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.

Yvonne Studer 2011

Happy Birthday, Russ, and happy day to everyone!

There have been too many "toos" this year: too much work, too many extra events at my school, too little time to sleep. But fortunately there was also this day to look forward to. So I could barely wait for the last report meeting of the day to be over. As I left my school, the sun was shining (we'd been under a cover of fog for more than two weeks) and coming out of the building, I felt like William G. at the end of Turtle Diary, "Coming up on the escalator with my hair flying I felt as if I was coming out of a dark place and into the light, then I laughed because that's what I was actually doing." (ch. 53).

Earlier I had decided to go 4qating in the real world rather than the digital one this year, but as I didn't get home from work until late in the afternoon, I couldn't go on a very extensive tour. However, there was an ideal place for a quote near the block of flats where I live, the fence around a construction site on which someone had sprayed, "Wer es wagt, zu träumen, kann alles erk..." (Whoever dares to dream can ... everything.) The original word was "erkämpfen" (achieve something by fighting for it), but another sprayer had added his tag, so only "erk" remained, turning the sentence into a delightfully polyvalent message. It can now be read as "Wer es wagt, zu träumen, kann alles erkunden / erkennen / erklären / erklimmen" (Whoever dares to dream can explore, recognise, explain, get on top of everything).

The fence with its graffiti had been sending out signals to me for quite a while but I wasn't sure I would hang up an SA4QE quote there until The Last of the Wallendas And Other Poems, Russ's 1997 collection of poems, opened up to the poem "Long Green Dream". I knew then that the fence had to be this year's 4qation site.

Here's what I printed on a piece of yellow A4 paper:

Long Green Dream

Last night there came a long green dream,
it pulled in like a train.
I climbed aboard and found a seat, it started
off again
and chuntered on and on and on to oh, so 
many places
with place-names that I couldn't read and
hundreds of strange faces.
We journeyed half-again as long as any trip
should take,
and yet it got me back on time, and brought
me to Awake.

Best wishes from Yvonne

Also posted to Facebook

Yvonne Studer 2010

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

Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis.

Then I added the following comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Kleinzeit, 1974)

"Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right."

(Turtle Diary, 1975)

"...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off."

(Linger Awhile, 2006)

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

(Kleinzeit 1974)

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

(Turtle Diary 1975)

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

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

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

(My Tango with Barbara Strozzi 2007)

"We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now."

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

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

Yvonne Studer 2009

Does 4qating get any easier or more of a routine each year? -- Certainly not. The heart always beats fast, an effort must be made every single time. But once the first step has been taken, it's pure fun.

So it was again this year. I 4qated the following quotes in Oerlikon, a district in the north of Zurich, near the place where my school has found a provisional home for the next two years:

From Pilgermann, 1983, p. 31:

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.

The Pilgermann quote was placed on a bench with rude inscriptions on the second level of MFO Park in Neu-Oerlikon, a hanging garden as it were, built on a scaffolding that imitates the shape of a factory which stood there until about fifteen years ago. MFO stands for Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, a place with a past as bleak as that of any factory that used to produce weapons in World War Two. The park tries to make up for the factory, no doubt, but the inscriptions on the bench show that the work of destruction never stops and always finds a way to turn something good into something evil.

This is a photo that shows the construction from the outside.

And this photo was taken while I was sitting on the bench on the second level. The greenish pebble-like pieces around what's a small pond in summer are in fact pieces of green, blue and white recycled glass, rounded off so nobody walking through them ruins their shoes. The sunlight made the pieces glitter as if they were jewels. Below you can see the bench.

Right next to the park is my favourite restaurant/cafe with the wonderful name Not Guilty. Motto: "Natural Food is our Passion." (Also see their website at www.notguilty.ch) They serve delicious organic food and a wide choice of fresh juices, and the best thing is the little owl painted in the top corner of a wall, almost invisible, by the boyfriend of the manager (according to a waitress I asked about it) -- Pilgermann, the owl! So you see how one thing led to another...

From Amaryllis Night and Day, 2001, p. 51:

'When I tuned in to you I wasn't thinking ahead,' said Amaryllis. 'I was desperate for someone to connect with, I had a good feeling about you, I pulled you into my dream and here you are up to your neck in my weirdness.'
'It takes two to make this particular weirdness, Amaryllis. I'm not sorry to be part of it. Are you sorry you pulled me?'
'Actually, no.'

The Amaryllis quote found another recipient. There is a flower shop named Amaryllis in Oerlikon, so I went there, bought pinky-orange roses with yellow furze and told the owner why I'd chosen her shop.

I said it was my favourite writer's birthday and that one of his novels was called Amaryllis Night and Day. She didn't know Russ's novel but had chosen the name of the shop because she liked the sound of it, even though a lot of people seem to find it difficult to spell it correctly. After paying for the flowers, I gave her the quote and we both had a good laugh at the transaction.

Finally I want to report the first 4qation in the virtual reality of Pet Society, a village on the planet Facebook in the Fourth Galaxy. Purryl, also known as Nabilca, Thing of Darkness, and her best friend Nnvsnu Tsrungh decorated their house with mini quotes ("Glim" from Amaryllis Night and Day, "No Trubba" from Riddley Walker, "Vegemania" from Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer, and "Be happy" from The Mouse and His Child). They also sent best wishes to Russ. Officially, Nabilca and Nnvsnu are on holiday, but in reality they are again on a secret mission to save the universe. Purryl forwarded the photos to me and asked me to pass on the message to the Kraken and the website.

Purryl (aka Nabilca) and Nnvsnu Tsrungh (sitting on her head pretending to be a hat).

Happy birthday to you, Russ, from me, too, and lots of love to everyone out there.

Yvonne Studer 2008

Dear all,

With the Sun squaring Neptune today, my daily horoscope (at www.astro.com) advised me to use my "common sense even about ideals, and above all, deal with the real world as it is" and not as I would like it to be. All this while feeling depleted of energy! But if I made an effort, there might be a reward. The horoscope said, "You can work to make it [the world] what you want, but don't assume that it already is."

The world today meant a full day at school with report meetings taking place from early morning till late in the afternoon, a bit of teaching in between and no time to go to scenic places to spread the word, much as I would have liked to.

Anyhow, I opened a bottle of emergency Joie de Vivre so "feelings of inadequacy or futility" couldn't even begin to tempt me "to avoid direct confrontations with people and even to take more devious courses of action than usual." And then I carried out my very commonsensical and energy-friendly plan for this year's SA4QE and approached some of my colleagues at school to give them the five sheets of yellow A4 on which I had printed quotes from Russ's books. Some quotes had been chosen with the future recipients in mind, others were general enough to be given away spontaneously. I had to place two of the sheets in pigeonholes, because my colleagues were busy or had already gone home. But handing over the three other sheets definitely accounted for the most enjoyable and carefree moments of the day, and as usual, 4qating made me go home with a smile.

Here are the quotes:

"Reason is not sufficient; I know what I cannot explain."

("Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road", The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

"The stranger it took me the mor I fealt at hoam with it. The mor I fealt like Iwd be long where ever it wer widening me to."

(Riddley Walker, 1980)

"Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed."

(The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973)

"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."

('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

"This house that childhood builds in the mind is a learning place and a place where we test words and images and ideas to find out what rings true. Also it's like a safe house in a spy film: in it the secret agent that is the child's mind can stay hidden until ready to venture armed into the hostile city. It isn't the world that is hostile – the stone and the leaf and the door of the world beckon and welcome – it's the grey city of the world that threatens, the grey city of the failed children of the world, the dry thinkers, the juiceless minds, the poison skulls that dream in numbers and megadeaths. They run the world, these failed children; they speak in all languages and in all languages their speech is vile."

('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)

Happy birthday, Russ, and all the best to everyone else!

Yvonne x

Yvonne Studer 2007

Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas, and dear 6th-form students from HoPro Zürich

On my very first SA4QE tour in 2003, I half-secretly 4qated the school where I work by hanging up quotations on various pillars and on a pinboard over the photocopier by the entrance to the school library. Half-secretly, because I told the deputy headmaster and also the librarian about my doings and met nothing but support and big smiles.

'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang.
(Kleinzeit, 1974)

The photo of the photocopier was used in the collage on the 2007 SA4QE homepage. This year something more effective was wanted, not least because it's also the fifth anniversary of SA4QE. So I decided to read one of Russ's books with my sixth form and somehow involve my students in this year's celebration of Russ's 82nd birthday.

Originally, the book was to be Turtle Diary, but as this novel is still out of print, Kleinzeit took its place and I'm happy to report that it is the highlight of my working week when I can go into my English class to "teach" Russ's novel rather than, for instance, the elusive differences between the 1001 ways of expressing future time in English...

As my students are very hard-working young people and since this time of the year is particularly stressful for them, I didn't want to ask them to go 4qating with me today. Instead I chose an individual quotation from Russ's works for each of them, printed it out on a sheet of yellow A4 paper and gave them the sheets on Thursday, 1st February. Of course I first told them about the project (they were properly introduced to the verb "to 4qate", including its pronunciation "fork-you-ate") and I also showed them a few examples of past 4qations so they could see what good company they would be in when I made them part of it all.

These were the quotations:

The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us! (...)
We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.

from "Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road", The Moment under the Moment, 1992


~ ~ ~ ~

Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973


~ ~ ~ ~

Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off.

from Linger Awhile, 2006


~ ~ ~ ~

Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding?

from Turtle Diary, 1975

~ ~ ~ ~

'That's it,' said Serpentina. 'Nothing is the ultimate truth.'
'Nothing?' said the child.
'Nothing,' repeated Serpentina. ...
'I don't believe it,' said the mouse child. ... 'I wonder what's on the other side of nothing?' he said.
'Tiny upstart!' said Serpentina.. 'Who are you to seek the other side of nothing?'
'If I'm big enough to stand in the mud all this time and contemplate infinity,' said the child, 'I'm big enough to look at the other side of nothing.' ...
'Ah,' he said, 'there's nothing on the other side of nothing but us.'

from The Mouse and His Child, 1967


~ ~ ~ ~

'Con este tango nacio el tango,' she sang, 'y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo' (With this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum, seeking the sky).' ... Klein had no Spanish, didn't know what the words meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of life in the darkness...
'I can't actually put canyengue into English,' said the Argentinian translator Klein found in the phone book the next day. 'It's a lunfardo word,' she said. 'Lunfardo is a local vocabulary in Buenos Aires and it's used a lot in tango lyrics. Canyengue carries the idea of the suburbs and the common person of low social condition whose manner of dancing the tango is earthy and full-blooded with no added-on refinement; canyengue in the hips means dancing with the real feeling of the tango.'
'Canyengue,' said Klein to himself later. 'Canyengue in the mind, from the outlying districts of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Either you have it or you don't. Right...?'

from Angelica's Grotto, 1999


~ ~ ~ ~

I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. ...
Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance.

from Turtle Diary, 1975


~ ~ ~ ~

'Sometimes there's good news when you least expect it,' he said.
'So tell me,' I said.
'Have a look.' He folded the paper as necessary and passed it to me. ... There was a one-column item with a colour photograph of an upside-down bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup sporting a right-side-up label. SAUCE FLIPS TO GO WITH THE FLOW was the headline.
[Heinz] has spent millions of pounds and three years on research to come up with an upside-down bottle with a cap and valve in its bottom. It is a solution that customers hit upon years ago - seven out of ten say they balance their sauce bottles on their tops.
'How's that grab you?' said Selby.
'It's definitely good news,' I said.

from Come Dance With Me, 2005


~ ~ ~ ~

The world-child has been told that this is a world, ... and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987


~ ~ ~ ~

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.

from The Medusa Frequency, 1987

~ ~ ~ ~

'Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.'

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973

I'd be delighted if the yellow sheets were 4qated further but there is no need for them to wander on as I know they are in good hands where they are now. The only thing I asked my students to do is to pose for a picture with their yellow sheets and their copies of Kleinzeit, which they all did, and I'd like to thank them once again for being game.

Happy Birthday, Russ, love and all the best to all of you,

Yvonne x

Yvonne Studer 2006

Dear Krakenistas

As I have been feeling a little melancholy and middle-aged lately, my SA4QE quotes all had to do with time and they were left in places which reflected or recorded the passing of time in one way or another. I invited my husband Dani to come with me because he knows the best second-hand shops in town. There were two on our way, in case the first one, Brocki Land, a huge shop for antiques, knick-knacks, junk and second-hand records and books in a former basement car park didn't offer a suitable spot for 4qating. But it turned out to be marvellous.

You enter by walking down the spiral driveway that once led down into the car park. There are two levels. On the upper one you can get candlesticks, scales, baskets, toys, golf clubs, tennis rackets, chess boards, vinyl records, video cassettes, cameras and kitchenware, gratings for your fireplace (if you have one) as well as furniture. To go further down, you follow the spiral driveway along picture frames, framed and unframed kitsch paintings hanging on the walls or standing on the floor and chairs of all kinds, light, heavy, made of wood or of metal. On the lower level, there are clothes, shoes, flower pots, demijohns, bottles, wine, water, sherry and schnapps glasses, silver cutlery, china crockery and books, countless shelves of books. I put the first quotation on a shelf with English books which were beckoning and evoking London and Russ at the same time. To be more precise, I placed the folded yellow sheet between a book on Westminster and another one on Russian Icons, in the gap left by a fascinating book titled Secrets of the Inner Mind: Journey Through the Mind and Body, which I bought.

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman's hand on a necklace, a man's hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being?"

from The Bat Tattoo

After leaving Brocki Land, a place teeming with ghosts, we went on to Buecher Brocki, another second-hand bookshop, and even though I had already used up my quotation and had therefore nothing to "give" to the place, I made an amazing find - my own book on one of the shelves side by side with that of a friend who had published a dissertation on texts by early African-American women writers! I guess they were orphans from one of the many local bookshops which have had to close down recently. The books looked new and untouched, and of course I was grateful for this special Russmas Day coincidence and didn't fail to buy them, too.

Then we went into the heart of Zurich to leave a second quotation on a bench on one of the historically most interesting spots in Zurich, Lindenhof.

 Roman ruins, medieval ramparts and the rubble of buildings from all the centuries since Zurich was first settled form an architectural palimpsest underneath a square planted with lime trees. In summer, when their blossoms perfume the air, it's one of the loveliest places in town to spend an evening talking to friends, drinking a bottle of wine, eating food from a takeaway place and looking at the old town and the Grossmunster on the far-side bank of the River Limmat in the twilight. Even now that Zurich is chilly and foggy and utterly uninviting, Lindenhof is the place which preserves flavours and smells of other times attainable only through the mind as well as stories and secrets told long ago in the dusk.

There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind.

from Linger Awhile

The last quotation found its place at the foot of Sankt Peter, the church whose spire contains the clock with the largest face in Europe.

The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us! (...) We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.

from Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road
(The Moment under the Moment)

You can't possibly ignore the passing of time there, the huge clock face is too imposing. It would be nice to think that Goethe was inspired by it to create in Faust a restless character to whom it is forbidden to linger in a place, for the clock in fact already told the time in 1775, when the German poet visited Zurich and stayed with Lavater, whose vicarage was right opposite the church. The clock was made by Hans Luterer in 1538.

Whether or not it influenced Goethe, it certainly did its duty with me and, after remembering the Some Poasyum and meeting Russ last year, Dani and I put the yellow A4 sheet on a low wall, placed a stone on it so the icy north wind couldn't carry it away and then we left the place, looking forward to a nice hot cup of chocolate at home.

Love and best wishes to all of you, and the very best of best wishes to Russ,

Yvonne x

Yvonne Studer 2005

I've only been able to do a little home 4Qating today and have taped this quote on the wall next to my reproduction of the Vermeer girl behind my desk:

I know now how fragile are the walls that keep out chaos – there are many weak spots and there will always be something or someone waiting to break in. Maybe I can reinforce those weak spots with the rock I'm leaving behind as I carve myself out and shape my destiny.

from Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (1998)

Best wishes from Zürich - happy 80th birthday, Russ!

Yvonne x

Yvonne Studer 2004

Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas,

On this year's SA4QE day, the question which directed my choice of quotations and locations was how to turn the lead of our everyday life into gold and to give new juice to a world getting drier all the time. My personal answer is pretty obvious of course: read Russell Hoban and 4qate. But since the word needs to be spread to become generally useful, I started by hanging up a quotation from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz at a tram stop called "Löwenplatz", a square so mundane, busy and evidently lionless that it cried out for a magical infusion.

For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him to death and life again. Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was.

(The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973)

My second quotation was from Fremder. I hung it up at "Stauffacher", a place where the church of St. Jakob is being renovated at the moment and services are therefore held in a hut in front of the church. I couldn't help responding to the symbolism of the situation. The hut in front of the church stands for spirituality displaced to a cheap makeshift home, waiting to be restored to its rightful place. But this can only happen if we stop being as we are now.

Can electrical impulses from the brain precipitate possibility? Leibniz says the world is as it is because God is as He is. But what if God is as He is because we are as we are? Then the world is as it is because we are as we are.

(Fremder, 1996)

The third quotation, from Amaryllis Night and Day, went to a square with the fairy-tale name "Goldbrunnenplatz" (i.e. Gold Well Square), which doesn't even offer any ordinary frogs for princesses to kiss. Quite a hopless case as far as appearances go, but you never know, the quote might nevertheless raise someone's curiosity.

People do it to each other all the time. The frog said he'd turn into a handsome prince if the princess kissed him but the princess said she'd rather have a talking frog.

(Amaryllis Night and Day, 2001)

Number four, finally, was hung up at my second workplace, Kantonsschule Riesbach, where the students are allowed to decorate their lockers, which is something they obviously enjoy very much. A sign of hope at last? I'd say yes, for creative students are definitely not on the way to becoming monsters.

Goya wrote -- I think it was on the title-page of Los Caprichos -- 'The dream of Reason produces monsters'. I don't think that's how it is. I think it's when reason is not allowed to dream that it acts out its dreams while awake, and then it is that monsters are produced, in Goya's time and in ours.

(Introduction to the 1977 Picador Edition of Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm, reprinted in The Moment Under the Moment, 1992)

Four quotes for the fourth of February two thousand and four. It was a Hermetic day indeed.

Happy birthday Russ, and good wishes to you all.

Yvonne

Yvonne Studer 2003

Hello fellow SA4QE-yellow-paper droppers and Krakenites!

What admirable ideas you've all had for today: The lovely map of SA4QE locations and the Russagrams, the idea to put the yellow paper into a rucksack, or the one to send quotations to people randomly chosen! And what lovely quotes! Forgive the novice for being more modest at her first attempt; I promise to think of something more original for next year. Here's a report from my tour, located within a Bermuda triangle between my school, i.e. Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade, the English Department of the University of Zürich, and the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, i.e. Polytechnic), where Russ gave a reading in 1983. I chose this area because within its boundaries, a lot of people will be able to understand the three quotations I prepared.

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ

I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?

I hung up the first photocopy of the quote at the entrance to the library of my school, for libraries are the very places to find and lose books and discover new authors. Moreover, there are computers for the students in a room nextdoor to the library so if anyone wanted to find out what SA4QE was, they would have access to the Internet right away (the links to Richard and Dave's websites were given at the bottom of each sheet of yellow A4 paper). The librarian was very interested in my action and asked me for copies of my other quotes. I thought that the interest stimulated at my current workplace was a very good omen: If you don't know how influential librarians can become, read the introduction to the Penguin edition of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men...

The second location for this quote was the library of the English Department. Unfortunately, the librarian was having her lunch break, so I couldn't recruit another accomplice. Still, I trust that a lot of people will notice the strange yellow attractor hanging on the glass door.

Thirdly, I put this quote on the notice board next to the door of the lecture theatre of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where Russ gave his Zürich lecture in November 1983 and thus made it possible to be found and lost and found again. Normally, it's engineers, mathematicians or architects who attend lectures there; but thanks to Professor Brian Vickers's efforts, English literature of the best kind has been taught there as well all these years. The lecture theatres are new additions to the nineteenth century building; like cylinders from outer space they disrupt the strict symmetries of the old building, so that, in the belly of the ETH, you can get quite lost in a labyrinth of corridors and in-between floors. Moreover, the atmosphere is a bit like inside the crypt of an old cathedral. A very hermetic place indeed. Small wonder it was here that I once found Russ.

from TURTLE DIARY

... 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.

After getting such a positive echo for my first quote in the school library, I became bolder. I went to the office of the deputy headmaster and asked permission to hang this quote on a column beside the staff room. And do you know what happened? Not only did he not frown, but he smiled and found the quotation great and a very good comment on the current situation of the world. I HAD ACTUALLY FOUND AN ALLY IN MY BOSS! He even advised me to get the piece of paper stamped by the secretary so that nobody would remove it from the column. YES!

The second place where I hung the quote was the daily events notice board of the English Department. As one of my former professors was passing me, he nodded and said, "A little subversive action won't do any harm". You bet!

from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of a night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.

For this quote I chose only one place, the door to the office of Professor Vickers at the ETH, i.e. the man who invited Russ to Zürich twenty years ago. The corridor in front of his office is separated from the dimly lit belly of the ETH by a pane, not by a solid wall, which gives the effect of looking at the window of a night train standing still. Planning nothing but to hang the quote on his door, I was quite surprised to meet Professor Vickers in person, a coincidence that quite befits this day. Next year it wouldn't have been possible anymore since he will retire in March. He told me to remember him to you, Russ, and he sends his best wishes.

I've also enclosed a picture of myself with a quote I hung up on my reproduction of the Vermeer girl on 4th February, i.e.,

from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY

I could feel that something had happened, I could feel the Hermes of it, could feel myself on a night road to somewhere else. 'I have no name but the one you give me,' I said, 'no face but the one you see.'

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Russ, and best wishes to all,

Yvonne