L'Engle wrote me a letter once. A monk friend of my mother's sent her a poem I wrote. Apparently. Now that I say it out loud, it all sounds rather implausible.

A college friend of mine wrote back and forth with Piers Anthony but I've heard he had hundreds of pen pals.

Kin Platt, author of my favorite and as yet unrepurchased YA novel Sinbad and Me, was tracked down (published info only) by an old boyfriend who wanted to surprise me with a copy...couldn't find any and figured the author might have a clue where to look. Platt threatened to call the police. That guy was cranky .

I mentioned Sinbad and Me here a couple of years ago and got shared love, which is validating. Still no copy on my shelf though.

Is still sad and possessing of a vague sense of incompletion.

I'm a huge fan of Sinbad and me. I'd love to read it again, as well as its sequels (which are even more rare).

It's beginning to feel like the Holy Grail...

There are sequels to Sinbad and me? That book turned me on to architecture.

There are sequels to Sinbad and me? That book turned me on to architecture.

I only read The Mystery of the Witch Who Wouldn't.

But I think there's another one after that.

That book turned me on to architecture.

Me too!

And codes and cyphers...far before I knew how to pronounce sighfers.

And gold dubloons.

And a kid in a wheelchair being smart and cool.

It's astonishing how much I remember from that book, nearly 40 years later.

I found this cool thing I need to share with Buffistas. I'm not sure if it really applies to literary, but it certainly has a literary quality, and would also apply to teachers and/or students of foreign language or people that like cool stuff (i.e., us).

I'm on a mailing list with Mimi Lipson, and she shared this recently:

My father wrote a Russian language textbook, considered a sort of cult classic in the rarefied world of out-of-print language textbooks.

Anyhow, the book contains all these amazing little stories--translation exercises, but also literary gems in their own right. They range from Gogolesque fairy tales to bathetic agitprop to lampoons of boilerplate textbook dialogues ("The American Tourist and the Soviet Citizen")... and beyond...

Here's a link to a flicr page of the transcripts.

They're so funny and interesting!

But there's this other cool thing that I really loved: The Ritual...

Here she describes The Ritual. Those classes must have been so fun and funny! It's like some fantastic combination of Nabokov and Tom Stoppard.

*************

Another feature of the textbook was the "ritual". This was a patterned response (or dialogue) that students were to learn by heart and automatically call up whenever the appropriate situation arose in class or the first line was said by the teacher. Quoting from the book: "To be effective, a ritual sentence must be an automatic response to the preceding sentence; e.g., "Excuse me!" might be your automatic response to "Ouch! You stepped on my toe!"

The idea, I think, was to keep the flow going in class, and sometimes to avoid embarrassment when a student was caught short without an answer, etc. They also were illustrations of upcoming grammatical details—so examples would be internalized before the rule was encountered--but I suspect conversational flow and ease was the main point. I could see the rituals as little subscript comics running along the bottom of other stories, the way Krazy Kat did at first. (And I think Tony Millionaire does this too.) Or just as little independent black-out sketches between longer stories.

This one was learned in the first day or so of class:

Ritual 1
[when you make a mistake in class]
-- Of course not!
-- Akh, forgive me, dear teacher!
-- Why? What have you done?
-- I've made a terrible /coarse, vulgar/ error.
-- [tenderly] That's all right /nothing/.

And I really like the "How to avoid answering a question" series, which gave you a number of options:

Ritual 9
Four ways to avoid answering a question:

-- What does the word 'doktor' end in?
(1) -- Repeat the last question, please.
-- "the last question, please".
-- Ha-ha-ha!

(2) -- I don't know.
-- And if you knew?
-- Even of I knew, then I wouldn't tell!
-- I'm very insulted!

(3) -- Hmm.
-- Louder, please.
-- HMMM
-- And what does that mean?
-- That means that I forgot the last question.

(4) – such {banal, naïve, uninteresting} questions do not interest me.

Or even better:

Ritual 23
How to avoid answering a question:
ADVANCED LEVEL

-- Mr. Jones (Miss Jones)! What's the difference between the preposition v and the preposition na?
-- Generally speaking, one might say, that, as a rule, it's more or less… What did you ask?
-- In a word, Mr. Jones (Miss Jones), you don't remember.
-- It's not that I don't remember, but that I forgot.
-- Enough! I'll ask somebody else.
-- [coldly] As you wish.

(There was also the option of "turning the ritual around," whereby the student could initiate the ritual and the teacher would have to complete it.)