An Extract from Hell

 Intimate distance can never be spoken as well as this: I have a dream. Right here and now, one can sense the affective power, the surging sonority, the outrageous poetry, of I have a dream. This is the fullness of I am alive. 

If we can find magic in the default, mundane sense of “dream,” how much easier will it be to understand the visionary sense in which Martin Luther King says I have a dream?

Dreaming is what brains do by default, in sleep. Sleep is the ground state of being alive, just as being alive is the ground state of dancing, just as dancing is the ground state of drama… 

King declares: "I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." Ultimately, that vision is about how simply alive beings can just be, without being targets or weapons; without being arrows. 

To be able to sleep in public, literally, without being punished in deed and thought and word; just to be alive, in the most relaxed and vulnerable sense; just to be rippling, palpitating, dreaming. Arrows of desire don’t point at all. 

Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology

Jesus He Knows Them

 The post Gabriel redo of the Carpet Crawlers vibe is also stunning. 

People like me must talk to white evangelicals about Jesus. Now. 

I Talk about Genesis in Hell (that Genesis, as well as that one)

 Give this version a chance. I know, I know, it doesn't have Hackett. But it has...magic. I hadn't seen the video until just a few minutes ago. I wrote about this song in Hell, and it's uncanny how the video is exactly what I wrote. There are some crazy amazing things about the Hipgnosis image too, on the sleeve, which I also discuss. It's as if the sleeve, as well as the song, is embodying some of the deepest ideas in the book. 

I'm Loving Sharing These New New Classes with You

 Head over to Soundcloud. 

Timothy Morton · Prosody Narrative Drama 3

I'm Proofreading Hell

 ...with three others. It arrived at lunchtime on Friday. Since then I've read about three hundred pages' worth of Blake quotations...they're the most pressing task, because over time a few errors crept in. It's easy to do with Blake, whose punctuation is notoriously fiddly...I think at least sometimes deliberately so: there's a feel of fake-logical punctuation in his brilliant parody of Descartes, "The Fly," for instance. 

It's a beautiful book. Beautiful, I tell you! The most beautiful book I've ever made, no really it is. It's much fatter than normal, although quite a lot shorter than normal--the print is gorgeous and generous with big wide margins. It's full color, on every page. The illustrations...it's mindblowingly lovely. 

Timothy Morton · Hell- A Brief Description

This DJ Set Interview Is Sublime

 Two years ago, I was in Paris promoting some of my books and I popped into Rinse France to do this interview with Edouard Isar, who span some of my favorite music. It was so incredibly good. 

Rinse France · Ed Isar invite Timothy Morton - 08 Octobre 2021

Eyes Get Wet in Dry January

 

Timothy Morton · No More Goodbyes

Plus Plus Plus

 ...I'm finally uploading a LOT of my music too. 

Big Big News

 I'm uploading my classes, again! After over ten years of refraining from doing so, I'm going to be uploading a whole new course in literary criticism. Head over to Soundcloud. I'll link to the courses in the "Classes" part of this blog too. 

You'll want to check these out. I think my teaching got better, but that's for you to judge. And what I teach has shifted and changed and developed. For example, you'll be bearing my theory of drama that I'm now publishing with Columbia. 

My First Book Published First in Spanish

 I'm very proud of it; Arquitectura sin Naturaleza. 

I Write Music Sometimes

Timothy Morton · Relativistic Jet Module 1 (Quantum Data)

Leaf Blowers

 Three workers without masks using three gasoline-powered leaf blowers around the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, for an hour; this recording is a thirty-second segment. The Menil Collection is an art museum and they own several properties in the four or so blocks around them, on which they also use these sorts of leaf blower.

One hundred miles in a gasoline car or twenty minutes with a gasoline leaf blower: it's all the same to the atmosphere. And to the lungs, if you imagine sniffing the tailpipe for one hundred miles.

I recorded the sound from about fifty yards away.

You can smell the gasoline up to one hundred yards away.

Timothy Morton · Menil Leaf Blowers

When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

 

My Dad Wrote the Orchestral Arrangement for "To Be Young, Gifted and Black"

 I know it sounds incredible doesn't it. But in the Sixties my father made a living in part by writing orchestral arrangements, and Nina Simone's classic was one of them. I can hear my Dad's fondness for suspended chords, a significant overlap with African American music, where Vaughan Williams hangs out in the disco. 

The Silence of the Lawns (new book)

This has been a year of accidents. Some of them tiny like bumping my head or feeling weirdly dizzy. Some of them weird

and sometimes dispiriting like the furnace not working, twice, the gas not being switched back on, three times, weird breakages. Of my toe in the bath for instance.

And some downright intense or even malicious seeming. Like every day there’s been a weird accident since my surgery.

They’re not bad per se. They’re not something one needs to despair about. But they could be.

The latest is, I just got bourgeois-evicted from my home (they’re selling it), because of my opposition to gasoline powered gardening equipment. I’ll never be able to prove it, of course, they have left no trace I can take action against, like the invisible footprints of Sabrina in Milton’s poem, only Sabrina was revolution and this is the modern bondage of carbon.

It’s been a seven-year struggle against the Menil Collection and I lost.

Except I’m writing a book about it. A really good one.

Maybe they forgot I can write. Maybe they didn’t quite think through the fact that there’s a lolol world class environmental philosopher living in one of their houses.

I kept telling them it would be fantastic PR, go wild like Rice, model good behavior, be part of how the art museum and the garden are becoming the same thing, worldwide.

It’s great actually. I am free from complicity in the American lawn, a slavery artifact that is deadly to flowers and Black people.

The American lawn, that gives workers cancer and uses 40% (?) of America’s water and deploys a nephew of Agent Orange.

The lawn fueled my earliest forays into big picture environmentalist thought. Now I’m ready to write the book that was always coming.

It’s called The Silence of the Lawns.

It Really Is Terribly Simple

 1. Vote for the KKK candidate. 

2. Vote to stop the KKK candidate. 

3. Vote to enable the KKK candidate by diluting votes. 

Want to get scared? Watch this tiny clip. If you are an ally to anyone in this nation who is vulnerable you have to register & vote for the current @POTUS no matter how much you dislike him bc the option is a fascist state which will go after everyone. You will not be exempted.… https://t.co/i32isUtxoc

— Jorie Graham (@jorie_graham) December 17, 2023

Neurodiversity Saves Earth: Wall.E in The Ecological Thought and Their Dependence on Mo

 If it hadn't been for the OCD of Mo, the depressive Wall.E, preserver of life for no reason, would've been sucked out into space. OCD and depression save Earth.