I've contributed to SA4QE over the last few years, but usually by the skin of my teeth, for various reasons. This year an archetypal 'bad day at work' left me in no frame of mind to consider choosing quotes or find inventive places to distribute them. As a result, my yellow paper quotes went out into the world the day after Russ' birthday, in the morning on my way to my necessary, but hated job. The quotations themselves were chosen not as firm favourites, but by a quite random method. I haven't re-read much Hoban lately, instead working through an endlessly replenished reading list of second-hand purchases by other authors, including the late Iain Banks 'Culture' novels. So I decided to give luck a role in choosing. To fit the date, I chose the fourth chapter from several novels, and started looking for a quotation in the second paragraph. Most of the time it worked very well.
SA4QE - The Slickman A4 Quotation Event 2014
SA4QE 2014 - Andrew M - Sheffield, United Kingdom
SA4QE 2014 - Debby Trimmer - Anchorage AK, United States
I have a Friend's card; I like the way they nod me through when I show it: I'm not a stranger. I always feel good in museums. I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and the voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long-departed Now.
SA4QE 2014 - Brynaussie Gwenda - Sydney Australia, Australia
His birthday will always be a celebration for me and a time to introduce him to a new audience. So I left my quote at Museum Station, Sydney. A very old, very deep underground station which feels to be inhabited by so many trapped in the great vessel of the alone
“In the storm a safe place, a calm and wild place. Oh the great secret. The forever-moment that has always been and will always be, the centre to which the universe configures itself. The magic place, the good blackness. The dancing of the heat on the infinite sands, the pyramids, the ziggurats, the lightning and the sphinxes of it, the pleasant palaces and rainbows. Now the satyrs are quiet and full-fed, now they sleep while the wild dogs howl. Broken is the great vessel of the alone, the aloneness is all spilt out. Broken the forty jars of silence wherein I crouched like forty dead thieves. Broken, broken, broken the solitary madness where the lizard-men ran silent on the ceiling of my mind. How they screamed and wept, how they dropped and one by one burst on the stone of Yes. The Yes of the death of the lizard-men.”
"Broken is the great vessel of the alone, the aloneness is all spilt out." I have always loved that imagery, my mind has seen what that looks like in all its glory.
SA4QE 2014 - Yvonne Studer - Zürich, Switzerland
Actually, I am a serial "4Qater" with a history of annual relapses, but as I had had a very long day at work and felt out of steam, I decided to restrict my "4Qating" to my cover on Facebook. Wondering how to get into the mood, I grabbed my copy of Amaryllis Night and Day, opened it at a random page, and this is what the book gave me: "Right", she said. "The thing is to move your head out of its ordinary busy-busy mode and make a clear space for things to happen in..." (p. 59) Of course, thank you Amaryllis.
I printed the quotation on my last sheet of yellow A4 paper, placed the Klein bottle from Russ and a tiny kraken magnet on the sheet, took two photos and posted them to my Facebook page.
Happy "Russmas" to everyone!
"Right", she said. "The thing is to move your head out of its ordinary busy-busy mode and make a clear space for things to happen in..."
“‘Nameless here for evermore’ she said. ‘Names are pretty useless really. If you say the name of anything ten or twenty times it scatters and falls away and the thing that’s named stands there all naked and unknowable’.
The night before I had actually tried to nip out and plant yellow paper, but thrashing rain and wind kept me inside. I imagined a soggy yellow lump of paper, stained with black ink and thought it better to wait. If it hadn't been February I'd have said it was 'Novembering hard'.
The next morning I walked down to catch a tram in the overcast half-light, eyes scanning for likely 'targets'. I thought the tram stop shelter looked a likely place for yellow paper discovery, with a steady flow of human traffic. I tucked an excerpt from ‘Amaryllis Night and Day’ into the timetable board.
"Pas the sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye,
Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky,
Thine the han what shapit the black
Guyd us there and guyd us back”.
Sat on the tram, I toyed with the idea of slipping my next yellow paper into a copy of the Metro (the nation’s ‘most popular’ free newspaper) and left it on the seat beside me. But instead of someone picking it up and being entranced, the next passenger to arrive just went and sat on it. Once their gluteous departed, I rescued the yellow paper and instead left it in the Metro dispenser at the terminus. The picture was snapped with my phone, and accurately conveys my state of mind that morning.