The Girl Who Grew Up

I’m sad today. We had a chance to elect our first woman President, and we didn’t do it. And to think that we elected this particular man instead is horrifying. As the president-elect himself has said so frequently during his campaign, “It’s a disaster.”

So I’m feeling shivery and shocked and have been pondering the plethora of “Girl” titles of books and films and how we once shed the word “girl” for the word “woman.” This is part backlash, part marketing, and part reclaiming a word, I know. But it’s been on my mind a lot in recent weeks, months, even years.

Here’s a partial list of what’s out there:

The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes
The Girl Who Drank the Moon
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
The Girl Who Played With Fire
The Girl Who Wrote in Silk
The Girl Who Lied
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Girl Who Fell to Earth
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
The Girl Who Ate Death
The Girl Who Bore the Flame Ring
The Girl Who Fought Napoleon
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The Girl Who Got Out of Bed

The Girl Who is Worth 100 Cows
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden
The Girl Who Had No Enemies
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
The Girl Who Heard Demons
The Girl Who Could Fly
The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo
The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die
The Girl Who Chased the Moon
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair
The Girl Who Owned a City
The Girl Who Stayed
The Girl Who Cried Murder
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS
The Girl Who Stole the Apple
The Girl Who Came Home
The Girl Who Ignored Ghosts
The Girl Who Looked Under Rocks
The Girl Who Slept with God
The Girl Who Came Back
The Girl Who Fell
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
The Girl in the Ice
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
The Girl in the Red Coat
The Girl in a Swing
The Girl in the Picture
The Girl in 6E

The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Mountain
The Girl on the Cliff
The Girl on the Half Shell
The Girl on the Boat

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo
The Girl With Seven Names
The Girl With All the Gifts

Enough already. 

I’m a girl who grew up. 

And voted for Hillary Clinton. 

In a pantsuit.

The Edge of Forever

So, I was just telling you about reading Time Travel, by James Gleick, which mentioned Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott, published in 1884. Abbott was dealing with the fourth dimension, and our difficulty getting our heads around that new idea, by imagining a two-dimensional land where the inhabitants are trying to get their minds around the possibility of a third dimension. (Plus, it satirizes Victorian culture.) Abbott's narrator is a square named A. Square.

Flatland has come back to us in various ways, including via Futurama and Big Bang Theory on tv, and also in an episode of Carl Sagan's television series, Cosmos, "The Edge of Forever" episode. But it came back to me almost immediately--that is, in the next book I am reading, which is This One is Mine, by Maria Semple, which I had to read after reading Today Will Be Different (which I had to read after reading Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Yes, I am, evidently, addicted to reading.) Little did I know that all three of Semple's novels sort of connect, in a Random Coinciday kind of way. (But not so random, as she is a bestselling author, who also used to write for Mad About You and Arrested Development--favorite shows in our house!--and she knows what she's doing!)

Anyhoo, imagine my delight when, on page 70 of my paperback edition of This One is Mine, "An image came to Sally, something she remembered from childhood. It was from the Carl Sagan series Cosmos, something called Flatland. Flatland was this two-dimensional world where everything was flat, even the Flatlanders who lived there. They could only perceive left and right, front and back, but no above or below. One day, a potato flew over from another dimension--really, Carl Sagan had said it was a potato--and this potato looked down and said, 'Hello.'"

OK, Sally goes on to perceive love in an altogether new way, thanks to Flatland, and I went on to seek out Flatland and Cosmos from the library! Oddly, I could only find the audiobook of Flatland, so that's a fun and unusual experience. When the narrator says, "In Figure 1, etc." I know there must be illustrations, but I can rather easily imagine them. I have not come yet to the potato, nor to "The Edge of Forever," but I have seen a still from the series in which Carl Sagan is holding an apple over a two-dimensional gameboard-like depiction of what might be Flatland, so...a pomme if not a pomme de terre. (Oh, my origami brain!) If I ever get there, to the Edge of Forever, and back, I'll let you know. But, for now, my destination is not even Flatland but Cleveland, via televisonland, and the World Series. May the best team win!

Time Travel

I am reading Time Travel, by James Gleick, so my brain is looping around in time. Many delights here, and Gleick is so clear, as he was in explaining chaos theory via Chaos, back in 1987. I will pause long enough in loop to mention two of the delights:

1) Gleick describes a short film called La jetee and I'm recognizing the plot of 12 Monkeys, a film I watch over and over when the mood overtakes me. Then I'm thinking I remember seeing a credit to La jetee in 12 Monkeys, then doubting my memory (am I creating that memory?!) and then Wikipedia to the rescue, and also IMDb!! Indeed. (And now I will have to watch 12 Monkeys all over again!)

2) On page 182 of Time Travel, I'm reading about the Golden Record, sent off in Voyagers 1 and 2, "a twelve-inch disk engraved with analog data via the technology, now obsolete, known as 'phonograph' (1877-ca. 1987)." Inner giggles at the way Gleick describes the obsolete phonograph record, which he and I are old enough to remember, and because I just read all about the Golden Record, in great detail, in The Voyager Record, by Anthony Michael Morena, which I reviewed for Escape Into Life. (Morena might not be old enough to remember the phonograph, but the records and record players are still around, relics of time travel...!)

Goofy little confession: The Golden Record part comes before the La jetee part of Time Travel, so I have reversed chronology here. Tee hee. People who like science fiction will enjoy this book, with its references to Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and E. Nesbit, among others. And I loved learning, via footnote, that James Gleick's mother, Beth Gleick, wrote a children's book on time, called Time is When.

On Fire

I am not on fire. But these poems I read side by side have little flames in them: take a look here, in a brief compare/contrast piece at Escape Into Life, where I continue to read and review and select poetry, even as the world goes up in flames around me. In some places, that's true, alas, and in the current political climate in the the USA, that's figurative. Sigh.... The poems, provided (with the poets' permission), are by Donna Vorreyer and Jeannine Hall Gailey, both, by now, returned to my stolen/absent/disappearing/reappearing blogroll. (Did it go up in [Russian] flames?)* And whose books I read and reviewed at EIL, as well. Here and here.

I hope you got to see that gorgeous big yellow harvest moon. The harvest is going on around here, corn and beans, with some good weather for it, and for the grasshoppers. I have spent time outside, reading, of course, and also gazing at a praying mantis who lives in the back yard. And, at night, gazing up at that moon.

Tonight I believe there is a Cubs game and a debate. I'm debating what to do...

*See Cranky Doodle Day blog explanation here.

Textbook Amy

Three things: 1) I am cranky 2) I lost my blogroll 3) I love this book that is not exactly a memoir, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and I need to return it to the library. That is not why I am cranky! I am a little bit cranky because I lost my blogroll here at blogger (Did the Russians steal it when they hacked America?!) and will be gradually reconstructing it... Sigh...

But I am mostly cranky because of the news I wake up to every morning and hear all around me, and all the political crap & comments going on. I may vote early just to help shut it out, but I do love voting on election day, which is November 8!!

But this book certainly cheers me up and gives me great faith and joy in the human race. Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an interactive book, and you can text her--words and photos--by doing what she says while reading the book, or later, and you can see what people have contributed at her official website for such things, here!* Have fun.

*It is a busy, ever-changing-because-interactive website, so it loads slowly. Be patient, not cranky!