The Slickman A4 Quotation Event is an annual literary activity in which fans of the novelist Russell Hoban write favourite quotes from his books on sheets of A4 paper and leave them in public places. The event has been happening since 2002 and to date, over 350 quotes have been dropped or '4qated' in 46 cities across 14 countries worldwide. The website http://sa4qe.blogspot.com records all the quotes submitted by participants together with photos, videos and some very nifty animations.
For more information see http://sa4qe.blogspot.com/2001/01/about-sa4qe.html
The SA4QE site officially lives at http://sa4qe.blogspot.com
The owner of the official site also owns this one and is messing about to see whether there might be any benefit running it on Posterous instead.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Yellow paper found its way into various social networking sites in 2010. Here is a selection of the Russell Hoban quotes found on Twitter and Facebook on 4th February.
One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again.
'She said, "Be the world-child with me"' said the head. I will.
The sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world.
We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.
Sometimes I don't know anything at all for large spaces; sometimes I know many things all in the same place. My perceptions are uneven, my understading patchy but I have action; I go. I can't tell this as a story because it isn't a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards ...
I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you.
The fog made everything more personal, as if it were taking me aside to tell me a secret.
At three o'clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere.
The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us!
Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself.
Here's to Art and all who sail in her.
There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management.
The action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.
The sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world.
Twilight it was, the dying day shivering a little and huddling itself up in its cloak. Suddenly there came flying towards me with a mouse dangling from its beak, an owl, what is called a veiled owl, with a limp mouse dangling from its cryptic heart-shaped face.
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.
Webmaster's note: Many thanks to Quillory who posted this report on Flickr. If Quillory would like to get in touch to add any further details about him/herself please email sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com
Tom liked to fool around. He fooled around with sticks and stones and crumpled paper, with mewses and passages and dustbins, with bent nails and broken glass and holes in fences.
He fooled around with mud, and stomped and squelched and slithered through it.
He fooled around on high things that shook and wobbled and teetered.
He fooled around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and fishing them out.
He fooled around with barrels in alleys.
When Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong asked him what he was doing, Tom said he was fooling around.
‘It looks very much like playing to me,’ said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. ‘Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful.’
‘All right,’ Tom said.
But he did not stop. He did a little fooling around with two or three cigar bands and a paper clip.
The squidgerino squelcher was put together by the wizard Bembel Rudzuk. Bembel Rudzuk made up three jars of monster powder, then he added twelve buckets of water and Splosh! There was the squidgerino squelcher. It slobbered and it moaned, it left a loathsome track behind.
Everyone was terrified, everyone ran off and left the princess all unguarded.
The squidgerino squelcher chased her up a tower then it crept around to the bottom of the tower slobbering and moaning.
The princess looked at the mess the squidgerino squelcher was making and she became rather cross. ‘Where’d this monster come from?’ she said. ‘And who’s going to clean up after it?’
I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
I had told myself that I was not going to relive the past but of course this is not possible: what we call the present is only the accumulated past.
"You took your time", says Moe.
"My time took me", says Max. "Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph."
He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - Willa Cather, My Antonia
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 anything youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.
Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I'd do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: It bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don't know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one's proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn't eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who'd have wanted to know about them? They'd have stayed in the garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they'd have been a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God MADE us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn't done it.
"What's pathetic about trying to understand what happens to you?"
"It's cowardly. Besides which I don't believe you. I bet you're writing it all down trying to make a story out of it. I can tell by the miserable look of you. You're not really living your life, you're pulling the legs and wings off it, one by one. Why don't you take up vagrancy or crime, it's more manly."
...I must say though lightning strike me as I speak that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I'm being arrogant, and maybe that's why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it's that simply - God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and PFFT! there go a few hundred or a few million X. Ah! To be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.
There is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it; he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it; singers to sing it; lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others.
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.
I think about the dead a lot, their wants and needs and their unfinished business; I suppose it's because of the way I came into the world. The dead prodigiously outnumber the living, and although their lives have stopped their action hasn't; they are with us always, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting...The dead are with me in the ordinary moments of every day - sometimes I see my hand life a cup of coffee or sign my name and I feel the ghost hands moving with mine, lifting their no-coffee, signing their no-names...I always come out of it with a deep sadness, half-remembering blurred faces. Each of us is the forward point of procession stretching back into the darkness. And even within oneself, every moment is a self that dies: the road to each day's midnight is littered with corpses and all of them whispering.
More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.
There's more emptiness in the air than there used to be, and its spores grow flowers of dust in the lungs.
Things don't end; they just accumulate.
"Death is longer than life", she said, "and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we're left with, maybe some of us more than others."
Persoon Eusa comes up agen this time hes got like a iron hat on his head. 2 long wires coming out of the top of the hat and littl pegs on the ends of the wires. Plus there’s a cranking handl on the side of the iron hat. Eusas trying to shift some kynd of a box its biggern he is. He gets the box heavit up on to the show board. He says, ‘Hoo! Thats a hevvy 1.’ Theres a cranking handl on the side of the box as the 1 on Eusas hat, 2 littl hoals and a slot in the top of the box and a nother slot in 1 end of it.Eusa sya, ‘2 heads are bettern 1.’ He takes them 2 wires coming out of his hat and he pegs them in to the hoals in the box. He says, ‘Now Iwl jus input a few littl things in to my No. 2 head.’ Hes terning that crank on his iron
hat. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.Eusa says, ‘Now les see if it works.’ He takes a peace of paper and he says out loud what hes writing on it; ‘Whats my name?’ He puts the peace of paper in the slot in the top of the box he says, ‘Now les see it you can anser
that.’Eusa terns the crank on the side of the box and a peace of paper comes out of the slot in the end of the box. Theres writing on the paper. Eusa reads it out; ‘My name is Eusa.’Eusa says ‘Thats the ticket.’ Hes terning the crank on his iron hat some mor then. Hes inputting all kynds of knowing out of his head in to the box.Mr Clevver comes up and hes watching Eusa and lissening to him. Eusas mummeling all kynds of numbers and formlers it souns like hes inputting all the knowing there ever ben in the woal worl out of his head in to that box. Hes saying the Nos. of the rain bow and the fire quanter hes saying the smallering Nos. and the biggering Nos. plus it souns like hes saying some thing about the 1 big 1. Mr Clevver hes leaning closer and closer hes lissening lissening.Mr Clevver he says to Eusa, ‘Thats a guvner lot of knowing youre inputting in to that box parbly theres knowing a nuff in there for any kynd of thing.’Eusa says, ‘That’s about it. I dont think theres many things you cudnt do with that knowing. You cud do any thing at all you cud make boats in the air or you cud blow the worl a part.’Mr Clevver says, ‘Scatter my datter that cernly is intersting. Eusa tel me some thing tho. Whyd you input all that knowing out of your head in to that box? Whynt you keep it in your head wunt it be safer there?’
You’ll notice that i don’t call It by its right name. speaking its name might not actually bring it on but why take foolish chances. I’m talking about a certain sort of stoppage or ungoing, not infrequently an ongoing ungoing, that sometimes afflicts those whose trade is the writing of fiction. One of the strange truths about fiction is that practitioner writing with no difficulty on Monday may be utterly incapable of doing it on Tuesday. The poor blighter is suddenly rocked. ‘How’s it going?’ one’s friends ask cheerfully. ‘It’s not,’ one replied.Can you pick it up from casual liaisons? Yes. From toilet seats? Yes. From reading the Sunday supplements? Watching The South Bank Show? Yes, yes. There are more ways of picking it up than not.Various writers deal with it in various ways’ alcohol and frequent snacks, the traditional folk-remedies, do little to relieve the blankness of the page. Jogging has been known to result in the odd paragraph and a fair number of heart attacks. Hot baths and cold showers, travel and other forms of escape are unproductive.One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect; certainly, in the mind-to-paper process, one’s choice of paper is important. I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into, isn’t It. While at the same time making a modest living if possible. Yellow paper definitely has less word resistance than blue; yellow-paper molecules are happier with blank-ink molecules than the blue paper ones are, and more susceptible to Brownian or even purpureal motion. I never use white paper - to intensity the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.
The electric light changed a lot of things. It was an Irish writer, maybe Padraic Colum but I'm not sure, who said that traditional story-telling had to do with the circle of the firelight and the night all round. When electricity banished the night something was lost.
It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadows first before me, then behind. 'Nothing to declare,' I said.I crossed the common and headed down to the New King's Road. The Belisha beacons clicked as they blinked in the coldness of the morning. Cars at intervals hissed past me, in each one a face as questionable as the faces on the tin windows of toy cars from Japan. The shops stood like sleeping horses.The lamps on Putney Bridge were still lit, the bridge stood in simple astonishment over the water, a stonelike creature of overness, of parapets and ghostly pale cool tones of blue, of grey, of dim whiteness in the foredawn with its lamps lit against a sky growing light. Far below lay the river; slack-water it was, turn of the tide, the low-tide river narrow between expanses of mud, the moored boats rocking on the stillness.A sort of singing filled my head; it seemed an aspect of the particles of light and colour that made in my eyes the picture of this time just before dawn. I thought of the dew on the grass where the olive tree stood. There seemed to be a question on the air.'Yes,' I said, 'I will.' I spoke aloud because I wanted my answer to be recorded on the early air.
