Zürich

This year, Russ would have turned 97 already. Hard to believe it‘s been 17 years since a group of fans met in London to celebrate our favourite writer‘s 80th birthday. The tradition of spreading quotations from his work on his birthday started earlier than, and went on regularly after, our „Somepoasyum“, and I have been doing my best to take part almost every year. However, this year I did not just want to hang up quotations printed on yellow A4 paper but decided to place spare copies of Turtle Diary in our school library and on a community bookcase in our neighbourhood.

This weekend I took part in a geography excursion to Halle an der Saale and Magdeburg in Germany from Friday night the 2nd until Sunday morning the 4th of February, Russ's birthday. A colleague of mine had arranged the adventure and had invited me to accompany him and a group of 14-year-old students we both teach. That in itself was cool, but in addition, it was also a wonderful opportunity to boldly place quotations from Russell Hoban's works in a location the yellow paper had never been to before.

I posted my contribution in the form of a Facebook status with accompanying cover photo. This is what I wrote:
Today, on 4th February 2017, would have been the American writer Russell Hoban's 92nd birthday hadn't he passed in 2011. To celebrate the day, I have chosen a quotation to post on my Facebook page, as many other Hoban fans will do too. We've been doing this since 2002 - it's an event we call the SA4QE, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. As always, my quotation reflects what seems to be "in the air", a sentiment or mood transmitted on a special frequency.

Swamped with end-of-term chores as always at this time of year, I nevertheless enjoyed doing a bit of "fork-you-ating" in the morning. This time my quotations went to a few colleagues at my school who had been in a reading group with me last year and who were game when I invited them to read and discuss Riddley Walker with me. Mind you, they weren't English teachers but teachers of German, French, Italian, Latin and History! Some received a quotation from the book we'd read together, others were given a quotation from The Mouse and His Child, which I love very much too.

SA4AE 2015
This year I felt a bit nostalgic and sad on Russ's birthday. So, rather than to venture out into the cold, I decided to stay at home and share my quotation only on Facebook (and here). In a note, I added the story of how I visited Russ for the very first time. After printing out the quotation on yellow paper and taking a photo of it placed next to one of the beautiful illustrations in a new edition of the book it came from I made it my Facebook cover photo.

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.