ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: What Didn't Make It into My Airplane Reading Piece

Thursday, January 5, 2012

What Didn't Make It into My Airplane Reading Piece

I'm writing it for Chris Schaberg. I thought the prose would work better if I didn't include this one. But it's worth knowing. My dad used to be in this avant garde jazz band, Centipede. Keith Tippett, Robert Fripp, most of Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, four other drummers (!) and up to 100 musicians all told, hence the name. After an infamous European tour it was time to fly home. It was 1971 and everyone was tripping off their face. One young woman, a violinist I think, had to be carried on board, screaming. In the middle of the flight one of the stronger people there stood up in his kaftan to reassure the passengers: "It's all right, children! It's all right my children!"

1 comment:

Christopher Schaberg said...: That's fantastic! We might have to add this as an addendum or something. (Or at least we'll include it in a sidebar in the book. Our agent wants little sidebar stories like this sprinkled throughout the book.); January 5, 2012 at 1:35 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Thursday, January 5, 2012

What Didn't Make It into My Airplane Reading Piece

1 comment:

Counter

ShareThis