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 Hand 2010

I 4qated the following in drizzling Melbourne:

'Stupid,' he said. 'I'm not going to stab anybody.' He moved a little way up Surrey Street towards the Strand, muttering to himself, 'For the first time I think of time as a sphere, as a globe on which, at various intersections of latitude and longitude, all things past and present are located, some near, some far from where I am. I'm thinking of Crazy Horse. On that great globe of Time, in western plains across the ocean, herds of long-gone buffalo make the ground shake and shadow hoofbeats sound down endless trails of sleep. Who am I that I should think of that strange one, the mystic, the great warrior who painted himself with lightning and hail and wore a little stone behind his ear? Riding into battle he shouted, "Hoka hey! It's a good day to die!" Now in the long yesterday of the place that once was his the visions flicker but there is no one to see them. In Paris at the Crazy Horse Saloon the naked dancers shake and wiggle for the tourists.

Wow. It's from Angelica's Grotto, which is wholly brilliant. Madness has never been so natural - hoka hey!

I blu-tacked the 4qation onto the underside of this strange sculpture titled *Vault*, which itself looks like a tribute to yellow paper and hence Russell Hoban. It was originally erected in central Melbourne but the public weren't ready for it, though it's now beginning to slowly gain the recognition and love it deserves....

Happy birthday, and thank you, Russ. Thanks Gombert for your efforts, too.

Kerry Power 2009

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

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

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

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


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

Mike Shuttleworth 2009

Here's my 4qation, left in the State Library's La Trobe Reading Room. I chose this piece because of the way it plays with ideas about language, creativity and time. The little scene takes place at night time and I would like to have to had a photograph to match the mood. You will therefore supply your own internal image of night, a quiet room and toys restless with their lot in the universe.

"Burning to say something! shouted the night watchman. "It is in me, something to say!"
"You simply don't know how it is with literary people like me," the crocodile went on. "The waiting, waiting, waiting for that perfect time!"
The night watchman had burned more incense than usual that evening. He was giddy with the fragrance and the heat of it, words danced in his head. In all the words of his own language he found nothing to say, but as the hours passed his mind became full of the sounds of the language the crocodile spoke so flowingly. Unknown words danced in his head. Eleven o'clock came, half-past eleven. Then it was midnight, and there was that tiny buzzing pause while his clock gathered itself to strike twelve times.
"NOW IS THE ONLY TIME THERE IS!" shouted the night watchman. He shouted in the crocodile's language, in words he did not know the meaning of.
"What's that?" said the startled crocodile as the clock finished its twelve strokes.

From La Corona and the Tin Frog by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Nicola Bayley
London, 1979

*****

See also Mike's 4th February blog post - Ed.

John Hand 2008

Hello Gombert (and to whomever owns the eyes Gombert is looking out from),

I participated in the SA4QE this year, in Melbourne, Australia. Russell Hoban's work picked up my little life and threw it into a satisfyingly confused and scared dimension, so I had to jump on board this tribute. I left a piece of yellow A4 bearing a quote from The Medusa Frequency in my uni library. It was the beginning of Herman's first chat with the Head of Orpheus -- I chose it mostly because it represents so much of what I love about Russell Hoban's work, but also because anybody who came across it would have to be made of stone to not want more.

It was an eyeless and bloated human head, sodden, covered with green slime and heavy with barnacles. I took it in my hands; where the flesh had been eaten away I could feel the ancient skull.

I could feel the head humming and buzzing in my hands, then it began to speak. Its voice was more elemental, more profound than human voices are; the way it spoke seemed more animal than human; it was as if speech had suddenly become possible for an animal, as if the creature were for the first time putting thoughts into words. 'Who are you?' said the head.

'Nobody, really. Nobody you'd know.'

'You wouldn't be seeing me if I didn't know you. What's your name?'

I didn't want to tell it my name.

'Speak up!' said the head. 'What are you afraid of?'

'Everything.'

from The Medusa Frequency

Unfortunately I couldn't take a photo because my camera insists on making a loud digital shutter noise and I was 4qating in a library.

Thanks for doing this, it adds yet another twist to the twistedness of Hoban fandom.

Kerry Power 2008

On yellow paper, placed in Parliament Station, platform 4, Melbourne Underground:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most a writer can do - and this is only rarely achieved - is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

from The Moment under The Moment
(foreword)

Mike Shuttleworth 2007

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

from Turtle Diary

Why this text, why this place?

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

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

Kerry Power 2007

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

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

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

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

Kerry Power 2006

This year I chose a quotation from The Mouse and his Child:

There's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us.

Yearly trek down to the Melbourne underground, Parliament Station, the bench seat, Platform 4.

Kerry Power 2005

Hi,

I have included two quotes this year. The first from Fremder. I love the idea of the mystery in the spaces of black between the pictures.

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 heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

from Fremder

The second quote is the opening line of Riddley Walker. I have included it because so many people have discovered Russ through Riddley Walker. This opening line is such a challenge. You can choose then and there to stop (eg., its too hard at first glance) or to read on...and so begin a journey of wondrous discovery.

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

from Riddley Walker

Once again (four years in a row now) I descended to the Melbourne Underground, and left the yellow A4 on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.

Kerry Power 2004

It has taken me a little while to my quote post this year, but here it is.....

I decided to choose a quote from Fremder for SA4QE 2004 after reading it again in 2003. It is a great book - and underrated! I was happy and surprised to later find that the quote has made appearances in each of the previous SA4QE events. I guess over the years we Krakenites may have to begin monitoring the most quotable quotes. This quote has now made appearances in the USA, Europe and Australia at least!

As per previous years on February 4th, during lunch hour at work, I wandered down to nearby Parliament Station in Melbourne and left the yellow A4 on a seat on Platform 4.

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.

- from Fremder
page 32

See you again next year!

Kerry Power 2003

Hi everyone,

I was tempted after "Trubba Not" last year to add "No Trubba" this year, but I am hoping this is something the UN Security Council is more likely to say.

...then I remembered loving a chapter toward the end of Angelica's Grotto and how it was vintage Hoban... so I chose a line from this chapter (48: "Loomings"):

You said you were going to tell me about the more.

The thing about the more is that it comes after what comes before it. When it's ready it'll make itself known.

- from ANGELICA'S GROTTO

I followed my approach of last year and ventured back to the Underground - it just seems appropriate (my own reverential Hoban tradition for SA4QE) to leave it there, on a seat, platform 4, Parliament Station, Melbourne.

See you next year!!!

Kerry Power 2002

Placed in underground train:

Trubba Not

- from RIDDLEY WALKER

I first read Riddley soon after it was available here in Oz and I found the language fascinating... RW is a great book to read out loud... I encouraged my friends to read the book and soon we were using a few words from the book, like Arga Warga and Comping Station (we worked in insurance!)... but the most common words we used were “Trubba not”...it has now become a part of my own family sayings... I say “Trubba not” and the kids respond “No Trubba”, even though they have not yet read RW or his adult books - they know him quite well from Frances, The Mouse and His Child and other “kids” books.

So, when it came to selecting a RH quote, this seemed to be the logical choice - it contains the simple innocence of Riddley and if we think about it hard enough, the two words have a depth about them that we could all find comfort from in today's world. If only we could go to the UN and say “Trubba Not” and all the countries of the world reply “No Trubba”.