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Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

July 17, 2020 By Riot Material 1 Comment

The Bhagavad Gita
Translated by Eknath Easwaran
Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00

Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked the man next to me if something had happened. “Kurukshetra!” he replied. “The next stop is Kurukshetra!”

I could understand the excitement. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. Its characters, removed in time by some three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary; I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history.

The Mahabharata is literature at its greatest – in fact, it has been called a literature in itself, comparable in its breadth and depth and characterization to the whole of Greek literature or Shakespeare. But what makes it unique is that embedded in this literary masterpiece is one of the finest mystical documents the world has seen: the Bhagavad Gita. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, From The Shelf, Mind, The Line, Thought

Storytime With David Lynch

March 14, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Today’s Topic: Accessing the Unified Field

 

Filed Under: Mind, The Line, Thought

How do we describe buddha nature?

December 5, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

How do we describe buddha nature? Buddha nature is said to resemble space. Can we say that space exists? Can we say that it doesn’t? We cannot, because space itself does not comply with any such ideas. Concepts made about space are merely concepts. Space, in itself, is beyond any ideas we can hold about it. Buddha nature is like this. If you say that space exists, can you define it as a concrete existent entity? But to say there is no space is incorrect, because space is what accommodates everything — the world and beings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mind

If The World Were Created By A God Then We’d Be Helpless

November 30, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

If the world were created by a god then we’d be helpless. It would not be within our power to do much about our own situation. However, some deity has not created the world, so we have the power to do something about our situation. That is because the situation we are in is the fruition of our own actions; our actions are a cause that has created this particular effect. Therefore it is within our power to abandon the causes of suffering and, likewise, to prevent the experience of suffering. In that same way, it is within our power to do what we want to do. If we want to achieve the higher realms of existence or the state of having crossed beyond all suffering, then we simply begin to engage in the causes that lead to those very realms. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mind

The process of our spirit disconnecting from the physical body

November 27, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

The process of our spirit disconnecting from the physical body [upon death] is accompanied by the dissolution of all gross and subtle thought-states or mental patterns. At this point there is nothing covering the basic state of mind at all. If we haven’t trained, then the basic state won’t last longer than a single glimpse. But if we have trained, then at that moment complete enlightenment is very likely. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mind

The Line

A review of Thelonious Monk's Palo Alto

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner Palo Alto on Impulse! Pitchfork Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, […]

Archie Shepp Quartet, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, September 1966. An interview with Archie Shepp, September 2020

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

Interview by Accra Shepp NYRB My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the […]

Bobby Seale Checks Food Bags. March 31, 1972.

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

By Amethyst Ganaway Food & Wine We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and […]

A Pandemic Q&A with David Lynch

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

 From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1”

Erin Currier, American Women (dismantling the border) II. Read the interview with Erin excerpted from Lisette Garcia's new book, Ponderosas, at Riot Material.

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

by Lisette García and Barrett Martin excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women  by Lisette García, Ph. D available November 20th Sunyata Books “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.” –Angela Davis Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her […]

A review of Mark Lynas's new book, "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency," is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

Reviewed by Bill McKibben  Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99 The New York Review of Books So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, […]

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor Brown: Poems by Kevin Young Knopf, 176pp., $19.29 Harvard Review In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich Persea, 80pp., $12.69 Columbia Journal In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below […]

Cornel West and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence […]

Another Week in the Death of America

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles Reviewed by Eve Wood The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London by Zadie Smith Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission edited by Clara Kim Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95 New York Review of Books Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is […]

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