Hoban News Archive
Items through April 20, 1999
For current items, see the main News page
Posted April 20, 1999:
Wonderful news! Mr. Hoban tells me that his latest novel, Angelica's Grotto, is now scheduled for an October release in the UK, so we should be reading it by year's end. (US readers will be able to order the book via online booksellers like Amazon UK, of course.) It will be released by Bloomsbury Publishing, which appears to be quite the A-list operation. Check out their website and get an eyeful of the nice work they do. Mr. Hoban, and Angelica, should be in very good hands with Bloomsbury.
For those of you coming in on the middle of all this, Angelica's Grotto is Mr. Hoban's tenth novel, following 1998's Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer. It was wrapped up in late '98, and in Mr. Hoban's own words is "about a 72 year-old man who gets involved with a woman who runs a pornographic Web site on the Internet." Mr. Hoban's research for the novel included taking Rorshach and Bender tests on behalf of his protagonist. The final draft for Angelica's Grotto came in at 271 pages, making it the longest of Mr. Hoban's novels to date.
Posted March 31, 1999:
It's been awhile since I've posted an update, so I've got a bundle of things to cover. I'll start with the most exciting news: I've got some details on the forthcoming Hoban collection from Indiana University Press. It will be (as far as we know) titled simply A Hoban Omnibus, and the contents will be as follows:
NOVELS: Turtle Diary, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Pilgermann, Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer. (This, of course, marks the first U.S. publication for Mr Rinyo-Clacton!)
SHORT STORIES: "The Man with the Dagger," "My Night with Léonie," "The Raven," "Dream Woman," "Dark Oliver," "The Ghost Horse of Genghis Khan"
ESSAYS: "'I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...'", "With a Choked Cry"
POEMS: "03:00 Abroad," "Crystal Maze," "The Owl-Woman," "Turtle Prince?," "Fred to Samantha," "Dragon into Dressing-Gown," "The Hippogriff," "What the Fairy Said to the Bibliophile," "The Dragon underneath the Mat"
...personally, I know what a lot of my friends and relatives are going to be getting for birthday and Christmas presents this year.
GROTTO WATCH: No word yet on the publication of Mr. Hoban's latest book, Angelica's Grotto. Patience, my friends, patience. Speaking of things we're all waiting for, the Hoban listserv, ORPHEUS-L, is expected to be in operation very soon. Watch the site for notification (and subscription instructions) as soon as it's live.
What's Mr. H. been up to? While he's "in between"--novels, that is--he's written a short piece for the English National Opera magazine on Monteverdi's Orfeo, a 15-minute radio script of a dialogue with Conrad's Lord Jim, and is currently "fooling around" with a short story idea. We should all be so productive in our down time. He also says, in a recent e-mail, "Since we last communicated I've re-read Singer's The Slave and The Magician of Lublin. Great. Got an invitation to a prizegiving, the David Cohen Prize, and saw William Trevor get a cheque for £30,000. Way to go, William. He deserves it."
Call for Questions: Announcing the Official Head of Orpheus Interview with Russell Hoban. Do you have a burning question you've been dying to ask Mr. Hoban since you first devoured that battered copy of Turtle Diary you checked out of the library in 1978? Now's your chance. My "nexters" (Chris Bell and Olaf Schneider) and I have been tossing around the idea of putting together an official interview for the site, based on questions from readers. We pitched the idea to Mr. H and he's game, so here's how it's going to work. Send your interview questions to me, Dave DaveA@neofuturists.org. I'll cull through them to remove duplicate questions and consolidate similar ones. Then, depending on volume received, I'll either include them all in the final interview, or select as many of the best as I can and save the rest for the sequel. I'll then send the interview to Mr. Hoban, who will answer them at his convenience via e-mail. The final product will be posted here on The Head of Orpheus once it's received. So get cracking and submit those questions. I'm asking for a deadline of April 21 to receive questions by, so don't delay. (If I get a lot of questions, first ones received may wind up getting priority!)
Tuning in to The Carrier Frequency: back in the mid-80s, Mr. Hoban collaborated with a London-based experimental theater group (called the Impact Theatre Co-operative) on a performance piece called The Carrier Frequency, which featured Riddleyesque dialogue, post-nuclear imagery, and poetic hints at themes that later emerged in his novel The Medusa Frequency. Now, after many years, those of you in the UK will have a chance to see this remarkable piece again. It's being remounted by another well-regarded British performance group called Stan's Cafe, as part of a Birmingham festival called Towards the Millenium which will be focusing on art made in the 1980s. Here's the info from James Yarker of Stan's Cafe:
THE CARRIER FREQUENCY8pm, 30th April & 1st May, Crescent Theatre, Sheepcote St., Brindleyplace, Birmingham B16 8AB. Tickets £9 (£6)
James adds that a symposium (some poasyum) discussing this project is being organised for 1st May, 1pm-5pm at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Cost is £10 (including refreshments). Booking from Stan's Cafe, 0121 4464526. Contact James for more info at james@stanscafe.force9.co.uk.
Stuart Delves, organizer of the Bloom Reading Holiday in Scotland, writes to say that Riddley Walker will be featured at this year's Holiday in July. The Bloom Reading Holidays, now in their fifth year, are a literary discussion event that takes place in a comfortable, secluded country house in the magnificent Scottish Borders. They are either 3 or 4 days in duration.
This year the Holiday is being hosted by British Writer Grace Ingoldby, and she's chosen Riddley Walker as one of the highlights of 20th century literature to be discussed. (Riddley is one of Stuart Delves' favorite books, too.) Grace Ingoldby will be joined by Irish writer Moy McCrory, and the dates for this holiday are Friday July 2nd-Monday July 5th. Other books on the reading list are: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, See Under: Love by David Grossman, and Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason. For more information about the event, e-mail Stuart at sdelves@redpath.co.uk, or phone + 44 (0) 1968 660098.
A number of Head of Orpheus readers who've ordered the new Expanded Edition of Riddley Walker from Indiana University press have written in to note that the hardcover version doesn't include a dust jacket. That means it also doesn't have the colorful photos of Punch that you see on the Expanded Edition page, which are from the trade paperback version. So you either have to choose the permanence of hardcover, or the colorful photos of Punch. Everything's a tradeoff in life, isn't it? Of course, you could always order both, which is apparently what some folks are doing...(Thanks to Nancy Ross and Ted Curtin for clarifying this!)
Marzipan Pig on video? It's a new one on me, but yes, there apparently was an animated version of The Marzipan Pig produced in 1990. A Head of Orpheus reader named Dolly wrote me to say she'd seen it years ago on PBS, and wondered if I knew where to find it. I confessed to my total, shocking ignorance, and asked for more detail. Dolly says it was produced by Family Home Entertainment. It was released on Sept. 11, 1991, with a 30-minute running time, and--I really love this part--it was narrated by Tim Curry. Dolly even found a listing for it in the Video section of Amazon, which says that the video is "CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE. The studio is currently not producing this video edition. If you would like to purchase this video, we recommend that you occasionally check this page to see if it's been re-released."
So here goes the inevitable query: Dolly and I are now both looking for a copy of this video. Is there anyone out there who has it and would be willing to dub it?
Speaking of folks willing to dub things, the kind and saintlike Chris Moon has graciously volunteered to dub a few copies of the Mouse and His Child video for those who've been seeking it so desperately. If you're in that category, drop Chris an e-mail and he'll set you up. Chris is at camoon@radiks.net.
Posted January 22, 1999:
Here's a scattering of small items since the last update to this page in November:
GROTTO WATCH: As mentioned previously on this page, at the end of 1998 Mr. Hoban completed his most recent novel, Angelica's Grotto, and it's currently being considered for publication. No word yet on on how it's been received, but as soon as I know anything I'll post it here.
What's Mr. H been up to since he finished Grotto? In a recent post, he says: " I've been working on another children's picture book, Jim's Lion,...plus I'm doing a song cycle with my composer son, Wieland: 'Night Roads'. I've been reading Larry McMurtry: Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, and I'm about two thirds of the way through Lonesome Dove. He's my favourite writer at the moment." Mr. Hoban has two children's books already in the pipeline: the new Trouble on Thunder Mountain, due out this spring, and a new edition of The Sea-Thing Child which should be out this fall.
Help other Hoban fans find their way to this site! If you maintain a web page yourself, please consider linking to The Head of Orpheus. In addition to the visitors who may follow your link, some search engines, like the new Google.com, actually take into account how many other sites link to yours in ranking their results.
The genuine Hobanmaniacs among you will want to know that I'm planning on setting up a Russell Hoban discussion listserv, sometime in the next couple of months, to be called ORPHEUS-L. Complete information on subscribing will of course be available on this site once the list goes live. I'm also planning on sending an announcement message to everyone who's ever posted to the Guestbook. If you haven't ever posted to the Guestbook and don't plan to (or if you did but your address has since changed), and you would like to be notified when ORPHEUS-L is available, drop me a line at DaveA@neofuturists.org and I'll add you to my notification list.
There's an essay by a writer named Andrew Brown, on Richard Dawkins, Darwinism and DNA, that quotes extensively from Riddley Walker, at http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/acb/rdprspct.htm. Brown compares the passages where Lorna tells Riddley about "the thing that looks out thru our eye hoals" to Dawkins' ideas about DNA in The Selfish Gene. The site says the essay was originally published in Prospect magazine in May, 1996.
Greg Roach, currently the Artistic Director of HyperBole Studios has written to note that the stage version of Riddley Walker was produced in the US as well as the UK. He directed its US premiere in April of 1987, for The Chocolate Bayou Theatre.
The mighty Olaf Schneider writes to say he's managed to find a CD which is a theme album devoted to Kleinzeit advertised on the web. It's by a Swiss band called No Secrets in the Family, and the cover art depicts Sister (at least I think it's Sister, kind of hard to tell) in the Underground. Check it out at http://music.ch/recrec/label/artist/nosecrets.html.
I've had a number of messages from folks who are trying to find copies of the 1977 animated version of The Mouse and His Child on video. So far I've had no luck finding it anywhere. But if anyone reading this knows of somewhere it's available, please let me know so I can share that info! Or perhaps there's some kind soul out there who's willing to make copies for others? Let me know...I've also had inquiries about where to find the Muppet version of Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas. I can be more helpful there: it's listed in my Fall '98 issue of the Movies Unlimited Catalog. It's item number 111073, for US$12.99. Assuming they still have it in stock, you can order from them by calling (US telephone number) 1-800-4-Movies. Or you can go through their website, at http://www.moviesunlimited.com. I was unable to find Emmett Otter listed there by searching for it, but if you go to the order screen and enter the catalog number, 111073, it comes up.
Posted November 14, 1998:
Alida Allison from San Diego State University dropped me a line recently to share some more details about the book she's editing on Mr. Hoban's children's books. Here's what she had to say:
Hello Dave, Can't tell you how much I enjoy your site--my students are logging on as well. I had mentioned to you last summer a book I'm editing on Russ' kids' books: Russell Hoban/Forty Years: Essays on His Writings for Children. It'll be out next fall in Garland's Children's Literature and Culture series, the first of their books dedicated to a single author. It includes a 20 pp. Introduction, an interview, and an annotated biblio, plus essays by:
- John Stephens, Macquarie Univ. Aus.
- Robyn McCallum, Macquarie Univ., Aus.
- Winfred Kaminski, U of Dusseldorf, Germany
- Liora Stavchansky, Iberoamericana U, Mexico
- Marty Teitel, independent scholar, USA
- Christine Wilkie, Warwick U, U.K.
- Dennis Butts, Reading Un., U.K.
- Maria Nikolajeva, Stockholm Un., Sweden
- Margaret Bruzelius, Harvard, USA
- Carole Scott, San Diego State Univ., USA
- Alida Allison, SDSU, USA
Some of you may recognize Christine Wilkie's name: she's the author of the book Through the Narrow Gate: the Mythological Consciousness of Russell Hoban, a critical study focusing on Mr. Hoban's novels.
More missives from the academic world: Professor David Cowart of the University of South Carolina (Department of English) wrote to tell me that he has a chapter on Riddley Walker in his book History and the Contemporary Novel (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 83-105. I've asked him for permission to post the chapter on The Head of Orpheus; pending clearance by his publisher, it should be available here soon.
Those of you've who've been visiting The Head of Orpheus for a while now may have noticed that the main graphic on the home page changed this month, from the head of Medusa to the Head of Orpheus. The new graphic is a detail from a pastel by French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) entitled Orpheus, and was suggested by Mr. Hoban himself. (I'd wanted to use an image of Orpheus when I first designed the site, but couldn't seem to find a suitable one, so I was very glad to get the suggestion.) Mr. Hoban is quite a fan of Redon, who is discussed in the forthcoming Angelica's Grotto. In the process of learning more about Redon, I also came across his rather fabulous charcoal drawing The Raven, which I've included on the Fremder page.
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