On the Range #1

Some links, basically

This here is what we at Depression Rodeo call a roundup,¹ which describes a process whereby I get on my discourse horse² and head over into yonder wilderness to muster up interesting things to read and listen to. I read a lot of online essays and such, and I listen to a lot of music. It seems a shame not to share the best of what I find.

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People seem to like to end these sorts of newsletters with songs, but I’d rather start there. I’ve been listening to the Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist Mabe Fratti for some time and really recommend her solo work. For her new project, Titanic, she’s teamed up with Hector Tosta. Here’s the album’s first track, Anónima.

Vidrio - Titanic

And with that, lets get to the recommendations. I want to start with some non-war stories, and then I’ll move on to some pieces on the war that I really can’t recommend highly enough.

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Firstly, from Mikala Jamison’s Body Type. In her recent essay “I dress sexy for other people, and so do you,” she complicates the discussion around the idea that we either dress for ourselves or for other people:

Sometimes women proclaim that we only wear anything because we like it and that other people’s attention plays no role. When it comes to dressing sexy, I think we feel compelled to do this because it seems a more correct feminist and intellectual motivation, and because we’ve been taught to “hide the work” of desirability and beauty in general.

The two things I’d most like to feel more often in my body are relaxed and present. There have been times when I’ve dressed sexy that I feel the exact inverse of those because I’m too aware of myself as an object of others’ gaze. That means at this point, I see dressing sexy as something to do more sparingly, only when I’m already feeling relaxed and present in my body. I can’t use it to get there. I have to already be there.

Relatedly, you should check out Jessica DeFino’s substack, The Unpublishable, which she recently described in a note as being “for a specific set of people who are/have been obsessed with physical beauty (having it or not having it) and harmed by it in some way (physical or psychological).”

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In the London Review of Books Adam Shatz wrote "Vengeful Pathologies,” one of the best pieces I’ve read on the war in Palestine, full of history and context old and new, including reflections on Fanon, widely cited in recent weeks:

To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’. In line with this commitment, Fanon’s vision of decolonisation embraced not only colonised Muslims, freeing themselves from the yoke of colonial oppression, but members of the European minority and Jews (themselves a formerly ‘indigenous’ group in Algeria), so long as they joined the struggle for liberation. In A Dying Colonialism, he paid eloquent tribute to non-Muslims in Algeria who, together with their Muslim comrades, imagined a future in which Algerian identity and citizenship would be defined by common ideals, not ethnicity or faith. That this vision perished, thanks to French violence and the FLN’s authoritarian Islamic nationalism, is a tragedy from which Algeria still has not recovered. The destruction of this vision, upheld by intellectuals such as Edward Said and a small but influential minority of Palestinian and Israeli leftists, has been no less damaging for the people of Israel-Palestine.

It’s hard to find representative quotes for such a broad piece (over 5000 words), but I’d probably recommend this piece above all others, especially if you’re having a hard time reconciling all of the competing rhetoric around this conflict.

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Johnathan M. Katz’s essay “Out of Zionism” tracks the history of his relationship to the conflict from his perspective as a practicing Jew and journalist:

For years I’d responded to claims that Israel was a settler colonial state with anger and incomprehension: “A colony of what?” But by the mid-2010s I wasn’t caught in the daily grind of journalism anymore, and had more time to read and think. I learned that “settler” was not just a meaningless modifier; that a settler-colonial system was an actual thing, one that described the formation of many states, including the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil. I began to understand that the early Zionists saw themselves as colonizers; that they were proud of it, that they thought they were bringing European civilization to a benighted and backward desert land. I read Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, the latter of whom wrote movingly both of the understandability of the Jews’ desire to protect ourselves from antisemitism, the debates between Jews as to how best to do so, and the vicious colonial project that the Zionists ultimately wrought, culminating in 1948 with the violent expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians known as the Nakba.

Wide-ranging, full of humanity and lived experience—I am grateful to have read this piece.

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Lastly, to interrogate our epistemological relationship to the conflict, I want to direct your attention to the thoughts of Univ. of Masschussets Amherst professor Paul Musgrave. In his essay “Not Another Israel Post, Not Another Palestine Post,” he draws our attention to the hard questions of saying something about other experiences, other places—even when we’ve been there:

Or one could spend two weeks on a package tour and decide to become an expert, confident in discussing the ins and outs of the Knesset after meeting a single MK or discussing Palestinian society after spending even a single night. For some lucky or cynical few, a single trip turns you into a machine capable of producing insights, or at least takes.

For others, there are still benefits to being in a place. You suddenly see how different aspects of a country and a society coexist and overlap. What text or video rips apart to present as narrow, separate slices come back together in a whole. It’s exhilarating to be liberated from the artificial divisions of books and articles.

And it’s infuriating. Spartan arguments that reduce reality to parsimony are felled by the mess of the real. What you thought you knew turns out to be recitations of words rather than genuine insight. Socrates was the wisest man because he knew nothing—but you have to stand and deliver lectures for paying customers. And now you know nothing? What did you go to a place for, if not to tune up the engine that turns impressions into thoughts into arguments?

That’s all for now. Take care of yourselves.

1. As a Texan, I’m tickled that this term, which for cowboys refers to mustering livestock, is the standard way to refer to this genre of writing.

2. Dischorse