Diana Slickman 2012

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

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

On another paper, this:

"At the corner of Parsons Green Lane I nodded to the two telephone boxes that stood like a pair of lanterns and paused to acknowledge the trees which were still embracing the night.  I admire those trees; fashions come and go but the trees still maintain their original identity, their unfashionable mystery.  They hold last night's darkness like lovers reluctant to let go....Sometimes I am astonished that there should be buildings built and institutions maintained to string out the brevity of human life over successive generations; trees don't do that, they just hold on to the darkness and accept the light night after night and day after day without pretensions to permanence."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's to Russ.
Slick

Photo borrowed from this blog

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

Dave Awl 2012

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.

— Russell Hoban (1925-2011)
from his book The Moment Under the Moment
In observance of his 87th birthday and the The Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE)

The photo is from the 2004 edition of the SA4QE, pre-Facebook. (This particular yellow paper was left on the #36 Broadway bus, which is usually just teeming with people who've been riding naked on lions.)

Also posted to Facebook

Diana Slickman 2011

I dropped this at my longtime local bar, The Hopleaf.  I've been drinking there, off and on, for 20 years.

"You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life.  At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story.  Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn.  Fremder means stranger in German."

- from Fremder

I added: This yellow paper was placed here on February 4, 2011 as part of a world wide event in honor of Russell Hoban’s birthday.  Your finding this and reading it makes you part of the celebration. Cheers!


Diana is the founder of the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. Read about the genesis of SA4QE here.

Dave Awl 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what my yellow paper said.

***

February 4, 2009

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Dave

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

Diana Slickman 2009

A bright, clear, cold February 4 in Chicago! Another in a long line of bitterly cold days we've been having since the new year began. They say - they, the people who say such things - that it's going to be in the 50s (Fahrenheit) by the weekend. I'll believe it when I'm in it.

Because it's cold and because I'm at work, I wasn't inclined to venture out until absolutely required and so I waited until I had some business out of the office to combine with this year's 4Qation. I went to the post office.

The P.O. we take our mail to is a large, rather shabbily grand structure in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago that butts right up against the northern edge of the city proper. It was built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, or the last great depression, and has ceilings that are ridiculously high and a gold-leafed sculpture of a postal carrier above the service windows. I think of it as The Church of Mail.

I left my yellow paper on top of a stack of priority mail envelopes that (for those of you not acquainted with the U.S. postal system) are provided free to postal customers.

As usual, I picked this year's quote by random selection - I opened The Moment Under the Moment and here's where my eye fell. I found another quote that I might post elsewhere later this evening, but this is what I left at the P.O.:

If the human mind is still evolving, as I believe it is, if our mind/soul capability is still developing, then the pattern of our mental intake and sorting and storing is not static but changing. It may well be that we shall learn to let go rather than hold on, that we shall become capable of being with the world rather than attempting to consume it.

from “Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road”, The Moment Under the Moment

February 4th is Russell Hoban’s birthday. This piece of yellow paper, and your finding it and reading it, are part of a world-wide celebration of the day.

Happy Birthday, Russ!

Diana Slickman 2008

Monday! Busy. Cold, windy, rainy. Winter in Chicago! My standard MO on Hoban Day is to open a book and see what presents itself. The Medusa Frequency being at hand, I opened it up and here's what it yielded:

Dr. Carnevale looked into the room and called my name and I followed him into his office. 'Pains in your chest and left arm?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'At first it was like an iron fist, but now it's as if I've swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.'

'Let's have your shirt off.' He unlimbered his stethoscope. 'Guess by now you've finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year.
Breathe in.'

'No, actually I haven't.'

'Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I'm told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell?'

'No. Is he a novelist?'

'Undertaker. He says they don't last as long as journalists.'

'Undertakers?'

'Novelists.'

'Why is that?' I said, as he took my blood pressure.

'Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?'

'Well, I can't be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.'

from The Medusa Frequency

This I copied out on to yellow paper and took with me to the grocery store. Monday nights I play cards with a group of interesting and intelligent women; February 4th was my night to host; hosting means making dinner. And so to the store. I slipped this, folded, between two bottles of Sauternes, which seemed fitting.

At lunch time, I opened up the book again and this is what I copied out of it this time:

"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 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 pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?"

from The Medusa Frequency

Out I went, to get some lunch and to find the right place for the yellow paper. I went into a book store: big, impersonal, lit like an operating room. I walked purposefully about, but I didn't know where I was going. Then I saw a book of movie posters from the 1930s on a shelf-end display and flipping through found a spread of two King Kong posters. I slipped my yellow quote in between them and replaced the book. Up the elevator to the fiction and literature shelves. "H" went straight from Hillerman to Hoeg. I went back to work.

On both of these pages I cited the work and the author along with my standard tag line, something along the lines of "February 4 is Russell Hoban's birthday. By finding this yellow paper and reading it, you are involved in a worldwide celebration of the day."

Happy birthday, Russ!

Diana Slickman 2007

Happy birthday, Russ!

It was a bright, frigid February 4th in Chicago. So cold that were it not for Russ having been born on this day, I'd not have left the apartment. The night before, the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong was on the TV machine and though not much interested in it, we watched it. Kong always puts me in mind of Kong and the quote I chose for this year was a tip of the pith helmet to the idea of Kong. I placed my quote, neatly folded, in my local video rental shop, Specialty Video, over the plastic sleeve that one must take to the counter to get the DVD of King Kong (1933). Most of the other sleeves contain the artwork that comes with the DVD, but the one for King Kong '33 contained, to my delight, someone's idea of Kong. On a piece of plain cardboard in black marker was drawn a small Empire State Building with a rather impressionistically rendered ape atop it. Little airplanes, like flies, buzzed around the building and in the ape's hand, in an altogether different scale, was a figure in a dress. I may be embellishing now, but there may have been a speech balloon coming out of the figure that said "Help!" I can't tell you how pleased I was.

Here's what the yellow paper said:

I live in a state of surprise much of the time; things others take for granted suddenly amaze me. Moving toward the ever-receding vanishing point I was struck by the frailty of what humans have put together like something out of a box: houses; shops; roads: street lamps; trains and railway stations; aeroplanes and airports. I imagined a gigantic foot stepping on it. Crunch. Of course film-makers imagine that all the time, and build monsters on to the feet.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

Added to the sheet was: "February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and this quote was left for you to find as part of a world-wide celebration."

Diana Slickman 2006

It is a Hobanesque day in Chicago this February 4th. The sky is low and precipitating slightly - sometimes rain, sometimes sleet, sometimes snow.

It's grey, cold, and things feel close. I wandered around my neighborhood, yellow paper in my coat pocket, looking into the shops and eateries to see which one wanted to be part of the SA4QE. There's a resale shop that just moved into an old theater close to my house on Clark Street. The theater was called Calo and for a long time it was the home of the Griffin Theater company. The resale shop is called The Brown Elephant, as the sales from it benefit the Howard Brown Clinic. My OED tells me that "calo" is a Latin word for a camp servant, and also the combining form of a Greek word meaning beautiful. So here is a beautiful servant formerly of the performing arts camp, with two powerful beasts in her life. In I went.

One of the things I like about this celebration is its covert nature. I get to feel like a spy for a little while, as though I am making an important drop for another operative to pick up later. I circled around the shop for a while, again waiting for inspiration to strike or for fate to show her hand. Finally I decided that hiding the thing in plain sight was the sneakiest thing to do, so I unfolded my yellow paper, laid it on a wooden end table, and casually strolled away. Mission accomplished! Happy birthday, Russ!

Here's what the paper said:

Running today, said the morning looking in at Kleinzeit's window.
Kleinzeit got up. Running today, he said to the bathroom mirror.
Not me, said the mirror. No legs.
Kleinzeit put on his new tracksuit, his new running shoes.
Let's go, said the shoes. Motion! Speed! Youth!
No speed, said Kleinzeit. And I'm not young.
Shit, said the shoes. Let's get moving anyhow.

from Kleinzeit

February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and if you've found this yellow paper, you're celebrating it with him.

Diana Slickman 2004

I'm finally getting around to posting my activities on Hoban Day, 2004. I'm amazed and delighted by the lengths some of you go to; my own efforts are more modest.

I launched two quotes this year. The first I copied on to a postcard of a landscape by Rembrandt and mailed. It wasn't A4 sized and it wasn't yellow but it was at hand, and overlaps nicely with my current project to dispatch one postcard every day for a year. The postcard was chosen at random from a drawer-full I've accumulated over the years, and it was sent to an address chosen by opening the Chicago phone book and pointing with closed eyes. Likewise the quote was pulled from The Moment Under the Moment by letting the book fall open and seeing what was on the page that presented itself. Here's the quote:

The people who run the world were children once. What went wrong? What is it that with such dismal regularity goes wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown-ups? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make any sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.

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

The second quote is one of my longtime favorites from Turtle Diary. This I wrote on a yellow Post-it note and stuck on the third or fourth page of a yellow legal pad in the school supplies aisle of my local grocery store. It was a Cambridge brand pad, a good one with good thick strong back and a dark blue sort of cover on it. Here's what some unsuspecting legal pad purchaser will find after a while:

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

- from Turtle Diary

Here's to everything success and better tomatoes!

Dave Awl 2004

This year, like last year, I found myself arranging a series of quotations into a kind of narrative structure. I chose ten quotations from five different Hoban books, starting with quotations about waking up, and moving on to quotations dealing with how we relate to the waking world. I arranged them in sequence on the page, set them in different fonts, and printed out 12 copies, a limited edition. Next year I'm thinking of numbering them (e.g., "#3 of 12"), like an art print. I'll include the full text of my yellow paper at the end of this report, since it's rather long and I'd rather tell the 4Qation story first.

Since I'd already 4Qated two years running in my home neighborhood of Andersonville, and last year I 4Quated Wicker Park (where I DJ), this year I decided to 4Quate Lakeview, where most of my favorite restaurants, bookstores and music shops are.

I left my apartment a little before 6pm on Hoban Day 2004, provisioned with an ample supply of yellow papers, a disposable camera, and the irrepressible urge to 4Qate. My first stop of the evening was a haircut at my charmingly misspelled local salon, Klassy Kut. I caught the #50 Damen bus down to Foster where the salon was, and briefly considered 4Qating in the rear section of the bus, but decided that since I was only going a few blocks there wasn't enough time to 4Qate properly. I believe that a certain amount of 4Qplay is not only necessary for a satisfying 4Qation, but is every bit as important as the actual moment of 4Qasm itself. So, with pride in my restraint, I delayed 4Qation until after my haircut.

From Klassy Kut I headed down to the Lakeview neighborhood, and a nice Thai dinner at Joy's Noodles on Broadway, where I finally succumbed to the urge to 4Qate for the first time that evening, discreetly in the washroom.

From there I headed a few doors south to Specialty Video, where I 4Qated in the Foreign Film section, leaving a folded yellow paper tucked neatly behind Il Postino.

I briefly considered 4Qating at my favorite bookstore, Unabridged Books, but the place is fairly small and the staff there know me and my ways pretty well, so there was no way to 4Qate without seeming heavy-handed about it.

So I caught the #36 Broadway bus a bit further south. As I got on the bus, I was scanning the back of my bus transfer for the cut-off time to make sure it was still good. "Don't worry," said the driver, "you'll make it." Slight pause, and then, with a conspiratorial grin, "... It's a magic bus."

How thoughtful of the Chicago Transit Authority to send out the magic buses in honor of Hoban Day, I thought. Perhaps there's hope for them after all. Thus encouraged, I 4Qated in the rear section of the magic bus before exiting at Diversey.

Yellow Paper, seated on the magic bus. Below: The tail lights of the magic bus, departing ...

I then entered the demesnes of a large corporate chain bookstore, which I won't name and where I didn't take any pictures, because they get all the advertising they need. But they do attract a lot of readers who ought to be 4Qated unto, so I tucked a yellow paper between two copies of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and then another inside one of the free weekly papers stacked up in the lobby.

I then caught the #22 Clark Street bus down to Tower Records. The #22 bus driver didn't allude to any magical powers, but I like to think he was just being modest. I 4Qated in the rear section again, then exited at Belden and rode the escalator up to Tower Records, where I spent a while browsing before 4Qating three more times: I left one folded yellow paper tucked among the CDs of Leonard Cohen, another among the Thelonious Monk discs, and the final one I left in the custody of Jeff Buckley. Hallelujah.

Having thus 4Qated nine times in the course of about four hours, I figured I'd better call it a Hoban Day before I caused myself a vitamin deficiency or something, so I headed home to rest and reflect. Here's the text of my yellow paper for 2004:

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

— The Medusa Frequency

I exist, said the mirror.

What about me? said Kleinzeit.

Not my problem, said the mirror.

— Kleinzeit

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.

— Turtle Diary

Is there a story of me? I asked myself. Am I in it?

— The Medusa Frequency

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.

— Turtle Diary

The year 1933 was full of many things. Showing with King Kong was a documentary film on Hitler's rise to power. In 1933 there was Goebbels officiating at a book burning. 'You do well this midnight hour,' he said, 'to exorcise the past in these flames.' Exorcise the past. Surely that thought alone was sufficient evidence of madness. But more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded. In the train derailment scene in King Kong the engine-driver could not believe his eyes when he saw Kong's face rising through the gap where he'd torn away the tracks but that was just another day in 1933. That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

— Turtle Diary

It is the longing for what cannot be that moves the world from night to morning.

— "Kong and the Vermeer Girl," introduction to the text of The Second Mrs. Kong

Near where William lives there was a dead cat by a bus stop, pretty well flattened out. He looked as if he'd been run over by a lorry. A grey stripy tom he was with a head like a Roman senator, one eye open, one eye shut. His whole corpse seemed expressive of the WHAM! when his life met his death. He looked as if he'd been one hundred percent alive until the lorry closed his account in the flower of his tomcathood and his mortal remains were cheerful rather than depressing. To live with a yowl and die with a WHAM! Thinking about him whilst walking back I stopped and wrote:

Stiff but not formal

A dead cat says hello

This winter morning.

— Turtle Diary

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 any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.

— Riddley Walker

Camden Station is the windiest tube station I know. Coming up on the escalator with my hair flying I felt as if I was coming out of a dark place into the light, and I laughed because that's what I was actually doing.

— Turtle Diary

* * *


Compliments of The Kraken — SA4QE 2004

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

~ ~ ~ ~

... thus endeth the 4Qation report.

Dave

Dave Awl 2003

Inspired by the valiant efforts of this year's other SA4QE participants, I decided to kick my efforts up a notch and do better than last year's single yellow paper left in a freezer case at the supermarket. And all in all, the evening of Feb. 4 was most productive: While my journeys weren't nearly as extensive as those of the peripatetic Mr. Cooper, I did manage to 4Qate in four separate locations and two different neighborhoods. (Yes, I've decided that the proper verb form of SA4QE is "to 4Qate" -- pronounced like "fork you ate." I 4Qate, she 4Qates, he 4Qated, we are 4Qating. Can be either transitive: "Oh yes, I 4Qated that cafe last year," or intransitive: "My assistant kept a lookout while I surreptitiously 4Quated in the poetry aisle.") And I got this year's 4Qations on film.

As I started to choose quotations for this year's yellow paper, I found myself drawn to a number of quotations that seemed to revolve around a common axis I couldn't quite articulate -- something about time, history, and one's place (or absence) in one's own story. I got interested in arranging a series of quotations to form a sort of oblique narrative, like finding a story in a sequence of Tarot cards.

Once again I was fussily disappointed by the yellowness of the yellow paper I was able to obtain locally. Compared to the more relaxed and self-possessed yellow paper on which I have letters from Mr. Hoban, the yellow paper I am stuck with seems to be trying too hard, an insincere look-at-me "yellow" as opposed to a quietly thing-in-itself yellow. Never mind, get on with it.

I finally settled on the following six quotations, in this order:

from TURTLE DIARY:

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 PILGERMANN:

A story is what remains when you leave out most of the action.

from FREMDER:

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 PILGERMANN:

One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ:

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

from PILGERMANN:

'Why are you weeping?' said Bembel Rudzuk.

'I am suffering from an attack of history,' I said.

'It will pass,' said Bembel Rudzuk.

I set each quote in a different font and added a footer at the bottom, which read:

Compliments of The Kraken - SA4QE 2003

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

My first stop was the Jewel-Osco supermarket in my home neighborhood of Andersonville, where I left last year's yellow paper among some boxes of frozen macaroni & cheese. There I picked up a disposable camera with which to document this year's 4Qations, and also snapped a picture of the freezer case from last year (see Dave's 2002 quotes below). I was attempting to inconspicuously snap a picture of the front of the store, bustling checkout counters and all, when a Jewel-Osco staffer appeared out of nowhere and issued me a curt "Excuse me" in a tone that clearly translated as "I am onto you, sirrah. It is clear that you are engaged in some kind of Shameful and No Good activity. Be away with you, before I am forced to summon The Law!" She clearly meant business and I didn't relish the idea of trying to explain the SA4QE to that stern countenance -- and besides, it seemed like explaining would be breaking the rules of the game, in a way. I slunk away.

My first official 4Qation of 2003 took place at Cafe Boost a couple blocks south of the Jewel. Once in the door, I realized that since the place is just one open room, and there were people in every corner of it, there was really no way to drop my yellow paper without being seen, and taking a picture without being fingered as Shameful and Up to No Good seemed out of the question.

Fortunately, at that point I discovered what many other Krakenistas may already have realized: washrooms are an ideal place to 4Qate. You can close the door behind you, position your yellow paper artfully on the towel dispenser or tuck it into the frame of the mirror, snap your photo and slip back out again with none the wiser. (Just be sure to lock the door so that nobody walks in on you while you're 4Qating, which would of course be awkward for everyone involved.)

I had a nice lemon-poppy seed muffin to celebrate the evening off to a good start, then moved on to Specialty Video, my friendly neighborhood video rental store. I had decided it would be fun to tuck a yellow paper behind the display box of a film. The shelves of the Foreign Film section formed a nice little semi-enclosed area that would afford me some privacy from the eyes of staff members and other patrons as I 4Qated. Of course, once confronted with the shelves I realized an agonizing decision was before me, as the choice of film would undoubtedly be seen to make a statement. What to choose? I did briefly go in search of King Kong in the "Sci-Fi" section, but its movie box was missing, substituted by a piece of brown cardboard with an amusing marker drawing with labels and arrows to the key elements of the cartoon: "Monkey." "Building." "Airplane." Very entertaining, but it was its own creation and didn't need the accompaniment of yellow paper. So I returned to the Foreign Film alcove and contemplated the possibilities. Wings of Desire? La Dolce Vita? Don't get too precious, now. Just choose a movie that you like, and that other Krakenites would probably like, too. I finally tucked the yellow paper behind City of Lost Children, took a snapshot and made my getaway.

I then whisked up a few doors to my neighborhood's other cozy little cafe, Kopi. After pretending to browse in the candles, incense & dangly earrings giftshop at the back for a few minutes, I made a beeline to the washroom where I 4Qated quickly and efficiently, but not, I hope, without feeling. I left my folded yellow paper perched on the chalk ledge of the blackboard where Kopi patrons scrawl graffiti du jour.

Having thus 4Qated all over Andersonville, I hopped a bus down to Wicker Park, an arty/trendy neighborhood where a friend was DJ-ing at a punk bar later that evening. (Those who saw the shamelessly Americanized John Cusack film version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity will have seen a somewhat cleaned-up caricature of this part of town.) It was virgin SA4QE territory as far as I knew, so I figured I could 4Qate a little and then go hear my friend spin. I decided to drop into Quimby's, an edgy little zine & underground comic book store that displays its immense taste and discernment by stocking What the Sea Means. I considered 4Qating on the shelf with the Robert Anton Wilson and alien abduction books, labelled something like "Paranoia, Paranormal and Psychosis" but that seemed to be putting too fine a point on things. I moved to the shelf of literary journals and placed the folded yellow paper behind the first copy of a quarterly called OPEN CITY. I wasn't familiar with it, but on flipping through it I was greatly entertained to see Parker Posey listed on the masthead. Parker, meet Russ. I asked permission of the woman behind the register to snap a photo of the store, "for a Web site," and when she asked me what Web site, I furbled something about "a literary site called SA4QE." This was strategic on my part. It is part of the code of honor in neighborhoods like Wicker Park that, when confronted with a cryptic and obscure name like SA4QE, one doesn't let on that one hasn't heard of it. She asked no more questions and gracefully gave me permission to photograph. I snapped my final 4Qation of the evening and headed off to a nice Chinese dinner before carousing with friends.

Diana Slickman 2002

from RIDDLEY WALKER

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. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.

I left this in the Chicago Cultural Center. The Cultural Center used to be Chicago's main library and is probably the closest thing the city has to a secular cathedral. It was built after the Civil War, by the Grand Army of the Republic, for the dual purpose of housing the city's library and honoring the veterans of the Union Army. It is kind of shabby and magnificent at the same time. Now it serves many functions: it holds the offices of the city's department of cultural affairs, houses the Museum of Broadcast Communications, has several gallery spaces, a couple of lecture/theater spaces, a concert hall, an informal performance space, a café. People from all strata of Chicago's population go there, from the homeless to the well-heeled (or well-healed, if you prefer). To arrive at the main hall, one climbs a staircase of white Carrera marble, encrusted with glass and gold mosaics in geometric patterns. The hall itself has a huge stained glass dome and high on the walls are quotes from authors of different countries and literary traditions, carved into the marble in their original languages. When I went there on Monday, a man was in this room playing a grand piano; practicing to rows and rows of empty chairs. A woman sat on a wide low window ledge and looked out on to Michigan Avenue while he played, but otherwise the room was empty. I sat down to listen for a minute, clutching my yellow paper. Suddenly the man stopped playing and picked up his cell phone which was sitting on the piano. He examined it while it bleeped, but did not answer it. I unfolded my yellow paper and slipped it on to the seat in front of me, feeling very sly. The man resumed playing; I listened a little longer and then went back to my office to eat my lunch.

Dave Awl 2002

As luck would have it, I was trapped in my apartment all day on deadline with work on the 4th itself, so my make-up SA4QE actually took place the following evening, on the 5th. Graeme and I were apparently listening to the same muse, the muse of freezer-cases in the frozen food aisles of supermarkets. I left my sheet of yellow paper between two boxes of frozen organic macaroni and cheese at the Jewel supermarket on Clark Street in my neighborhood. I thought the yellow paper went so nicely with the yellow of the cheese on the boxes. Having been privileged to receive numerous communiques from Mr. Hoban on his own yellow paper, I am painfully aware that the paper I was forced to use was a much brighter and sharper shade than the genuine article, and it was 8 1/2 x 11 rather than the slightly larger A4. (Perhaps I should have more properly proposed acronyming the event SYPQE, with YP for "yellow paper"? But then the acronym is devoid of numerals, so much blander somehow.)

Focus. I was also unable to choose only one quotation...I am a person who is incapable of ordering just one thing at a restaurant, I always need a little of this and a little of that. And I generally enjoy the juxtaposition of things more than the things themselves. So I went ahead and catered to my Gemini side, and printed out the following troika:


~~~~~~~

from PILGERMANN

When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened – whatever that thing might be – that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.

from FREMDER

Perhaps this world that's in us, this world that we're in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it's only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it.

from A BIRTHDAY FOR FRANCES

"That's how it is, Alice," said Frances. "Your birthday is always the one that is not now."

~~~~~~~


...and into the freezer it went.


Dave