This year is the 10th anniversary of SA4QE, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event, in which fans of Russell Hoban celebrate his 4 February birthday by placing quotes from his books in public places. Diana Slickman, its originator, proposed when SA4QE was established in 2002: “We each, on February 4, write our favorite passage, of any length, from any Russell Hoban book, on a piece of yellow paper and drop it somewhere public and then walk away, leaving chance to do the rest … I would recommend leaving it someplace rather than just dropping it on the ground … The paper should at least include the name of the book and Russell’s name … leaving chance to do the rest … let the mystery of things take it from there, let the paper find its way (or not) to some receptive (or not) person who would then go seek out the book (or not) and become another fan (or not)…”

The best sentence I know in the English language is from Page One of Russell Hoban‘s novel, Pilgermann (Jonathan Cape, 1983):

“Suddenly there came flying towards me with a mouse dangling from its beak an owl, what is called a veiled owl, with a limp mouse dangling from its cryptic heart-shaped face.”

Russell Hoban, chipping away at the limited reality consensus since 1925. For that I’ll love you always, Russ. What follows is the essay I wrote to commemorate his 80th birthday in 2005.

Photo of Russell Hoban at his lamplit binnacle by the wonderful Mr Dave Awl.

The writer Russell Hoban is in hospital having a pacemaker fitted. He’ll be 87 in February. Friends, acquaintance and visitors to this website know he’s frequently in my thoughts. I think about his health more often than I think about that of most members of my family. That’s what happens when you follow a writer for 30 years. They become part of your family, bigger than the books, as important as the language. Russ has in fact been in hospital for a couple of weeks after suffering heart failure. He’s been feeling much better in recent days, and I’m taking the fact that this operation is going ahead to be a positive sign. Russ took the trouble of phoning a member of The Kraken so his fans would know. It was suggested he take it easy, to which Russ – as always in Hobanseque character – replied, “I can’t take it hard.” Again, my thoughts are with him while I head for the bookshelf in search of comfort.

“Thomas Wolfe was once his favorite author, though today he prefers Marcel Proust and André Gide, and in painting, his idols were Rembrandt, Daumier, and Goya, who would now be joined with Bonnard, Kokoschka and Vuillard,” American Artist magazine wrote in 1961 of Russell Hoban.

He is best known today for his novels – the blurbs of which hint that he “worked as a book illustrator before becoming a writer” – or for his children’s books. Few today would know that his art wasn’t just a temporary diversion, and yet his work included covers like this for Time magazine. His Joan Baez portrait took 16 days from commission to delivery, and he spent 10 or more of those working on the portrait, with at least one all-nighter required to finish the job. After all that, Baez hated it.

Consider this the wordsSHIFTminds manifesto. Over a century ago author Arnold Bennett wrote How To Live on 24 Hours A Day and it’s still being read today. In it he urges readers to use their time more effectively. “The chief beauty about the constant supply of time,” Bennett writes, “is that you cannot waste it in advance.” Time is a more precious commodity than ever.

New Zealand writer Chad Taylor (this photograph by John Hagen) has been described as “the Nick Cave of New Zealand literature”. ‘Departure Lounge’ has been called his best book to date. His previous novels are ‘Pack of Lies’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Shirker’ and ‘Electric’.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment minus Raskolnikov; Dickens’s Little Dorrit with no William Dorrit; Sebold’s The Lovely Bones without Susie. To read Trevor Butterworth’s recent article on FT.com, in which the co-founders of new publishing collective Mischief + Mayhem (Dale Peck, Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson and Choire Sicha) talk about publishing in the second decade of the 21st Century, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this would be the world of books if commerce-driven publishers had their way. It’s no longer acceptable, it seems, for writers to include prison inmates, murdered children or less-than-beautiful protagonists in their novels, for fear readers won’t be able to identify with them.

I. The Vanishing Point: “Here I am, somewhere in Time: Typo Blod, a man devoid of nationality. I find the notion of Time an elusive one. It and I make for uncomfortable bedfellows. But I think I could provide a history of myself, if necessary. At once, I am at London’s Liverpool Street Station bidding farewell to a lover (there is only ever one that counts…”

Oliver Onions on writers and books, in his novel The Tower of Oblivion: Of the makers, as well as the making of books, there is no end. They are born, they lisp, they spell, they write; and then they die. The eager heart, the busy brain, are a few tarnished letters on a frieze, a strip of paper gummed into
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Robert McAlmon was driven by an uncompromising urge to publish writers who were undervalued or ignored by the big, commercial publishers. By 1925 he had published, some for the first time, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Norman Douglas, Djuna Barnes, Havelock Ellis, Edith Sitwell, William Carlos Williams, H.D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Gould, Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, Glenway Wescott, and Kay Boyle.