SA4QE founder and
Neo-Futurist writer/director/performer, Chicago
Monday! Busy. Cold, windy, rainy. Winter in Chicago! My standard MO on Hoban Day is to open a book and see what presents itself. The Medusa Frequency being at hand, I opened it up and here's what it yielded:
| Dr. Carnevale looked into the room
and called my name and I followed him into his office. 'Pains in your
chest and left arm?' he said. 'Yes,' I said. 'At first it was like an iron fist, but now it's as if I've swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.' 'Let's have your shirt off.' He
unlimbered his stethoscope. 'Guess by now you've finished the novel you
were working on when I saw you last year. 'No, actually I haven't.' 'Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I'm told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell?' 'No. Is he a novelist?' 'Undertaker. He says they don't last as long as journalists.' 'Undertakers?' 'Novelists.' 'Why is that?' I said, as he took my blood pressure. 'Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?' 'Well, I can't be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.' from The Medusa Frequency |
This I copied out on to yellow paper and took with me to the grocery store. Monday nights I play cards with a group of interesting and intelligent women; February 4th was my night to host; hosting means making dinner. And so to the store. I slipped this, folded, between two bottles of Sauternes, which seemed fitting.
At lunch time, I opened up the book again and this is what I copied out of it this time:
| "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 |
Out I went, to get some lunch and to
find the right place for the yellow paper. I went into a book store: big,
impersonal, lit like an operating room. I walked purposefully about, but I
didn't know where I was going. Then I saw a book of movie posters from the
1930s on a shelf-end display and flipping through found a spread of two King
Kong posters. I slipped my yellow quote in between them and replaced the
book. Up the elevator to the fiction and literature shelves. "H" went
straight from Hillerman to Hoeg. I went back to work.
On both of these pages I cited the work and the author along with my
standard tag line, something along the lines of "February 4 is Russell
Hoban's birthday. By finding this yellow paper and reading it, you are
involved in a worldwide celebration of the day."
Happy birthday, Russ!
~ ~ ~ ~
Diana's 2007 quotes
Happy birthday, Russ!
It was a bright, frigid February 4th in Chicago. So cold that were it not for Russ having been born on this day, I'd not have left the apartment. The night before, the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong was on the TV machine and though not much interested in it, we watched it. Kong always puts me in mind of Kong and the quote I chose for this year was a tip of the pith helmet to the idea of Kong. I placed my quote, neatly folded, in my local video rental shop, Specialty Video, over the plastic sleeve that one must take to the counter to get the DVD of King Kong (1933). Most of the other sleeves contain the artwork that comes with the DVD, but the one for King Kong '33 contained, to my delight, someone's idea of Kong. On a piece of plain cardboard in black marker was drawn a small Empire State Building with a rather impressionistically rendered ape atop it. Little airplanes, like flies, buzzed around the building and in the ape's hand, in an altogether different scale, was a figure in a dress. I may be embellishing now, but there may have been a speech balloon coming out of the figure that said "Help!" I can't tell you how pleased I was.
Here's what the yellow paper said:
|
I live in a state of surprise much of the time; things others take for granted suddenly amaze me. Moving toward the ever-receding vanishing point I was struck by the frailty of what humans have put together like something out of a box: houses; shops; roads: street lamps; trains and railway stations; aeroplanes and airports. I imagined a gigantic foot stepping on it. Crunch. Of course film-makers imagine that all the time, and build monsters on to the feet. from Amaryllis Night and Day |
Added to the sheet was: "February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and this quote was left for you to find as part of a world-wide celebration."
Diana
~ ~ ~ ~
Diana's 2006 4qation
It is a Hobanesque day in Chicago this February 4th. The sky is low and precipitating slightly - sometimes rain, sometimes sleet, sometimes snow.
It's grey, cold, and things feel close. I wandered around my neighborhood, yellow paper in my coat pocket, looking into the shops and eateries to see which one wanted to be part of the SA4QE. There's a resale shop that just moved into an old theater close to my house on Clark Street. The theater was called Calo and for a long time it was the home of the Griffin Theater company. The resale shop is called The Brown Elephant, as the sales from it benefit the Howard Brown Clinic. My OED tells me that "calo" is a Latin word for a camp servant, and also the combining form of a Greek word meaning beautiful. So here is a beautiful servant formerly of the performing arts camp, with two powerful beasts in her life. In I went.
One of the things I like about this celebration is its covert nature. I get to feel like a spy for a little while, as though I am making an important drop for another operative to pick up later. I circled around the shop for a while, again waiting for inspiration to strike or for fate to show her hand. Finally I decided that hiding the thing in plain sight was the sneakiest thing to do, so I unfolded my yellow paper, laid it on a wooden end table, and casually strolled away. Mission accomplished! Happy birthday, Russ!
Here's what the paper said:
|
Running today, said the morning
looking in at Kleinzeit's window. from Kleinzeit |
February 4th is Russell Hoban's birthday and if
you've found this yellow
paper, you're celebrating it with him.
- Diana
~ ~ ~ ~
Diana's previous 4qations
I'm finally getting around to posting my activities on Hoban Day, 2004. I'm amazed and delighted by the lengths some of you go to; my own efforts are more modest.
I launched two quotes this year. The first I copied on to a postcard of a landscape by Rembrandt and mailed. It wasn't A4 sized and it wasn't yellow but it was at hand, and overlaps nicely with my current project to dispatch one postcard every day for a year. The postcard was chosen at random from a drawer-full I've accumulated over the years, and it was sent to an address chosen by opening the Chicago phone book and pointing with closed eyes. Likewise the quote was pulled from The Moment Under the Moment by letting the book fall open and seeing what was on the page that presented itself. Here's the quote:
|
The people who run the world 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? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make any sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.
- from Pan Lives (an essay from The Moment Under the Moment) |
The second quote is one of my longtime favorites from Turtle Diary. This I wrote on a yellow Post-it note and stuck on the third or fourth page of a yellow legal pad in the school supplies aisle of my local grocery store. It was a Cambridge brand pad, a good one with good thick strong back and a dark blue sort of cover on it. Here's what some unsuspecting legal pad purchaser will find after a while:
|
I had a salad. If I were to say that today's tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
- from Turtle Diary |
Here's to everything success and better tomatoes!
Diana Slickman
~ ~ ~ ~
Hello, all -
I spent Russ's birthday in Rochester, NY this year. By accident, not by design. I am here in Rochester, still, performing with the theater company with which I have long been associated, the Neo-Futurists. February 4th was a very windy day here on the banks of the Genessee river, mostly overcast and snowy. I and a couple of my fellow-performers had a little outing and visited the George Eastman house which, if I may say with apologies to our host city, is one of Rochester's few attractions. It was the home of the late film-and-photographic-equipment mogul (as in Eastman Kodak), and now houses a large cinema and photographic archive. We saw an wonderful exhibit of photographs by the great renaissance man Gordon Parks and wandered around the house marveling at the number of ashtrays and curios made from animal hooves contained therein. I had my yellow paper in my back pocket the whole time, waiting for its opportunity. In the gift shop I slipped the quote in next to a book of photos by Lewis Hine, whose portraits of sweatshop children have that same quality that Vermeer's turbaned girl has, of the thing itself looking out from their eyes. The bookshelf was tightly packed, crowded with books on all manner of subjects photographic and if there was an order to it, it eluded me. Here is the quote that chose itself this year:
from PILGERMANN
To me everything is extraordinary and nothing is. Aeschylus was killed when he was hit on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle but that's not extraordinary when you consider that he was sitting directly below the eagle when it dropped the tortoise from a considerable height. On the other hand, that there was Aeschylus, that to me is extraordinary: that the world appeared in his eyes, that the world lived in him like the light in a lantern, that there are continually new lanterns for the world to live in, that you and I are two of them, yes, that to me is extraordinary.
Here in Rochester, I am at the mercy of library computers for my internet and e-mail access, but I look forward to going back to Chicago and reading at my leisure all of the correspondance re: this year's event. I'm so pleased that this fledgling idea has taken flight so successfully. Here's to many more!
All best!
Diana Slickman
~ ~ ~ ~
from
RIDDLEY
WALKER
The
worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it
right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing
nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant.
You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you.
Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say 'I dont want to
know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant
not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to
put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it
inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more
its inside you.
I left this in the Chicago
Cultural Center. The Cultural Center used to be Chicago's main library
and is probably the closest thing the city has to a secular cathedral.
It was built after the Civil War, by the Grand Army of the Republic, for the
dual purpose of housing the city's library and honoring the veterans of the
Union Army. It is kind of shabby and magnificent at the same time. Now
it serves many functions: it holds the offices of the city's department of
cultural affairs, houses the Museum of Broadcast Communications, has several
gallery spaces, a couple of lecture/theater spaces, a concert hall, an
informal performance space, a café. People from all strata of Chicago's
population go there, from the homeless to the well-heeled (or well-healed, if
you prefer). To arrive at the main hall, one climbs a staircase of white
Carrera marble, encrusted with glass and gold mosaics in geometric
patterns. The hall itself has a huge stained glass dome and high on the
walls are quotes from authors of different countries and literary traditions,
carved into the marble in their original languages. When I went there on
Monday, a man was in this room playing a grand piano; practicing to rows and
rows of empty chairs. A woman sat on a wide low window ledge and looked
out on to Michigan Avenue while he played, but otherwise the room was
empty. I sat down to listen for a minute, clutching my yellow
paper. Suddenly the man stopped playing and picked up his cell phone
which was sitting on the piano. He examined it while it bleeped, but did
not answer it. I unfolded my yellow paper and slipped it on to the seat
in front of me, feeling very sly. The man resumed playing; I listened a
little longer and then went back to my office to eat my lunch.
-
Diana
