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Working at home, eating at home, shopping (not much) at home, doing theater (even less) at home, I thought it appropriate to 4Q8 at home as well this year. As usual, Russ came through with a germain quote!

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.

I posted my quote as a pair of 3D-generated images to the Russell Hoban Facebook page today, then propagated them to my timeline for my hundred-odd friends. I pretty much live on Facebook, ever since I became paraplegic, and so can't leave pages out in the world any more, but never underestimate the power of a picture! The images here were created using Blender 3D open source software and the instructions in Pilgermann for creating Hidden Lion.

Oh, how I miss him. I left this one. Chapter One of Pilgermann is the most beautiful pice of prose writing in the world. Happy Birthday, Russell.

On the 4th, just as I was preparing to leave home for work, my boss called. He was using the last of the coffee beans at the office and since our office, like many, cannot function without a steady supply of caffeine, he asked me to swing by Metropolis and pick up a couple more pounds. Metropolis is our coffee purveyor of choice and since their cafe http://www.metropoliscoffee.com/cafe/ is not far from my apartment so I am often called upon to perform this critical operational task for the greater good.

My Facebook post:

Russell Hoban called Turtle Diary his “gateway novel.” It was that for me when I found it in a Bethesda, Maryland, used bookstore one day. Since then, it has been joined by many other Hoban books, but it still is my favorite. Every time I reread it, I make new discoveries. With language Russ was an adventurer and a guide, too. He was a pearl-diver.

My first quote for 2015 is from Hoban’s 1975 The Sea-Thing Child. The second quote is from the novel Pilgermann, published in 1983, set during the Crusades, and said by the Jewish Pilgermann to his Muslim friend Bembel Rudzuk near the end of the story.

I got a late start this year. Around 9 p.m. I left work, clutching my yellow paper and a roll of tape, and headed to the Howard Street terminal of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). I had it in mind to post a my quote at the station, which is the terminus for 3 train lines and a number of bus lines serving the north side. The quote, from Linger Awhile, was printed out in a large legible font on two sheets and handwritten on one. One of the printed sheets I folded up and put into the receipt tray of a vending machine that dispenses tickets and passes for the CTA.