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. I cut up a yellow folder from Rymans and doodled on five of them, with three-ish different quotations.
SA4QE - The Slickman A4 Quotation Event 2014
SA4QE 2014 - Nick Campbell - London, United Kingdom
I left one in a cafe in the BBC's Broadcasting House - something about news stories, transmission and the Shipping Forecast seeming to chime with Hoban's work. I left one in a copy of Kleinzeit in Foyles, one in the H's in Any Amount of Books, one peeking from between two Amaryllis Lost and Found's in Dulwich Library. But I am proudest of the words from The Medusa Frequency I left travelling up and down the Victoria line: the Underground being a strong motif in Hoban's work. At last I feel I properly participated! But isn't it strange to know whether anyone found one or not...?
Webmaster's note: follow the link below to Nick's own blog to see a full write-up, more photos and more quotations.
SA4QE 2014 - Ra McGuire - White Rock BC, Canada
Usually many walking men, and women, frequent this end of the beach (they call it East Beach, not to be confused with the other end - West Beach) but Russ's naming day was bitter cold, with a wind that necessitated three stones rather than the usual one. When I left the scene there was only a vigilant bear in attendance.
No lions in sight.
Happy Birthday Russ.
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.
SA4QE 2017 - Roland Clare - Bristol, United Kingdom
I chose a random Hoban novel, and opened it at random, and used as much as I could fit on an A4 page.
from Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
– Russell Hoban –
I took the Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate and the Central Line from there to Chancery Lane. The afternoon reality was a low-budget sort of thing I wasn't sure that everything I saw even had a back to it. None of the people in the underground had speaking parts and many of the faces were blank. The Grays Inn Road scenery had been done without much detail – a shop that sold second-hand office furnishings and another that cut keys were fairly realistic but I doubted that the doors actually opened and closed. The Morgenstern building was a little more convincing – a pseudo-Bauhaus thing with practical glass doors.
The security man at the reception desk looked me over critically but I brazened it out, signed in, and took the lift to the third floor. ‘Jonathan Fitch to see Jim Reilly,’ I said to the smart young woman who greeted me. She asked me if I'd like a coffee, I said yes, and she showed me to a conference room filled with business-grade sunlight.
Jim Reilly appeared shortly; he looked and sounded pretty much like me. There are probably a lot of people in the potential-realising-and-maximising business who look and sound like us – decent, clean-cut types with good teeth, firm handshakes, and clear eyes that don't blink too much. Jim had about two kilos of bumph under his arm which he laid on the dark and shining table. He took a sheet from the top and handed it to me. ‘I put together a little agenda here,’ he said, ‘of the points I'd like to cover in this first meeting.’ […]
My eyes travelled down the agenda but my mind had already fixed on Point 3: CLIENT OBJECTIVES! Did I have any, and what were they? The smart young woman brought in coffee and I drank it while Jim Reilly went on for quite a long time like a TV with the sound turned off. Every now and then he paused to remove some of the papers from the top of the two kilo stack and place them before me while I nodded or tilted my head to one side appreciatively and made such verbal responses as my mouth could manage. Objectives!
Celebrating the late, great writer’s 89th birthday
http://www.russellhoban.org/
No particular theme, or relevance, to the locations ... but lots of sellotape this year, so ... weather permitting ... they should remain for a while.
Happy Russmas to one and all !
SA4QE 2014 - Ruthie - Massachusetts, United States
Waiting for another snowstorm and reading of lions.
"He was delighted to find that he did not love Gretel for any reason that he might have thought good in the past. Not for intelligence or accomplishments. Not for anything that she did. He loved her simply because she was. What a thing, thought Jachin-Boaz. Love without a purpose."
'For years I have signed and measured and located this point and that point on the face of the earth,' said the surveyor, 'and I have gone back to the same places to find my stakes pulled out as boundaries waver and lose accuracy. I sight and I measure and I plant the stakes again, knowing that they will be pulled out again. It is not only stakes and boundaries that are lost - this is what there is to know about maps, and I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that? You're still a boy, so maybe you can't. Can you understand that?'
"Jachin-Boaz traded in maps. He bought and sold maps, and some, of certain kinds for special uses, he made or had others make for him. That had been his father's trade, and the walls of his shop that had been his father's were hung with glazed blue oceans, green swamps and grasslands, brown and orange mountains delicately shaded. Maps of towns and plains he sold, and other maps made to order. He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day. He sold husband maps and wife maps. He sold maps to poets that showed where thoughts of power and clarity had come to other poets. He sold well-digging maps. He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sickness-and-accident maps to physicians, money-and-jewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police."
'We make fiction because we are fiction ... It lived us into being and it lives us still.'