Paddy, Jan & Russell Caleb 2008

Hello there

The Mouse and His Child is one of our favourite books, and we thought we'd celebrate the return of beavers to Martin Mere at the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust's centre with a few words from Jeb and Zeb. We left one page of yellow A4 inside the hide and another copy by the beaver sculpted from wood outside.

"Jeb," said the voice of Zeb, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"A beaver," said Jeb without hesitation.
"A beaver?" said Zeb.
"A beaver!" echoed Muskrat.
"Right!" said Jeb, clicking his teeth and whacking the floor of the lodge as hard as he could with the flat of his tail. "Beavers do things! They cut down trees! CHONK! BONK! Make dams! SPLASH! KERPLONK! Beavers get rich!"

from The Mouse and His Child

Best wishes,

Paddy, Jan and Russell (age 18 months)

Hugh Bowden 2008

After having failed dismally to 4quate last year (I was on leave, so all the time in the world but never enough time for anything) I made rather more of an effort this year, although I think the result shows a disappointing literal-mindedness. My excuse is that I had been busy trying, and failing, to make sense of the cult of Isis in the Greco-Roman world (as one does), and was not able to think very subtly. My choice of quotation was from the fifteenth chapter of the Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, starting somewhere on the second page (I left out the detail of who was saying the words):

‘Easy enough to see where the sculptor’s sympathies lay. His commission may have been from the king but his heart was with the lion. The king, for all the detail and all the curls in his beard is little more than an ideograph, a symbol referring to the splendour of kings. But the lion!
‘The king is almost secondary. The mortal stretch of the lion’s body meets the length of the spears he hurls himself upon, becomes one long diagonal thrust of forces eternally opposed. That thrust is balanced on the turning wheel and the lion’s frowning dying face is at the centre, biting the wheel. Masterfully composed, the whole thing. The king is secondary, really — a dynamic counterweight. He’s only there to hold the spear, and nothing less than a king would be of suitable rank for the death of that lion.’

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz

There was really only one place to leave the passage, so I printed off five copies, with a picture at the top and 4 February 2008 www.sa4qe.com on the bottom, and headed to the Assyrian Galleries of the British Museum. The museum was full of school parties and tourists, and there was a constant trickle of people through the lion hunt passage. I sat on the bench and looked at the lion biting the wheel - although I actually always find my self drawn to the dead lion to his right, body twisted upside down and his tongue hanging out - and put the sheets of yellow A4 paper on the bench beside me, with my hand resting on them. Feeling more like a character out of a le Carré novel than an Hoban one (but then again, middle-aged academic sitting on a bench in central London feeling that I am doing something vaguely improper - who am I trying to fool?) I waited until the museum attendant had made her slow way through the gallery, and then walked out in the other direction, without a backward glance.

Not really a photo-opportunity, although the scene could be illustrated with the lion biting the wheel. In all probability the paper will have been spotted by a cleaner and rapidly consigned to a bin, but there is always a chance that someone will have picked one up, thinking it an information sheet - which of course it was. I suppose that, had I thought about it more, I could have mocked it up to look like a BM leaflet (although those are mostly full-colour these days) or a school work-sheet, but I don't think that that would be quite in the spirit of the exercise.

Happy Birthday Russ!

An Hugh Bis

Richard Cooper 2007

With a two-week-old baby in the house (just what is it with me and this time of year, eh?), I haven’t had as much time to prepare a 4qation as on previous years, and this has only made my ‘normal work panic’ about choosing a quote from the many thousands of words in Russell Hoban’s many books even worse. However, the problem has happily suggested its own solution. The new arrival, Charlie Andaman, has, in the tradition of his Thai side, already been awarded a nickname. His elder brother Joe (born March 2005) being dubbed Squid (Thai: ‘Mg’), we felt something similarly oceanic and possibly Hobanesque was called for, and so Charlie has become Turtle (‘Thou’). Thus I narrowed my search for quotes this year to Russ’s superb early novel Turtle Diary. After some searching – punctuated by assorted changes, baths, feeds, plays, tellings-off, naps, and even a bit of attention to my children – I settled on the following three quotes. They’re from chapter 3, narrated by William G., and from adjacent pages, so not strictly separate quotes, but can be read that way.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their 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 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 Turtle Diary

I liked this passage firstly because it sets out the turtles’ incredible quest and achievement, which in itself seems to me a metaphor for the human condition – we spend so long working towards something, not always knowing why or how but only knowing we have to do it, and without any guarantee that we’ll succeed or that the turtle-eggs we lay even if we do get there will survive. Secondly I like the way Hoban takes something negative about the turtle experience – the sacrilege of being turned into soup – and makes something both positive and amusing out of it. As a father now for the second time I’ve naturally spent many hours lately contemplating the kind of future I’ll be able to give Charlie, and the kind he’ll have anyway regardless of my influence, so this passage also suggests to me some good advice to him: We’re all our own kinds of soup; be proud of your Charlie soup, and for that matter your London roots, and don’t be put off by the fact that millions of gallons of other-people soup is sloshing around the world at the same time: your variety is unique.

The second passage follows directly on from the last:

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there... I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks.

“...I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

from Turtle Diary

Turtle Diary centres on two people at a crucial point in their lives and confronting their own situations, which, despite being pretty mundane, are nonetheless troubling to them. I can relate to the story and characters partly through being a bit of a worrier myself (and even if I wasn’t, I daresay most parents would admit that having children makes you worry anyway) and this beautifully cadenced passage with its Zen-like idea of ‘swimming, swimming [with] nothing in the mind’ provides me with some reassurance that there is, in fact, a way through, a way forward.

My last selection also follows on directly from the last paragraph, in fact is the final sentence of that paragraph, but I feel deserves separate consideration:

And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

I’m not a religious person and I despise the way that some people use religions and ‘faiths’ to mess up the world. Nonetheless I do retain a great deal of respect for people who manage to have faith (in spite, indeed, of the way faith is regularly abused and misused) and put it to good use, and one of those good uses is simply, as Bob Dylan put it, keeping on keeping on. I believe – or I’d like to believe – in a turtle-god, in turtle-faith, something that keeps you going despite the darkness, the sharks, the chances of getting lost.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far today and time is already running out, so I don’t know where these quotes are going to be 4qated. I doubt I’ll get the chance to go anywhere much further than the high street this afternoon so I’ll see what opportunities present themselves there.

(Later.) In the end I almost didn't manage to actually leave my quotes anywhere. I went to Waitrose and had a few ideas - by a bottle of Jindalee shiraz, which has a turtle on the label; in a copy of their store magazine Source, in a reference to the 'I am the source of William G soup' - but it was too busy and I felt conspicuous, and anyway I was with wife and kids so time was against me. (I also saw a box of some medicine stuff in the health section with the brand name Wellman and thought that would be good for a Kleinzeit quote - maybe next time.) On the way home it was dark and we were all tired and cold but I did manage to leave the quotes on the windscreens of some random parked cars, on a steel lion-shaped bench and through the letterbox of a chocolate shop. Didn't have my camera with me this time though, more's the pity!

Roland Clare 2007

SA4QE from Bristol ... Two texts left variously on a fence at the Sea Walls overlooking the Avon Gorge (above), and in other locations (see below).

The two quotations are close neighbours in Turtle Diary. Neither is the bit I was actually planning to use, which was the satirical tale of the rich shark-diver and his rubber-clad brothel experience: in the end I thought that was bit long for people to read in a high wind or a crowded shop.

Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

from Turtle Diary

It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.

from Turtle Diary

The other locations were:

among the 'forthcoming events' at the Redgrave Theatre ...

... in the loo at Bristol Zoo ...

... among the children's books for sale in the Zoo bookshop ...

... and fastened to a spavindy bench frequented by bird-watchers:

Here are some passers-by inspecting the Sea Walls 4qation.

Jane Clare 2005

As The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz was the first Hoban book I read, I decided that lions should be central in my SA4QE drop. Having only just moved to Liverpool, however, I set off with the yellow pages in my bag not knowing where to find any. Bizarrely, a friend whom I met for lunch insisted that we battle through the wind so he could show me something he thought I would like. I was led to this enormous bronze lion head, one of an identical pair, mounted on two doors in the commercial centre of Liverpool. I thought the reference to those who ‘run the world’ was therefore fairly apt.

The second lion was found in a changing cubicle in a clothing shop. Understandably, I didn’t remain concealed to watch the reactions of other customers!

The people who run the world now 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?

from Pan Lives, The Moment Under The Moment

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

Olaf Schneider 2002-2004

Interactive animations inspired by Russell Hoban writings

NOTE: Be sure to have the sound turned on for these Flash animations, and to give them a few moments to load. All open in a new window as they are hosted externally. You need to have installed Flash version 5 or later to view them. If you don't, download it for free.

Enjoy! - Olaf

Full moon spring tide turtle wind

An evocative extract from Turtle Diary. The Chopin nocturne of animated Hoban quotes.

Wheel of Action

A quote from Fremder with the words animated by a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Be warned, this is very science-fiction-like...

The rolling passage in the darkness of my mind

As thought by Sarah Varley on an Underground journey in The Bat Tattoo. Complete with authentic London Underground soundtrack.

"This is your life"

From the "Memory's Arrow" chapter of Amaryllis Night and Day.

Aristaeus's Story on the potsherds

"Broken pieces want to come together," said the brain, "they want to contain something..."

Another delightful piece from The Medusa Frequency.

Three o'clock in the purple-blue morning

An atmospheric extraction from The Medusa Frequency.

The Flickering

Flicker-film by Gösta Kraken, from Fremder and (in part) The Medusa Frequency.

What a convenience

One of my (many) favourite quotations from The Medusa Frequency.

Golden Windows Homeward

Video sequence from the Turtle Diary film with text from The Medusa Frequency.

The Mouse and His Child Dance

A short film of the original wind-up toy used by Russ at his lecture to the San Diego State University on October 17, 1990.

Nighttrain

An animation based on an excerpt from The Medusa Frequency.

Who left the yellow paper?

Inspired by the hibiscus light of The Marzipan Pig.

An animated Fremder cover

Animation of Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction placed on Fremder book cover; accompanied by Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor, Opus 67, No. 4. Unfortunately it’s not the Ilse Bak recording...

The District Line at Notting Hill Gate

“A poem at its place” from The Last of the Wallendas.

Yellow paper virtually dropped by Olaf at Notting Hill Gate tube station, London.

Chris Bell 2004

She took my hands again. “In each of us lives the little animal of the self: Nothing to do with the mind, it goes its own way; there is no talking to it. Sometimes it wants to live; sometimes it wants to die. Maybe you are in hospital for surgery, and while you are anaesthetised the little animal of the self makes up its mind. ‘OK,’ it says, ‘this time I don’t die.’ Or it says, ‘That’s it - I have had enough and now it’s time to pack it in.’”

- from MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER

I don't think I've ever chosen a 'Rinyo-Clacton' quote for SA4QE before. The appropriate 4qlocation for this struck me as being the local cigar bar, 'Cuba', at the top of Parnell Road in Auckland. These pleasantly decadent surroundings are furnished with leather sofas, wooden venetian blinds and deep brown timbers, masked by a haze of expensive cigar smoke. Just the sort of place Mr Rinyo-Clacton would likely hang out, if ever he came here, I thought.

I left the quote on one of the tables late last night (about 12:15 a.m., Wednesday 4 February, 2004) and drank a toast of Laphroaig single malt to Russ.

Well being,
Chris

Lara Hoffenberg 2003

This was my first SA4QE - I joined the Kraken too late last year to take part in the first event. I've been re-reading The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz a lot during the last year, finding new things in it all the time, and especially enjoying the tension between fateful inevitability / biting the wheel, and freedom / letting go. I re-read it after finishing The Bat Tattoo because so much of Lion was wound up, for me, in the crash test dummies. Anyway, I knew I wanted to use Lion quotes.

It was easy to find a place to leave them. Just above the university where I work, on the slopes of a mountain called Devil's Peak which has a commanding view of the Cape peninsula [you can even see both the Indian and the Atlantic oceans at once] is a monument incorporating 8 huge stoic lions. They keep a watchful eye on everyone below; the irony here is that there used to be lions on these 'plains' but now they too are gone. So I left a sheaf of yellow paper between the giant paws of one lion and on the back of another - weighted down so as not to blow away. I came back to the site four hours later and they'd all been taken.

The first two quotes from Lion hint at all the wonderful mysteries of the novel.


~ ~ ~ ~

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ

The last lion alive was the one whom the others would have made their king if they had been allowed to. He was large, strong, and fierce, and with two arrows deep in his spine he was still alive. The arrows burned like fire in him, his sight was fading, the blood was roaring in his ears with the rumble of the chariot wheels. Before him and above him, racing away, the glittering king was calm in his chariot, is spear poised, his spearmen beside him. The dying lion-king leaped, clung to the tall and turning wheel that brought him up to the spears. Growling and frowning he bit the wheel that lifted him and bore him on to darkness.

The lion was gone. Where the lion had been was a sudden empty giddy blackness, like the sensation produced by straightening up too quickly after bending down for a long time.

~ ~ ~ ~

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being.

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.

~ ~ ~ ~

I chose the last two quotes because they reminded me that whoever we think we are, we're all something different to somebody else - and they made me smile:

from PILGERMANN

"Am I a mirror in which you see yourself?" I said.

"Everybody is," he said. "I am so infinitely varied that I never tire of myself. Mortals looking in a mirror see only me but I see all the faces that ever were and I love myself in all of them."

"You think well of yourself!" I said.

~ ~ ~ ~

from THE MARZIPAN PIG

"Friends unknown to me have heard of my disappearance and are coming to the rescue, " said the pig. "No doubt there'll be a big celebration when they find me. Crackers and party hats and probably a cake with pink icing. Perhaps I'll be stood on top of the cake and asked to make a speech."

He began to think of the speech he would make. "Dear Friends," he said, "having spent long months in solitude behind the sofa, I speak to you tonight of..."

"Sweetness," said a voice behind him.

"Who's that?" said the pig. It was a mouse. She was nibbling at him. "You're sweet," she said.

"There was a time when I was sweet," said the pig, "but I have known such..."

"Sweetness, sweetness, sweetness," murmured the mouse, and she ate him up entirely.

~ ~ ~ ~

Happy birthday Russ! And thanks for the chance to send these words out into my part of the world.

Lara

Alida Allison 2003

What's below
Is what goes
All around
My campus--

Feb. 4, 2003

Happy Birthday, Russell Hoban!

Quotes from Russell Hoban's Children's Books

La Corona was the name of the beautiful lady in the picture on the inside of the cigar box lid. She wore a scarlet robe and a golden crown. Beyond her was a calm blue bay on which a paddle-wheel steamer floated. A locomotive trailed a faint plume of smoke across the pink and distant plain past shadowy palms and pyramids. Far off in the printed sky sailed a balloon.

But the lady never looked at any of those things. She sat among wheels and anvils, sheaves of wheat, hammers, toppled pedestals and garden urns, and she pointed to a globe that stood beside her while she looked steadfastly out past the left-hand side of the picture.

Inside the cigar box lived a tin frog, a seashell, a yellow cloth tape measure, and a magnifying glass. The tin frog was bright green and yellow, with two perfectly round eyes that were like yellow-and-black bullseyes. He had cost five shillings when new and hopped when wound up. He had fallen in love with La Corona, and he was wound up all the time because of it. He kept trying to hop into the picture with her, but he only bumped his nose against it and fell back into the box.

"I love you," he told her. But she said nothing, didn't even look at him.

"For heaven's sake!" said the tin frog. "Look at me, won't you? What do you expect to see out there beyond the left-hand side of the picture?"

"Perhaps a handsome prince," said La Corona.

"Maybe I'm a handsome prince," said the tin frog. "You know, an enchanted one."

"Not likely," said La Corona. "You're not even a very handsome frog."

from La Corona and the Tin Frog (1979)

The wind was howling, the sea was wild, and the night was black when the storm flung the sea-thing child up on the beach. In the morning the sky was fresh and clean, the beach was littered with seaweed, and there he lay--a little black heap of scales and feathers, all alone. All alone he was, and behind him the ocean roared and shook its fist. He lay there, howling not very loud, Ow, ow, ow! Ai-ee!" while the foam washed over him and went hissing away. He was too little to swim very well and he hadn't learned to fly yet. He was nothing but a little draggled heap of fright.
After a while, when the tide went out and the day grew warm, he crawled up on the beach, leaving a wide and messy track behind him in the smooth sand. He crawled up among the big old seaweed-bearded rocks by a tide-pool, and he went to sleep, cheeping softly to himself.

from The Sea-Thing Child (1972)