Finally! To be honest I'm not fond of the people from central casting who've been reading my audiobooks thus far, and anyone who wishes to have me re-record them is most welcome. Listen to my BBC Radio 4 series, The End of the World Has Already Happened: face it, I do have a lovely radio voice. I do. I'm not bragging because it's just how I sound, it's an accident.
People come up to me in lunch queues and say that...
I loved writing that book. I wrote it in three pages then I just kept adding sentences so that in the end, it was the right kind of size. It took about eight weeks. I'm eternally grateful to Harvard for publishing Ecology without Nature, because that let me write this one. This is the one Gary Snyder said was a philosophy book, the first person to have used that word on me.
The lunar year of the Water Tiger reached its nadir on Friday, where all the mud churned up by the Water Tiger caused it to overwhelm us with dirt. It's very often a day in the calendar where all kinds of intensity and obstacles come up. It happened this year to be the anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine. I spoke with my Russian graduate student in LA. She was as you can imagine feeling pretty miserable about it.
Today is a neutral day, and tomorrow is losar, the lunar new year's day. Of the Water Rabbit? What will that be like? Imagine a rabbit made of water jumping around in a stream. You'll figure it out. The Water Tiger was mostly pretty rad as far as I was concerned. A wild ride, much needed.
If a Republican wins the White House next year, it's likely that China will prevail and enjoy its new found role patronizing the USA as it forces Russia and NATO to make some kind of rotten deal that will in effect be Russia winning.
His one-size-fits-all rhetorical tic is as small minded and as aggressive and as stupid as the Brexit he voted for.
ISN'T IT.
Professional jealousy and a genuinely urgent sense of his utter and dangerous wrongness led me to write Humankind as a riposte to Sapiens. What Graeber (was just befriending him when he died) and Wengrow say about Harari is the shiznit, every time (The Dawn of Everything). Basically, he's popular because he tells people exactly what they already know. Humans are special and different and liable to transhumanist godlike becoming. And there's "no way out" of inevitably oppressive social structures. Which is why he gets to talk at Davos and I don't. Grrrr...
The professional jealousy slash outrage nadir was in Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford 2019. Harari was on every single "important books" table, I assume he has an agent who insists on this. I was in the basement at the bottom right of a shelf at the back about "Earth Science."
I can't get an agent because I have trouble telling people what I'm going to write, because creativity. So I do it all myself. I tried a few times and then just said, fuck it. I'd rather publish cheap and free things that agents don't like, anyway.
That anarchist review someone sent me entirely misses the point of why Graeber and Wengrow wrote that. It's the same reason as why I had to tell John Zerzan to stop stalking me. It's a big old flaw of a lot of anarchist thought that it's caught in an Enlightenment rhetoric, whether upside down or the right way around: first we were great, now we're fucked. A fall narrative without the Jesus stuff. It's one reason Marx wrote "Who educates the educators?" The concept "Man" jerking off one more time. Colonialism upside down served with lashings of cynical reason. Destroy.
Fuck it's good. This drama book is good. I can say that without any arrogance art all because I didn't write it. I sneezed it.
If there's any justice in the world, this is the book I'll be remembered for, above Hyperobjects. It's that good.
I've just written the drama book. It took five days. Or more accurately, twenty hours.
Hyperobjects took fifteen six-hour days. That was the record so far.
The Ecological Thought took eight weeks.
Ecology without Nature took about six months. So did my other new book, Hell (Columbia). Have I told you about that yet? They really like it. They say it's real theology and they're going to circulate it in religious fora.
I can't believe how much of a sneeze this drama book was. Twenty hours!
It's good. I swear. I had a weird experience writing Hell of having the idea simultaneous with typing. But with A Theory of Drama, the typing happened before I had the idea. I'm not kidding. It was so weird.
...when Google Scholar tells me that scholarship has cited Hyperobjects 4001 times.
