Wednesday, November the 10th, 2004

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How the Quotations Are Selected

A number of readers have asked me how I choose the quotations with which each Hooting Yard bulletin begins. I wish it was as simple as saying “I browse through books and find a sentence or paragraph that tickles my fancy”, for who among us does not like having their fancy tickled? In truth, the process is hideously complicated.

When I developed the initial concept for this website towards the end of last year, covering page after page of a big writing tablet with notes, diagrams, graphs, squiggles and, it must be said, the occasional savage doodle born of fractiousness, it seemed to me that mere whim was an unacceptable way of making the selection. After all, the rest of the content adheres to a system—albeit a deep system—and so should the quotations. I therefore designed an Oulipian constraint to govern my choices. Careful study of the quotations will thus reveal that there is a profound logic at work determining which words, by which author, are excerpted at any particular point on the calendar.

So abstruse is the scheme that the launch of Hooting Yard, which ought to have taken place in October 2003, was delayed until mid-December. I spent six or seven weeks devising the system, having cast aside the original writing tablet and obtained a fresh one just to work on what I code-named, like a military adventure, Operation Quote-of-the-Day For The Hooting Yard Website, or OQOTDFTHYW for short. Without wishing to lay bare the rules by which the system operates, I think it is worth pointing out that today, for example, being the tenth of November, the title of the book cited includes the word poise, and the extract itself consists of four sentences, two of which refer to an apparatus designed to deflect rainfall.