I haven't been checking newsletters much the last month so there's a few to catch up with here, but as soon as I get a deadline out of the way I'm excited to check out the full-length overview for your upcoming book - that earlier description sounded awesome! In the meantime, passive person that I am, I was dutifully waiting for some kind of automatic notification that you had initiated paid subscription option. But now I see it's been up top for awhile. Oh well.
"Find the right questions; find better questions. Be curious about everything, but maybe our own assumptions most of all." While I continue searching for the right question, I will borrow this nifty answer of yours if that's OK.
I only just enabled it! It's one drawback, I can't see what payment notifications look like from my end. And goodness, talk about being behind -- I'm now fording through 383 unread emails in my "Magazines" folder. I'd just dump them and start clean but there's always something useful or interesting ...
Maybe that's what this is about, always looking for better questions. Glad there are people on the same journey :)
Oh, I'm all about the questions. Just not so adept with the answers. Or even the method, necessarily (though sometimes method is a great means of finding the question?). By the way, I love how I'm now feeling the irrational need to tack question marks onto the end of sentences just to emphasize that I'm not claiming the answers (almost as bad a habit as tacking on things in parentheses all the time).
I think with particularly thorny problems of the type you tend to discuss here, it's good practice to focus on the question end of things. Or even prior to that, the introspective exercise of figuring out what you're feeling and how certain experiences and situations are affecting you in certain ways. Which you're particularly good at doing.
If it's not too late to help you look for better questions like a month behind schedule from your posts sometimes, honored to be on the journey.
Did you notice I also do the same things with question marks on everything?! It feels like a habit now -- everything is a question, not a statement, somehow.
I get a notification whenever someone comments on these posts, no matter how old they are. And I always appreciate them! One thing I've learned shifting fully away from social media and onto these kinds of platforms is how much I value discourse and dialogue.
So many great links, as usual! I've ordered the Debra Magpie Earling novel and look forward to reading it! I hope as I type this that you're enjoying your getaway and the volunteer trail crew work. I hope you'll write about it when you get back!
I *think* you will like it. I tell everyone you have to downshift several gears to sink into this book, and it is well worth it. It is bleak in a lot of ways but so beautiful.
Dictatorships of spin - How apt! Thinking of all the ways our attentional resources are turned, twisted and milked to ultimately serve the interests of the wealthiest. And yet, we're made to believe that the friction free life, mediated by tech and disembodied consumerism, is the desirable kind. Your closing offerings form the perfect counterweight to the draw of "grim books." I literally just read a few chapters of Red Paint while visiting a friend yesterday! The universe has been everything but subtle in its messaging for me lately. LOL Thanks for this nourishing salad of a post.
Yes! So many parts of the book were really chilling, like how spin dictators allow a certain amount of opposition media to make it look like there's a free press, but I think the hardest for me is the constant reminder that most of these dictatorships don't need to rig votes. They get voted in overwhelmingly because the spin *works.* It ... did not leave me in a good headspace.
And oh, how funny about Red Paint. Definitely a bit of a signal there :)
Thank you :) And I'll ask about YouTube and link to that if it happens, to hopefully Chris La Tray will get to it first!
I feel the same about the cranes, almost as much as I do about loons. Loons really hit that siren point for me. I could probably sit and starve to death listening to loons.
So great to finally get a chance to connect in person!
I've spent the week rereading Perma Red. I didn't realize at first it was a re-issue, and kept thinking, "don't I know this book?" but oh, was it worth it.
So glad! Did what I said about downshifting make sense? I really have to do it with that one.
It was awesome to meet in person! And how funny that you probably had met the friends I was with -- whom I lost touch with when they moved to Arizona and was so glad to run into! He worked in conservation real estate, which is how you might have met them previously.
I might have met them through the Livingston/Arizona crowd? Or through my friends in Tucson? One thing I love about the Rocky Mountain writers is how we connect up and down the spine of the range ...
Thinking about your Graeber question -- seems to me the answer lies with the Indigenous potlach culture. When your power comes from how much you give away ... (but not in the controlling Bill Gates way).
"I have finally enabled payments! This will be about the last free “walking composition” post, as those will be for paid subscribers only, but remember you can, if needed, email me the code word “tribble” to enable a paid subscription, no questions asked."
At some point there may be trouble with tribbles, but I switched on the paid sub.
"Unfortunately, the question that gnawed me after finishing that book was that their suggestions require in the first place leaders who value democracy above many other considerations and who are uncorrupted by desire to increase their own wealth + power; and in the second, large majorities of voting people who require the same both of their leaders and themselves."
That was the issue to start with in the United States: it was all about liberty for rich guys and the elites controlling individual states, but also about keeping both the enslaved and the hoi polloi under control. Unfortunately for people who think that 'freedom for rich people, dictatorship for the rest' undermined themselves with the civil war, and the the US passed some amendments that said things. So now we have the Federalist society as a response ('Let's get back to the good old days of slavery and low taxes!') - which is hilarious since the sort of people who populate the Federalist society mostly would've hated the Federalist (and their Whig successors) party, back when it existed. Never underestimate the ability of wingers to edit the truth out of history.
"We are saddled, all these authors seem to be saying, with leaders who are incapable of making choices that threaten their own positions, much less their potential for material gain."
Persistently over all of human history, I am sorry to say. See late Republican Rome but also see Hellenistic Greece (and the revolutions of 1848, the French Revolution, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam, ad infinitum. Most of it is unnecessary, and as lot of it is simply destructive of the people who engage in it, but there it is.
"Read his story “Featherweight” in The New Yorker,"
Working on it! There is so much to read!
elm
at least the covid-19 didn't stay so much this time
You are right -- all of human history. I should remember that every time I think about this. I guess that's part of the core purpose of The Dawn of Everything.
I forgot to say but meant to -- tried your suggestion for the beets, piled up a foot of compost on a small 1-foot by 2-foot bed, and planted seeds for the fall. They came up fast and seem to be doing better!
"the US passed some amendments that said things." ;)
"You are right -- all of human history. I should remember that every time I think about this. I guess that's part of the core purpose of The Dawn of Everything."
It sound ponderous to say, I know. I started when I was 12 or 13 with the Holocaust and spiralled outward from there (the French Revolution, assorted American massacres, the entire Soviet episode of Soviet insanity, et cetera plus oodles on the history of war) because I wanted to understand why people slaughtered each other for no apparent reason. And at the end of 30-plus years of reading that stuff I realised that there was no there - it doesn't make any reasonable, rational sense, there is no perfectly sensible justification, it's all just a big vortex of fear and hatred. The whole 'show trials and purges' period is Soviet history is exactly that - they start off killing the 'obvious' traitors and the thing then takes on a life of its own and the machine keeps churning long after they've run out of 'traitors'. After awhile, nobody knows precisely why they're doing, or why they would do it to a given person, they just know they don't want it done to them. Usually this ends with the instigator being toppled and killed himself (comme Robespierre), but Stalin managed, somehow, to bring the thing to halt by killing off his own chief killers. I would suspect that the threat from Hitler focused his attention, and gave that paranoid personality disorder person a much bigger threat to focus on rather than constantly worrying about internal traitors. (Of course, he started up again with the Purges after the war.)
At any rate, I don't think it's worth the dig so much. (Cue up the Bill Maudlin WWII cartoon with the caption: 'Go back, fella, it ain't worth it.' The person talking is referring to the latrine. 🙃) If you want one book that explains it without explaining it (you can't explain the irrational) it's: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023
A thoroughly depressing book, but worth it just for the one book.
""the US passed some amendments that said things." ;)"
I'm serious! You get these guys talking and they'll be all like, 'The US can just issue letters of marque & reprisal to Hero Billionaires and then they can use their yachts to hunt pirates on the high seas!' and 'You can't make interim appointments unless you're a Republican president!'. Just as soon as the 14th Amendment comes up they go all woo woo and mystical and misty-eyed and start talking about 'when you think about, what does the 'the' in the amendment actually mean' and 'how equal is equal exactly, surely we can't do anything about that' and 'my client may be a inbred racist self-identified Nazi who has 14 blonde wives and 57 children, but the first amendment guarantees him freedom of conscience, and protecting his religious liberty requires respecting his belief that black people and Jews can't live in his neighbourhood, so equal protection REQUIRES that he be allowed to ban blacks from his HOA' at which point I have to take a walk before I start punching people in the face. (That last argument is the coarse approximation of Kennedy's argument in Bush v Gore.)
I think Alex Jones' lawyer is gettin' to me.
'I forgot to say but meant to -- tried your suggestion for the beets, piled up a foot of compost on a small 1-foot by 2-foot bed, and planted seeds for the fall. They came up fast and seem to be doing better!'
Yep! The root system is at least 50% (or more) of the plant and most plants have very slow or no growth in clay. (Trees do better, but it's still s l o w w w w.) I'm just going to have to pull this blueberry bush and redo the soil in the planter with a lot more compost to get to achieve full size. 😏 If you've got some spare compost, you could throw down some basil seeds real quick and have them ready to use before the frost!
"because I wanted to understand why. And at the end of 30-plus years of that I discovered that there was no there" I think that's where I've been living for the past 20 years, so what you're telling me is I have 10 more years to go before I let go of the idea that there might be any answers 🙃
That whole paragraph about the 14th amendment is just right on fire. I think Jones's lawyer is getting to me, too, and I'm not even following that case closely but who could miss the "oops, just sent years' worth of texts to opposing counsel and BTW government investigators now want it" moment?
Come to think of it, nobody can ever get blueberries to grow here. It's just not done because it doesn't work. Maybe the soil is the problem. There's not a ton of incentive because wild huckleberries are so plentiful, but still, it's always been a curious thing to me.
"I think that's where I've been living for the past 20 years, so what you're telling me is I have 10 more years to go before I let go of the idea that there might be any answers "
Well, no, you could let go beforehand, but if you have read, I dunno, an entire book about the Holocaust, ou Le Terreur, or the Soviet Purges, you're going to know the basics ever massacre and mass murder and atrocity, because the details aren't that important and after awhile the faces of the murdered (even between people who were trying to murder each other) all kind of blur together. I'll always read a biographical newspaper story about a Holocaust survivor or a Soviet war veteran (or a Purge survivor), but the history, man, I dunno. You start out with a well filled to the brim with something and bullshit on top, and you start digging it out to see if you find something more underneath and at some point you (or me, at any rate) start to feel like the butt of the Reagan joke about the kid frantically digging in the room filled with bullshit 'because there must be a pony in here somewhere'.
Basically there's always some more life-enhancing things you could be doing (or reading). Also, looking over that comment, I see where I did the thing where I dropped a bunch of words and I appreciate that you, as a copy editor did not hit me over the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
"I think Jones's lawyer is getting to me, too, and I'm not even following that case closely but who could miss the "oops, just sent years' worth of texts to opposing counsel and BTW government investigators now want it" moment?"
The dude is a complete incompetent but in making his close his bullshit sounded about sensible as every bullshit 'originalist' argument I've heard in the last 30 years, and I'm not sure why lawyers who pull that aren't charged with 'insulting the intelligence of the court' and dragged out back and given a beating by two guys named Vito.
"Come to think of it, nobody can ever get blueberries to grow here. It's just not done because it doesn't work. Maybe the soil is the problem."
Probably too cold during the winter. My blueberry bush has some freeze damaged limbs and this is supposed to be zone 6b. (In practice it's zone 5 in the winter and zone 7b in the summer.) So I expect any blueberry bushes would just freeze to death in Montana. But also, your clay soil may simply be too alkaline. Blueberry bushes like 4.5 to 5.5 ph. Good article: https://agreenhand.com/is-clay-soil-acidic/
Ah, yes, too cold. It's funny, where we lived in New York had pretty harsh winters but tons of blueberries. But the winters were shorter and maybe the blueberries we picked were sheltered.
I often tell people I'm a process person, so I guess I can let go of the idea that there might be an answer and just enjoy the process of never-ending reading trying to understand what on earth is wrong with humans (many humans, not all humans).
Being a copy editor is an interesting position. I feel bad because everybody worries about making grammar or spelling mistakes, and/or apologizes for noticing one in an email or text message. But I've spent over 20 years professionally nitpicking over grammar and spelling and style guides, and one of the great pleasures of my life now is to not care in the slightest about it unless I'm being paid!
Looked up all the books on my library ap, and none of them were listed. Typical. I can get really arcane books at a finger touch. Off to a trip to the brick and mortar to complain and special order. That’s the good thing about the library. Once you ask for it, it gets in the system. I encourage others to do the same. And thanks for the list, one of my favorite substackers the irritable Matisse was also an author at the festival
Thank you so much for that reminder! I was at the county library yesterday and didn't think to check but will now, and will request if they don't have it, and the same for my town library. Libraries are some of my favorite things but somehow I always need reminding to do this.
David Weiden's book sounds like it has a bit more violence than I go for in fiction (which is why I don't generally read thrillers) but he was such an amazing speaker and read it so well that I picked it up anyway.
I haven't been checking newsletters much the last month so there's a few to catch up with here, but as soon as I get a deadline out of the way I'm excited to check out the full-length overview for your upcoming book - that earlier description sounded awesome! In the meantime, passive person that I am, I was dutifully waiting for some kind of automatic notification that you had initiated paid subscription option. But now I see it's been up top for awhile. Oh well.
"Find the right questions; find better questions. Be curious about everything, but maybe our own assumptions most of all." While I continue searching for the right question, I will borrow this nifty answer of yours if that's OK.
I only just enabled it! It's one drawback, I can't see what payment notifications look like from my end. And goodness, talk about being behind -- I'm now fording through 383 unread emails in my "Magazines" folder. I'd just dump them and start clean but there's always something useful or interesting ...
Maybe that's what this is about, always looking for better questions. Glad there are people on the same journey :)
Oh, I'm all about the questions. Just not so adept with the answers. Or even the method, necessarily (though sometimes method is a great means of finding the question?). By the way, I love how I'm now feeling the irrational need to tack question marks onto the end of sentences just to emphasize that I'm not claiming the answers (almost as bad a habit as tacking on things in parentheses all the time).
I think with particularly thorny problems of the type you tend to discuss here, it's good practice to focus on the question end of things. Or even prior to that, the introspective exercise of figuring out what you're feeling and how certain experiences and situations are affecting you in certain ways. Which you're particularly good at doing.
If it's not too late to help you look for better questions like a month behind schedule from your posts sometimes, honored to be on the journey.
Did you notice I also do the same things with question marks on everything?! It feels like a habit now -- everything is a question, not a statement, somehow.
I get a notification whenever someone comments on these posts, no matter how old they are. And I always appreciate them! One thing I've learned shifting fully away from social media and onto these kinds of platforms is how much I value discourse and dialogue.
So many great links, as usual! I've ordered the Debra Magpie Earling novel and look forward to reading it! I hope as I type this that you're enjoying your getaway and the volunteer trail crew work. I hope you'll write about it when you get back!
I *think* you will like it. I tell everyone you have to downshift several gears to sink into this book, and it is well worth it. It is bleak in a lot of ways but so beautiful.
So thankful for the links to the festival speakers and the other writers you listed--can't wait to read their work.
I was excited to get to meet the work of so many writers, and even more excited to share!
Dictatorships of spin - How apt! Thinking of all the ways our attentional resources are turned, twisted and milked to ultimately serve the interests of the wealthiest. And yet, we're made to believe that the friction free life, mediated by tech and disembodied consumerism, is the desirable kind. Your closing offerings form the perfect counterweight to the draw of "grim books." I literally just read a few chapters of Red Paint while visiting a friend yesterday! The universe has been everything but subtle in its messaging for me lately. LOL Thanks for this nourishing salad of a post.
Yes! So many parts of the book were really chilling, like how spin dictators allow a certain amount of opposition media to make it look like there's a free press, but I think the hardest for me is the constant reminder that most of these dictatorships don't need to rig votes. They get voted in overwhelmingly because the spin *works.* It ... did not leave me in a good headspace.
And oh, how funny about Red Paint. Definitely a bit of a signal there :)
Man, the croak of the sandhill just hooks me every damn time. Makes me feel like Ulysses among the sirens.
Don't do Facebook, hope the festival uploads to YouTube.
By the way, wonderful writing of course.
Thank you :) And I'll ask about YouTube and link to that if it happens, to hopefully Chris La Tray will get to it first!
I feel the same about the cranes, almost as much as I do about loons. Loons really hit that siren point for me. I could probably sit and starve to death listening to loons.
Another wonderful post Antonia. You have an amazing talent to paint a visual image in your writing.
Thank you!
So great to finally get a chance to connect in person!
I've spent the week rereading Perma Red. I didn't realize at first it was a re-issue, and kept thinking, "don't I know this book?" but oh, was it worth it.
So glad! Did what I said about downshifting make sense? I really have to do it with that one.
It was awesome to meet in person! And how funny that you probably had met the friends I was with -- whom I lost touch with when they moved to Arizona and was so glad to run into! He worked in conservation real estate, which is how you might have met them previously.
I might have met them through the Livingston/Arizona crowd? Or through my friends in Tucson? One thing I love about the Rocky Mountain writers is how we connect up and down the spine of the range ...
Thinking about your Graeber question -- seems to me the answer lies with the Indigenous potlach culture. When your power comes from how much you give away ... (but not in the controlling Bill Gates way).
It really seems like that's the most plausible response. Give it all away, no strings, no expectation of favors returned.
Montana: Still a small town with long streets but maybe that describes the Rockies in general :)
I hope to read some of your suggestions and the sound of the birds…thanks for that.
The birds were such a gift. I hadn't seen them up there before!
"I have finally enabled payments! This will be about the last free “walking composition” post, as those will be for paid subscribers only, but remember you can, if needed, email me the code word “tribble” to enable a paid subscription, no questions asked."
At some point there may be trouble with tribbles, but I switched on the paid sub.
"Unfortunately, the question that gnawed me after finishing that book was that their suggestions require in the first place leaders who value democracy above many other considerations and who are uncorrupted by desire to increase their own wealth + power; and in the second, large majorities of voting people who require the same both of their leaders and themselves."
That was the issue to start with in the United States: it was all about liberty for rich guys and the elites controlling individual states, but also about keeping both the enslaved and the hoi polloi under control. Unfortunately for people who think that 'freedom for rich people, dictatorship for the rest' undermined themselves with the civil war, and the the US passed some amendments that said things. So now we have the Federalist society as a response ('Let's get back to the good old days of slavery and low taxes!') - which is hilarious since the sort of people who populate the Federalist society mostly would've hated the Federalist (and their Whig successors) party, back when it existed. Never underestimate the ability of wingers to edit the truth out of history.
"We are saddled, all these authors seem to be saying, with leaders who are incapable of making choices that threaten their own positions, much less their potential for material gain."
Persistently over all of human history, I am sorry to say. See late Republican Rome but also see Hellenistic Greece (and the revolutions of 1848, the French Revolution, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam, ad infinitum. Most of it is unnecessary, and as lot of it is simply destructive of the people who engage in it, but there it is.
"Read his story “Featherweight” in The New Yorker,"
Working on it! There is so much to read!
elm
at least the covid-19 didn't stay so much this time
Thank you! 🧡
You are right -- all of human history. I should remember that every time I think about this. I guess that's part of the core purpose of The Dawn of Everything.
I forgot to say but meant to -- tried your suggestion for the beets, piled up a foot of compost on a small 1-foot by 2-foot bed, and planted seeds for the fall. They came up fast and seem to be doing better!
"the US passed some amendments that said things." ;)
De rien!
"You are right -- all of human history. I should remember that every time I think about this. I guess that's part of the core purpose of The Dawn of Everything."
It sound ponderous to say, I know. I started when I was 12 or 13 with the Holocaust and spiralled outward from there (the French Revolution, assorted American massacres, the entire Soviet episode of Soviet insanity, et cetera plus oodles on the history of war) because I wanted to understand why people slaughtered each other for no apparent reason. And at the end of 30-plus years of reading that stuff I realised that there was no there - it doesn't make any reasonable, rational sense, there is no perfectly sensible justification, it's all just a big vortex of fear and hatred. The whole 'show trials and purges' period is Soviet history is exactly that - they start off killing the 'obvious' traitors and the thing then takes on a life of its own and the machine keeps churning long after they've run out of 'traitors'. After awhile, nobody knows precisely why they're doing, or why they would do it to a given person, they just know they don't want it done to them. Usually this ends with the instigator being toppled and killed himself (comme Robespierre), but Stalin managed, somehow, to bring the thing to halt by killing off his own chief killers. I would suspect that the threat from Hitler focused his attention, and gave that paranoid personality disorder person a much bigger threat to focus on rather than constantly worrying about internal traitors. (Of course, he started up again with the Purges after the war.)
At any rate, I don't think it's worth the dig so much. (Cue up the Bill Maudlin WWII cartoon with the caption: 'Go back, fella, it ain't worth it.' The person talking is referring to the latrine. 🙃) If you want one book that explains it without explaining it (you can't explain the irrational) it's: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023
A thoroughly depressing book, but worth it just for the one book.
""the US passed some amendments that said things." ;)"
I'm serious! You get these guys talking and they'll be all like, 'The US can just issue letters of marque & reprisal to Hero Billionaires and then they can use their yachts to hunt pirates on the high seas!' and 'You can't make interim appointments unless you're a Republican president!'. Just as soon as the 14th Amendment comes up they go all woo woo and mystical and misty-eyed and start talking about 'when you think about, what does the 'the' in the amendment actually mean' and 'how equal is equal exactly, surely we can't do anything about that' and 'my client may be a inbred racist self-identified Nazi who has 14 blonde wives and 57 children, but the first amendment guarantees him freedom of conscience, and protecting his religious liberty requires respecting his belief that black people and Jews can't live in his neighbourhood, so equal protection REQUIRES that he be allowed to ban blacks from his HOA' at which point I have to take a walk before I start punching people in the face. (That last argument is the coarse approximation of Kennedy's argument in Bush v Gore.)
I think Alex Jones' lawyer is gettin' to me.
'I forgot to say but meant to -- tried your suggestion for the beets, piled up a foot of compost on a small 1-foot by 2-foot bed, and planted seeds for the fall. They came up fast and seem to be doing better!'
Yep! The root system is at least 50% (or more) of the plant and most plants have very slow or no growth in clay. (Trees do better, but it's still s l o w w w w.) I'm just going to have to pull this blueberry bush and redo the soil in the planter with a lot more compost to get to achieve full size. 😏 If you've got some spare compost, you could throw down some basil seeds real quick and have them ready to use before the frost!
elm
back to work
"because I wanted to understand why. And at the end of 30-plus years of that I discovered that there was no there" I think that's where I've been living for the past 20 years, so what you're telling me is I have 10 more years to go before I let go of the idea that there might be any answers 🙃
That whole paragraph about the 14th amendment is just right on fire. I think Jones's lawyer is getting to me, too, and I'm not even following that case closely but who could miss the "oops, just sent years' worth of texts to opposing counsel and BTW government investigators now want it" moment?
Come to think of it, nobody can ever get blueberries to grow here. It's just not done because it doesn't work. Maybe the soil is the problem. There's not a ton of incentive because wild huckleberries are so plentiful, but still, it's always been a curious thing to me.
"I think that's where I've been living for the past 20 years, so what you're telling me is I have 10 more years to go before I let go of the idea that there might be any answers "
Well, no, you could let go beforehand, but if you have read, I dunno, an entire book about the Holocaust, ou Le Terreur, or the Soviet Purges, you're going to know the basics ever massacre and mass murder and atrocity, because the details aren't that important and after awhile the faces of the murdered (even between people who were trying to murder each other) all kind of blur together. I'll always read a biographical newspaper story about a Holocaust survivor or a Soviet war veteran (or a Purge survivor), but the history, man, I dunno. You start out with a well filled to the brim with something and bullshit on top, and you start digging it out to see if you find something more underneath and at some point you (or me, at any rate) start to feel like the butt of the Reagan joke about the kid frantically digging in the room filled with bullshit 'because there must be a pony in here somewhere'.
Basically there's always some more life-enhancing things you could be doing (or reading). Also, looking over that comment, I see where I did the thing where I dropped a bunch of words and I appreciate that you, as a copy editor did not hit me over the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
"I think Jones's lawyer is getting to me, too, and I'm not even following that case closely but who could miss the "oops, just sent years' worth of texts to opposing counsel and BTW government investigators now want it" moment?"
The dude is a complete incompetent but in making his close his bullshit sounded about sensible as every bullshit 'originalist' argument I've heard in the last 30 years, and I'm not sure why lawyers who pull that aren't charged with 'insulting the intelligence of the court' and dragged out back and given a beating by two guys named Vito.
"Come to think of it, nobody can ever get blueberries to grow here. It's just not done because it doesn't work. Maybe the soil is the problem."
Probably too cold during the winter. My blueberry bush has some freeze damaged limbs and this is supposed to be zone 6b. (In practice it's zone 5 in the winter and zone 7b in the summer.) So I expect any blueberry bushes would just freeze to death in Montana. But also, your clay soil may simply be too alkaline. Blueberry bushes like 4.5 to 5.5 ph. Good article: https://agreenhand.com/is-clay-soil-acidic/
elm
i should go fix that
Ah, yes, too cold. It's funny, where we lived in New York had pretty harsh winters but tons of blueberries. But the winters were shorter and maybe the blueberries we picked were sheltered.
I often tell people I'm a process person, so I guess I can let go of the idea that there might be an answer and just enjoy the process of never-ending reading trying to understand what on earth is wrong with humans (many humans, not all humans).
Being a copy editor is an interesting position. I feel bad because everybody worries about making grammar or spelling mistakes, and/or apologizes for noticing one in an email or text message. But I've spent over 20 years professionally nitpicking over grammar and spelling and style guides, and one of the great pleasures of my life now is to not care in the slightest about it unless I'm being paid!
Repaired somewhat.
elm
yeesh
Thank you so much, Nia. I'm going to my indie bookstore to order some of these books, and I'm also subscribing as we speak!
🧡!
Looked up all the books on my library ap, and none of them were listed. Typical. I can get really arcane books at a finger touch. Off to a trip to the brick and mortar to complain and special order. That’s the good thing about the library. Once you ask for it, it gets in the system. I encourage others to do the same. And thanks for the list, one of my favorite substackers the irritable Matisse was also an author at the festival
Thank you so much for that reminder! I was at the county library yesterday and didn't think to check but will now, and will request if they don't have it, and the same for my town library. Libraries are some of my favorite things but somehow I always need reminding to do this.
David Weiden's book sounds like it has a bit more violence than I go for in fiction (which is why I don't generally read thrillers) but he was such an amazing speaker and read it so well that I picked it up anyway.
Chris La Tray is the best 🧡
And if they do it next year I would love to go!
I was wondering if they might change locations every year. Curious to see how it manifests in the future ...