Michael Whelan
snail as old as slime
Second book of 2019 is The Overstory by Richard Powers. Trees!!!
My first book was an old sf novel I bought 2nd hand. After a dozen or so pages I really wasn’t enjoying the prose style but thought that since it found its way onto my To Read list (though I can’t remember when or from where) I ought to give it a go
A dozen more pages and I still wasn’t feeling it so I looked up the Wikipedia page and it turns out the author is a holocaust denier who also doesn’t believe in AIDS
So now I don’t feel bad about giving up on it, and since it wasn’t new I’m not directly supporting the asshole
——————
So the next book on my pile is book 4 of the Falco series
Marcus Didius Falco is a 1st Century Roman private detective that does the hardboiled noir tropes but subverts them all beautifully
I’ve never been one for mysteries but these are becoming my absolute faves
Also Marcus and Helena Justina are my OTP
I don’t think I’ve had one of those before
Boo the first guy.
The Roman thing…intriguing? I’m always put off by Ancient Rome stuff for some reason, I have no idea why, but this sounds like fun. On my list it goes.
absolutely, really fun
not too big either. and super-short chapters for some reason
Second book of 2019 is The Overstory by Richard Powers. Trees!!!
My first book was an old sf novel I bought 2nd hand. After a dozen or so pages I really wasn’t enjoying the prose style but thought that since it found its way onto my To Read list (though I can’t remember when or from where) I ought to give it a go
A dozen more pages and I still wasn’t feeling it so I looked up the Wikipedia page and it turns out the author is a holocaust denier who also doesn’t believe in AIDS
So now I don’t feel bad about giving up on it, and since it wasn’t new I’m not directly supporting the asshole
——————
So the next book on my pile is book 4 of the Falco series
Marcus Didius Falco is a 1st Century Roman private detective that does the hardboiled noir tropes but subverts them all beautifully
I’ve never been one for mysteries but these are becoming my absolute faves
Also Marcus and Helena Justina are my OTP
I don’t think I’ve had one of those before
Roll the dice!
Absolute magic today!
Did I tell you about the kid in my art class who couldn’t get anything done because she was paralysed by indecision?
I gave her a d6, she now uses it to make choices and loves it.
And she also knows the trick that if after the roll she’s unhappy with one of two options, that means she really wants the other one! We saw that in action pretty early.
She’s so much happier and more confident now. She no longer answers every single question with “I don’t know”, she just rolls the dice. I also told all the other kids that they should use the system if they feel undecided, to make sure she doesn’t feel like she’s the only one with that problem, even if the scale is perhaps a little different.
Now, the silliest thing is I got the idea from White Teeth, where a protag uses a coin toss to decide things, and it seems to be described as a flaw, proof of his absolute inability to take responsibility for his decisions, with some of the story really driving that in…but by the end of the book, as familiar with him now as I could ever be, I interpreted it more as lifehack created by a man who knew his limitations and chose to overcome them as best he could. The risk of making a bad choice or becoming addicted to the coin was great, but so was the risk of his life slowing down almost to a halt. And in the end, it was always his conscious choice to leave it to the coin, to acknowledge his inability to decide- while still actually having to face the consequences. Because, you do. You can’t just go ‘oh that bad choice wasn’t me, it was the coin, i’m innocent and carefree’, you still carry the burden no matter what you based your actions on.
Anyway. It might seem unusual that making basic, largely inconsequential choices should have a learning curve that one still struggles with past a certain age (the girl is nine) but it’s like any other skill you can learn, isn’t it? And if you need assistance at first, it doesn’t mean you’ll never be free from that assistance. Practice makes better. Repeated actions usually become easier, take less of a toll. Doing scary things in a controlled, risk-free way helps overcome the fear and lets you gain experience of how the process works until you feel comfortable doing it without the safety net.
Last but not least, a person has to save their spoons. If rolling the dice for ‘which colour crayon do I want to use’ and ‘do I want to draw a human or an animal’ helps this kid not become overwhelmed and upset with herself so that when she has a more important decision to make that day, she doesn’t freeze up, that’s a good thing.
It also plays neatly into my art rule of ‘whatever you make is good enough as long as you try.’ I don’t care what colour crayon the kid uses because it’s up to them, leaving it to chance only emphasises that, especially since once the dice rolls they will probably feel one way or another about the result, and those are the only feelings that matter.
Bugs Bunny and Gossamer
“Hair Raising Hare” (1946)
“You monsters are such INTERESTING people…”
is this gritty?
hellenhighwater
