread sand over with their flippers and cry reptilean tears.  Or, later in the season, where tiny hatchlings break out and make their precarious way in darkness towards the sea.

Anyway, there was Mon Repos and I knew I wanted to see turtles.  There I would 4qate that very evening (what better place?) with a group leaving by minibus, to await the hatchlings’ appearance on the beach, possibly as late as 2a.m., probably with marine commentary by a keen turtle Ranger.

That’s when I began to feel uneasy.  That’s when it began to feel too easy, just a bit voyeurish.  Would I like a gang of snapping turtles waiting around to watch me deliver, or to watch my babies hatching into the world without me?  It’s a private thing, surely, at least it was, when the turtles evolved and went back to the ocean 150 million years ago.  Why were humans permitted to exploit a mysterious, nocturnal miracle of nature?  By the way, it was the rainy season, the best rainy for farmers in Qld. for ten years, worst for everyone else.  Creeks flooded, dams rose, roads were closed, skies thundered and lightninged, winds bent the motel-palms to the ground and beaches were inclement.  In other words, the turtle viewing closed, all turtle tours were cancelled, a wash-out, even on the beach.  Straight away I knew it had to be Hobanesquely so.  You get there and everything’s shut.

Anticipation turned without much ado to relief at this ‘bad’ luck.  Bad for whom?  It was an intrusion to which I would have been party, along with engines, headlights, voices, smells, bacteria, litter... tainting the nesting grounds of an endangered species, their fragile existence.  We’re assured they can’t hear human voices, well, they don’t have to, they’re bound to feel the vibrations are not quite benign, their sense of smell is greater than a dog’s, everything is a predator and they cannot run!

No doubt the turtle handlers are sensitive, they help more baby turtles into the sea with their hands than nature might allow, and the money may go into conservation.  But you can’t help asking, are the shrinking numbers a side-effect of sheer human presence?  Like the bats in Carlsbad Caverns and the coral on Great Barrier Reef.  And which is more degrading, the zoo tank or the turtle tour?  I’m no born-again greenie, but this was planet-priority Australia, I mean, they don’t let you take fruit from one state to another, their traffic police are truly Mad Max, yet this....  Nor did I feel smug, leaving Bundaberg in the sheeting rain, I just felt lighter, knowing they were out there, that they could have hatched in private that night on the waterlogged sand.
I’d left my yellow paper behind in the information rack.  Let this belatedly be my report, with apologies, because that, I’m afraid, was February 2010.  This year, the weather became cyclonic and I haven’t heard yet what turtles do in a typhoon.

‘I’d been aware of the turtles for some time before I went to look at them.  I knew I’d have to do it but I kept putting it off.  When I did go to see them I didn’t know how to cope with it.  Untenable propositions assembled themselves in my mind.  If these were what they were then why were buildings, buses, streets?  The sign said that green turtles were the source of turtle soup and hawksbills provided the tortoiseshell of commerce.  But why soup, why spectacles?’

‘A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on.  Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.’

- from Turtle Diary (1975)

Lindsay Edmunds 2011

And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going. . . . Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

- from Turtle Diary

The above quote was included in Lindsay's contribution to The Huffington Post on 4 February entitled The Kraken rising: Russell Hoban's 86th birthday

The following was posted the same day by Lindsay on her own blog, Writer's Rest:

Under our ordinary speech there are always invisible subtitles in an unknown tongue.

- from The Medusa Frequency

 

Yvonne Studer 2010

As I'm on sabbatical and have been spending a lot of time on Facebook recently, spreading the word in public this year meant sending out quotes to those of my Facebook friends I thought might enjoy Russ's books. I set my status update to a quote from the essay 'I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment (1992):

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.

Then I added the following comment:

"Today, on 4th February 2010, is the American writer Russell Hoban's 85th birthday. To celebrate the day, fans from all over the word spread quotations from his books for adults and children in various places, an event we call the "Slickman A4 Quotation Event", short SA4QE. Often the quotes are written on sheets of yellow A4 paper because this kind of paper played a major role in Hoban壮 second novel for adults, Kleinzeit (1974). But other forms of expression from handwritten quotes on rizla paper to digital posts and animations are just as suitable. If you want to learn more and enjoy looking at examples from past years, check out the special SA4QE blog at http://sa4qe.blogspot.com/

Since I've always "4qated" ("fork-you-ate-it") places where I was busy, I decided to be active on Facebook this year, and particularly in Pet Society. So, don't be astonished if Purryl drops you a note with a quote today. Time is too short to 4qate all houses, though, and since everybody doesn't play Pet Society, the quote in my status update is for all those who won't get a personal message.

What the status update didn't allow me to type because there is a restriction on its length is that the essay from which I borrowed my quote is from the collection The Moment under the Moment.

Here on Facebook, we probably show each other a little bit more of our dreams than we usually would, and that's definitely something to celebrate and be thankful for. Here's to our unseen lives then! x"

Finally, I posted individual messages to twenty friends via the game we play together. If the quote was too long for an in-game note, I would direct them to the Inbox and place the quote there, stating why I had sent them these particular bits. These were the quotes:

"'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang."

(Kleinzeit, 1974)

"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."

(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."

(Linger Awhile, 2006)

"'5p more, luv,' said the lady at the ticket-taking booth. 'Fare's gone up.' That's life, Kleinzeit noted. Yesterday it cost so much to get from here to there, today it costs more. Just like that. Who knows what it'll cost me to wake up tomorrow."

(Kleinzeit 1974)

"Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They're gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn't need to come back."

(Turtle Diary 1975)

"Ink on paper makes books; books make worlds. You don't need a printing press, you don't even need to be grown up. Little children take pieces of paper, of different sizes as often as not; on them they print great gangling words with capitals and lower-case letters not always in the usual places; they draw pictures on the pieces of paper and they staple them together and the pages turn and it's a book with monsters and spacecraft from beyond the galaxy. Or trees and flowers and there was a princess who lived in a castle."

('With a Choked Cry', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment 1992, and in A Russell Hoban Omnibus 1999)

"I don't believe there's anyone who could know my needs and bear the burden of my sorrow the way you do."

(My Tango with Barbara Strozzi 2007)

"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."

('Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road', reprinted in The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

I hope you all had a great day, and, once again, Happy Birthday, Russ!

Roland Clare 2010

Here are some Bristolian SA4Qations perpetrated in the noontide gloom not far from my workplace. The text is from Turtle Diary … a chapter that has always made me laugh out loud, and yet links so interestingly to later work like The Raven (from The Moment under The Moment):

… The Original Therapy lady was a rampant-looking woman of about forty. Shiny red hair in the style of old musical films, tight white trousers, gold sandals, silver toenails, bursting purple silk blouse. Swarthy boyfriend with a St Christopher medal and a racing-driver watch strap.

Her name was Ruby and she sounded as though she lived in a caravan, her voice and her way of talking. She began to tell us about her therapy while some of the people in the room sat in lotus positions with very straight backs and others held their heads. One girl wailed a little now and then, another muttered the whole time.

She was American, this Ruby. Told us how she’d knocked about, been a rodeo rider, done roller derbies, wrestled, had three husbands and all kinds of troubles. Discovered her Original Therapy whilst wrestling one night. Another lady had a scissors grip on her and was squeezing very hard, got a bit over-enthusiastic and wouldn’t let go. Under the pressure Ruby experienced a strange alteration of consciousness.

“I was seeing all kinds of coloured lights and shooting sparks,” she said, “and the sound of the crowd was beginning to come and go like the roar of surf far away. Something began to happen to me. I could feel myself going way way down and way way back, like thousands of years, millions of years, glaciers coming and going and the dinosaurs sinking into the swamps and the primitive trees being crushed into coal. Farther back than that even, crawling out of a warm ocean and gasping on the beach and beyond that back to the sea and smaller and smaller, all the way back to a single cell. And back beyond that to nothing, just the warm sea, what they call the primordial soup.”

Ruby went farther than the soup even, she got to a point where there was nothing, no time, no her, no anything. Then there came something like the idea of a question, a kind of original YES? or NO? It put itself together as YES. There was a mystical green pattern with no sound, then a red explosion in Ruby’s mind and the people in the ringside seats were picking the other lady wrestler out of their laps. That was the turning point in Ruby’s life, going back to the origins of life and finding the big YES, and she was going to show us slides and then demonstrate her therapy …

The slideshow below shows:

(1) A bit of Turtle Diary on the bench outside a suitably Hobanesque café.

(2) Hobanised yellow paper left amid virgin yellow paper in stationery shop.

(3) The ‘Pedestrians’ sign seemed like a ready-made notice-board.

(4 & 5) Hoban quotation obscuring ‘All the stuff you need to know’ at a well-used info-terminal near the city centre.

(6 & 7) Stuck to a random door, because I liked the ‘doorbell’ there.

(8) Yellow sheet left in a derelict refrigerator on waste ground … something for the low-budget drinking community to enjoy, perhaps.

Emmae Gibson 2009

4th February 2009. Snowed in this year, as it happened. In Appin, where it doesn't usually. Happen, I mean, snow, I mean. Which made it a doubly happy happening, snowing and 4quating, all wrappin'd up; left it in the rack of books and birthday cards in the village shop:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: `This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: `This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'

from Turtle Diary, ch 24.

Chosen with certain grown-up children in mind.

Struggled home and sent yellow cosmic paper to several members of a writers' group, quoting this other, familiar, wonderful struggle:

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do. HERO, I'll call it. Chapter I. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

from Kleinzeit, Picador edition 1976 p.108.

Antti Savela 2009

A yellow paper at the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå, Sweden (photo below). The paper said; William dragged out the first crate, tipped it on the trolley and wheeled it away with an amount of noise that would have waked the dead. I followed with the rope. from Turtle Diary Happy Birthday Russ ! If you have any problems viewing the above video try watching it on YouTube

Hugh Bowden 2009

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Fairclough 2009

I've gone for this from Turtle Diary.

Each new generation of children has to be told: "This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this." Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say, "This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all."

Carolyn Mayne 2008

As a new-ish member of the Kraken I decided I'd like to join in the sa4qe this year, then realised that we would be travelling to our house in Devon that day. I had chosen extracts from Kleinzeit and Turtle Diary, obtained a supply of gold paper, and planned several suitable places to leave them in my home town of Guildford. However, Surrey's loss was the west country's gain. The first two were left at the Solstice Somerfield shop, a couple of miles from Stonehenge - one in the display of newspapers where the Guardian should have been and one in the ladies' loo (tucked into a large bucket of fresh flowers - the gold paper complemented the yellow chrysanthemums). Later on that evening, in Hope Cove on the south Devon coast, we went to the pub for dinner and left a couple there (one in the ladies' loo again I'm afraid, wedged by the mirror). Then, walking back to the house in gale-force winds, I left the last one in the telephone box only a few yards from the crashing waves - appropriate, I thought, for the Turtle Diary piece.

He put his face in front of the bathroom mirror.
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.

from Kleinzeit (1974)

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: “The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup….” I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that’s a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary (1975)

No pictures I'm afraid. Perhaps next year!

I have enjoyed Russell Hoban's novels for many years, and have managed to get one of his books onto the programme of both book groups I belong to - Riddley Walker and Her Name Was Lola. Both were popular choices, though none of the other readers had previously heard of him.

~ Carolyn

Rosie Harrold 2008

I am one of Roland's students. We have been studying Mr Hoban's work as part of our AS course and decided to participate in the sa4qe.

“Thursday. Grey and rainy. That was a help, sunny blue-sky days always look like bad luck to me.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

“There’s nothing like a little physical violence to make a man feel young again.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1975) page 125

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4th February in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Amanda Moorghen 2008

I am in Mr Clare's lesson and we are all sa4qe-ing. Here is mine. I'm planning to leave it somewhere in the art block at school.

All the best,

Amanda.

“And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.”

from Turtle Diary

Picador, London (1977), page 45

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s third novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday.

Richard Cooper 2007

With a two-week-old baby in the house (just what is it with me and this time of year, eh?), I haven’t had as much time to prepare a 4qation as on previous years, and this has only made my ‘normal work panic’ about choosing a quote from the many thousands of words in Russell Hoban’s many books even worse. However, the problem has happily suggested its own solution. The new arrival, Charlie Andaman, has, in the tradition of his Thai side, already been awarded a nickname. His elder brother Joe (born March 2005) being dubbed Squid (Thai: ‘Mg’), we felt something similarly oceanic and possibly Hobanesque was called for, and so Charlie has become Turtle (‘Thou’). Thus I narrowed my search for quotes this year to Russ’s superb early novel Turtle Diary. After some searching – punctuated by assorted changes, baths, feeds, plays, tellings-off, naps, and even a bit of attention to my children – I settled on the following three quotes. They’re from chapter 3, narrated by William G., and from adjacent pages, so not strictly separate quotes, but can be read that way.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: ‘The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...’ I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary

I liked this passage firstly because it sets out the turtles’ incredible quest and achievement, which in itself seems to me a metaphor for the human condition – we spend so long working towards something, not always knowing why or how but only knowing we have to do it, and without any guarantee that we’ll succeed or that the turtle-eggs we lay even if we do get there will survive. Secondly I like the way Hoban takes something negative about the turtle experience – the sacrilege of being turned into soup – and makes something both positive and amusing out of it. As a father now for the second time I’ve naturally spent many hours lately contemplating the kind of future I’ll be able to give Charlie, and the kind he’ll have anyway regardless of my influence, so this passage also suggests to me some good advice to him: We’re all our own kinds of soup; be proud of your Charlie soup, and for that matter your London roots, and don’t be put off by the fact that millions of gallons of other-people soup is sloshing around the world at the same time: your variety is unique.

The second passage follows directly on from the last:

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there... I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks.

“...I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

from Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary centres on two people at a crucial point in their lives and confronting their own situations, which, despite being pretty mundane, are nonetheless troubling to them. I can relate to the story and characters partly through being a bit of a worrier myself (and even if I wasn’t, I daresay most parents would admit that having children makes you worry anyway) and this beautifully cadenced passage with its Zen-like idea of ‘swimming, swimming [with] nothing in the mind’ provides me with some reassurance that there is, in fact, a way through, a way forward.

My last selection also follows on directly from the last paragraph, in fact is the final sentence of that paragraph, but I feel deserves separate consideration:

And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

I’m not a religious person and I despise the way that some people use religions and ‘faiths’ to mess up the world. Nonetheless I do retain a great deal of respect for people who manage to have faith (in spite, indeed, of the way faith is regularly abused and misused) and put it to good use, and one of those good uses is simply, as Bob Dylan put it, keeping on keeping on. I believe – or I’d like to believe – in a turtle-god, in turtle-faith, something that keeps you going despite the darkness, the sharks, the chances of getting lost.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far today and time is already running out, so I don’t know where these quotes are going to be 4qated. I doubt I’ll get the chance to go anywhere much further than the high street this afternoon so I’ll see what opportunities present themselves there.

(Later.) In the end I almost didn't manage to actually leave my quotes anywhere. I went to Waitrose and had a few ideas - by a bottle of Jindalee shiraz, which has a turtle on the label; in a copy of their store magazine Source, in a reference to the 'I am the source of William G soup' - but it was too busy and I felt conspicuous, and anyway I was with wife and kids so time was against me. (I also saw a box of some medicine stuff in the health section with the brand name Wellman and thought that would be good for a Kleinzeit quote - maybe next time.) On the way home it was dark and we were all tired and cold but I did manage to leave the quotes on the windscreens of some random parked cars, on a steel lion-shaped bench and through the letterbox of a chocolate shop. Didn't have my camera with me this time though, more's the pity!

Mike Shuttleworth 2007

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and small one. The sign said: 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...' I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone s the source of his or her own kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

from Turtle Diary

Why this text, why this place?

I've been thinking a lot about turtles lately, not least because a good friend of mine has been involved in writing an environmental impact report that opposed a billion dollar gas processing plant being built right on the nesting grounds of the flat-back turtle in north west Western Australia. Seems that when the report landed on the desk of the West Australian premier Alan Carpenter he announced, hand on heart, "I will do whatever it takes to get that gas plant built". Maybe a copy of Turtle Diary should have been sent to him. So with a few million bucks slung out by the developers to the government, guess what, suddenly the problem goes away. Just the turtles, I'm thinking.

Anyway, I love the way that William G is perplexed by his own identity throughout Turtle Diary. What is it one must do in order to define who (or what) one is? I have placed the quotation on the table of Mr Tulk, the cafe attached to the State Library of Victoria. You can see the old W-class tram in the background. Books, cities, people, journeys, questions. What I love about the work of Russell Hoban.

Olaf Schneider 2007

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

Night outside

Olaf writes: 'One of my (many) favourite quotes from Turtle Diary'.

Turtle navigation

More turtle thoughts swim through Olaf's mind.

Night-drive to Polperro

Take a ride with William and Naeara from Turtle Diary.

Roland Clare 2007

SA4QE from Bristol ... Two texts left variously on a fence at the Sea Walls overlooking the Avon Gorge (above), and in other locations (see below).

The two quotations are close neighbours in Turtle Diary. Neither is the bit I was actually planning to use, which was the satirical tale of the rich shark-diver and his rubber-clad brothel experience: in the end I thought that was bit long for people to read in a high wind or a crowded shop.

Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

from Turtle Diary

It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.

from Turtle Diary

The other locations were:

among the 'forthcoming events' at the Redgrave Theatre ...

... in the loo at Bristol Zoo ...

... among the children's books for sale in the Zoo bookshop ...

... and fastened to a spavindy bench frequented by bird-watchers:

Here are some passers-by inspecting the Sea Walls 4qation.

Emmae Gibson 2007

You live in the country now. You lived in the country before, but this is the real thing. Mountains, stones and oceans, trees, green islands and untrodden valleys, and shortly before the 4th February you realise in panic that successful 4quating is an urban activity.

For a start, deer don’t read. Just have no idea.

Secondly, the amount of horizontal rain here lately would wash the profundities of Kleinzeit deeply underground.

Thirdly, you did bus stops last year.

Land and seascape so pristine, a shred of paper of any colour gets dirty looks from green people. Of which you are one, naturally. Yellow paper with black capitals fluttering on a tree trunk? Looks fine in a romantic movie, but you could get your name in the local newspaper; think of the ignominy in the same column as ‘Man Bites Diggs,’ you’d be ‘Woman Accused of Yellow Loitering.’

Out on the waves? Now there’s a pretty thought, a Riddley message in a bottle bobbing, bobbing. But - plastic or glass - Coke or Glenfiddich? Both death to turtles. You dare not.

So you find yourself in the city with your man, who’s always on business, the Saturday night before the Sunday 4th February morning, on the fifth floor of the Thistle Hotel, listening to the raucous voices of party-goers in the street below long after 3.a.m. In New York all you could hear were sirens; at least Glasgow still has its well-documented, human element.

You brought a carrying book, a spare paperback copy of the first Hoban you ever read. You remember another hotel, the one where you read it, how it took you by surprise on the long way home. You could throw it out of the window now and surprise someone else. Not exactly A4 in its presentation, not yellow in deed, but yellow in thought.

But no, it might hit someone and how user-friendly is that?

You go back to sleep. The yellow paper waits written and folded inside the book of surprise, with the golden words:

‘The ends of things are always present in their beginnings…. the ends are actually visible in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again…. some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again, no matter how the seeing changes in between.’

from Turtle Diary

In the morning you go down to breakfast with your man and your book. You don’t leave it on your table for the waiter. You don’t leave it in the room when you check out, or at reception; no, she’s not the one. By now you’re getting desperate. You’ve failed to 4quate, you’ve let the team down, and soon you’ll be back in the car speeding guiltily towards useless, wide-open spaces again. Man asks if you’re okay - concerned - was it the steak last night?

You’re the one with the car park ticket and the money.

“No charge, hen,” says the man in the kiosk with the another-boring-sunday face. “Residents free!”

“Oh?”

You pause for a second as he turns away from his little window, to yet another-sunday-paper. The car starts to slide away. You know he’s the one. You slide the book on to his window ledge, the yellow folded bookmark sticking out.

You could have said something, given it to him, explaining, but that’s not 4quating, is it?

It has to be surreptitious. More fittingly Hobanesque, for the recipient, for the bored man in the green luminous jacket, you have to give him the element of discovery, surprise, the change of face.

You’re sure he was the one.

Nicole Paluszek 2007

Well a lot of things didn't quite go according to plan but hopefully there will be some positive effect from it all. I found out I was flat broke so I couldn't afford to go buy some yellow A4 and ended up using a purple 5x8 legal pad I had lying around. At least they'll get noticed!

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

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.'
I said, 'What thing is that?'
She said, 'Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn 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.'

from Riddley Walker

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far. --William G.

from Turtle Diary

I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes were an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes. -- Neaera H.

from Turtle Diary

A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy. --William G.

from Turtle Diary

Neither the library nor Borders had anything Hoban in stock (how scandalous!!) for me to draw quotes from except for a few Frances booklets, which I read on the spot, and frankly, to my surprise, unlike anything else by Hoban I've read before, I thought they were schlock, not eligible for quoting anything from. So I left Kailua-Kona and went back home and pulled some quotes, five in all, off Dave Awl's website, from the Riddley and Turtle books, and pinned them to power poles along my street in Honaunau.

For the sake of suspense/curiosity all I added is the SA4QE URL.

Aloha,

Nicole

peter morrison 2007

the first paragraph below i left on paper in the arches in glasgow, and posted the full thing on my blog/journal here and here.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: "The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup..." I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they're swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can't believe they'd swim, 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can't shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.

Mr. Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I'd got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we'd subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.

It's hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he's about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that's what penguins do on overland journeys. They're big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be, swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can't see the sun, what then? Their vision isn't good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

i've only been reading hoban for a few years, think this is my 3rd sa4qe? i worked my way through all the bloomsbury books with the matching covers, not really realising turtle diary would become hard to get. but by the time i was ready to just get it despite it not matching the others, the only copy i had actually seen in the shops was gone. so i finally got round to buying it second hand about a month ago, and read it in the last couple of weeks. normally its the humour, the sense of the weird that creeps in that gets me with russell's work, though i acknowledge the darkness in his work. reading turtle, i guess it hit me in the rut, and turning that last page i was left with a sense of melancholy, a need to release my own turtle. since reading it the whole idea of "soup" has become a running gag between me and a friend - you have a choice, accept new ideas and keep moving, or become soup.

i avoided reading the related posts before i went out, not entirely sure why, but i didn't want it to influence me. very weird to then find that the same quote has already been used. and to think i nearly went for the one about the playboy in the shark cage and the parallels between fetishism, or william g's speculations about shamanism and the turtle as his spirit animal.

anyway, a good day to you all, and may you avoid being soup good and long!