SA4QE 2017 - Diana Slickman - Chicago Illinois, United States
Happy Hoban Day to all!
My usual 4QAtion practice is to select quotes more or less at random. This year being how this year is, I had a couple of quotes in mind that I specifically wanted to drop and in the course of looking those up, a quote that wanted to be part of the event made itself known to me, so I took it along.
Thanks to Richard for continuing to maintain this record of our efforts on Hoban Day, and to all who participate, in any medium. It warms the cold cockles of my worried heart.
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Chicago Illinois
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I woke up. There you are, I thought; life goes on.
Left at The Book Cellar in Chicago's Lincoln Square, taped up among the posters for plays, yoga classes, cleaning services, and other events that prove that life does in fact go on.
The people who run the world now were children once. What went wrong? What is it that with such dismal regularity goes wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown ups? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying then that there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.
This quote, from the essay Pan Lives, is one I've 4QAted before, but it seemed a question worth asking again. Also left this one at the Book Cellar, in the fiction section in the M's, at random.
One speaks of the American Dream and the meaning various with the speaker but always what is meant is a montage of heart-pictures, desire-pictures, richly coloured wishes and memories and expectations of what people variously want from America or associate with America. This montage may have in it the Declaration of Independence, John D. Rockefeller, the Ku Klux Klan, Daniel Boone and Joseph MCarthy, Shirley Temple and the mountain men and Charlie Parker; it may have Abe Lincoln and Billy the Kid and the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door of the Land of Opportunity where the plough breaks the plains, the West is won, the Yanks are coming, the Wright brothers and the astronauts go up and the economy comes down, Henry David Thoreau plants beans at Walden Pond, the Okies roll out of the dustbowl in battered Fords and talking blues by Woody Guthrie, Frank Sinatra sings at Las Vegas, Thomas Wolfe burns in the night and Jack Dempsey, Marilyn Monroe, Diamond Jim Brady, P.T. Barnum and the Enola Gay gleam high in the sunlight over Hiroshima while Bartolomeo Vanzetti writes a letter to his son and survivalists in Texas stockpile provisions and machine guns. The American Dream is pretty much whatever montage of heart-pictures you like to look at.
I am not sure if Russ meant this to be comforting or alarming or just a slice of the reality he saw, but I thought it relevant to the situation we find ourselves in, here in America. It's from the essay "I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...". I left this one on top of a stack of newspapers in a corner newspaper box.