Heat wave
Democracy Book Club week!
Hello friends,
This week has been bloody hot in Massachusetts, so I hope wherever you are you are staying cool and hydrated!
Farm News
Because of the heat, we’ve been waking up early to water the gardens before the sun rises too high in the sky. This involves filling up a 275-gallon square plastic ‘tote’ which we call ‘the cube’ on the back of the pickup truck, and driving it over to the pick-you-own flower patch to irrigate the beds using gravity, since we don’t have a well over there. This works surprisingly well.
That done, we take turns running sprinklers on all the gardens near the house and running the irrigation system (lines under black plastic) in the market garden down by the pond.
We feed and water the little pullets in the yard, the big pullets in the chicken coop, the laying hens, sheep, goat, and dog. We make sure everyone has shade.
The strawberry patch is still producing, but winding down.
Yesterday I cut the tops off the dahlias and zinnias to encourage them to branch out and produce bigger, bushier plants.
The rabbits are helping trim the tops off, and then some. Due to their enthusiasm for eating the gardens, one of them ended up skinned in the freezer this morning.
Writing News
This week I’ve been workshopping my query letter and synopsis for Queenslander book two, while waiting to hear back from agents about book one.
The publishing industry right now is so slow that it isn’t abnormal to have to wait six to twelve months for a response from a literary agent who has asked to read your full manuscript.
You could have to wait nine months for a rejection, or worse yet, never hear back. Your email could have been lost in their spam folder.
It’s important to have multiple irons in the fire, multiple projects to work on, so you don’t waste years of your life waiting for a response from an agent.
The query letters I send out in July won’t get responses until September, and any requests for full manuscripts probably won’t respond with a yes or no until next March, or later.
And yet we write every day!
Three of my writing critique groups are now active and lively, which feels amazing.
I can’t stress enough how helpful it is to be in community with other writers. We all have blind spots when we look at our own writing, but we can see each other’s weaknesses and point them out.
You do not need to pay thousands of dollars to find people to read your manuscript or give you feedback and edit it for you. Trading manuscripts is the way to go, unless you have extra funds burning a hole in your pocket.
Democracy Book Club
Every month I choose a different book for us to read based on the reading list from the Antifascist Book Club from Veterans Fighting Fascism.
“The Antifascist Book Club is a community-driven initiative that brings people together to read, discuss, and act against the rising threats of authoritarianism and fascism. Through a carefully curated reading list, practical resources, and local organizing tips, we aim to transform knowledge into action.”
This month we read The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) by Hannah Arendt.
Arendt, a German/American historian and political theorist, wrote this book between 1945 and 1949. (She was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933.)
I’ll be honest, this book was nearly impossible for me to slog through. I don’t recommend it. That said, here is what I gleaned from it:
Totalitarian movements have fictitious worlds
You can understand a broad social trend by studying its history
Passivity in the face of dictatorship, even widespread willingness, eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda is a phenomenon
Loneliness breeds Totalitarianism
By destroying civic institutions, totalitarian regimes keep people away from one another and prevent them from sharing creative or productive projects
Don’t be afraid to speak to other people and talk about real things
Isolation is totalitarianism’s most fertile ground and always its result.
Mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brainwashing. It’s a personality cult. (p 325)
Totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them
What do you think?
Paid subscribers can chime in below, in the comments section.
Next month, in July, we’ll read a shorter book, Surviving Autocracy (2020) by Masha Gessen.
“This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years.” (Barnes and Noble)
Feel free to read along!
Also,
Shout out to my friend Kim’s new Substack about reinforcing feedback loops, Loops Behind the News!
Here are some quotes from the About section of Loops Behind the News:
Loops behind the News is the product of an unusual collaboration between an observer of the natural world (Kim) and an observer of the mind (Tim). Kim is retired from being a Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Tim is a Professor of Psychology at Temple University.
Do you ask "Why?" a lot? Are you curious about why things in the world happen the way they do, and refuse to accept that the world “just is the way it is"? Confronted with a problem, do you want to know what are the underlying causes? And what might happen next? If you are such a person, feedback loop thinking can offer you a powerful way to think about causes and consequences.
Feedback loops impact everyone, not just scientists!
Also shout out to 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in the democratic primary for NYC mayor.