My post title is the essay title "Binary" translated into . . . . . you guessed it! Binary code. Talk about meta.
Luckily for us Sally J. Johnson doesn't get as abstract as I did. Her binary titles are simply the sequence numbers in binary (1-10). I don't speak fluent binary, so I did have to use an binary translator to make sure that she didn't skip numbers or throw in an oddball character. That would have informed the work in a different way had she done that. But then perhaps it would have come off as gimmicky.
Sidebar: The translator didn't translate the sequence titles into text but into ASCii. A distinction perhaps only a geek could love!
The strongest element in this work for me is actually the title and the choice to use binary code for the sequence titles. The more I think about it, the more genius it is to me. While computing [sexuality] can be broken down into its (arguably) smallest elements in 1s and 0s [boys and girls] {ON and OFF in electrical parlance} <YES and NO in SQL>, its options are not black and white as they [gender roles] might seem on the surface. In reality, the possibilities are infinitesimal. Moving the 1 in the first sequence <0001> from the fourth position to the first position <1000> transforms a flat, boring, straight-laced ONE to a sensuous, curvy, luscious, juicy, pregnant-with-possibility EIGHT.
WHERE'S THE A/C?
what I like best about this comment is the idea that options are not binary but "infinitesimal" and that Leslie can see numbers as having qualities like "sensuous, curvy" etc. --reminds me of that book "Born on a Blue Day," written by an author with autism who sees numbers as a language as rich with possibility as any other. And I was happy that my reading of the section numbers as being sequential was accurate, even though I have no math or computer background and would not know binary code from, say, an embroidery stitch. But I could look at how the numbers were changing and puzzle out that they represented a sequence.
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