Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

By Leave a Comment

by Merve Emre
NYR

The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.
—Theodor Adorno

The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do. [Read more…]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

By Leave a Comment

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…]

An Exclusively Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

By Leave a Comment

An excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to the ways we can enter our own mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already perfectly awakened state. To do this, we must first cleanse the body of the myriad mind-clouding 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 is more properly known as ‘mind in its natural state.’ Here, in this state, we learn to Awaken.

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

By Leave a Comment

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…]

“Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell: A Reflection

By 1 Comment

by James McWilliams

Robert Lowell
Life Studies / From the Union Dead
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176pp

In 1958, The Partisan Review published Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” This was a notable moment in American literary history. The poem was closely linked to Lowell’s friendship with Elizabeth Bishop. Reading and re-reading Bishop’s work allowed Lowell to escape, as he put it, “the shell of my old manner.” It is to her that he dedicates this poem. 

“Skunk Hour” is worthy of close study because it captures Robert Lowell in the midst of creative transformation. He alters himself from a formal to a confessional poet in the middle of the poem. It happens “right before our eyes,” as one critic aptly put it.

What follows is my own stanza-by-stanza attempt to make sense of it. I’ve always loved this poem for the way it hits my ear, and the shifting imagery. But I’ve never really slowed down and tried to figure out why. This is what I’m doing here. My comments are italicized    —jm———

[Read more…]

The Great Perfection: A Perspective on Dzogchen

By Leave a Comment

In his new book, Entering the Mind, C von Hassett takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state, where he shows us how to recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through holistic, wholly committed practice. “EtM is a singular accomplishment, remarkable for its clarity as well as its richly poetic delivery. The text is all the more essential for its practitioner’s insight into what is considered to be the highest wisdom practice known to man – that of Dzogchen.”

Below is an excerpt from Entering the Mind.

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

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. [Read more…]

The View Into Your Already Awakened Mind

By Leave a Comment

In his new book, Entering the Mind, C von Hassett takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state, where he shows us how to recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through holistic, wholly committed practice. “EtM is a singular accomplishment, remarkable for its clarity as well as its richly poetic delivery. The text is all the more essential for its practitioner’s insight into what is considered to be the highest wisdom practice known to man – that of Dzogchen.”

Below is an excerpt from Entering the Mind.

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

The View

There is a road leading into the Grand Canyon, Highway 64, that takes you straight into the heart of some of the most magnificent views on the planet. They are literally breathtaking, these views, looking out as they do on both space and split plateaus that plunge deep through the earth and through stratas of time into the Río Colorado below. One could say these views are to die for, for they deliver you headlong into the contemplation of your own imminent death. This contemplation isn’t necessarily a philosophical one, though it can certainly be that as well. Rather, it is one which is immediate and visceral and borne entirely of a fall, for you cannot look over the edge of the Grand Canyon without considering your own fall into that great abyss of emptiness. It is this very abyss which gives rise to the canyon’s ineffable beauty, as well as highlighting by way of counterpoint the sheer sanctity of the riven land. [Read more…]

I Am Not Your Cis

By Leave a Comment

by Hypatia

The verve of English is under house-arrest by the under-educated: the students of Ivy League universities. They are the standard-bearers — Premium Woke — of our freshly scoured language. Still hallowed as God’s little incubators of future elites, America’s most prestigious universities began their decline in the 1980s. The humanities became a forum for hurt feelings instead of nuanced thought. Now America is carpeted wall-to-wall in the egg shells the Woke have laid.

The born-again Roundheads of academe damp-mop our language with trails of their tears. They hold conversations in capital letters too numerous to remember, tacking on new ones to keep pace with fresh categories of victims. Our future leaders neither speak nor write. They abbreviate.

[Read more…]

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

By Leave a Comment

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022)
Reviewed by Johanna Drucker

What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. Works serve as mere illustrations of some finger-wagging statement that is itself a recycled thought-form extracted from some current revisionist seminar-speak for the nth time.

But two stunning installations at the Vincent Price Art Museum, at the East Los Angeles Community College, make strong arguments for the way visual art offers illuminating awareness of the multifaceted complexity of current cultural issues. Liquid Light and Golden Hour, quite distinct in their approaches and materials, are each visually smart exhibitions that show ways to understand and interrogate identity, geography, and ecology without reducing them to didactic messaging. [Read more…]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

By Leave a Comment

by Mark Arax

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
by Mark Arax
Knopf, 576pp., $25.00
MITTR

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the Sierra, transmuted into ash, is right outside our door. 

We have learned to watch the sky with an uncanny eye. We measure its peril. Some days, we breathe the worst air in the world. On those few days when we can walk outside without risking harm to our lungs and brains, we greet each other with new benedictions. May the shift in winds prevail, I tell my neighbor. May there be only the dust clouds from the almond harvest to contend with. In the meantime, I don’t dare quiet the turbo on my HEPA filters, hum of this new life.  [Read more…]

Feral States: The US Drifts Into the Pernicious Wilds

By Leave a Comment

The United States’ democracy is being threatened by increasingly polarized politics.
Other countries’ histories offer warnings and suggest possible solutions.

by Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press
From a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The rise of political polarization in the United States has pushed analysts to ask a fundamental question: what long-term effects will polarized politics have on the United States’ democracy?1 Existing evidence provides ample reason for concern. At the elite level, deep political divides in Washington have crippled efforts at legislative compromise, eroded institutional and behavioral norms, and incentivized politicians to pursue their aims outside of gridlocked institutions, including through the courts. Yet these divides extend far beyond the corridors of power, as polarization at the mass level is pushing Americans across the country to divide themselves into distinct and mutually exclusive political camps. The rise of an “us versus them” mindset and political identity in American sociopolitical life is evident in everything from the rise of highly partisan media to the decline in Americans’ willingness to marry someone from the opposing political party.2 Even more concerningly, these dynamics are contributing directly to a steep rise in political violence.3 Polarization has already brought on serious problems—what more lies ahead? Are insights on this critical question available from the experience of other polarized democracies? [Read more…]

Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020

By 1 Comment

by Mark Goodman

For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read more…]

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

By 1 Comment

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 identity of Black communities and has played a role as a source of both comfort and strength for a people constantly subject to abuse, discrimination, and misunderstanding. [Read more…]

Words On Fire: The Literature Of The Doors

By 4 Comments

by Alci Rengifo

The music of The Doors seems to find its place in every era since the band’s stirring debut first appeared fifty years ago. Spawned in the era of Vietnam, revolution and technological innovation, The Doors dived into a dark, literary well that is timeless and always relevant. Jim Morrison alone introduced a manic onstage persona that has influenced every rock genre to emerge since the 60s. He was Dionysus meets Rimbaud, hedonistic jester meets feverish wordsmith. Because the band was fronted by a figure who viewed himself foremost as a poet — the rare rock star who even wrote fan letters to literary scholars — their music endures much the same way the edgiest of classical literature still finds devotees. [Read more…]

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

By 3 Comments

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…]

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

By Leave a Comment

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 the knee. Young and fit but unidentifiable, their fingertips rasped smooth. When first put on display, tens of thousands saw this pair of dismembered bodies and admiringly walked right by them. [Read more…]

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

By 2 Comments

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 — reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence — for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the prob­lem of the color line. [Read more…]

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

By Leave a Comment

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 having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition? [Read more…]

Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics

By Leave a Comment

by Johanna Drucker

Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a  trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained. [Read more…]