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Slow random and Ellen Raskin
My ISP is being a little persnickety. Responses from my various websites either come back at their normal speed, or take a long time ... with no discernable pattern.
There was a period of time last night when I couldn't convince their domain-name server that impudence.com/nibelung.org existed - even though I could telnet to the site; I just couldn't get to them via the web.
So if you use Nibelung, or you're one of the three escribitionists I "sublet" on impudence, or you're trying to read this week's mouth organ ... they're all from the same ISP as this site, and it's not my fault.
Doubly frustrating because today I seem to have a lot of words to put here. The entry I just posted took over five minutes for the CGI to respond. You can't interrupt it in the middle, or you end up with a nasty situation where the pixie has changed some pages and not others; then you have to go fix it by hand.
Even so, I will risk a second entry.
It's a good thing I don't go to the Brunching Shuttlecocks' site regularly or I'd probably have little toys all over the place. This one's Tina, the Troubled Teen. As I post this, she's saying "Blair Witch Project RULES!" but if you check it tomorrow she'll probably be saying something else.
[The image of Tina the Troubled Teen was formerly embedded here]
I still remember the Weather In Hell toy they had. The problem with toys like that, of course, is: if you go back to this page two years from now, will the link still work? How long do the projects last before the Shuttlecocks get tired of changing the caption in the image every morning?
We'll just have to see, won't we? If you're reading this and there's a missing-image symbol up there, you'll know what happened.
I love you all and now you must please stop sending me guesses for the two name-this-quote questions I threw into an otherwise unrelated rant a few days ago.
Of course the movie quote is Gone With the Wind. Just about everyone who wrote got that one and didn't get the book quote ... except for the one person (I think there was only one) who got the book correctly ... and had no idea about the movie. Separate worlds, I suppose.
However, to give everyone credit, a lot of people guessed that the book quote came from Roald Dahl, which is not a bad guess - the tone fits - and a few people said, "Oh, of course!" when I gave the answer.
It's from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It's from the (second) sequence where Uncle Sam Westing's will is read. In fact "Wrong! All answers are wrong!" is part of the text of the will - the lawyer's reading it. And all answers are wrong - but you'll need to read the book to know how Uncle Sam could've been so sure of it.
It occurs to me that even the Westing Game fans - and there are many - don't know much about Raskin or her other books. Not that there's a lot of information available. I've been trying some searches and I'm coming up with a paucity of Raskin information. I find it significant that after Raskin's death, a friend of hers wrote an article for Hornbook entitled "Ellen Raskin: Some Clues About Her Life." (I haven't seen the article, just the citation.)
Here is a bio of Raskin, in her own words, but it only speaks about the picture books she did for very small children - the part of her career which, until recently, I had no idea existed. You'll notice that the last of those citations is 1970. The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel), her first book for older children, was published in 1971. After that, she did only books for older children. Figgs and Phantoms was somewhere between '71 and '75; it's the only one of the four I don't own. The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues was 1975. The Westing Game was 1978. And then, as far as I can tell, she did no other writing. In 1978 she'd have been fifty. In 1984 she died. She'd probably have been amused at the idea of someone searching for clues on her after all this time, given that three of the four books are centered around a puzzle/mystery.
Mysterious Disappearance is my favorite. It's not as complex as The Westing Game, but I like its sense of whimsy. It's also the only one of the four she illustrated (save for the house-of-money title piece in The Westing Game). Her illustrations for this book are whimsical figures made out of words; they are important to the book (the central puzzle is a word puzzle). Since her picture books are all extremely difficult to find now, this may be your only chance to see her art. Fortunately the book has been rereleased in paperback after a long absence.
The Westing Game is the Newberry winner (Figgs and Phantoms was an honorist) and the one everyone knows about. It centers around the intrepid Turtle Wexler and the mystery of Uncle Sam Westing's will. It has a lot of characters and is a surprisingly complex book for its intended audience.
The Tattooed Potato is an absolutely charming book that no one knows about. It's a mystery having to do with art, and art history. If you can find it, get it. Avon Camelot reprinted it in paperback while I was in high school, which is when I got my copy; I haven't seen it since then.
Figgs and Phantoms, the non-puzzle book, is about a young girl's adolescence and the weird things she goes through. It's not a bad book, but if you're expecting another Westing Game, this isn't it. It's very different from the other three.
That's more than enough about Raskin. I'm over word count (beyond a certain number of words, the form gets grumpy) so I should press the -30- button now and cross my fingers.
I'm still not out of words, so maybe I'll post again later today. Forgive the effluence.
© Columbine
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