Ruth Bosch 2012

"What I am now is waves and particles, I don't need to walk around, I just go."

- from Pilgermann

".....still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes...."

- from Pilgermann

I did this in my field, up in the back forty. Buckland, Massachusetts. Or Western Massachusetts.

In memory of Russell Hoban 1925-2011

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.

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

Margaret Fulton 2012

 

Then came the River Bend Nightmare, all of them wearing silvery, spangled costumes. They played a song called River Bottom Rock, and while they played, the coloured lights were making designs and patterns that jumped and shook like lightning on the walls and ceiling. The music roared and crashed and rattled windows all over town while Mary Jane Chipmunk moaned and hollered and screamed into the microphone. 

 - from Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas

"I am growing hard," he said, "And bitter. What a waste of me."

 - from The Marzipan Pig

The Emmet Otter quote was affixed to the glass wall of the bus shelter near my apartment in Seattle.

Also posted to Facebook

Andy Barding 2012

- from The Serpent Tower

- from Kleinzeit

Posted to Facebook

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 Hand 2012

Hello Gombert & all you weirdos...

My SA4QE experience this year kinda spiralled out of control wonderfully.... I apologise in advance for the length of this.

First, I thought the student/hipster/muso/street-art community in Melbourne might appreciate this kind of enlightened vandalism, so I aimed to get a bit of copy on SA4QE in the Arts section of the city's premier street newspaper, Beat Magazine, with a circulation in excess of 30,000. However, with the help of the irrepressible people behind that publication, it soon became the following full-page spot:

I was really chuffed with that, and cannot thank the editors enough for their enthusiasm. The first February edition carried the spot here: www.beat.com.au/arts/slickman-a4-quotation-event

Then I became a bit anxious... Does that kind of thing violate the spirit of SA4QE - the DIY ethic - the personal passion? So I planned to flagellate myself with something of a personal evangelical broadside on the town: I had 44 4qations to 4qate. (DISCLAIMER: in actuality it was only 11 quotes each 4qated 4 times, so Mr Cooper's one-day record still stands well clear of the pack.) It was a long, excellent day, and the following eleven quotes will stay in my mind forever:

24 January 2003. I don’t think of my daughters very often. Wherever they are, they have done alright, that I know. Sometimes I think of Elias because there are things I want to tell him. These things he knows maybe, maybe not.

...

Everything is twice itself, this I often think. Things are what they are every day, but then sometimes they are not. Sometimes I see people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. Suddenly it is like TV with the sound turned off and I see that this is really Death dressing himself up as these people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. So that is what is really happening, no?

...

But who am I that I should say this? My mind is like a top that spins crazily just before it falls over.

- from Come Dance With Me

Learn the speech of ravens and they will feed you.

...

    ‘Piss off.’
    ‘Make me.’
    The colours of my craziness roared and bellowed in my ears.

- from Fremder

  

        ‘I’m lost,’ said Klein.
        ‘In what sense?’ said Dr DeVere.
        ‘In the sense of I don’t know where I am.’
        ‘Can you elaborate?’
        ‘I am of a people who have always been fearless navigators of the mind. The dead sail with us as we make our way from idea to idea, steering by the stars and sea-marks named by those before us. Such a wide, wide ocean! But you always know where you are by the waves, by the swells, by the loomings and the stars. Then one dark night the waves change, and the swells; the winds blow from not the usual quarters. Black squalls come, and heavy seas, the stars are blotted out, the wind moans in the rigging. You suddenly realise that you might never make your landfall, you might drown. A great wave hits the boat and takes you with it, you feel yourself going down, down, down and then you don’t know any more which way is up and you can’t hold your breath a moment longer and the wild wide ocean fills your lungs and then you’re gone: down among the dead men.’
        Dr DeVere kept respectfully silent for a few moments. ‘It’s good that you could get that out,’ he said.

- from Angelica’s Grotto
    

By their in-your-face humble posture I [Angelica] recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.
       ‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’
       ‘How do you do,’ I said.
       We shook hands.
       ‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’
       ‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.
       ‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.
       I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’
       ‘But that’s imaginative displacement,’ I said, ‘and believing that wishing will make it so. It’s a Ghost Dance!’
       ‘Say what?’ said Ruthany.
       ‘Wovoka, the Paiute holy man from Nebraska, in 1888 had a vision during a solar eclipse, and he started the Ghost Dance Religion.’ I read off my computer printout: ‘ “He claimed that the earth would soon perish and then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state, replete with lush green prairie grass, large buffalo herds and Indian ancestors.”
       ‘He told the Indians how to earn this new reality, with prayer and meditation and especially dancing “through which one might briefly die and catch a glimpse of the Paradise to come”.
       ‘The government banned the Ghost Dance, the Indians didn’t stop, so on the morning of 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, the soldiers killed a hundred and fifty Indians and wounded fifty, all of them wearing Ghost Shirts to stop the bullets.’ By this time I was crying again.
       ‘She’s upset,’ said Jonathan to Ruth. ‘We’ll talk about this another time,’ he said to me as I sat there in my Ghost Shirt, weeping by the rivers of Babylon.

- from Angelica Lost and Found

    ‘And what did she ever see in you?’
    ‘Flickering images.’

...

The idea of a club of people eating lunches was frightening to me.

- from The Medusa Frequency   

Time back way way back befor peopl got clevver they had the 1st knowing. They los it when the got the clevverness and now the clevverness is gone as wel.

- from Riddley Walker

VIRGIN STATUE WEEPS, said the headline at the newsstand outside the station. ‘As well it might,’ said Klein.
...

Klein thanked her and walked home, still seeing Lucifer in pinks and greys and greens.

- from Angelica’s Grotto

When she told me that her name was Bertha Strunk I said, ‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s Box?’
‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes,’ she said.

- from My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

All in all it was a perfectly strange day. My only regret is not catching up with fellow Melburnian 4qaters, KP & MS, but time is a sphere.

Click to open a PDF of some of John's quotes

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
 

Yvonne Studer 2012

Today I travelled south to Hergiswil, Canton Nidwalden, in the Heart of Switzerland and on the shore of Vierwaldstättersee, where beautiful and artistic glass creations come from. More precisely, I visited the Glasi Hergiswil, a glass works that used to produce industrial glass (no Klein bottles!), but is nowadays well known for its beautiful and artistic glass creations. The Glasi has been making anything from plates and vases to works of art ever since the artist Roberto Niederer saved it from bankruptcy in the mid 70s.

But the glassblowers haven’t been at work since December, because the oven had to be fitted with new stones and it’s only from tomorrow that a new “Ofenreise” (literally, “journey of the oven”), i.e. a new period of production will start and go on for five to seven years of uninterrupted production.

Once the oven has cooled down for maintenance, it takes 2 weeks for it to reach the right temperature (1500 degrees C) again after a new fire has been kindled. This happened on 24th January, with the youngest glassblower ringing a bell to indicate the start of a new production cycle.

Outside the hall with the oven, there are sculptures, some made of glass, some made of other materials, marking the Glasi as anything but a simple factory. I’m sure that this place, with its magic and art originating in the skill and craftsmanship of the glassblowers from Switzerland and all over Europe would have appealed greatly to Russ.

So I placed a quotation from Russell Hoban's fragment "North" on a glass brick of one of the objects of art outside the factory. In fact it's the beginning and the end of the fragment.

"There is a north in the mind where the white wind blows, where the white ones live. Where the ice bear walks alone, the ice bear swinging his head on his thick neck that is like a great white snake in the body of a bear. Where the white wolf comes trotting, trotting on the paths of the living, the paths of the dead. Where the snowy owl glides in silence through the twilight. Where the raven speaks its word of black. 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.
(...)
You see? says the north. I put on these shapes and I do what I do.
You're far away, I say. I'll never go to the north.
Everything has its north, says the north. I'll come to you."

(Russell Hoban, from "North", in The Moment under the Moment, 1992, p. 175-177)

North in the south, beginnings and endings, our unwillingness to confront the north, its coming to us if we don't go there, all these things wanted expression today, on this coldest Russmas day since I started participating in SA4QE, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. I was thinking of Russ, grateful that there was someone like him, sad that he left us last December, but confident that his ideas will always stay alive.

Ra McGuire 2012

the worl is ful of things waiting to happen, Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you.

- from Riddley Walker

Last year I put my yellow paper in a plastic enclosure to shield it from the rain, and taped it firmly in place so it wouldn't be caught by the wind and blown away.

This year was different.

Ra also posted some favourite quotes on hearing the news of Russell Hoban's death.

Heather Uhl 2012

I tend to over-think things. Not on purpose - it's no more by choice than having freckles or craving cheesecake. But thinking too much, too hard, or too long can make life more work than it needs to be.

For this, the 10th anniversary (and first posthumous) SA4QE, I spent hours poring over quotes. I considered, and discarded, as many romantic, symbolic, or just plain quirky places I could think of that might be worthy of leaving them. No combination felt quite right, and I was getting frustrated.

My husband has never read one of Russ's books but, being a good man regardless, he tries to support my idiosyncrasies, so he asked, "What do you want to accomplish?"

As much as I want to honour Russ and have the fun of a global act with fellow 4qaters, the bottom line is that I want to encourage someone else to discover the delight and power of Mr. Hoban's words, just as one of my very best friends did for me years ago.

Russ's books were the first that made me feel like I wasn't the only one. Not the only one who had weird thoughts randomly flit through my head, uninvited and unattached. Not the only one who pondered a bigger picture and whether it was worth the work of pondering. And possibly most of all, not the only one who struggled to write whatever it was that was clawing both to come out and to stay in.

Aha. I knew what I wanted for this year's 4qation. I printed it out on the yellow paper, and we drove to the biggest, most soulless, mass commercial bookstore I could find. A small, tucked away Mom & Pop shop may be more appropriate to Russ's stories, but that's not where writers who are desperate for relief go. They would first try the easiest and most obvious place, not knowing what they're looking for but hoping to hell that, in the sheer size of it, surely something will jump out helpfully.

It is my sincere hope that this yellow paper will jump out and trip someone who is considering writing, or even just feels confused by the writing they have stuck inside them tauntingly, and that, like me, they will discover Mr. Hoban and no longer feel quite so odd or alone.

The quote I chose:

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 1. 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

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 …

Wesley Paines 2012

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

 - from Fremder

Left at the Apáczai Educational Centre, Pécs, Hungary

I had just started reading Angelica Lost and Found when I heard of Russell Hoban's death. It will take some time before I bring myself to finish it, knowing that it will be the last thing by him that I will ever read.

This classic quote from Fremder just about summed up what was going on in December. The snow (now somewhat deeper) could not be more apposite.

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

Lindsay Edmunds 2012

"I'm not wound anymore," he said.

"Well," said Frog, "I don't suppose anyone ever is completely self-winding. That's what friends are for."

- from The Mouse and His Child

Left in Peters Township Public Library, McMurray, PA, USA and also posted on Facebook

The most readable part of my SA4QE quotation photo is the last two lines, which I took from Chris Bell: "The books live on. Long live the words." 

See Lindsay's blog

Kate Laity 2012

"Everything is real, Angelica. Reality is a house of many rooms, and sometimes we can enter more than one."

 from Angelica Lost and Found

Pictured in situ, James Hardiman Library, NUIG (nestled next to Chandler; no Hoban in the library's holdings! Such a sad miscarriage.) 

Posted to Kate's blog