Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Psyche of Migration in Igor Posner’s Cargó

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Reviewed by Justin Herfst

In the opening sequence of Igor Posner’s Cargó, two images are stacked on top of each other. In the top image is a green thicket, and in the bottom a black and white image of an elderly gentleman dressed in a long coat walking in the dark. The man appears deep in thought, the very top of his head cut out by the frame almost as though his head were filled with the imaginations of the thicket. The sequence is pure intuition, an inner movement that has been refined over the ten years Posner worked on Cargó. Like two disparate sounds brought together into harmony, the sequence intuitively makes sense. On the following page are two black and white images, one of a women’s legs on a bed and the other a boy looking on into the camera. In the low light, the shutter speed is slowed and both images are blurred. Black space in both photographs reach across the page so no border separates the images and there is no frame save for the rectangle of the page. Gone are any presuppositions of tradition and bookmaking. In its edit and its subject, Cargó is loosed from the material present and handed over to the subliminal.    [Read more…]

American Agri-Giants Are Swallowing Us Whole

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Reviewed by Ian Frazier

We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way. [Read more…]

With a Fierceness Greater Than the Beast She Births: A Review of Chouette

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Reviewed by Jennifer Kurdyla

Chouette
by Claire Oshetsky
Ecco Press, 256pp., $13.29
HR

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Claire Oshetsky’s delightfully disturbing novel, Chouette, offers a nonplanetary paradigm through which to view the female experience: the bestial. Equal parts magical realist and radical feminist, the novel follows the plight of Tiny, a woman whose journey through pregnancy and motherhood vies with the most dramatic of Hollywood depictions. For Tiny is not with child per se — not a human child — but rather an owlet, the offspring of an affair she has with a wild female owl in a dream. Through her experience we see motherhood and associated notions of sacrifice, compassion, and belonging upended and redefined. [Read more…]

Dystopia Borne Alive in No Land in Sight

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Reviewed by Jason Tandon

No Land in Sight
by Charles Simic
Knopf, 96pp., $23.95
HR

Charles Simic is not just one of the most celebrated and honored poets of the last fifty years; now in his eighties, he remains one of the most prolific, having released four books since 2015. Fans of Simic’s poetry who have especially enjoyed his newer work, such as Come Closer and Listen (2019) and Scribbled in the Dark (2017), will find many of the hallmarks of his recent style in his latest collection, No Land in Sight. The poems are brief, often ten lines or fewer, and they are primarily set in a city (presumably New York City, where Simic has spent much of his time when not in New Hampshire). His persona is a solitary figure who suffers from insomnia and roams the streets at all hours or lies in bed listening to the wind, a portentous sound in Simic’s work. He routinely shows empathy for the homeless, disdain for political leaders, and bemusement at the masses who blindly follow them. [Read more…]

Freedom and the Postwar Avant-Garde

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Reviewed by Erik Hmiel

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880pp., $18.89

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I played in punk-rock bands. Not just punk-rock bands, hardcore-punk-rock bands, bands you might even call post-punk. We played shows in basements and garages, record stores and art spaces, cafes and homeless shelters. We played to 100 people and to zero. We hated the radio and were enthralled by our involvement with a national network of young people who made music outside of the confines of a commercial ecosystem. I even came to disdain the calls of older independent musicians who–suddenly confronted with a loss of revenue from illegal downloading services like Napster and the bootleg copies offered by the CD-R—made genuine, heartfelt appeals to the connection between artistic labor and material compensation. Punk was “beyond” such an outdated way of thinking about art. What was truly radical and inspirational about punk-rock was that no one cared about money. We existed in our own ecosystem, played to each other, patronized specific record stores, and otherwise went on with our lives without the metaphysical baggage associated with being ‘Artists’. Without knowing it, we simultaneously embraced the abiding ideal of the historical avant-garde’s sense of radicality—art as oblique challenge to staid conventions—and what the German art historian Hans Belting, writing in 1987, called ‘The End of the History of Art.’[1] [Read more…]

Stalking the Atomic City

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Reviewed by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Stalking the Atomic City
by Markiyan Kamysh
translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
Astra House, 160pp., $13.59
HR

The disaster at the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl in April 1986 created, in real life, a geography people had only imagined. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is the size of Luxembourg, a thousand square miles of marsh, ponds, forest, villages, towns, and large-scale industrial ruins, frozen in time. We’ve seen the photos of swing sets and classrooms overrun with vines, the abandoned high-rises in Pripyat. We’ve heard the stories of boar and lynx and deer and birds reclaiming their ancestral wilderness and harboring who knows what genetic mutations. The Red Forest is the most toxic place on Earth. In a hospital basement is a pile of firefighters’ uniforms that will remain deadly to the touch for centuries. [Read more…]

It Begins with a Corpse: New Work from Cormac McCarthy

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Reviewed by Michael Gorra
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 383 pp., $20.22
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 190 pp., $19.99
NYR

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before. [Read more…]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

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Reviewed by Dan Chiasson

The Philosophy of Modern Song
by Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93
NYR

Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play. [Read more…]

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

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Smoking the Bible
Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla

Smoking the Bible
by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99
HR

Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along with references to West African rituals, reveals the devotion of a sibling who has become his brother’s keeper as he succumbs to cancer. Displacement, violence at home, civil unrest, and neocolonial forms of subjugation are all running themes in this accomplished, elegiac collection. [Read more…]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

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by Sue Halpern

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Liveright 352pp., $18.89
NYR

In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was talking about, and for good reason. The metaverse does not exist. Born of science fiction and blending virtual reality into everyday activities, the idea is one that some tech executives like Zuckerberg believe will be the future of the Internet. In his case, it is a belief so resolute that he is willing to wager something like $10 billion a year and the fate of his company on it. [Read more…]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

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by Jarrett Earnest

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer
University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYR

When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read more…]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

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Reviewed by Cintra Wilson

The History of Bones: A Memoir
by John Lurie
Random House, 435 pp., $28.00
NYRB

It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. [Read more…]

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Água Viva
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
88pp., $14.95

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
864pp., $29.95

The word is my fourth dimension
–Clarice Lispector

And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. Maybe the music of that name was more pure music and vivid living syntax, and less history and persona. Or maybe Clarice Lispector’s innate capacity to shape-shift, from lantern-eyed panther to clucking hen to hothouse orchid, demands to be perceived as multiform epiphanies in an infinity of mirrors. Possibly, maybe resides at the Bjorkian core of Clarice Lispector’s output and purview. As an existential Lou Costello, she questioned with rabid circuitous intensity, again and again: Who’s on first? Who, exactly? And as a literary high priestess with a lifelong crush on void, she understood clearly that everything knows everything … we are a species of kissing cousins in a grammarless whirlpool. From mortar to manna, Lispector’s legacy in prose is one of paradoxes and trap-doors, rococo balconies kissing sea air, perfumed arias and empty cola bottles, gutted mermaids on dusty streets bleeding out brackish emeralds. In her world, silence favors its motives and heaven commits the meek to memory. [Read more…]

Songs For Our Higher Selves

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A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln
by Eve Wood
Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99

Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles – that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.

If you’re seeking to recalibrate your own internal compass on what it means to be a ‘good person’ or, conversely, are in search of sound template for our next generation of elected leaders, A Cadence for Redemption is a singular point of onset, for its terrains are of the highest bearings, its lyricism of heartsome beauty, its imagination of distinct wonder. It is, in other words, an altogether fine book of poetry for this fraught moment of our now.  – C von Hassett

Below are three excerpts from A Cadence for Redemption, courtesy of  Eve Wood.

[Read more…]

A Strictly Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

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A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to an ageless way of resting the mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already Awakened state. Yet to do this successfully, we must first cleanse the body of its myriad mind-fogging toxins taken in through food. The chapter below, “Eclipse and Revelation,” argues in favor of a diet free from industrial pesticides, which only then will allow us to see our own naturally occurring mind within — or what the great Tibetan Masters speak of as Mind in its Natural State.

Entering the Mind
by C von Hassett
Waterside Productions, 173pp., $12.95

Eclipse and Revelation

Before entering mind or having any opportunity to recognize its essence, we must first have a body that allows us to freely enter the natural state without awareness itself being impeded by the toxins we take in. The in-flight airplane metaphor is apt: when masks drop in a moment of alert, put yours on first before taking care of others. We must take care of our body first before there is even a chance to remedy the confusion of our own mind. If the body is sick, being poisoned each day by pollutants in our environment, then awareness, too, is hampered by these same toxins. Mind follows body, and when the mind is riddled – be it by thoughts or by the actual poisons absorbed into our flesh – it cannot recognize itself, let alone come to the experiential realization that Wisdom-Being arrives only from within. [Read more…]

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

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By Catherine Nicholson

Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton
Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton
Joe Moshenska: Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
NYRB

Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, the most delightful and underrated are his efforts to imagine daily life in Paradise before the Fall. Compared to the risks he takes elsewhere in the poem—recasting the devil as its charismatic antihero, scripting conversations between God the Father and his only begotten Son, staging war in heaven, describing angelic sex, and playing fast and loose with the logic of allusion so as to make himself the founding author of the entire Western literary tradition—the domestic details of prelapsarian existence can appear merely charming, inventive flourishes on the scenic backdrop to the grand conflicts between good and evil. In the long, relatively uneventful middle of the poem, after Satan has hatched his demonic plot but before he’s worked out the crucial business with the snake, Adam and Eve occupy themselves with an array of activities: talking, eating and drinking, strolling and stargazing, sleeping, dreaming, bickering and flirting, playing with the animals, tending the roses, socializing with angels, and passing whole days in the unexpectedly interesting business of innocence. [Read more…]

Foucault in Warsaw and the Shapeless, Shaping Gaze of the Surveillance State

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Reviewed by Marcel Radosław Garboś

Foucault in Warsaw
by Remigiusz Ryziński 
translated by Sean Gasper Bye
Open Letter Books, 220pp., $15.95
Harvard Review

Since Poland’s state socialist system collapsed in 1989, the records of its police agencies and security services have gone to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation,” today part of the Institute of National Remembrance. Remigiusz Ryziński credits the Institute and its holdings for enabling his work, yet his use of this archive also challenges prevailing Polish narratives of collective suffering under surveillance and repression. Trained in gender studies, queer theory, and feminist thought, Ryziński belongs to the milieu of pioneering Polish intellectuals who investigate the experiences of people persecuted and ostracized because of their sexuality. He has authored four books, three of them reconstructing the inner lives of LGBTQ+ communities across Poland’s traumatic twentieth century while tracing how illiberal regimes have constructed sexual deviance as a problem to be monitored, contained, and excised since World War II. [Read more…]

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast

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Riot Material Presents

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast is an intimate discussion on “mind in its natural state” — what the Tibetans refer to as rigpa — and how we as meditators can recognize this already awakened mind within ourselves, then fully realize it through day-to-day practice. But the conversation is so much more than that, for it is an intimate discussion between two intimates — husband and wife duo C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie, both of whom are practitioner’s of a timeless wisdom practice known as Dzogchen, which points the meditation practitioner directly into the fertile interiors of their own mind — not the conceptual mind, which we are all too familiar with. The mind referred to here is the naturally occurring one, the innate mind, or what is known in Dzogchen as “mind in its natural state.” It has been called the awakened mind, or the fully realized one, and not only is this mind within each of us, it is also ever-so close – as close to us as our finger is to touching space. How far must we move our finger to touch space? Our own natural state is this close, and we must only turn inward to first see it, then familiarize ourselves with it, before intimately coming to know it.

The rich discussion in the series below speaks to the key concepts in C von Hassett’s new book, Entering the Mind, excerpts from which can be read here. We hope you enjoy the 3-Part Podcast, and we likewise hope you enjoy the book.

[RACHEL REID WILKIE NARRATES ETM THE AUDIOBOOK]

[Read more…]

The Mind-Slicing Wisdoms of Dzogchen

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A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, by C von Hassett
.

The Great Perfection

Dzogchen is like the highest point of a monastery, the golden top-ornament: above it, there is nothing but sky.
–Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Dzogchen, or atiyoga, is a profound body of teachings that point us directly toward the recognition of our own mind in its natural state. This state, what in the Tibetan tradition is known as rigpa, is naturally pure and nakedly aware. It is, in other words, awakened, and this already awakened state is present within each of us, is always accessible to us, and through clear instruction it is also easy to identify. In seeing it, we are literally in witness of our own luminous path to liberation, this with one subtle though skillful shift in perspective.

The teachings as a philosophy are radical, if not wholly revolutionary. As a practice, they are transformational, moving one from concept-based being to awareness being; from contrived, dualistic thinking to a mind unbound by mundane thought. This is the wisdom mind, enlightened mind, and our arrival here means there is no turning back. There simply cannot be, for conventional mind has been sliced clean through. [Read more…]