An Essay on Food in Tank Magazine

I'd given up writing about food until these kind people asked me for something. There's a good reason for that: all histories of consumerism are really not great. I explain why. 

Falsity

"PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling. Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Mrs. Clinton just six; the G.O.P. nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27." --Paul Krugman

Fourteen Essays So Far in 2016 (Complete List)

Not too bad:

“Frankenstein and Ecocriticism,” in Andrew Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein (Cambridge UP, 2016), 143–57.
“This Is Not My Beautiful Biosphere,” in Tom Bristow and Thomas Ford, eds., A Cultural History of Climate Change (Routledge, 2016), 229–238.
“How to Defeat Invisible Gods,” Mario de Vega, Victor Mazon Gardoqui, and Daniela Silvestrin, eds., Limen: Ecologies of Transmission (Mexico City and Berlin: 17 and ñ, 2016), 77–93.
“She Walks in Beauty like the Night in which All Cows Are Black: Byron's Nonhuman,” Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry (Routledge, 2016), 57–68.
“What Is Dark Ecology” in Mirna Belina, ed., Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–2016 (Sonic Acts Press, 2016), 29–56.
“From Things Flows What We Call Time,” in Olafur Eliasson et al., eds., Unspoken Spaces (Thames and Hudson, 2015), 349–351.
“Weird Embodiment,” in Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer and Peter Lichtenfels, eds., Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 19–33.
“Portals,” in Jonas Zukas, ed., The Baltic Atlas (CAC, 2016), 1–10.
“You Are Sitting on a Chair in the Sky,” in Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, eds., Airplane Reading (Zero), 107–110.
“Jūs esate kirmgraužoje,” Doxa (January, 2016) (in Lithuanian).
Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer, “Hyposubjects,” Cultural Anthropology (January, 2016).
“Dream,” Cultural Anthropology (January, 2016).
“Spectres of the Non-human,” in Julian Charrière, For they that Sow the Wind (London: Parasol Unit, 2016), 64–67.
Timothy Morton and Emilija Škarnulytė, “Yttrium Hypnosis,” in Nadim Samman and Boris Ondreicka, Rare Earth (Vienna, 2016), 102–110.

I Called This Weeks Ago

“In an upcoming “Frontline” special, Omarosa Manigault told PBS that the roots of Trump’s presidential campaign may be traced back to the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, when President Barack Obama cracked a few jokes at the real estate mogul’s expense. The quips came after Trump falsely accused Obama of lying about his birthplace and citizenship, thus feeding the discredited right-wing “birther” conspiracy theory.

“It just kept going and going and he just kept hammering him,” Manigault said. “And I thought, ‘Ohhhh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.”

She said:

“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”   --Huffington Post

--Exactly. I'd been thinking that this was about the humiliation and revenge of a racist. 

Lecture Invites Pro Tip

Hey by the way--if you're thinking of inviting me somewhere...my dance card fills up very early and quickly these days. For example, I'm planning lectures in Mexico City and Montreal for September and October of 2017. It's a shame when I get an invitation I can't make for say November of this year, because I'm all chock a block at that time and have been for months.

I'm not doing as many lectures as Graham...but I am doing many lectures...

Updated Future Talks

...I just updated my upcoming lectures if you're interested (click on "Future Talks").

Next up is Seoul, for a dialogue with Olafur Eliasson at the Leeum Museum. That's next week on September 28.

I fell in love with Seoul last week on my way back to Rome from Singapore. It's obvious if you're a buddhist how profoundly swathed in that peacefulness it is...I've been in love with ancient Korean ceramics for ages, that celadon ware.

There was a full on Vajrayana temple (Buddha Tooth) in Singapore that I really liked, too. Really luminous and dripping with floating transparent Pokémon, enough to give Badiou a nightmare.

Singapore Lecture Venue

Today at 4pm I'll be talking at the Yale-NUS Performance Hall...

Sorry Donna, It's Not the Cthulhucene

Cthulhu is a being that doesn’t link shit in its tentacles. Cthulhu means shit doesn’t matter at all.

I'm sticking with Anthropocene.

What's interesting is the disturbance people feel with this word, such that they want to change it to fit their concept.

I like being irritating.

***

PS: Donna Haraway is a mutual friend of me and Cary Wolfe.

Rock Your Body

At Exeter on Thursday September 8 I'm going to be unleashing my new theory of action, a queering of the theistic categories of active versus passive. It's called rocking and it's central to the book I'm writing for Verso, Humankind.

This Is What I'm up to Today

The Aleppo group in Brussels is a really powerful and creative organization and I'm talking with them this evening in the park in Brussels. My talk is called

Nature Isn't Real

Hahaha...

Go Jan

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice, as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Cultures of Energy Podcast is so good!

I'm waking up here in Brussels, about to give a lecture in a forest courtesy of the fantastic Aleppo group, and the theme is very much to do with how the concept Nature is actually the prologue to the Anthropocene in a really bad news disguise.

And I'm listening to Howe and Boyer interviewing Jan Zalasiewicz, the great, great geologist member of the Anthropocene working group. They do it with such intelligence, lightness and humor. It's so exactly what we need to cope with this stuff.

If you haven't been paying attention the working group just defined the term officially.

Interview with Architect Sean Lally

I was so honored that Sean came from Chicago to interview me a couple of weeks ago. This is the result. 

Please Stop Already

Question from a Great Contributor

Some people are so good. They send me all kinds of fantastic things all the time and make my intellectual life so much richer.

One of them has just asked:

And what is it called when politicians use the same tactics to incite people regarding their opposition...and then when those folks act (demonstrate, kill etc) the politicians disavow they did anything wrong blaming the actor?

Let's find out.

"I'm certainly not one of those awful narcissistic buddhists who actually LIKES themselves!"

Before we can extend our compassion to others, we first have to extend it to ourselves. How do we do this? We have to look at our own mind and appreciate how our own neurotic expressions – our confused thoughts and disturbing emotions – are actually helping us wake up. Our aggression can help us develop clarity and patience. Our passion can help us let go of attachments and be more generous. Basically, once we see that this mind of confusion is also our mind of awakening, we can appreciate it and have confidence in our ability to work with it. It’s a good mind after all, the mind that will carry us to enlightenment. When we understand this, we can begin to let go of our previous attitude of revulsion toward our emotions. 

 --Ponlop Rinpoche