RICHARD COOPER
Web content manager, Rugby, UK
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.
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`What is Luise to you?'
from The Medusa Frequency
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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.
Happy birthday,
Richard
If you have any problems viewing the video above try going direct to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UyzfwgZiq4
Read Richard's report on the 2007 theatrical production of Riddley Walker in Waterford, Ireland
~ ~ ~ ~
Richard's 2007 4qation
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!
Happy birthday Russ and best wishes to awl,
Richard
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Richard's 2006 4qation
For SA4QE 2006 a particular quote didn’t spring to mind, at least not one I hadn’t already used on any of my previous 4qations. In fact in some ways I regret 4qating so promiscuously in 2003 because I dropped enough quotes in one day then to last a lifetime, and although it was great fun at the time it satisfied my hunger to 4qate and I’ve rarely felt quite as hungry since.
To complicate matters, SA4QE day this year fell on a Saturday. In years past this would have given me more time to find a quote and go out and drop it, but, with the birth of my little boy last March, 2006 is, to say the least, not like other years. Both my wife Koy and I work full time, so we take turns in looking after Joe, and not only is Saturday one of my days, but tonight Koy and I are going out for dinner for the first time in ages and Joe is staying at his grandparents'. So in addition to the usual routine of changing, feeding, playing and (most sappingly) frustrating his quest to bring down the contents of the flat on top of himself, there's the added task of getting all his bottles, pyjamas, nappies, wipes, creams, spoons, jars of food, extra clothes and the kitchen sink together into one bag that I can actually lift, and getting it and Joe to my mum and dad's... as fantastic as it is, having a baby has turned "not enough hours in the day" from a casual expression into a way of life.
However, as the ancient Chinese proverb has it, "Not being hungry is no excuse not to eat when someone offers you a fortune cookie", so as I rush out the door with baby under one arm and holdall under the other (and the moment under the other), with my spare tentacles I pick up my copy of Linger Awhile and a sheet of yellow paper (from a ream of gold or “apricot” A4 I bought from Ryman’s for the Some-Poasyum last year) and head for the street.
I thoroughly enjoyed Linger Awhile and felt it was Russ’s best book for several years, and as I only finished reading it a few weeks ago much of it is still (in principle at least) fresh in my mind. Under the circumstances, this is important: in years past as SA4QE day has approached I’ve spent several hours looking slowly through my Hoban collection for something to 4qate, but this year this obviously hasn't been possible. I also think it would be appropriate to use the opportunity of SA4QE day to promote Russ’s latest book (if, that is, leaving a quote from a book on a sheet of yellow A4 in a random public place doesn’t somewhat stretch the definition of “promote”).
We arrive at my mum and dad's and to my great relief they fuss over Joe immediately, giving me the chance to survey Linger Awhile from the comfort of my dad's armchair. My memory of the novel is that there are many great quotes and passages in it, but now that I skim through as attentively as possible in the little time I have before meeting my wife, they prove surprisingly slippery. I think it was Graham Greene who said he had a habit of marking the books he read to indicate passages that particularly struck him for future reference; I have a habit of not doing this, as much as I’d often like to, mainly because my instinct is not to risk spoiling the enjoyment of any future reading by distracting yourself with something that caught your eye on a previous reading, especially if it means you only ever re-read the bits you've marked rather than the book as a whole. Then again, this instinct is not unconnected to my inner Felix who likes to keep books (and everything else) pristine, and the suspicion that this has triumphed over the writer in me who wants to scribble all over them gives me a momentary identity crisis. Whatever's the case, not for the first time it becomes clear to me that the interest factor of many (if not all) passages one reads comes in context, in the act of reading the text, not just from the text itself; reading is not a passive occupation, it's creative and interactive, and the DNA of a book gets mixed up with the DNA of your own self and personality and situation and experience until it's a whole other unique thing altogether - and not just once, but each time you re-read it.
After about 45 minutes of speed-reading the book up to page 78 I have three or four passages that I would be more than happy to be seen out 4qating with. Curiously, all are from chapters narrated by Irving Goodman – perhaps, as his name suggests, because he’s a good man (the only truly good character in the book, perhaps, apart from Grace Kowalski), the one with all the self-knowledge and memories and poetry and melancholy in him. While Istvan Fallok is guilty of greed, and Chauncey Lim of opportunism, Irving is only really guilty of falling in love. Even though Irving ends up the same way as the other two, at least he does so having realised the depth of his mistake, and that the woman he loves is a real one and not the Frankenstein’s monster he has helped to create. Although Irving is a melancholy character, it’s maybe the melancholy that saves him; it is that capacity for reflection – as rotten as he feels – that leads him to understand what he’s done wrong. The other two, while not exactly carrying on regardless, don’t have enough melancholy in them to realise the consequences of what they’re doing and stop it before it runs out of control. Irving indicates several times through his memories of his childhood that he’s never been a confident person, but if anything it’s Istvan’s and Chauncey’s confidence that causes their undoing.
It’s one of Irving’s memories of his childhood that I finally choose:
| When
I was a child we had a large mirror that took up most of the width of the
rear wall in the front room. It had no frame and was fastened flush
against the wall. It showed what was in front of it but I used to put my
face against the very edge and try to see around it to what it wasn’t
showing. I never could but I knew that the mirror wasn’t giving me the
whole picture. I’m still trying to see around the edge.
from Linger Awhile |
When I first read this passage I felt sad because Irving is 83 and he’s still looking round the edge of the mirror, as if he never learnt the lesson that he can’t see what’s there. When I thought about it some more though the fact that he's 83 and still looking struck me as profoundly uplifting.
It’s ironic then that it’s this admirable need to see around the edge that gets him and a number of other people into deep trouble. But it’s in keeping with the best of Russ’s characters, the ones who take the risks and go on quests and have dangerous adventures, that he follows his feelings and keeps trying to find his way around the edge. Without characters who do that, there are no stories, there is no drama, there is no heroism in life. And at least Irving does it for love, or what he believes is love anyway.
My mum and dad have a full-length mirror in their hallway, this one tall and narrow and with a wooden frame, so not quite the same as the one described by Irving Goodman, but still whenever we visit, Joe always crawls over to the mirror, stands right up against it, looks at it for a bit and then tries to see what’s behind and around the edge of it. So, Joe, a word of advice – try and stay out of trouble if you can, but don’t ever stop looking.
Anyway, 4qationwise, as luck would have it I end up falling asleep in dad's armchair (a reflection on my lifestyle rather than Russ's book) and the next thing I know Joe is attempting to 4qate me with my own yellow paper. Then my wife rings from the station and, as we've booked a table for 7pm on the basis that we have to make room for another booking by 9, I rush out and the quote gets left behind... oh well. In an attempt to repent I order for my starter goat's cheese salad a la russe and toast Russ's 81st with a nice glass of house red.
In the end, the quote doesn't get 4qated on SA4QE day itself but the following Monday I nip out in my lunch hour and head for a very Hobanesque spot not far from my office in Waterloo, where I sellotape the quote around the pole of a lion-tastic traffic sign in Stamford Street, with King's College (helpfully yellow), the IMAX cinema and London Eye bringing up the rear:
Further reflections...
My dad said once that his earliest memory is of looking at his mother’s dressing table, which was one of those old-fashioned ones like a desk with three large hinged mirrors around it, triptych-like; my dad says he must have been about two at the time and remembers going round behind the mirrors to see what was there. So with this and the other two examples above maybe children and mirrors simply have a thing going on. If so, I wouldn’t know as I can’t remember having a mirror memory myself. That said, a couple of the (many) comic strips I read as a kid spring to mind. In one, a single-frame cartoon, a man stands in front of a mirror about to have a shave, his reflection upside-down. He looks angry and early-morning irritable. “Okay,” he barks, “who turned the mirror upside-down again?”
The second cartoon is from Garfield. In the first frame, the eponymous cat walks towards a mirror. In the second frame he stands in front of it, but where his reflection should be is Snoopy instead. In the third frame he looks towards the reader and says, “I can see it’s going to be one of those Mondays.”
All of these mirror stories converge again towards Hoban as I now remember at least three great mirror quotes from his other books:
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)
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror. (Kleinzeit)
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. (The Medusa Frequency)
Something that Irving Goodman would concur with, I’m sure.
- Richard
Richard's (chaotic) 2005 4qation
Yellow Paper Diary - 4th February 2005
07.01 Rise and shine, sort of. Negotiate bed space with wife's bump, due to reveal itself as a baby in a month's time. Get up, shower, shave. Look through t-shirt drawer for slogan-free t-shirt to wear beneath Serious Office Shirt. Don't find one. Only option is t-shirt with slogan rpc@blockedauthor.co.uk turned inside-out. Wonder if, maybe, the act of reversing the shirt will reverse the slogan and unblock me?
07.42 Eat breakfast guiltily in realisation that it's SA4QE day and I still haven't decided on a quote to drop, or where to drop it, as I've been spending all my spare time lately helping to arrange the Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum. Maybe that in itself can be my SA4QE this year? No, no, that's the coward's way out. Take down entire collection of Hoban books from shelves and flick through anxiously. How to choose one quote when every page of each book has something profound on it? I know: on that basis any quote will do, so choose a random book, a random page, a random line and that'll be the one! OK, here goes: Fathers are prone to name first daughters elaborately. I don't mind being named after a nymph but I really don't care to be associated with the pastoral tradition. Hmm: interesting, and appropriate if the baby is a girl, but doesn't really do it for me 4Qationwise. Try again: Lenore liked Messiaen, Ligeti, Boulez, Birtwhistle ('I have no time,' she asserted, 'for composers who try to please, except when I'm in the mood for Antonio Carlos Jobim'). Better, but... damn, have to go. Pile books in rucksack, kiss bumpy wife and go.
8.20 The shop below our flat has been closed for some time. Rather than whitewash the windows, the ex-owners have hung some nifty yellow curtains there instead. Consider as I pass graffiti'ing a Hoban quote across it. If only I could think of one...
The shop below chez Cooper, with its handily yellow windows just crying out for a Hoban quote.
08:51 Squeeze onto train for Victoria at Clapham. 'Sorry, names move around behind the boiler.' 'What boiler is that?' 'The big black lying-down one.' Well, certainly interesting, but a touch on the wilfully obscure side perhaps? Ah, here's Victoria. "Hello," says Victoria. She looked at me as if my head were transparent and every one of my thoughts was visible to her, especially the last one.
09.14 Arrive at work. Check convention emails. Ohmygod, 22 of the little buggers. "My sample booklets arrived this morning and, in my opinion, they look stunning," says Chris. "Just about to do some SA4QE with my Year 10 group," says Roland. Luise had translated that poem for me, I'd recorded her reading it in German and in English and I still remembered lines here and there. Tempting, but must do some work. Resolve to tackle emails and quotes throughout day.
10.52 "Proof-reading standards have indisputably dropped since the introduction of desktop publishing packages such as InDesign and Quark XPress," meditates Chris. "The Troubanotdour sounds like a fine fling of a finale to the convention, Richard!" says Emmae. 'You've got a million pounds in cash back at your flat?' says Jonathan Fitch. 'I always like to have a little cash on hand,' replies Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Good, but is it 4Qational?
12.10 'You think too much, Harold.'
'Like a Jewish horse.' "If a cakewright could be found in Fulham, to make and
deliver a cake for Russ,
it would be nice, doncha think?" says Roland. "If it were made in the form of a ziggurat
it would be possible to arrange 80 candles on it in such a way that all could
be lit (not very easy on a flat cake)." Hmm, I'll think on that. I can't be bothered with details, said
God. I've told you that before. Kleinzeit didn't hear him.
13.26 "Shirts... a bit urgent," says Roland. 'The fault is
mine,' said the father in the same language. 'I do not look. I do not see. I
regret.' "The best plan for booklet distribution,"
I type with one hand while eating sandwich with other, "is for me to leave them all in the
office and for Roland to come here with me next Friday, ferry Bloomers'
300 to them in his car and grab a box (or half a box) for the convention." "Happy to do that," replies Roland rapidly, "but will it slow down the glueing?"
'Fister you know they wont do nothing moren dock his fraction for the nex
14nt or so. You jus cant go sticking Mincery peopl in bogs when ever you feal
like it.' Head out for a much-needed breath of fresh air. Passing
the Nomad Travel Store next to the office, wonder again whether their sign
REGISTERED YELLOW FEVER CENTRE could be cunningly adapted for Yellow Paper
purposes? Argh, if only I'd decided on a damn quote...
The Nomad Travel Store near Richard's office
in Victoria - a Registered Yellow Paper Centre? If Richard had got his act
together, maybe.
14.49 "Hello again," says a potential Some-Poasyac, "I'm trying to sign up but I can't work out how to make Paypal charge me less than £55, have you got any idea?" 'This Hidden Lion belongs to no one person more than to any other,' I said. 'It is simply the lion that remains hidden until it reveals itself.'
15.59 Helen went on about Elijah and how Yahweh showed him the stillness and Yahweh spoke the stillness that comes after the earthquake and the wind and the fire, the stillness that follows the release of energy from the potential to the actual. Er, come again? "Does anybody remember certain pictures and artists that show up in Russ's novels?" Olaf asks as he researches his slide-show. Think: what was the one with the bottoms in it? Ah yes, Angelica's Grotto. 'We were talking about Death,' Klein whispered into his hand. Death as a friend, said Oannes. 'Or as an editor,' whispered Klein, 'writing Delete? in the margin.' Good, but possibly negative, and no bottoms. Bum.
16.59 "i'd like to reserve all three t-shirt designs in medium, cheers," says Some-Poasyac Malcolm. We'd neither of us bothered to find out about the tide in advance. Whether it was in or out we'd launch the turtles. My wife rings, "Can you buy some soy milk and a bag of clementines for me on the way home?" she says. He made a fourth drawing: both arrows and one of the spears under the lion's feet. "Bookmarks arrived yesterday, ahead of schedule, and look great!" says Diana, "see you next week!" Mrs Crow, who had been stranded more than once herself, was cordial in her welcome. Argh! It's all going horribly wrong. This random idea isn't working. Reminds me of the so-called "random" orchestral crescendos in the Beatles' A Day in the Life: they listened to truly random versions and they sounded rubbish, so George Martin ended up having to orchestrate the randomness. True randomosity just doesn't have it, in the same way perhaps that creative writing courses say "Write about reality by all means, but don't expect to be able to take a chunk of reality and glue it to a blank sheet of paper and hope it'll become art." It needs a bit of intervention, needs a touch of personal meaning. Double bum! I have to get out of here in precisely 16 minutes and I still haven't worked out which quote to 4Qate, where to put it, how to bake a cake in the shape of a ziggurat, what a ziggurat is even.What a baby. You and your Ibsen and your Chekhov. Maybe the revolver in the drawer's for another play, you ever think of that? You think your three acts are the only three bloody acts there are? Maybe you're the revolver in somebody else's play, eh? Never thought of that, did you? "Can you order the cake?" says Roland. 'NNNGGHH,' I said. 'ZURFF, KRULJJJ.'
Actually, that's a point...
The Medusa Frequency is a tried and trusted favourite, a Hoban classic, my first experience of Russ, and although I've quoted from it before surely has something for all 4Qeventualities. A favourite passage comes back to me as I flick through. Feel a bit cynical using Russ's texts for political ends, especially when the passage was originally intended to be funny, but it does sum up to me the motivations of the various terrorists of the world, in all their forms. So here it is, at last, the passage I choose for SA4QE 2005:
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NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH IS THINKING VIOLENTLY. Of what? OF GOING AFTER WHOEVER PULLED THE GREAT SNYUKH. What was the Great Snyukh? IT WAS THE BLUG OF NEXO VOLLMA. The Blug of Nexo Vollma. I like that. I should think it was about forty feet high with a thousand tentacles and it left a slimy track. NEXO VOLLMA IS THE BLUGHOLE OF THE UNIVERSE. You mean plughole. Nexo Vollma is the plughole of the universe and the Great Snyukh was the plug. In that case the great Snyukh must have been a good deal bigger than I thought. IT WAS A WHOLE LOT BIGGER THAN ANY PLUG YOU CAN THINK OF, AND IT GOT PULLED. BUT IN THAT UNIMAGINABLE MOMENT BEFORE THE BIG WHOOSH, SNYUKH! INTO THE BLUGHOLE WENT NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH. He saved us all. HE DID WHAT HAD TO BE DONE BUT NOW HE THINKS VIOLENT THOUGHTS. FROM THE BLUGHOLE IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE HURGO MURMUS, FROM THE UTTERMOST DEPTHS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP HE SENDS HIS MIND AFTER THOSE WHO PULLED THE GREAT SNYUKH, THE BLUG OF NEXO VOLLMA. Who did it? Who pulled the Great Snyukh? THE DEEPLY BAD ONES DID IT. Why did they do it? THEY WANTED TO HEAR THE BIG WHOOSH. The bastards. from The Medusa Frequency |
I photocopy the passage onto two sheets of yellow paper, slip one onto an absent office colleague's chair because, being of a similar political and literary persuasion to me I know he'll enjoy it, and, gathering my entire Hoban collection together into one sagging rucksack, leave the office with the other. Outside the building between the pedestrian crossing and the Nomad Travel Store are three or four of those bins dispensing free newspapers for the benefit of the thousands of backpackers who trek around Victoria every day. Secrete the second copy of the quote between the pages of one of the papers, and, with some relief, head for home.
Richard's 2004Qation
Richard Cooper (left) attempts to 4Qate in Aix-en-Provence with a French Gom Yawncher man, October 2003 (photo by Koy Cooper)
SA4QE 2004 was rather disorientating for me. Due to the extreme nature of my 2003 4Qation (half a London marathon’s worth of walking to drop 35 yellow paper quotes), I’d decided this year to 4Qate more modestly in the southwest suburbs of the city where I live and work, in order both to take it easy and return to Diana’s SA4QE roots, which stress that 4Qation does not have to be location-specific. However, as fate would have it I ended up 4Qating in central London instead, albeit not quite as extensively as before. I had planned to drop a quote or two in and around my workplace (currently, a textile warehouse in suburbs even further out than my own), but I ended up not going to work at all that day. The previous evening I’d received an email from a journalist from Talk of the Town magazine (an excellent arts-based supplement that comes free with the UK’s Independent on Sunday) who wanted to talk to me about SA4QE, and we’d arranged to meet at three o’clock at the Hobanesque location of Tower Hill and the Cheshire Cheese. After making a quick phone call to work to excuse myself (I told them I was suffering from bull nose rash), I spent the morning helping my pal Gombert update the SA4QE site and preparing myself to be grilled over a slow Hoban. The meeting was positive, interesting and enjoyable, although modesty, journalistic integrity and good old-fashioned superstition (i.e. the more you talk about something, the less likely it is to happen) prevents me from going into any more detail about it at the time of writing. Suffice to say that all being well, an article will appear about SA4QE in TOTT on 15/02/04, so watch this space. [Gombert notes: The article did indeed appear on 15th February - click here to read it.]
On my way up the District Line to Tower Hill I’d rummaged about my person for a business card to give the journalist, in the vain belief that it makes me seem more efficient, writerly and webmasterly. I didn’t have one, and although business cards are probably always bad news in identity terms (saying at most very little about you, and at very least that you're a prat with a business card), I resolved to go to one of those machines you see on train stations everywhere to get some printed out for a few pounds at the next opportunity. (Something else I didn't have was my camera, which was in for repair. I've felt since starting this site that no matter the power of the words on it, illustrations really help these pages to hang together, so this made me feel even more naked and vulnerable. I've tried to cover up the picture-gaps here meanwhile with a few photos from different Hobanesque situations from the past year.)
I’d chosen Tower Hill tube station and the Cheshire Cheese pub for the atmospheric chapter of that name from The Medusa Frequency, long my favourite of Russ’s novels. The journalist and I were looking for cappuccinos rather than the more Hobanesque boilermakers, which (probably appropriately) it turned out the Cheshire Cheese didn’t serve, so we went across Crutched Friars to the Pitcher & Piano instead – somewhat less atmospheric, but certainly caffeine-friendly. After a very interesting conversation (I thought so, anyway - God knows what he made of it), we wandered back to the Tower Hill tube and went our separate ways... me to 4Qate, and the journalist to write up his piece. It was a lovely, clear, mild afternoon and I didn’t fancy going straight home to 4Qate domestically, although whereabouts I actually would drop my yellow paper I had still to work out. There I was, all forked up and nowhere to go. One thing was clear, though: before I decided on my movements, I had to return to the Pitcher & Piano to use the facilities.
On my way out of said convenience I noticed a postcard rack on the wall, and this struck me as a good place to 4Qate. I wasn’t sure if any of the quotes I had with me would make much of an impression on the average Pitcher & Piano punter, which I have to say I’m generally not, but I looked through the quotes and decided the following might be the best for this location, although I can’t really say why it should be so:
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I’d said that I’d never lose the idea of Medusa but I wasn’t at all sure that I knew what the idea was. The head of Orpheus had said, ‘Behind Medusa lie wisdom and the dark womb hidden like a secret cave behind a waterfall. Behind Medusa lies Eurydice unlost.’ ‘Let it be,’ I’d said, ‘you’re wording it to death.’ It was a mystery and I hadn’t wanted it explained to me. Now I needed to know where I was with it. Kraken, I typed, can you tell me anything about this mystery? THIS MYSTERY, said the Kraken, SHOWS ITS MEDUSA FACE TO COMPEL RECOGNITION, TO WARN THAT UNDERSTANDING STOPS BEFORE IT AND GOES NO FURTHER. THIS IS THE FACE OF MEDUSA WHO CANNOT BE IGNORED, CANNOT BE INTRUDED UPON, CANNOT BE POSSESSED. YOU HAVE NEVER GIVEN YOURSELF TO THIS ONE WHO WILL NOT GIVE HERSELF TO YOU, YOU HAVE WANTED ONLY THE SWEETNESS OF EURYDICE TO LOVE AND BETRAY. THIS IS THE FACE OF WHAT CANNOT BE BETRAYED. LOVE CAN BE LOST AND BEAUTY, BUT NOT THIS FACE OF DARKNESS MADE BRIGHT. THIS IS THE ONE TO WHOM YOU CAN BE FAITHFUL. |
- from The Medusa Frequency
I folded up the quote and inserted it into one of the perspex pockets, in front of a Virgin Mobile postcard showing a rear-view of a woman whose tracksuit trousers had slipped down a couple of inches and the slogan CRACKING!!! I must admit that the main reason I chose the quote in the first place was that I was afraid the journalist would ask me “What exactly is the Medusa frequency?” and I’d find myself tongue-twisted over this most crucial of Hoban questions. Despite reading the book several times, the concept has in fact always proved elusive to me (the fact that it seemed similarly so to Herman Orff providing little reassurance), so although the journalist didn’t ask me about it after all, it didn’t matter because copying it down gave me the chance to really think about it properly and in isolation for once. And, er, still not completely understand it, but there you go.
Richard with fellow 4Qationist Graeme Wend-Walker, The Cheshire Cheese, April 2003 (photo by a Beefeater from the Tower of London)
I left the pub and went back to Tower Hill tube, wondering if I could 4Qate discreetly anywhere inside. Tower Hill station is half in the open air, and a great gust of wind whipped up as I approached, so it seemed an impractical place to try to leave a sheet of paper. Instead, noticing a BT internet terminal alongside a normal phone booth, I inserted a pound coin and negotiated with a half-dead keyboard to type the SA4QE website address. It’s always strange to see a website you’ve designed on someone else’s computer, but it was especially surreal to see the site hovering on a screen in the middle of a London tube station. My pound had bought me a few minutes of surftime, so I left the home page where it was and crossed to the other side of the foyer to watch the incoming crowds of commuters as they passed it to see if the site would catch anyone’s attention. Three crowds passed in as many minutes and nobody so much as batted an eyelid that they were even alive. Trying not to take it personally I went out and caught another tube in the direction of the South Bank Centre, not only one of my favourite places in London but also a great 4Qation spot.
The Circle Line tube took me to Embankment, where I got off and crossed the beautiful new Hungerford footbridge for the South Bank. (The new bridge was actually finished about two years ago, but it’ll always be the “new” one to an old Hungerford hand like me.) Half way across the bridge a young girl with long blonde hair and a long black overcoat was playing a speeded-up version of Autumn Leaves. It was hard to tell if she was racing through it from nerves or because she was cold, or if she’d deliberately arranged the tune that way. Either way I put 50p in her case and she bowed to thank me without missing a note. On the other side of the bridge I bought a Big Issue from a vendor with a bald head, and a copy of Private Eye from a kiosk. The kiosk-keeper thought the Big Issue was one of her magazines and there followed a tense moment while I convinced her not to charge me for it. The Eye cover had the headline HUTTON REPORT IN FULL, with a picture of the now notorious Lord Hutton and a speech bubble saying, I FIND DR SHIPMAN INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES.
It was good to get out of the gale and into the South Bank Centre with its warm and laid-back 1960s interior. Here my remaining four quotes for 4Qation would not only not be blown away but actually stood a chance of being read by sensitive souls as they bought CDs and books, drank at the bar, looked at exhibitions of images, listened to the opera currently playing, went to a concert or stood looking out of the window across the Thames and a deepening winter sky. I first of all sat down with my magazines at a table by the window, the dusk settling over the river and the Charing Cross skyline, and when I’d caught up with the satirical view of the Hutton Report (not that the original wasn’t satirical enough) I got up and left the following quote on my chair:
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Why should a blank piece of paper be frightening? Well, you never know what’s going to find its way on to it, do you. H.P. Lovecraft said, in the very first line of his story The Call of Cthulhu: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. Even scattered bits of the mind’s contents are scary enough; consider the piece of paper that was blank until there appeared on it: E = mc² What mind generated that equation? Einstein got it on to paper but was Einstein’s mind his alone? Is there an individual mind for each one of us? Is the blankness of the paper an individual blankness for every writer or is there one blankness that waits to swallow everybody? I think that mind is a consciousness not confined to the individual but shared by all of us; the brain is the organ that limits that consciousness so that we can carry on the business of every day in the consensual state we call reality. I know that the mind is ancient. We are descended from the dust of stars, and the mind is more ancient than the stars: the whole history of the universe is in it, and more. The limited-reality consensus ignores the strangeness of our being and the strangeness of the consciousness that lives in us; it maintains a pretence of reasonable thought and action for reasonable objectives. With those thoughts and actions we have achieved the world we find ourselves in now. Goya in his etchings showed us the monsters let loose by the dream of Reason: but Reason, in our time, wide awake and staring, has gone a good way beyond anything that Goya or even Goya and Lovecraft together ever could have imagined. |
- from Blighter’s Rock
(an essay from The Moment under The Moment)
I’d chosen this passage partly because its reference to pieces of paper and “the scattered bits of the mind’s contents” called to mind SA4QE, but mainly because it neatly contained several of Hoban’s main concerns, themes and influences, as well as his oft-quoted coinage “the limited-reality consensus”. The table by the window looking out over the Thames seemed a great place to leave a long, thought-provoking quote like this.
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Cooper: Now you see him... |
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...now you don't |
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Photos: NEXTER TAILER
On my way to the other side of the centre I walked through Books Etc, where a few weeks before I’d found a large display of Bloomsbury paperback reprints of Hoban classics together with a glowing “staff picks” report that ran as follows:
These long-overdue reprints afford the perfect excuse to sample/celebrate the glorious work of one of the most inventive, bizarre and exuberant of modern British novelists. In Hoban's books the forces of myth, symbol and dream, let off the leash, work exquisite havoc with prose that sparkles - or darkles - with humour, intelligence and surreal beauty. A wonderful writer, not to be missed.
Today there was another staff selection, this time of books by a variety of authors, and among them was Amaryllis Night and Day, accompanied by a card describing the novel as “mysterious, beautifully written and unerringly left-field” and quoting another line that has become a favourite among Hoban fans: “Happiness can be unsettling, like catching a baby someone has thrown out of a window.” Among other staff selections in the display was Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories by M.R. James, another of Hoban’s original influences. I bought a copy, and after checking that the other display of Russ’s catalogue was still there with its excellent staff report (it was), I went out and looked for somewhere else to 4Qate.
Outside Books Etc., as part of a BBC Radio 3 promotion, was a wallful of headphones against a warm yellow and orange background. I sat down, put on a pair of phones and selected the option labelled ELVIS COSTELLO. As Costello launched into the old classic She (“She may be the face I can’t forget, the trace of pleasure or regret...”), I flicked through my remaining quotes and selected the following to leave on the perspex ledge underneath the headphones on the yellow backdrop:
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“The world-child has been told that this is a world,” said the head, “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.” “Who told the world-child all this that it now believes?” I said. “Each thing told itself to the world-child: the tree; the mountain; the ocean; the woman; the man. You and I, we have told ourselves to it.” “And the idea of love? Who told that to the world-child?” “It didn’t have to be told,” said the head. “This idea arises of itself from that energy of belief that keeps the mountains from exploding and the seas from going up in steam. It’s only a kind of cohesion that binds together possibilities that have spun together out of the blackness.” |
- from The Medusa Frequency
I’ve always loved this passage. While this idea of the world-child being told about the world and believing it in all its innocence might seem over-optimistic or even sentimental, elsewhere in the book you learn the other side of the equation, which is classic Hoban, that the world-child will ultimately be betrayed along with everything else – and despite the fact that the betrayal only happens when Orpheus kills the tortoise to make the lyre, and therefore make music, and therefore attract Eurydice... and therefore lose her and get her back and then lose her forever, and so it goes on.
I hung up the headphones, still buzzing with Elvis Costello and an apparently out-of-date advert for a jazz festival happening in October, and wandered upstairs to the Poetry Library. I hadn’t been there for years: it’s as quiet and peaceful and (personally speaking) as vaguely depressing as any ordinary local authority library, but it has a special air about it from being devoted solely to poetry and of course being on the South Bank rather than Neasden high street or wherever. A woman sitting at a computer at the front of the library said hello to me as I came in, taking me unawares (walking around as I generally do in a kind of bubble of silence), and I mumbled a greeting of my own in return. The library has a LOAN section and a REFERENCE section, both containing the same titles and therefore guaranteeing to always have the book you want. I went to the LOAN section, deciding to use the opportunity to seek out some Hoban poetry, which (surprisingly perhaps) I’d never read, and after some searching found a very old green hardback copy of The Pedalling Man, which had a purple stamp inside the front cover saying REJECTED FROM ISLINGTON LIBRARIES. Why? I thought, reading through the charming poems about a tin frog, a crow, a seagull, and the pedalling-man weathervane of the title. The book was illustrated in simple black ink by Lillian Hoban, the little drawings seeming slightly sad there on the sparse pages. “Not everybody will need all of these poems,” Hoban had written in the foreword, “but if some of you need some of them then I’m satisfied.” My favourite poems were Typo, in which the narrator mistypes “nothing” as “nitgub” and engages in a dialogue with the typewriter about this new word, concluding “nitgub ventured, nitgub gained”, and Solu the Barber, about a gents’ haircutter who when alone in his salon picks up “a guitar he made himself” and sings old songs while the narrator hovers outside listening. There was also an appropriate poem whose title was (I think) London Town, about the US narrator’s London snowdome and its simple landmarks of Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge, a testament perhaps to Russ’s anticipation of arrival in the city where (although he didn’t know it then) he would spend the rest of his life. Rather than put the book back, I left it open at this poem on a spare section of shelf and wandered over to the magazine racks, where beside a quiet window giving onto an increasingly dusky South Bank and the flickering coloured neon tubes of the Hayward Gallery, I 4Qated the following amidst magazine titles like THE YELLOW CRANE, IOTA and SCRATCH:
| It is not love that moves the world from night to morning, it is not love that makes the new day dawn. It is the longing for what cannot be. The world needs the power of your yearning, the world needs the power of your love that cannot be fulfilled. |
- from The Second Mrs Kong
These lines leapt out at me when I first read Hoban’s libretto for his opera collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle. Being both a variation on an eternal classic (Beauty and the Beast in this case) as well as highly original and funny, the opera is quintessential Hoban: timeless icon King Kong (or the idea of him anyway), having loved Fay Wray and lost her, now falls for another timeless icon in the form of the girl from Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl painting, only to find himself in a second impossible situation. I feel sure we can all relate to these lines, and I can’t be the only person to have noticed the delicious irony that the intensity of feeling generated by an unrequited love or of anything in life you can’t have (or at least know you shouldn’t have) can be vastly more life-affirming and exciting than actually having it... but maybe that’s cynical. Anyway, given that I was in the Poetry Library, I felt this would be the most appropriate of my selected quotes to drop here.
I left the library and the South Bank Centre and walked to Waterloo Station. I had one more quote to drop and I’d saved it for the train home, for reasons which will be self-explanatory:
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Risk-taking was a big thing in my mind at the time. Only a year before I’d left my TV art director job to become a freelance illustrator. That was a risk I’d hesitated to take: I had a wife and three children and a mortgage, I was a responsible citizen with a lot to lose. One evening coming home on the train I’d said to my friend Harvey Cushman, who worked at another advertising agency, “When I have $10,000 in the bank and a couple of steady accounts I’ll do it.” “You’ll never do it then,” said Harvey. “I’ve heard lots of guys say the same thing and somehow the time never comes. If you’re going to do it you’ll do it without the $10,000 and the steady accounts.” So I did it and I prospered and I was confirmed in my belief that the human being is a hunting and finding and risk-taking animal. |
- from The Bear in Max Ernst’s Bedroom or The Magic Wallet
(an essay from The Moment under The Moment)
This may not be one of Russ’s most poetic passages, but it sounded like poetry to me when I first read it sometime in the mid-90s. I found my copy of The Moment under The Moment on the top shelf of a Richmond second-hand bookshop (tragically, now closed) while browsing for Hoban titles one Saturday afternoon, and the beautiful hardback (long out of print) has become a treasured possession. By the time I got round to reading the book properly (I rarely dive into books upon buying them, preferring to wait until they want me), I was in the latest in a long line of dead-end jobs, yearning to escape and do what I really wanted to do – be a writer. Unlike Russ, I didn’t have a family but I did have a mortgage, and I too had hunkered down for the dreary long haul of 9-to-5 and regular saving to enable myself to fulfil my dream. I remember sitting in my flat eating dinner alone one evening when I read this anecdote (from a long, complex and eclectic essay about risk-taking in art and elsewhere in life) and physically shivering as my mind opened to the simple possibility suggested in it: I didn’t have to wait, I didn’t have to go through the motions for years before I could be that writer – I could do it now, or at very least I could find a better, more immediate way of enabling it to happen. Very shortly afterwards I found a new job which was not only far more interesting but which gave me two weeks off every month, and the writing started to pick up forthwith. That said, the job was a lucky break, short-lived and nothing really to do with Russ’s essay; the important point is how reading the essay made me feel at that moment and how it arrived in my life just when it was needed to change my way of thinking. Quite often a character in a Hoban novel will say they feel much better about something, a relationship or some other situation, and that moreover they also feel that even if the situation doesn’t last, it doesn’t matter because they can now move on, and this was very much how I felt at the time of reading the essay.
I left this quote on the empty seat next to me as I got off the train, partly with reference to the conversation that took place on a train in New York between Russell Hoban and Harvey Cushman in the late 1950s, but mostly in the hope that it would be picked up by someone just as frustrated and hungry for spiritual, emotional and artistic escape as I had been when I first read it, and would inspire them to go out and take a risk and prosper and fulfil their dream.
When I got off the train in Richmond I passed a BUSINESS CARDS machine and remembered my earlier thought about getting some printed up. I inserted £2 and followed the on-screen instructions, filling in my name, address, website URL, email, telephone, fax and mobile numbers and my line of work, and clicked OK. A few moments later a card popped out of the dispenser at the front of the machine. I picked it up: ROGER SMITH, it said, SCREENWRITER AND SCRIPT CONSULTANT. What was it I said before about business cards being bad for the identity? Well, it could have been worse, I suppose...
Happy birthday, Russ, and thanks for the continued inspiration,
Richard
Richard and friends (including tee-shirted Russ Hoban and Che Guavara) toast a farewell to the limited-reality consensus, April 2003. (Photo by Koy Cooper)
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Any similarity between this photo and the cover of Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure is completely coincidental. |
Click here to read Richard's 2003 extravaganza
(make sure you've got a good pair of shoes first)