The Medusa Frequency

This is a special SA4QE report created to contain images posted on Twitter for the 2015 event so they show up in the SA4QE gallery. To see these images in context please see this page.

For the last few years I have put up quotes in my village for sa4qe on my own, so it was lovely to be able to do it this year with my boyfriend, Rik, whom I met through a conversation on Twitter about Hoban. We bonded through our mutual love of The Medusa Frequency in particular. I live next to a river and wanted my first quote - sellotaped to the local lifebuoy - to be one of Hoban's lyrical evocations of the natural world; this mix of lyricism and natural elements feels romantic too.

I've been taking part in this curious and lovely annual celebration since it started in 2002, and today was the first time I celebrated in tandem. I met my girlfriend Katy on Twitter after we got into a conversation about Russell Hoban, specifically The Medusa Frequency. Two years later we're still crazy about each other, in the full Hobanic sense of the word, although for logistical reasons we're not always able to be in the same city at the same time.

I first became aware of the SA4QE in about 2005 from an article in The Guardian. At that time I was mainly housebound with chronic illness, and knew no one else who participated, so I did the event solitarily for several years, leaving sheets of (I have to admit non-yellow) paper around the local village green next to the river. Leaving Hoban’s quotes here felt playful and subversive, a fitting tribute to a quixotic writer.

I really wanted to do SA4QE properly this year. I've read about others doing it for years, and the best I managed was normally a bit of loose-leaf paper in Borders (that shows you how long ago that was) or a post on Facebook (pitiful). This year I was planning on dropping a couple of words (which sounds pleasingly like a metaphor for taking mind-altering drugs), but I had the idea of making bookmarks. I liked the thought that they were less likely to be thrown away, more likely to hang about. I like bookmarks.

Last SA4QE day I was in ambivalent mood, reflecting on my past relationship, so it seemed only right that I quoted from The Medusa Frequency, which is for me Russ's most lyrical, if at times most cynical novel about relationships. In the months that followed I struck up a special friendship with someone who loves the book as much as I do, so for 2014's Hobanic celebrations I again consulted Medusa, this time seeking out passages that resonated more romantically.