“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.” ~ Russell Hoban – Fremder

It’s Russell Hoban’s 85th birthday today and I celebrated it by writing this quote on a piece of yellow paper and taping it to the side of the large white rock that my city was named after. All around the world, pieces of yellow paper with quotes from his books were left in other public places – cafe tables, bookshops, park benches, telephone booths, train stations or anywhere the birthday celebrant deemed appropriate. The SA4QE (Slickman A4 Quotation Event) website lists 350 quotes that have been left, on his birthday, in big cities and small towns in 14 countries since 2002.  I am still the only Canadian representative listed on their site, but I know at least one other Canadian who leaves the yellow paper anonymously for the simple joy of having done so.

Happy New Year everyone!

The yellow post-it notes were never the best idea. I can’t remember if they were intended to be permanent at the time, or just a quick way of demarcating the division between “Chorale”, “Instrumental & Solo” and “Organ and Chimes” as well as the sixteen other arbitrary categories I created for my recently sorted collection.

I had covered the floor of the den with LPs – each pile representing a vain attempt at organization. The room, and the rest of the house, smelled of thrift-shop dust, old cardboard and vinyl. This was when I first learned that I had accumulated over three hundred Christmas albums.

It’s unlike me not to finish a job properly, but trying to bring order to the chaos of the collection must have left me just enough energy to quickly print, in red pen, the sometimes inscrutable descriptions (”Cool Comp”, “Program” and “?”) that remain today – poking out at random intervals along the eight foot shelf they fill.
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My Dad, a brilliant sculptor, used to tell people that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like what he’d set out to create. Watching him work, you’d swear he did just that – uncovering animals and people that had been waiting in the wood for his chisel to free them.

I joked with Monty on Saturday night that I was hoping to use Dad’s approach to finish my submission for this year’s Three-Minute Film Festival. My rough cut had timed in at over an hour. I simply needed to carve away all but three minutes of that.

Monty laughed, but I could see the look of concern in his eyes.
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YES!!

Just in case there’s a google-bot sweeping the internets for references to Barack Obama and the presidential debate, I believe that Barack Obama clearly won tonight. I wish I could vote for him.