Richard Cooper 2008

I had very little time to 4qate this year, and the prospect of trying to find a quote (especially one I hadn't already used) from Russell Hoban's huge oeuvre seemed more daunting than ever, so I went back to first principles and tried to think of the main reasons I was initially attracted to his work. These were: a lyrical writing style; a great sense of humour; an ability to make mundane things fascinating; and a refusal to accept the 'limited-reality consensus'. I thought I would try and find a passage that not just represented those but which the average passing stranger might stand a chance of identifying with. With all of this in mind I reached firstly for Kleinzeit: I enjoyed revisiting both the long passages and the one-liners, but somehow it was all a bit too weird to grab the attention of the passer-by. Of course, weirdness is another reason I enjoy Russ's books, and you can divorce hardly any of the best bits within them from a general, all-pervading sense of weirdness. Fighting off a slight sense of futility, then, I remembered this passage - a shining snippet of dialogue between the protagonist Herman Orff and film-maker Gosta Kraken - from The Medusa Frequency, my first and probably still favourite Hoban novel, which met my criteria and also sat well with my intention this year of filming my 4qation for the website.

`What is Luise to you?'
`Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.'
`Don't roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.'
`Seven years ago with my sound man.'
`What do you suppose she heard in him?'
`Other music.'
`And what did she ever see in you?'
`Flickering images.'
`Of what?'
`It doesn't matter, it's the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black betwen the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?'
`Luise saw all that in you, did she?'
`It isn't only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I'm so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman's natural
holding-on reflex.'
`And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.'
`Nothing is for ever.'

from The Medusa Frequency

As it happened, the video is of me reading the passage, but I didn't film the paper-drop itself as it didn't seem terribly cinematic. This was posted on a notice-board outside a nearby village church hall which always seems to be completely empty (both the hall and the notice-board): it was nice to finally see something on there - a Hoban quote especially.

If you have any problems viewing the video above try going direct to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UyzfwgZiq4

Alastair Bickley 2006

For my sa4qe contribution I chose some passages from Fremder, making it clear that, contrary to appearances, they are both in fact the product of Russell Hoban.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses 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 the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip that shows it 24 stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention, the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.
Gosta Kraken, 'Perception Perceived - an unfinished memoir' (Jonathan Cape, 1987)

...to this I supplemented:

When I ask people if they experience being as a smoothly continuous state or a flickering one they always say it's smoothly continuous for them. For me it's always been flickering. Not that I've actually seen the black between the pictures in my eyes but I've sensed it in my brain and for that reason I don't make any assumptions about reality. Can it be that the chair that I sit on is only rythmically and repetitively but not continuously there? Why don't I fall to the floor between therenesses? How do I manage to flicker synchronously with the chair?'
Helen Gorn, diary, 17 August 2016

I printed off 10 copies at work and next day headed for central London. I left one on the bus when I got off at the Aldwych. Then at the National Gallery, I folded a couple of them into copies of the free gallery plan available at the new entrance and then reinserted them into the pile. Then I left one by the screens in the little coffee bar a bit further in.

After this I went to the little room where Hoogstraten's peepshow with it's little dog Hendrick (featuring in Amaryllis Night and Day and more lengthily in Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer) stands and left beside it ...Difficult to be surreptitious about any of this as the place was packed but it is remarkable how people generally only see what they expect to see, and no-one seemed to notice, despite the garishness of the paper.

The I thought I might go to Westminster Reference Library next door for a couple of long-haul insertions into a tome or two, but I found it was closed for refurbishment. To salve my frustration I went to the Salisbury public house in St Martin's Lane for a pint and left one there. Finally I inserted one cigarette-like between the fingers of the sculpture of the resting ballerina in Broad Court near the Opera House.

It was fun.

Louis Arron 2004

Stuck to a map notice-board for Bristol tourists, and to the door of the Cabot Tower:

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?’

from The Medusa Frequency, p 87

Louis is a student in Roland Clare's English class. Of the Cabot Tower, Roland notes that "its top, visible from my office, flashes out something in Morse at night that I've never decoded - probably NNVSNU TSRUNGH or something similar..."