General Strikes 103: Book Clubs

Some of the tokens painted by community members this week

Hey all! It's been a busy week in the Commons, so I'm going to jump right into it.

Coming up soon:

Tomorrow @ Noon - Dance for Democracy protest down at the Weathervane. There's a high wind warning, so it's best to stick to smallish signs. We won't be bringing the banner, but we'll be there with the music/CDs/zines.
Tuesday, March 17, 3-5pm - Join us at the Nuveen Art Center to help us sew a giant fabric sandwich puppet. Why are we doing that? You'll have to be there to find out.
Wednesday, March 18th, 6-7pm - WLACAC Advocacy Check-in. Stayed tuned for the location. If the weather is nice, we'll be meeting and walking at a local trail. We'll be wrapping up our 90-day composting sprint at this gathering. Did you learn something new about composting? Did you start a new composting habit? What barriers did you run into?
Tuesday, March 24, 5:30 pm to 6:45 pm - The Chemours Environmental Impact Committee is hosting a discussion about data centers at the White Lake Community Library
Saturday, March 28, 12 – 1pm - No Kings III at the Montague Weathervane. We'll be there with stickers, mutual aid supplies, and info about our upcoming projects this year.

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Are you good at maintaining a calendar? Do you want to use that skill to help the Commons? Let's talk! We would love to help more local organizations promote their events, and help all our newsletter folks find more local events. But my brain is incredibly bad at keeping track of that stuff, and I haven't had time to set up a good system for it yet.

Website updates

I expanded the Useful Stuff page that I set up last week, and organized things into categories based on where they can be found. It's probably going to continue to expand over time, and I'll try to keep boosting it in the newsletter when there are major updates.

I'm hoping to have a similar "Quests Available" page up in the next few weeks that will list current participation opportunities in the Commons. I know there are a lot of folks out there looking for ways to make a difference, and I've got a bag-full of them in my brain that I'd love to help people tackle.

Exploring the Fediverse

I've spent several nights this week messing around with self-hosted Mastodon and PeerTube servers. They're both open source, de-centralized social media networks. Instead of the network being controlled by a big corporation and hosted in giant data centers, it's hosted on thousands of home servers and small cloud instances maintained by open source nerds around the world. Those servers can choose which other servers they want to link up with, and users can choose to move between servers whenever they want.

I'm not going to lie, they're harder to use than their corporate equivalents. I'm still learning the basics. But once Nate and I are fluent enough in how to use them to provide some basic tech support, we're hoping to build them into a local, community-focused alternative to corporate social media. Eventually I would love to be able to organize a local tech co-op that could provide tech services and support to the community through the Hours system, but that's at least a few years down the road.

Right now we're looking for folks to fill the following roles:

Moderately tech-savvy beta testers willing to go on a journey with us as we get this thing off the ground.
Professional IT folks who are willing to let us pick their brains.
People who are interested in helping to develop tools and systems to maintain a healthy online community, including a community care team who can reach out in person if someone's online behavior indicates distress.

If one of those sparks your interest, or you know someone who might be a good candidate, get in touch and we can figure out a time to talk.

Hour tokens are all the rage!

I was able to bring blank tokens to several community events this week, and our token treasury is starting to grow! The more tokens we can make before the Artisan Market starts in May, the more shifts we can offer to crafters and elders once the market starts. I'm working on building some little token painting kits that will hold a few blank tokens and an assortment of paint markers, but in the meantime feel free to hit me up for some blank tokens and use them with your own paints. I'll have them available at the next Art Center Open Studio, and if you live reasonably close to the White Lake area, Nate can drop some off for you when he does his weekly errands.

The giant fabric sandwich puppet

There are a lot of downsides to life in the Anthropocene, but it does have the occasional silver lining. In this case, the ability to go from "What if we made a giant fabric sandwich for No Kings Day?" to "We have 12 yards of custom printed fabric to make a giant fabric sandwich for No Kings Day." in less than a week.

Why are we making a giant fabric sandwich for No Kings Day? You'll have to meet us at the Art Center on March 17 from 3-5pm to find out. (Here's a hint.) Sewing experience is a plus but not required. Supplies that would be helpful if you can easily bring them from home:

Irons and ironing boards
Portable sewing machines
Cutting mats, quilting rulers, and rotary cutters

We'll have at least one of each, but it takes many hands to make a giant fabric sandwich, and it might be nice to have more than one person sewing or ironing at the same time.

Also, to deepen the mystery, we're going to need at least two hula-hoops of different sizes. If you've got a hula hoop in the garage that you've been meaning to get rid of, now's your chance.

So: Book clubs!

Last week, we went over how a weekly pizza party could help your neighborhood make it through troubled times. But that can be an intimidating prospect for the introverts among us. So this week, we're talking about book clubs, and my favorite way to organize them: as weekly craft-and-listen audiobook clubs.

A bunch of us in my neighborhood have been doing this for about a month and a half. Each week, we all bring a craft project over to one person's house, and then we listen to a chapter of the audiobook together while we work on our projects. Then we talk about the chapter we just listened to, and go through some discussion guide questions.

We've been reading Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. Kelly and Mariame are both organizers whose work I've been following for a long time, and I can personally vouch for their decades of real world, on-the-ground grassroots experience. This book posits that we can make broad social change by starting in our own communities and helping people find ways to rebuild social ties and take care of each other.

Reading together in a group like this gives us a chance to think through ways we could put what we're learning into action. We're not just learning about community organizing, we're actively doing it.

Our current book club has already hit maximum living room capacity, but if you'd like to host one of your own, let me know. If you can get 5-10 people interested in showing up to your living room, and you can figure out a time that works for everyone, I can bring the books and discussion guides. In addition to Let This Radicalize You, I'd love to get a reading group together for Monk and Robot, which is a wonderfully peaceful exploration of the solarpunk future we could still have if we put in the work. (I'm going to stop myself here before this post turns into a giant list of books 😂 A "Wiley's Book List" page is on the list of things I want to add to the website eventually.)

It's a nice, low-key way for folks to build community, and it's a great opportunity to hem those pants you've been meaning to hem, or finish that coloring page you started a couple of years ago. If you don't do any handcrafts yet, we can help you find one you like.

Recommendation Corner

Since I've already recommended a couple of books this week, I thought I'd balance it out by sharing an album I've been listening to a lot lately. It came out in 2020, but it captures a lot of the feelings that come with life in the world right now. Heads up that while overall it's a beautiful and harmony-rich album, there's a crescendo towards the end of the last song that includes some screaming. (Did I mention that it felt like the world right now? 😅)

This Week's Nails Beetle

You made it to the end of the newsletter! I didn't quite get to my nails this week, but I do have a fun story about the beetle in the picture up above. Nate and I found it upside down on the beach, and brought it a stick that it could grab to flip itself over. Once it was upright, it started trundling back towards the waveline, but we were able to take a few pictures along the way. It matches fairly well with iNaturalist records for the Vertical Diving Beetle. I had no idea they were a thing, and I'm glad we got the chance to help one get back on its feet. I love aquatic insects and mammals, because their ancient ancestors went to all the trouble of adapting to life on land, and then their more recent ancestors decided the whole land thing had been a scam and noped on back to the water 😂 Maybe by the time the Anthropocene finally ends, this guy's distant grandchildren will be venturing back out of the water again, to munch on the mushrooms that have figured out how to turn plastic back into soil.

Hope to see you around town soon, and if not I'll see you back here next week.