Richard Cooper 2012

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

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

- from Trouble on Thunder Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- from Pan Lives (The Moment under The Moment)

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

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

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

peter morrison 2012

somewhere along the line, between there and here i think i flickered once or twice too many times. it seems the only logical explanation, the experienced gaps in time that account for the last week, or two...

i had visitors, so found my distracted, unsure what my plans were for the day of fourqating. which left them with a flickering, unsubstantial/unsubstantiated kind of spontaneity.

on my recent re-read of fremder, i had noted page numbers in my phone. so minutes before going out the door for the evening, i grabbed phone, yellow paper, and a fremder. and with those three objects i scrawled out, in huge hurried letters, the following two quotes from that novel:

What I like about Badru is that its so much what it is, so much the appearance of itself printed on the very thin membrane that we call reality. On the other side of that membrane is the endless becoming that swallows up years and worlds, Badr al-Budur, Mikhail’s Intergalaktik, even the dream rats and their sacred objects, in the darkness of no remembrance.

...

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillness per second, making real by an act of retinal attention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lover’s kiss, the shots are fired the horses gallop; but bellow the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

- from Fremder

my brother and i nipped into a book shop, late on in the day, before moving on to the next steps of our insubstantial plan. there i found of books that were on "sale", one piece of yellow paper was thrust into the pages of iain banks' The Steep Approach To Garbadale - which seemed appropriate given he is a scottish writer and these events took place in scotland. (think quick with this logic thing...) the second piece of paper was thrust equally hastily, and sneakily into a copy of ben aaronvitch's Rivers of London. this too seemed appropriate, a curious london novel, for a writer who wrote so much about london. the banks is one of his rare ones i have not actually read, however i would recommend aaronvitch's novel, an enjoyable read.

anyway, that was my belated qatation.
yours flickeringly.
peter

Pablo K 2012

- from Pilgermann

outside Goldsmiths, 1am, on their cow bins. 

Tweeted

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

- from The Medusa Frequency

on the East London line. Not technically A4. So sue me.
Tweeted

John D 2012

"What are you?" she said. "A hypnotist?"
"Please forgive my staring, I'm a writer."

- from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

Left outside Karben Cafe Bar, Portland Road, Worthing and on a bench outside Waitrose, High Street, Worthing

Also posted to Twitter
 

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.

Roland Clare 2012

A quick report on a gruelling afternoon SA4QEing in snowy Bristol.

I posted this quotation:

‘… theres something in us it don't have no name […] Its looking out thru our eye hoals … Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way […] We aint a naturel part of it, We dint begin when it begun we dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I don't know what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to it or boyls on the arse of it I don't know.'

 - from Riddley Walker

at the Arnolfini café:

at the Colston Hall:

and a gloomy staff workroom at Bristol Grammar School:

I also posted three quotations from Soonchild (I hope that is not contrary to the spirit of SA4QE, since the publication date is so close!):

… the living are the link between the dead and the unborn and the dead have to work all the time to pass along to the unborn all the things they're going to need […] maybe you think you're doing it all by yourself but it's the dead working in you. They simply have no rest, the dead. Life is hard and death is hard, nothing is easy.

- from Soonchild

at The Lord Mayor's Chapel [on the monument to Lady Margaret, 1610–35, wife of Sir Baynham Throkmorton]:

at Bristol Guild of Applied Art:

and Fopp Records and Books (top of report).

Inclement weather put paid to my slightly ambitious plan to paint the A4 yellow, just where it comes into Bristol from Bath. Maybe another year …

Chris Lilly 2012

When I got home I opened the door, took a deep breath of silence, turned on some lights, ... and settled back to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred by himself has never interested me much despite the wonderful things he could do; the enchanting Ginger, however, as a partner of independent spirit, gave him importance and validated his masculinity by acknowledging his mastery and following his lead...When they were alive I was glad to know that somewhere they were among us; when they departed this life they left the world poorer. 

 - from Come Dance With Me 

Left opposite the O2 Arena, London, and posted to Facebook and Twitter

Alan Gibson 2012

Here and gone, the music; the mind shielding it from the winds of forgetting, holding what is partly now and partly remembered. Here and gone the whisper of the vox humana in the stones of darkness. On earth and out beyond the Hawking Threshold yesterdays and everydays in the morning mirror, the red glimmer of the Dog Nebula, the unremembrance of flicker dreams, a tawny owl flying low over the heather in the Grampians, great sea-shapen rocks at Portnockie, and the rattle of pebbles in the suck of the tidewash...

- from Fremder

These two quotes were from The Moment Under The Moment, Tottenham Court Rd. This is one of my very favourite long quotes and had to be spread over about three pages - it goes from "The moment will not stay" and continues through Tottenham Court Rd via High Fidelity, watches resistant to the suckers of giant squid, very thin calculators, to radio frequencies, symphonies to a map as large as the land it attempts to represent. A rant of longing, fallibility, want, frustration, human-ness and pure genius. There were others in the sequence but the lamination reflected the flash too much.

Blue-black shiningness, bluish-white shining on the puddles on the football pitch in the rainy night all starred with lamps and windows. Always in November there comes such a night, blue-black and shining and wild with rain and wind and brown leaves blowing. In the morning suddenly the plane trees on the far side of the common are bare winter trees.

Windowed shapes of light on the ceiling, Melanie Falsepercy asleep beside me, Luise rising in the shining dawn in the wild and rainy night.

In the dimness and the shadows of the room I breathed the novembery fragrance of Melanie Falsepercy.

- from The Medusa Frequency

These and other quotes posted around Southampton and to Facebook

Alan has written about the event on his lovely blog: http://theurbaneforager.blogspot.com/2012/02/slickman-a4-quotation-event.html

UPDATE: On 14th March Alan emailed the following:

Just thought you and other Russ readers might like this...

I was rowing on the river Itchen in Southampton yesterday when I noticed something strange in the distance; I was sure that I had just spotted the Head of Orpheus, swimming upsteam...

Fortunately I had my camera with me and managed to overcome my sense of impending strangeness and dread just enough to photograph the mysterious item...

It was quite strange when I saw it - I had seen a seal once before and thought it was a football, now I see a barnacle covered football and think of the Head of Orpheus - I always attain a heightened susceptibility to coincidence when I read Medusa Frequency ;-)

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!

Martin Eve 2011

My quotation this year is taken from the beginning of Hoban’s 1998 novel Mr. Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, definitely not one for the kids, but which I hope proves intriguing. So, without further ado:

He winced. “Please — the idea of Pelléas in English is abhorrent. Must go now. See you later. Or not, whichever.” In the fresh breeze he made as he passed me I smelled money and something else, medicinal and disciplinary, that I thought of as bitter aloes. As far as I know I’ve never smelled bitter aloes but the name suggest the smell I have in mind. The card said, in an elegant little typeface:

T. Rinyo-Clacton

Although Russell Hoban was born in a different era, as were we all to some extent, the world does not stand still. This year instead of printing my quotations directly onto yellow paper, I printed the above QR code, which when scanned on an Android, Blackberry or iPhone device redirects to this very post (producing a pleasing cyclical reference in the picture above).

Here’s three photos of my drop locations (there were many more, but these were the ones I photographed):

Somewhere between Enfield Town and Seven Sisters

The British Library Cafe

Somewhere in the British Library.

The above photos were posted to Martin's blog and to his Facebook profile

Roland Clare 2011

Around us all is night, black night that howls outside the circle of our words or crouches magically with the fire reflected in its eyes. We are in it; it is in us. We need to know that night and we need not to know. Our primal ‘What if?’ is the twining of our fingers in the dark with those of unseen Chance and whispering Dread who walk with us. They are sister and brother to us, father and mother: the ancient family of not knowing, walking in uncertainty.

- from Household Tales (an essay from The Moment under the Moment)

Placed on the music stand of a fine harmonium in Bristol Museum (above), and also:

Participating in the Chinese New Year celebrations at Bristol Museum (I tucked it in after taking the photograph), plus:

Lurking among the frozen peas in our local branch of Waitrose.

Second quote:

Pan, the all, the everything half-human, half-animal god, is there to be a Thou for us to talk to. Because that’s what the language base is. It’s a place where the Thou of things is perceived and the silence speaks. The best that words can do is to make a space in which the silence can speak, in which the language of the everything can be heard. Humankind is naturally and properly religious, and I suggest that one definition of religion is that it is a mode of being and perception in which everything is Thou and nothing is It. Certainly we’ve tried it the other way; we’ve tried making both things and people It, and we’ve seen the results.

Is it possible that the sadness we sense in childhood is the sadness of the Thou perceivers who know that the world will come between them and the Thou of things, will stop its mouth and their ears? Is it the sadness of the listener who will not be allowed to hear the silence speak? Or is the sadness something else? Is it that whatever looks out through the child’s eyes knows that it must destroy the child to make the adult, must close the garden of the child to the grown-up just as Adam and Eve closed Eden to themselves? Is the sadness of the child the knowledge that it is doomed to repeat the original sin, deny its knowledge of the Thou, kill humble Pan and crucify the Word?

- from Pan Lives (an essay from The Moment under the Moment)

Tucked inside the Richer Sounds catalogue...

In a little red drawer in Habitat (I closed the drawer after taking the photograph)...

Lurking among the magazines in our local branch of Forbidden Planet.

Roland Clare November 2010

This was the first time I've ever 4quated in the dark and the driving rain; the photographs below reflect all that Novembering.

I said, 'No 1 ever starts his self.'

He said, 'Yes they do. You dont start the life in you thats like a rivver running in you stil there comes a time when you push your oan boat out in to the middl of it.'

(page 182)



Behind the grille that protects the glass of a very distinctively run-down, military memorabilia shop that has finally folded after occupying a conspicuous corner-site near the centre of Bristol for a good sixty years



Similarly, my Riddley quotation peeping from behind a grid: here it's in front of some posh offices built inside a mediaeval building, St Bartholomew's Hospital, in the centre



A longer shot of the same



Self-explanatory ... lots of people will have seen this one, I imagine



The old telephone-box gambit is getting a bit hackneyed by now ... though the boxes are getting harder and harder to find

Pablo K. 2010

Quotes dropped around south-east London:

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

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

[channelling H.P. Lovecraft]

I had told myself that I was not going to relive the past but of course this is not possible: what we call the present is only the accumulated past.

- The Bat Tattoo (2002)

"You took your time", says Moe.
"My time took me", says Max. "Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph."
He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - Willa Cather, My Antonia

- Her Name Was Lola (2003)

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of anything youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

- Riddley Walker (1980)

Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I'd do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: It bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don't know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one's proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who'd have wanted to know about them? They'd have stayed in the garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they'd have been a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God MADE us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn't done it.

- Pilgermann (1983)

"What's pathetic about trying to understand what happens to you?"
"It's cowardly. Besides which I don't believe you. I bet you're writing it all down trying to make a story out of it. I can tell by the miserable look of you. You're not really living your life, you're pulling the legs and wings off it, one by one. Why don't you take up vagrancy or crime, it's more manly."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

...I must say though lightning strike me as I speak that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I'm being arrogant, and maybe that's why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it's that simply - God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and PFFT! there go a few hundred or a few million X. Ah! To be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.

- Pilgermann (1983)

There is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it; he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it; singers to sing it; lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others.

- Pilgermann (1983)

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

I think about the dead a lot, their wants and needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it's because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn't; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting...The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day - sometimes I see my hand life a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel the ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names...I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.

- Fremder (1996)

More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

- Fremder (1996)

There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.

- Fremder (1996)

Things don't end; they just accumulate.

- Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (1998)

"Death is longer than life", she said, "and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we're left with, maybe some of us more than others."

- The Medusa Frequency (1987)

See the slideshow below for all the excellent photos from this report. If you have problems viewing this, you can browse the set on Pablo's Flickr page.

Steve Long 2010

I 4qated a day late this year, but better late than never I feel. The pressure of work done with for the weekend I used the Slickman technique of more or less random selection. I has preselected Riddley Walker, and was delighted to come upon this in the first page I looked at:

Persoon Eusa comes up agen this time hes got like a iron hat on his head. 2 long wires coming out of the top of the hat and littl pegs on the ends of the wires. Plus there’s a cranking handl on the side of the iron hat. Eusas trying to shift some kynd of a box its biggern he is. He gets the box heavit up on to the show board. He says, ‘Hoo! Thats a hevvy 1.’ Theres a cranking handl on the side of the box as the 1 on Eusas hat, 2 littl hoals and a slot in the top of the box and a nother slot in 1 end of it.

Eusa sya, ‘2 heads are bettern 1.’ He takes them 2 wires coming out of his hat and he pegs them in to the hoals in the box. He says, ‘Now Iwl jus input a few littl things in to my No. 2 head.’ Hes terning that crank on his iron
hat. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

Eusa says, ‘Now les see if it works.’ He takes a peace of paper and he says out loud what hes writing on it; ‘Whats my name?’ He puts the peace of paper in the slot in the top of the box he says, ‘Now les see it you can anser
that.’

Eusa terns the crank on the side of the box and a peace of paper comes out of the slot in the end of the box. Theres writing on the paper. Eusa reads it out; ‘My name is Eusa.’

Eusa says ‘Thats the ticket.’ Hes terning the crank on his iron hat some mor then. Hes inputting all kynds of knowing out of his head in to the box.

Mr Clevver comes up and hes watching Eusa and lissening to him. Eusas mummeling all kynds of numbers and formlers it souns like hes inputting all the knowing there ever ben in the woal worl out of his head in to that box. Hes saying the Nos. of the rain bow and the fire quanter hes saying the smallering Nos. and the biggering Nos. plus it souns like hes saying some thing about the 1 big 1. Mr Clevver hes leaning closer and closer hes lissening lissening.

Mr Clevver he says to Eusa, ‘Thats a guvner lot of knowing youre inputting in to that box parbly theres knowing a nuff in there for any kynd of thing.’

Eusa says, ‘That’s about it. I dont think theres many things you cudnt do with that knowing. You cud do any thing at all you cud make boats in the air or you cud blow the worl a part.’

Mr Clevver says, ‘Scatter my datter that cernly is intersting. Eusa tel me some thing tho. Whyd you input all that knowing out of your head in to that box? Whynt you keep it in your head wunt it be safer there?’

- from Riddley Walker

I added a few explanatory words at the bottom and took the yellow paper with me to Milton Keynes theatre to see the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake. We arrived quite early and I left the yellow paper in the foyer by a rail close to a stand carrying publicity leaflets for future shows. My mother-in-law was with us when I dropped the yellow paper, I thought she would be puzzled as to what was going on but she said she has "been on one of these before"! I can't remember which...

Best wishes to all,

Steve

peter morrison 2010

You’ll notice that i don’t call It by its right name. speaking its name might not actually bring it on but why take foolish chances. I’m talking about a certain sort of stoppage or ungoing, not infrequently an ongoing ungoing, that sometimes afflicts those whose trade is the writing of fiction. One of the strange truths about fiction is that practitioner writing with no difficulty on Monday may be utterly incapable of doing it on Tuesday. The poor blighter is suddenly rocked. ‘How’s it going?’ one’s friends ask cheerfully. ‘It’s not,’ one replied.

Can you pick it up from casual liaisons? Yes. From toilet seats? Yes. From reading the Sunday supplements? Watching The South Bank Show? Yes, yes. There are more ways of picking it up than not.

Various writers deal with it in various ways’ alcohol and frequent snacks, the traditional folk-remedies, do little to relieve the blankness of the page. Jogging has been known to result in the odd paragraph and a fair number of heart attacks. Hot baths and cold showers, travel and other forms of escape are unproductive.

One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect; certainly, in the mind-to-paper process, one’s choice of paper is important. I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into, isn’t It. While at the same time making a modest living if possible. Yellow paper definitely has less word resistance than blue; yellow-paper molecules are happier with blank-ink molecules than the blue paper ones are, and more susceptible to Brownian or even purpureal motion. I never use white paper - to intensity the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.

from "Blighters Rock", The Moment under The Moment

the picture shows this year's quote on my work monitor, with post-it to prompt the sourcing of yellow paper.... the quote itself was then tweeted (in a chopped up, unfortunately messy fashion), though was one of those days where i went to work and had dinner at friends, so had little other option. and would help if twitter weren't blocked from work....and all the parts had actually gone in from my phone. so it goes.

Hugh Bowden 2010

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

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

- from Pilgermann

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

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

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

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

Join the Facebook group campaigning against the redundancy threats
Further information and petition: http://stopclassicsfacultycuts.webs.com/

Hugh's brand new book Mystery Cults in the Ancient World (in which Hoban fans will be pleased to hear Orpheus plays an important role) is available from Amazon

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.

Deena Omar 2009

Stunned to realise my first quote was identical to Steve Long's from Pilgermann. I chose it pretty much at random. I handwrote it and left it, late last night, among some flyers in the 12 Bar Club, Denmark St, in between sets by Satan's Cock and Sergeant Buzfuz. Here it is…

One wakes up every morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into the being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.

from Pilgermann

Earlier, I tucked the following inside a copy of Bob the Builder comic, in the Camden branch of Sainsbury's. I had been flicking through the Pedalling Man collection and it jumped off the page and threw a snowball at me…

London City

I have London, London, London-
all the city, small and pretty,
in a dome that's on my desk, a little dome.
I have Nelson on his column
and Saint Martin-in-the-Fields
and I have the National Gallery
and two trees,
and that's what London is - the five of these.

I can make it snow in London
when I shake the sky of London;
I can hold the little city small and pretty in my hand;
then the weather's fair in London,
in Trafalgar Square in London,
when I put my city down and let it stand.

from The Pedalling Man

My whole day seemed to oscillate between sweetness and darkness and these words mirrored my feelings perfectly.

Happy (and sweet, and dark,) Hoban Day.

Paul Saich 2009

This year I was lucky enough that some of my colleagues at school put up quotes for me! My thanks to the English, Music and Drama departments for being so accommodating.

I reused the opening to Fremder AGAIN so I won't reproduce it here. Then also these:-

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. I've certainly never found any way to roll it back so that I could change my actions and the consequences of them. Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions. And lodestones are more frequent than pot-holes on the streets of Used-To-Be.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

My third attempt gave me a feeling of desolation and an old woman posing as a black cat. I'd dreamt her many times before; she looked like the old witch in the Grimm story who sent the soldier down into the hollow tree for the tinder-box.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

And also this one...

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.

from Fremder

Bit of a challenge to try to pick things that might appeal to students but I know that at least one went round trying to make sure he saw each of them!