Mike Lynch 2011

‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘I said that fish and chip shops are metaphysical.’
‘Everything is.’

- from The Medusa Frequency

Tucked into an odd piece of street furniture in Haymarket, Sydney, Australia.


Posted to Tumblr and Instagram

Paul Gough 2005

I've been a fan of Russell since I discovered Riddley Walker by accident in a 2nd hand book store in 1988 and became obsessed after that. Especially after Kleinzeit.

I could go on at length....I remember reading about SA4QE and then promptly forgetting, only to be chuffed when at my local fruit shop in Sydney in 2002 or 2003, I found a page with a quote from Kleinzeit. Basically I was hurrying home after shopping at the Broadway Shopping Centre and it was stuck to a pylon. I can recall that when I saw it I was aware of SA4QE and I left it there for others to enjoy too. The exact quote shall remain unknown, a part of the waves and particles of words that float endlessly on.

Each year I've tried to remember to participate and FINALLY! this year I'm on the money.

So, this morning, I purchased 10 fresh yellow A4 pages. I work for the ABC (sister to the BBC) and I ended up putting 5 copies at work, 3 near lift entrances but the other 2 which may be unspotted for a while are a series of 'Emergency Buidling Exit' signs. Imagine 3 laminated A4 cards in a plastic wall bracket close to the entrance of an office space, one is coloured white, one red and one yellow. I slipped the yellow A4 in the place of the other one and given most people probably ignore it, eventually it will hit them. Perhaps some observant people will notice straight off the bat.

Of the other 5 I put one in a local bank who uses yellow as it's main colour, it lasted 1 minute before an eager employee picked it up at took it inside the security area! I placed one in a supermarket near my kids' school, and also put one in Summer Hill in memory of Judy Tihany, who I never knew, though I know the music of Mic Conway.

I'll try and send you a photo of them. I've chosen a selection of quotes - as I'm in the middle of moving house, the books aren't easy to find. I chose some quotes that have been already used, but I loved. The only Hoban book not packed was The Medusa Frequency, I used one quote "Being is not a steady state..." [probably my favourite] but wanted to choose something else as well. I settled for this:

There's no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is.

There is an endless surging and undulating of me, an endless cycle of ebb and flow; that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.

from The Medusa Frequency

Sorry to ramble. Just wanted to finally say hi and thanks for the site and I hope you enjoy the Some-Poasyum next weekend.

regards

Paul

P.S. I create abstract electronic music under the name pimmon, my first CD was called 'Waves and Particles'. One track was called 'the black that we crave', but out of context I think some people were a little unsure of what I meant. I wrote to Russell via email around 1999 and got a very nice reply and I sent a CD of some early work. I'm sure it wasn't to his liking, but I just wanted to say thanks for all the wonderful creative output that has given me a jolt quite often.

Graeme Wend-Walker 2005

My quotes; a few from Come Dance With Me to help it on its way into the world:

What is the world but little pieces of pictures and who can see a whole one?

(p35)

~ ~ ~ ~

Django was craning his neck to see out of the window. 'Are there sharks down there?' he asked.

'All kinds of things,' I said. Such a deep dark blue, the water below us, then a fringe of white surf as Kahului Airport came into view back in 1993. The palm trees were moving a little as if they didn't care one way or the other. It was a dull day and those trees put a jungly smell in my mind.

(p144)

~ ~ ~ ~

I can never get used to the passage of the self through time and space and the passage of time and space through the self. The years in me surged up like acid reflux to mingle with the travel hours I was trying to digest while the miles lay like a lump in my stomach and half-forgotten songs spun in my head...

(p178)

Masterful, all of it.

Graeme

Judy Tihany 2004

Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in a dictionary - you keep being led astray. 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.

- from THE BAT TATTOO

I placed this quote on a wall between two automatic money-tellers on a bank shopfront in a Sydney suburb called Summer Hill. Afterwards I sat in my car and watched as one man stared at it, then later as a woman didn't seem to see it at all. This quote resonates as (a) I love looking in the dictionary, and (b) I carry my ghosts, demons and absent friends with me always.

Love and much happiness to Russ,

Judy
xxx

Graeme Wend-Walker 2003

The world vibrates like a crystal in the mind; there is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road might be taken.

- The Medusa Frequency

Happy birthday to you, Russ. I hope this day and all the days of this year find you well and keep you that way.

In trying to select a quote, I was aware that my favourite passage is often a longer one, some oceanic passage which I am swallowed by before the whale of it spits me out its spout, and I find myself looking back and wondering how I got there.

Of course your books also frequently feature sound bite sized chewy quotables which lend themselves particularly well to being picked up by strangers.

So I've gone for one short one (above) and one long one. As for locations, something other than last year's melancholic disjointedness was called for. Instead of supermarket frozen-food cabinets I left the sheets where I thought I might have liked to find them: on seats in trains, and in a second-hand/antique/book shop: in picture frames, in mirror frames, and protruding rolled from vases and teapots.

The long quote follows. However many times I read it, I always must stop to laugh with the line, "Both men looked at me with expectation."

Thanks for everything, Russ.

from PILGERMANN

THERE WAS standing before me a tall and noble-looking Turk with heroic moustaches, a red fez, a scarlet and purple jacket worked with gold. I judged him to be sixty or so. He put a large hand on my shoulder and drew me a few steps away from the others. He looked at me in such a way that I knew he was going to say something that would make me his friend. He said to me in Greek, 'What if I say to you that the universe is a three-legged horse, eh? What then? What will you say to me?'

I said to him, 'It is because the universe is a three-legged horse that the journey to the red heifer is so slow.'

'Ah!' he said. 'You're a Jew then.'

'How does that follow?' I said.

'A Jew will consider anything,' he said. 'Are you or aren't you?'

'I am,' I said.

'I need you,' he said. 'Do you need me?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Done!' he said. My price was twenty-five dinars but he counted out fifty gold dinars and gave them to the pirate captain. 'This is twice as much as I have asked,' said the pirate captain in Greek to the Turk. The pirate's name, by the way, was Prodigality. He had formerly been a slave named Thrift who had in trading for his merchant master put by enough money to buy his freedom, and having done so he changed his name and went into piracy. 'Why are you doing this?' he said to the Turk.

'I am afraid not to,' said my new owner. 'I want Allah to take notice that I am taking notice of my good fortune.'

'If Allah's taking notice I don't want to look bad,' said Prodigality, and counting out twenty-five dinars he put them into my hand.

Both men looked at me with expectation.

'Can I buy myself back?' I said to my new owner.

'Just as you like,' he said. Prodigality wrote out a bill of sale to him and he wrote out a bill of sale to me. I then gave him the gold that Prodigality had given me. 'Now you're a free man,' said my former owner. 'What will you do?'

'I'll come with you freely,' I said, 'as we need each other.'

'Thus does the will of Allah manifest itself in human transactions,' said my new friend.

'Wait!' said Prodigality as we turned to go, and taking my hand he put into it the remaining twenty-five dinars of the double payment.

'What's this?' I said.

'Allah wills what Allah wills,' said Prodigality. 'Let it be altogether circular.'

'I am obedient to the will of Allah,' I said, and put the gold back into the hand from which it had originally come.

'Let it be noticed by all who have eyes to see,' said my new friend as he received the gold, 'that Allah has taken notice.'

'It's a pleasure doing business with you,' said Prodigality. 'It's spiritually refreshing. It's only a pity I can't afford this sort of thing more often.'

With many expressions of mutual esteem we parted, and as I walked away with my former owner and new friend I marvelled at how Prodigality had been able to rise above the practical considerations of commerce. Certainly with my gold and diamonds and the plunder from the other pilgrims in his coffers he could afford to be generous but even so it seemed remarkable to me that gold and silver and gems could produce in him that degree of moral sensitivity that enabled him to behave so handsomely.

Judy Tihany 2003

Well! What a day! It seems that when you start to look for a quote, they all rear up at you on their hind legs and squeal "Me! Me! Choose me!!"

Anyway, after much agonising, I settled on this one (ignoring the piteous wails of all the rest):

Dionysus and 'the other' are outside us and within us. So is Hermes, the Priapic god, the thief-god, the god of roadways and night journeys, of chance and change and all kinds of shadowy connections. Here I quote myself from The Medusa Frequency:

Hermes is a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of energies. There's what you might call a frequency of probability when complementary equivalents offer and anything can be anything.

- from The Bear in Max Ernst's Bedroom
an essay from The Moment Under The Moment

I then went to the luggage section of David Jones Department Store (a lovely big, elegant store in Sydney) and looked for Hermes brand luggage - but they didn't have any. So I placed the yellow sheet inside a 'Travelite' backpack.

Now who will buy this backpack?

This quotation covers my favourite territory: that we don't actually know what anything is, and that anything is possible.

With strangely fond greetings to all my unknown collaborators,

Judy

Graeme Wend-Walker 2002

from TURTLE DIARY

There was a week of nature films on the South Bank and I went to see one about sharks. The film was made by a man of apparently unlimited wealth who fitted himself out with a large ship and any amount of special underwater gear for shark photography. He and his companions all agreed that diving among sharks was for them the ultimate challenge. They were particularly keen to encounter a great white shark, a rare species and the one most feared as a man-eater. They went from ocean to ocean looking for the great white shark and I couldn’t help wondering all the time how much it was costing. I think the money spent on even one of the special diving cages would keep me in high style for half a year at least.

For a large part of the time they followed whaling ships, photographing sharks feeding on whale carcasses. Sometimes they took their pictures from inside a cage but often they swam fearlessly among the sharks. They swam among blue sharks, dusky sharks, oceanic white-tipped sharks and several other kinds but they were continually frustrated by the absence of great white sharks.

Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horsemeat. It was a truly terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in his teeth and shook it about. The wealthy man said it had been fantastic, incredible, beyond his expectations. His friends congratulated him on the success of the expedition and the film came to an end.

I found myself resenting that man, however unreasonable it might be of me. All the money in the world does not give him the right to muck about with a direful secret creature and shame the mystery of it with words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’. The divers were not the ultimate challenge for the shark, I’m certain of that. Socially they were out of their class, the sharks would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking them. It would have gone its mute and deadly way mindlessly being its awful self, innocent and murderous. It was the people who lusted for the fierce attention of the shark, like monkeys they had to make him notice them.

Money can do many things, even the great white shark can be played with by wealthy frotteurs in posh diving gear. But they have not really seen him or touched him because what he is to man is what he is to naked man alone-swimming. They have not found the great white shark, they have acted out some brothel fantasy with black rubber clothing and steel bars. Aluminium they were actually.

It was raining outside so I took Yellow Paper to the supermarket. Everyone goes to the supermarket and it’s a place where a lot of decisions are made but we don’t expect to be confronted with existential literature there. In Bi-Lo they have these rectangular frames for putting pieces of card in with the prices on them: ‘Helga’s Bread, 700g. $2.95’. I slid Yellow Paper into one. The thing is, the card they use for the prices is yellow A4 too. It might take ages for anyone to notice.

I thought the frozen food section seemed right for a piece about sharks, so I put Yellow Paper on the shelf with the pre-crumbed, pre-lemoned fish fillets. I did that at Coles too. I put one in a display box for recipe books. I put one in a ‘WHO’ magazine. I went to the video shop, found Turtle Diary and put Yellow Paper in the box. That was probably the most sensible thing I did. I was going to put one on the noticeboard in the lobby of my building, in front of the lift, but I didn’t. Instead I put one in each of the stairwells, at the landings between floors. I don’t think many people use the stairs.

At the top of the stairs there is a door that doesn’t go anywhere, it just looks out over the rooftops. I put one there.

The piece sums up the spiritual/imaginative void in modern society. The interesting thing is, the speaker (Neaera H.) technically has ‘not really seen him or touched’ the shark either. The difference is that she is faithful to the idea of the shark, which is where the shark really lives; she finds more shark in ordinary existence than the divers do in the ocean. You don’t need to go anywhere or spend any money to do that, because ‘naked alone-swimming’ is what we already are, which we would see if we could drop our ‘brothel fantasies’. I like the Kierkegaardian echoes in this. The most important thing in the world may be something that doesn’t (in the dull, conventional sense) ‘exist,’ but which we must nonetheless reach for in fear and trembling.