Glacial Errata, No. 45

One: Rahawa Haile Goes to Monster Jam

This week, five articles I’ve read in the past month that I’ve loved so much I want to share them with you. Bookmark ‘em and enjoy at your leisure.

First up, Rahawa Haile:

“Finally, it is time for the main event: Monster Jam Freestyle, where all the stops are pulled for every trick you could imagine. Earlier, some friends had asked me whether Monster Jam was staged, and if so, to what extent. Was it like wrestling? The Harlem Globetrotters? Well, it wasn’t scripted, and I know it to be genuinely competitive, because in no way could someone pay me to strap into a 12,000-pound fiberglass chassis and launch myself 30 feet into the air without the chance of winning something.”

I cannot impress upon you how good this piece is. Every paragraph offers something new and wonderful.

(Yeah, this one is paid, but Coyote is a worker-owned journalism collective and don’t you want to support that in order to get amazing writing like this? Of course you do. Hit that “subscribe” button.)

Two: David Cunningham Revisits Some Former Confederate Monument Sites

“But as embodiments of unacknowledged and unreconciled histories, Confederate monuments are not easily expunged, even when their erstwhile places now appear as voids. The weight of the objects was never solely symbolic, and their material imprints remain heavy. In several cities in Virginia, for instance, monuments have been removed from the centers of intersections, and the former roundabouts or mini-squares paved over, leaving scars on the asphalt.”

A truly thoughtful and engaging meditation on history, both distant and recent, how we memorialize things, and how we move forward. From the journal Places, which is an all around amazing publication to support. I loved this piece; you will too.

Three: Erick Galindo Lingers Among the Cemeteries of Los Angeles

“If you stand there long enough, and look around this corner of East Los Angeles, you can feel all of it—the fame, the loneliness, the faith, the reinvention, the whole myth of Los Angeles, resting quietly in the dirt of six closely clustered cemeteries that tell the story of the City of Angels.”

You’re not reading this newsletter unless you already have some appreciation for cemeteries and the way they can record history in entirely unexpected ways. This piece at LA Taco has got you covered.

Four: Alexandra Vasti and Raisa Rexer Unearth Lesbian Desire in the Archives of Porn

“And yet, despite these real-life examples, representations of lesbian sex acts in erotica are commonly dismissed as purely pornographic by academics and historians. Art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau, for example, argues in her book Photography at the Dock (1991) that photographic images of women engaged in sex cannot ‘illustrate lesbian sexuality’ because their ‘erotic display’ must be read as ‘for the presumed male viewer.’

“Discovering whether these texts can or should be read as representations of real 18th-century lesbian desire, and not some invention of the male gaze, requires some historical investigation.”

History News Network does excellent features on forgotten or sidelined avenues of history, and this piece is a great example of that work, opening up questions and pushing back on received wisdom in truly interesting ways.

I also love the way this piece is organized, beginning with Vasti’s perspective before a hand-off to Rexer’s. I don’t know that I’ve seen this exact kind of structure in an essay like this before. It’s very cool.

Five: Manjula Martin Reviews a Middling Film

“Still, every hero needs a villain, and the enemy in the film appears to be wildfire itself. And relegating fire to the role of monster, rather than understanding it as a reaction to human-influenced circumstances, is exactly how we got here in the first place.”

Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, is one of my favorite books from 2024 and a true masterpiece of blending the personal, the political, and the ecological. Her review of Apple TV+’s The Lost Bus is another great example of what she does: situate our world and its concerns within a larger framework that dissolves the artificial boundary between the human and the natural.