Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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19 January

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

After moving to London in 1969, Russell Hoban ('Russ') was to live the rest of his life in his adopted city, which informs his novels.

Wishing all who participate* a happy and fruitful @sa4qe !

* Or who might, if they knew what it was - for which see :https://t.co/MyaZGyM8SZ

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2021

Well, as Emmae Gibson points out, Russ was born in 1925, so - on 4 February, the day of SA4QE**, when people remember him (now and in his mortal years) - it will be Hoban at 96.

I suggest that we respond withGnome at her***, since time is an illusion, and - as Russ himself, at least twice, said in print**** - Nothing is forever. [Nothing, except love, as the waves and particles of Russ' novel Pilgermann, as Emmae has reminded me, suggest... ?]

The birthday of novelist Russell Hoban, who has also written and / or illustrated children's books, such as Jim's Lion, The Mouse and his Child, or 'the Frances books' (e.g. Bread and Jam for Frances) :https://t.co/cbJGdx1fnR#CelebrateHobanAt95 pic.twitter.com/LTzY3skdOb

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 20, 2021

Did anyone say 'puppets' ?

If people have read any novel by Russell Hoban, it's Riddley Walker*, here reported on as adapted for theatre in a celebrated show :https://t.co/FgjipRZSya#CelebrateHobanAt95

* Published by Jonathan Cape in 1980.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 24, 2021

End-notes :

* This Tweet refers to where material from the original hoban2005.co.uk can now be found :

The site is now at https://t.co/WRvsUzhUzx

— RussellHoban.org (@russellhobanorg) February 4, 2021

** The Slickman A4 Quotation Event, named after its initiator, Diana Slickman, and during which [on (or for ?) 4 February] a distribution of quotations from the works of Russ is made.

Depending on the assiduity of the participants, the 4ations (as they are called) are usually shared via http://www.russellhoban.org/sa4qe, on or after that date.


*** Those who have read Hoban's second novel Kleinzet (1974) may have indulged a fascination for atrocious puns, or what - on Twitter - this writer collects as #Homophones.

**** The same (exactly ?) long paragraph appears in the consecutively published novels The Medusa Frequency (1987) and Fremder (1996).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Blighter's Rock

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 October

Russell Hoban wrote a short piece, included in the collection of various bits and pieces The Moment under The Moment, of that name, and elsewhere, in his novels, gave characters that Spooneristic phrase to describe their predicament.

I have always inferred, since first reading the words, that they were, if not dear to Russ' heart, then at least acknowledged as part of his own experience: I find that he is a writer who does not keep you at arm's length, in that way, from what he has known or seen, and I see The Medusa Frequency, in 1987, as having come out of a very particular encounter with Medusa's powers, for ill and good. The previous novel, Pilgermann, had come out in 1983.

The fact that there was another such long gap and then, instead of a novel to follow Medusa, Moment came out in 1992, suggested that something had happened, and that the volume attempted, by bringing various things into one place, to maintain an interest / following. The next novel, Fremder, was not published until 1996*.

Although, for my money, both Medusa and Fremder are flawed by their ending, they are, nonetheless, masterpieces, linked by containing the same piece of text about occulting views and the rate at which the retina refreshes, making films possible, because of the persistence of image. Fremder, especially, though both books are short, is costly on dedication to read. It seems to me that the road to these novels had been a hard one, and likely that there had been prolonged stays on Blighter's Rock, before and after Moment.

What is characteristic of Russ is that he creates something out of the impossibility of creation, converting the self-pitying writer's block (being 'blocked' doesn't sound good) to something that happens to blighters. In other words, not taking himself or it too seriously.


End-notes :

* Data courtesy of http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/, known as The Head of Orpheus.


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NHS carrier-bag slogans

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 October

Inspired by Hobanesque influences such as The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Kleinzeit, here are some slogans, for NHS carrier-bags, dreamt up to (try to) amuse @jakkicowley, the starting-point being:

Why wld a hospital feel the need to give carrier bags with 'PATIENT PROPERTY' emblazoned on them. Plain 'confidential' ones not do same job?

— Jacqueline (@jakkicowley) October 17, 2012

* CONTAINS BAGS

* BAG NOW EMPTY, BUT WILL SOON BE FULL

* AVOID THIS BAG - DIRTY SMALLS!

* THIS BAG CONTAINS 1.257 KILOS OF SMACK

* BAG WILL BREAK AT 2.36PM

* THIS BAG CAN DISGUISE A SEVERED HEAD

* CARRY THIS BAG, AND FEEL LIKE A QUEEN

* THE QUEEN CARRIED THIS BAG PREVIOUSLY

* BAGS LIKE THIS DON'T GROW ON TREES

* SAVE A TREE - DIG IT UP, AND CARRY IT HOME IN THIS BAG

* NOT REMOTELY PATIENT PROPERTY - OUTTA MY WAY !


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The Truth about Russell Hoban (according to Hermann Orff)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 December

Those who know Russ Hoban's work well (although he is also author of A Practical Guide to Wood-working, and a number of spin-off titles such as A Practical Guide to Working with Live Maggots on Film-sets) will not be surprised by the revelation, cannily made to-day by one-time shrinkhead and writer for the breakfast-cereal market Hermann Orff, that the person who has died recently was not really Russ at all.

Let me (with the benefit of what, courtesy of Hermes Soundways®, I have understood about the whole Hoban Morphing Project - Humph for short - in the last few crazy days, when sleep seemed a luxury, not a necessity) try to explain:

* Orff first got it from a cabbage that wasn't really a cabbage, but a tip-off that domestic intelligence was getting wise to the whole Hoban vibe, that things were not as they seemed.

* He, being a crazy son of a bitch at the best of times and, like the prophets of old, not one to do what he was damn'd well told, tried to turn the mission down (as if we Agents have any choice, any right of veto, say, about being despatched to Connemara with god-little notice to obtain Yerk's tie-pin (by fair means or foul)!

* So he buggers off to Antibes, and starts hanging out with set there, saying that, despite his thick Rhine accent, he is a Plaid Cymru councillor turned t.v. evangelist who has been working wonders in Mold and even as far as Chester...

* Anyway, the short of it is that he gets zapped in quite the sort of way that he's making out the hand of God is whipping his flock into divine order, because Youdi visits him personally (but in a dream - some of your mystic apparition stuff) and tells him that if he doesn't fry his backside pronto and get back to Blighty, no accrued pension rights (deferred or no) for him.

* Orff falls in line, and goes on the snoop like a good member of the agenthood. Truth is, MI5 has by now got the whole scam, so pretending to date Stella Rimington by overpraising her latest ouevre brings him enough Gewissheit to blow the gaff and, on the pretext that he is a demented collector of plastic figures from the packets of those puffy little boulders of sheer sucrose that Orff himself had been wont to scoff at breakfast as a boy, secures the whole Hoban files.

* On Youdi's orders, this time communicated through that rather bored and, if not world-weary, then rather mundane bearer of tidings Gaber, he legs it with the dossiers, leaving behind a dented metal globe and some electrodes (some trip Kraken had been on made him think that it would be a red herring), and pores over the whole caboodle down at The Cheshire Cheese.

* I see him there, think to myself I wonder what the schlemihl's up to this time with his conspicuous Bogart gear (hat and all), and, sidling up, start plying him with double pink gins, for which he has an insatiable fondness. Well, he's got the fondness, but he hasn't got the stomach to go with it (and is toping on a near-empty stomach), so, on his sixth, he's suddenly belly side up on the floor, and I'm legging it with the Hoban papers.

* I go to a location that Lola told me about, some weird sort of castle place off the south coast that she liked (it was nice, with the ribbons and banners and all that), and master the whole scheme in a matter of hours, plied by a dram or two from the Sound of Islay, before getting the nub over to Youdi on the old handheld (had to stand on one leg, though, facing the wind to get a signal when it came to transmit).

* Message back from Youdi, via a vision of a bus about to plunge off the edge of a nearby cliff and the assorted screams of the no longer would-be passengers, to make a posting here.

* So, the real Huss Hoban (christened Russell Idaho Obama) first saw the light of day the day that Christ died at his parental home in Foxrock nearly 55 years ago. Unaccountably, though the ostensible child of a god-fearing Protestant Irish couple called Becquet, he was black, and it does not require a genius to work out that he was destined for the care of the Sisters of Mercy.

* All in all, he quickly had a new home in Brixton, and grew up, not knowing otherwise, as if South London were his natal home, and the immigrant Borges family, who adopted him to overcome childlessness, were his parents.

* When it came to know better, he didn't care to, being too much engrossed in learning the business of being an illustrator to care much about how he was conceived or who gave him birth. However, he did execute a deed to change his name, because he had resolved to overcome the stigma that it was obvious that would detract from his work, if, as he fancied, he branched out into writing.

* In a place as huge and populous as the States, finding someone with the same name who would settle in the UK and front as him for as long as was convenient was not difficult.

* Both men quite enjoyed their respective roles, one with full licence to embellish any aspect of his life that would enhance the quirky, out-of-the-groove market that his accomplice was seeking to appeal to, who was, in turn, freed from the demands on him to do other than write, without the need to present a front.

* The rest is history. Van Morrison, more obviously, did the same thing when he appointed Brian Kennedy as his public mouthpiece. Those, however, who really believe that Naomi Campbell authored a novel about a swan have wasted precious minutes that could have been spent reading The Daily Mail instead - sorry to have intruded on those endless stories of doom and disaster!

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