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. 

You Fucking Idiots

 Don't give people a stick to beat us with. They've been wanting to beat us real bad for years, and you just handed them the perfect stick. 

Now forever they'll be able to say "But your best people claim that violence is contextual. This isn't transphobia, This isn't racism. This isn't misogyny." 

Your interlocutor was an idiot, highly trained at made-for-meme moments. And you let her do way, WAY more damage in thirty seconds than I have ever witnessed. In my lifetime. 

So just from a strictly tactical, non-moral, non-ethical point of view: you fucked it up. 

As if I needed more things to be terrified of. "We're coming for the Marxists and the other vermin"? You just held the fucking door open for them. 

Hell Promo Hits 600 Views

 It's not a lot compared with the thousands that some videos have accumulated since I uploaded them ten years ago, but it seems fast, and 612 feels like a significant enough number to mention it. You can pre-order the book now! I hope you like these little ads I'm making. Feel free to share them. 

I've sent about 100 stickers out. The QR code links to this video. If anyone wants to stick some up somewhere, let me know and I'll send them to you. 

I'm really, really trying to reach America with this book. I think it's really important. 

In general, thanks for being the lovely supporters of this blog. I am grateful to you all. 

Stickers and Memes and Video, Oh My

 If you'd like some stickers email me at tbm@rice.edu. You know, stickers: 

I've got 1000 of them to send you 

Stick em up, people! 

Meanwhile: 

Online Class (register)

 

The Divine Image or, The Remix of Heaven and Hell: A Playlist for My New Book

 

I'll be adding to this as time goes by...

Joy and Pain or, Last Night (x 13,000-ish) a DJ Saved My Life

If you've been following me for a while you'll know how important dancing and dance music is to me. I have some really good news on that front. I have made the most wonderful connection to the DJ who saved my life, many many nights ago, David M/A/R/R/S Dorrell. Turns out he was reading my stuff anyway! I had found out how to contact him for permission to reproduce his incredible LOVE flyer, for the club he created in 1988. 

This is all in the Hell book, but I wanted to share some of it here. David is wonderful and is constantly sending me music, which I will start to share here. 

Here's the latest. The strangest strangest synchronistic connections happen around me and David. Let's just say that this song has been playing in the back of my head since I went to his club in 1988, but for a totally different and very strangely poignant reason. It's too much to write here at present and I want just to share this incredible Pentecostal (David's very accurate term) call and response of it as soon as I can. 

PS here is the magnificent M/A/R/R/S: 

The Ecological Thought Is Now on the Dutch High School Curriculum (instructional video I made last week)

 

This turned out to be one of the loveliest occasions ever and I think I gave a great presentation, although I say it myself. 

AI Is One of the Topics in Hell (Columbia UP)

 

The Ecological Thought Is Now on the Dutch High School Curriculum

 ....and today is when I train the teachers about how to teach it. I'm so incredibly proud of that. And glad that someone is taking ecology that seriously. 

Unless you've been in high school in the 2010s, you wouldn't believe the number of high school students who like my stuff and are glad that I'm around. I'm putting it that way because it's actually true. In Cumbria in 2019, at Wordsworth's house, a mum and her daughter told me they had flown fro Ireland to say thanks to me for doing what I do. I get emails from high school students all the time. 

In 2014, at the library of Northwestern University, I had done a dialogue and was about to do my lecture. About one hundred graduate students piled in. There was nowhere for them to sit so most of them sat on the floor. Afterwards, about twenty of them surrounded me and told me how much they loved my stuff. 

I get emails from high school students all the time. Claire Colebrook once said something really nice. She said that the reason for this is, I'm giving them things they can actually think about. 

If you put my books through Lexile software, they come out as legible by kids from eleven years old and up. 

What You See Is What You Get

 

Abandon All Hope

 

Hell.

There's an Audiobook of The Stuff of Life, and I'm Reading!

 Yes. Finally someone did the right thing and recognized my lovely radio voice (thank you Liza Thompson and the Bloomsbury team!). I'm so thrilled with this and I hope it leads to many more. I think you will be too. It was a blast to do. Thanks to my lovely employer I managed to get a soundproofed room, and thanks to the BBC I had been well trained in how to do such things. 

You can order it here if your'e in the USA, and here if you're in Europe, and here if you're in Australia. 

I'm so fond of the cover. I love the transparency of the things. 

Does Anyone Else Know to Handle Hecklers

 

Being Ecological Excerpt

 

Being Ecological (MIT) Is Great, and You Should Read It (Says Jeff VanderMeer)

“A freewheeling, essential guide from one of our foremost ecological philosophers. Very useful for anyone wanting a better understanding of our relationship to the biosphere. Morton points to how we can live a meaningful life in an uncertain modern era.”―Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy

Blurbs for Hell

 I am really touched and honored by them. Laurie, Laura and Jeff are all incredible people. 

What a massive relief to have another book about the biggest disasters of our age  from the hilarious wise and brilliant Tim Morton.  Wild and free, Tim’s ideas give me hope.   

Laurie Anderson

 

Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic Tim Morton, and it's more. It's William Blake's “mental fight” reimagined for our contemporary world. It's religion reloaded after a major born-again experience (yep), British colonialism, ecological catastrophe, and the efflorescence of diversity on every racial, sexual, and gender level one can imagine (and then some). Hell is a trip, and a flip. Get ready.  You probably already are. 

Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

 

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is an ecstatic sermon beamed in from another dimension, one far stranger and more human than our own. I often think that dimension is where Timothy Morton’s consciousness resides, and we are so very lucky for it.

Laura Hudson

A Video Lecture about Food and Ecology

 I encourage you to eat a lot less meat and talk about pleasure as the driver of an ecologically just future. This was for a Japanese museum, and I made it recently. 

You Can Pre-Order Hell NOW

 Good heavens. That didn't take long. Thanks as ever to the magnificent Cliff Gerrish. 

I Made This Short Video about Beauty and Goodness for MoMA in June

 

My Fourth Ever Hyperobjects Lecture (2011)!

 

Inside Big Botany (video)

 

It Was a Christo-fascist Coup (Podcast): Learn about Parsifal

 Parsifal is a criminal moron who saves the nation. Straight White American Jesus on the other hand is a podcast that is trying to save the nation another way. 

If You Subscribed to @EcologywithoutNature on YouTube, Please Switch Over

 ...to @timothymorton303. The reason why is, I can no longer edit that page! It's not such a bad thing. I am much better at editing and uploading things now and "Ecology without Nature" is this blog and one of my books! 

This is where you want to go instead. 

This Is Really, Really, REALLY Important

 I mean it. Keep watching. Longer than that. 

I'm Writing a Theory of Drama, and in This Lecture I Take It Out for a Drive

 

We Are the Asteroid: The Art that Inspired Don't Look Up

 From 2017 to 2019 I made art with Justin Brice Guariglia, art that showed up all over the world, and in particular in the background of the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, and on marches in NYC...

Feelings Are Ideas from the Future

 Another video for you, this time from a cultural festival in San Francisco last year: 

A Lecture on the Art of Zheng Chongbin

 

A Lecture on Racism, Ecology, AND Quantum Theory...AND Talking Heads...(and OOO)

 

The Mesh! (video)

 In 2010 I published my foundational text on ecology, The Ecological Thought. It argues for two major concepts: 

The mesh: how lifeforms (and nonlife) are interrelated, how they connected (and disconnect). 

The strange stranger: what a lifeform is. 

In this video I outline the mesh concept. I made it in 2010 and it's pivoted to be one of my most popular statements, cited often in scholarship. 

Yesterday I gave it a little polish and put it on my YouTube channel (revamped, for those of you who have been following since those days!). I hope you like it. 

Beautiful Soul Syndrome (complete)

 Those of you who have followed me for ages (and for you I am so grateful I don't have the words)  will recognize this. People still cite it in scholarship so I thought, let's join all the footage together and make a whole new video and put it on my new YouTube channel. 

Cary Wolfe and Me Talk Environmental Humanities

 I'm revamping my YouTube channel! 

"There Is a Crack in the Real": Small Bombs Studio Presents....

 Have you seen them yet? They are incorporating my work into a series of really quite quite amazing things. This, for example, appeared recently: 

Ashes to Ashes

 

A Wellek Lectures Person Muses on Their Recent Torture

I wonder how Fred Moten's Wellek Lectures have been going? I have been hearing great things. I loved doing those. 

I'm reading Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf, finally. He's right: it's his best book. 

Zizek on Kinder Surprise Eggs is taking me right back to my chapter on sugar in The Poetics of Spice. I did give it to him, he was visiting CU Boulder that year...all that stuff about voids and sugar and the subject...It was a very Zizek-inspired book in the first place... 

Some time in the middle of my inquisition on the BBC, I heard one of my arguments from 2010 being fed back to me: it is very interesting to think about the "turn" towards "nonhuman" beings, "objects" and so on as part of a nascent ecological and planetary awareness. 

It was uncanny, disturbing and irritating to hear something I had said 13 years ago, and used as part of my own transition from someone who talks about food and eating to someone who talks about ecological systems more generally, about metabolism in short...about things I was taught about in Marxist Sunday school (theory class with Terry Eagleton), that I am now reading again about in The Puppet and the Dwarf...

To hear all that used to pathologize me as a symptom of something that the Knights of St. Hegel were themselves doing. That they had been empowered to do by years of people like me struggling to even get a job, when talking about commodities such as food and social practices such as eating was totally unheard of or taboo, even in sociology, let alone in literature. 

One of them does fridges. "Fridge scholar feeds old professor their own thoughts" -- strange poem. To hear all that fed back to me a part of my torture...that was disturbing, laughable, weird. It reminded me of my colleague at UC Davis who was all about saccharine and saccharine dispensers, back in 2003. It's 2023 now. If what they think about theory and philosophy is woven into their work, I won't enjoy reading it very much if and when I do. 

Beginning his essay on the eggs, Zizek remarks, “Repulsive anti-intellectual relatives, whom one cannot always avoid during holidays, often attack me with common provocations like “What can you, as a philosopher, tell me about the cup of coffee I’m drinking?”  Once, however, when a thrifty relative of mine gave my son a Kinder Surprise egg and then asked me, with an ironic, patronizing smile: “So what would be your philosophical comment on this egg?,”  he got the surprise of his life—a long, detailed answer.”

Hell Promo!

 

Hell's Main Idea: Flipped Gnosticism

 Whereas the current fascist state of affairs is paranoid-Gnostic, seeking the pure spirit of total violence against the others(s) and producing the usual toxic antisemitic and racist memes, Hell proposes by contrast a flipped Gnosticism that describes this fascist situation: we are poor mortal bodies trapped in a universe of ideas. Phenomenologically “our” body and its biosphere are the most distant things in the universe. 

There is a LOT on this. I am going to come out and say it: it's great. 

The idea of “only two genders” (the proposed new MAGA law) is an artifact of the yin-yang New Age “pagan” Christian (pretending to be fundamentalist, or maybe this is the essence of fundamentalism) universe. Literally an artifact, a stupid meme, made by artificers who do things like copying presidential decrees found on Google. 

An NPD President for an NPD Religion

Groups are by default narcissists (Freud): all about exclusion. The Evangelical Churches (the white ones in particular) are extremely narcissistic. One slight deviation and it's your fault (the purity culture). The group becomes the master, you become the slave, and your "body" (including thoughts, the brain etc) are overseen by this group, in abstract and tangible ways (the accountability partner). 

Whereas what Jesus says in Matthew 5 about adultery and looking is, you can't help it. It turns out to be neurologically correct. When you intend to do something, you are already doing it. So even if you think there's something wrong with looking, you already did it. "You have already committed adultery in your heart" means you cannot possibly survey yourself perfectly enough. 

Because the command-control, master-slave format just doesn't apply. 

Unfortunately, the Evangelical churches have been getting ready by accident (as well as deliberately) for a leader such as Trump, throughout their existence. 

Any extra input (he's going to save them, he's a Parsifal who will restore their power) is icing on a group dynamic cake that was baked into America for four hundred years: the legacy of slavery. 

Discuss. 

Earth Day, 2024

Oh, THAT''s What Happened

 Thanks WB:

“The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Listen Up Good, Crusaders

 We’ve been doing this for years. It never gets old. Let’s start with a poem. 

OOO

Still refreshingly deviant 

After thirteen years in the whatever-light

The way out of the master-slave duality is not to make everyone an honorary master, nor to reduce everything to machinic slavishness.

The fact that some Hegelian Marxists still don’t get it (deliberately) and still assault it is such a feature, not a bug.

But their willful misunderstanding is slander adjacent, because it implies something despicable about anyone who is interested in OOO:

Once more with feeling: flat ontology is not flat ethics or flat politics. The fact that something exists in the same way as something else has NOTHING to do with its right to exist. 

It is non-OOO that most frequently ontologizes the world in a toxically normative way, along master-slave lines.

But I think the real reason they’re pissed is, we came up with our own idea rather than steal someone else’s. Simple as that. 

"German idealism." It sounds real bad. You don't say "Taiwanese transcendentalism." You don't say "Jamaican empiricism." Treena: "You don't even say 'Jamaican reggae'." 

What most of you don't know is, we got reported on to our deans and provosts, for saying bottles of milk weren't just bottles of milk, that we should be punished and fired for being all kinds of despicable, and it happened over and over again, and it was Hegelian Marxists who did it to us. We were too confused, and ashamed, and polite, and scared, and new, to point it out. We would've been pilloried even more. 

Some of the original inquisitors are still circling like vultures above my twitter feed, waiting to lunge if one of us makes one tiny little mistake. And probably still talking all kinds of despicable smack that I have happily long been deliberately deaf to, until this last Tuesday on the BBC. 

Take a hike. You've been on at us for 13 years for pointing out and upstaging your religion just by existing. Your religion and its grip on the department lounge.

The first rule of Hegel club is...some of you don't even know you're in it. 

Spread These

 

Theory of Causality Expounded in Hell

 

Here are Hell's Endorsements, So Far

 What a massive relief to have another book about the biggest disasters of our age  from the hilarious wise and brilliant Tim Morton.  Wild and free, Tim’s ideas give me hope.   

Laurie Anderson

Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic Tim Morton, and it's more. It's William Blake's “mental fight” reimagined for our contemporary world. It's religion reloaded after a major born-again experience (yep), British colonialism, ecological catastrophe, and the efflorescence of diversity on every racial, sexual, and gender level one can imagine (and then some). Hell is a trip, and a flip. Get ready.  You probably already are. 

Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is an ecstatic sermon beamed in from another dimension, one far stranger and more human than our own. I often think that dimension is where Timothy Morton’s consciousness resides, and we are so very lucky for it.

Laura Hudson

I Just Finished Copyediting Hell

 Well that was intense. It got to the point where I couldn't read it, let alone understand it. You know when you're all dressed up and ready to go somewhere and you're quite nervous and you really don't understand or even quite know what you're doing or why? It's like that. 

It's also like cooking Thanksgiving dinner, you wonder whether you forgot the green beans, no you didn't, oh dear, the potatoes are gonna be late, how's the main course doing...why isn't my friend calling back...all these different sorts of task. Checking notes, adding the odd sentence, looking at the style, finding a page number...because it's actually going to be published, it suddenly becomes this huge big deal. 

And I want this book spick and fucking span. As good as I can get it. Because it's saying some really intense things, and you need to be wearing a great suit if you're going to say really intense things. 

"Leyendo esto como la introducción a una peli de Star Wars": An account of my scapegoating at the BBC (sparks of ignorance flew!)

 The Spanish is a tweet that really sums up my description of a show about OOO on BBC Radio 3 (coming soon). Enjoy: 

The Knights of St. Hegel are still crusading against the heresy of letting beings that don't think they're the "subject" have any reality, let alone determinacy or agency. The extent to which they call it evil is boringly astounding at this point, especially when the master-slave template that underwrites their religion is so obviously causing the worst damage.

Who are the Knights? Well there is a chapel inside the Church of Marx for true devotees. Marx was seriously gaslighted by Hegel, and if you're a real intense Marxist, you're going to want to genuflect there. You might not even know the long history of the chapel. You might even say that Hegel was a bastard. But you still genuflect to the idea that the subject determines reality. 

In that scapegoating way, the BBC Knights of St Hegel accused me of being too anthropocentric, not anthropocentric enough, too centered on white western philosophy, not centered enough...at one point I did need to beg for mercy in the form of my Black Jamaican wife and my uncle-in-law descendant of an enslaved person from the (Elizabeth) Barrett plantation.

My attempts to conceptually hug the Knights despite their swordplay only enraged them further. It was rich, lively exposure of the extent of the gaslighting.

But at least the Knights are in earnest. The true malevolence was a Demon who enabled them with their "who will rid me of this turbulent ontologist." "Ontology is nothing...this is a game" was a truly sinister way of being on a nice little radio show. I had never heard of the Demon before, but they had most assuredly heard of themselves.

Did the Knights and the Demon know they were crusading against a nonbinary intersex person on BBC radio? I got accused of being male quite a lot.

I hope the BBC keeps the bit where one of the Knights of St. Hegel calls me a wanker.

Conclusion: I was kind and polite and enthusiastic and generous and didn't once say "Your straw target versions of OOO are not even wrong." I was so well behaved. I am still alive. I was so triggered the rest of the day I couldn't even move, I could hardly talk, I was totally magnetized. It was intense. I needed to talk to my grief counselor friend. I was shaken to the core. I had to take one of my panic pills. 

Most dispiriting perhaps was the extent to which the Knights of St. Hegel sounded so Thatcherite. They had totally absorbed the language of impact, STEM, utility. Which is perhaps why the Demon adventitiously described themselves as a utilitarian, having first announced they were not a philosopher at all. 

My main sin appeared to have been to talk with hesitancy, irony, and nonviolent thoughtfulness. 

Most sinister was the Knights of St. Hegel agreeing with the Demon that "My use of a thing is what a thing is." That's the justification for slavery, right there, from Aristotle to Hegel. 

They picked on the word "object" of course, that dread mirror in which gaslighted "subjects" see the worst possible thing that could happen to them: the enslavement they impose on all other beings. 

Professor from Hell Says

 

A BBC Show about OOO

 I'll post a little on this but first, it was an honor to talk with Rachele Dini, Caroline Edwards, and Steven Connor, grade 2 professor of English at Cambridge. Here's an example of his work: 

Douglas Kahn on Locust Jones

 Jones's cosmic paintings are lovely. And lovely is a good word to describe my friend Doug, sound studies pioneer and general subversive awesome-dude. Here is his essay and a goodly selection of Locust Jones's work. 

A Sneak Peek at Hell: Lines Written a Few Miles Above Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

 This is from a part called "Exordium": 

By June 1992 I was full of dreams and I was about to leave for the USA for the first time, and I had decided that the introduction to the Big Eco Book I was planning (it took twelve more years to turn it into Ecology Without Nature) was going to be called “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” a joke about a Wordsworth poem, the location of a rave called Perception I was at on my birthday (Juneteenth 1992) and my highly altered state at that location, a state brought on by a cocktail then charmingly called The Specialist, where one took a capsule of E and a few hours later when nicely remixed into a saner and wilder version of oneself, a hit of acid. The mealymouthed not-quite-fascism-lite of ecocriticism was bound to have zero psychoactive effect on me by comparison.

😂

Face It

 

On the Back of Hell

 What do you think? 

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
Timothy Morton

 

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

 

Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and center. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

 

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, and Olafur Eliasson.

Jemar Tisby on White Christian Nationalism

 This is so important. Also provides context for my next book: 

My First Book in Spanish First

 

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Wow This Interview (with Spanish Huffington Post) Is Heavy

 See for yourself. 

What I'm Teaching Next Term (I'm really excited)

 

Lost Matter (video)

 ...by my lovely friends VestandPage: 

TRAILER | "Lost Matter" A performance ritual by VestAndPage from VestAndPage on Vimeo.

I'm Very Proud of This Book and Would Be Honored if You Read It

 ...especially in the USA. Yes, it's Being Ecological, and I'm realizing with increasing chagrin that I didn't do nearly enough to tell my American audiences about it when it came out. If you like that faux naive David Byrne sort of a voice, the True Stories vibe, then you will really like this book. It's a kind of self-help manual for environmentalism and it's been doing so much better worldwide than in the USA that I've decided to spend a little time promoting it. 

MIT is the publisher here in the US and the cover is really striking. 

Dialogue at the Menil (video) with Nestor Topchy

 This was lovely. I talk about Hell. 

White Supremacist License Plate

 I just wrote the Texas DMV, and so should you if you see something like this: 

Hello--while driving my son to school with my wife yesterday, I saw a white SUV with the license plate "SPQR 1." (This was in Houston.) I know enough about the Roman empire (I studied Latin in high school) to know that this was a Roman symbol, and I suspected that it might be a white supremacist license plate. 

Doing some further research, I figured this might well be true: https://hyperallergic.com/457510/the-misuse-of-an-ancient-roman-acronym-by-white-nationalist-groups/

Would it be possible please to prevent people from getting such provocative license plates? 

Yours sincerely, Timothy Morton 

"What Does It Feel like to Be a Lifeform? Ask Religion" (lecture in MUSE science museum, Italy)

 This was truly great. I loved the Q&A. I got people to meditate! 

DJ Set with Me and Edouard Isar (Paris, 2021)

 I've posted this before but I thought you might enjoy it again, and if you're new to this blog it might be buried rather far down the page here, as it was October 2021 when I did this. What a lovely evening. Edouard interviewed me and I spoke and he span some of my very favorite records. It was so moving. 

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

Hell Radio Interview!

 Yesterday, on the local radio arts show, with Nestor Topchy, whose wonderful icon-like paintings I'm exploring with him live at the Menil Collection yesterday. The synchronicity with my book is surprising and amazing. 

Timothy Morton · Living Arts Living Arts with Timothy Morton and Nestor Topchy

I Would Be So Honored if You Would Watch the Stream of This

 So many new people are showing up on my blog these days that I feel duty bound to share lots of things with you. It's my honor to be giving a lecture at a big science museum in Italy on Friday, and here is the flyer. I believe you can find out about how to stream it from this, let me know if you can't. 

Hell: A Brief Description (audio)

 I'm honing in on a video for Columbia's big conference presentation about their new work. Judith Butler was the guest a few years back, now it's my turn: 

Timothy Morton · Hell- A Brief Description

New Podcast: A Video about Hell

 You can find it here. I've made three! 

At the Menil This Thursday with Nestor Topchy

 Auspicious coincidence doesn't even begin to cover it. This is exactly the right time for me to be doing this dialogue with Nestor, who is diving deep into early Christian art and making icons of regular folks, exhibiting them in this incredible way at the Menil (I live in a Menil house here in Houston). If you're anywhere near you should come. It's going to be great. 

Something very special happens when you see this art. Go and take a look if you're in Houston. The Menil was never white cube-y but this is really something else. 

Tomorrow Is When I Record the Audiobook of The Stuff of Life

 ...it's my first ever audiobook recording and I'm hoping that it won't be my last! Thank you ever so much to Bloomsbury and in particular to my great editor there, Liza Thompson, for asking me to do it. 

People do come up to me all the time and say that I have a nice voice. "Lovely radio voice" is the commonest phrase and it's true, even among radio people. The producers of my BBC show thought I had good bass. 

It's still nice to listen to. It puts me in my feelings. You know what I mean? I'm a recovering dissociated person and there's nothing like being in my feelings, even if they're unpleasant. That "far away" vibe is really nasty. 

The BBC made me get a Zoom H6 WAV recorder. It was $500 and it was one of the best purchases I ever made. It's still pretty state of the art a few years later. It can record at least four separate tracks, it has two mics that come with it, one of them you can set to mono which is how it's best for voice recording. I figured out how to do that yesterday. Working for the BBC was a whirlwind and I didn't do anything but follow my producer's very adept instructions, so there was no time to learn. 

So you'll hear the Zoom 6 being used, badly, on the first podcasts on my Patreon page. Badly means, I didn't know how to access that mono feature, and the XY mic especially is wonderfully directional. With the MS mic you can control the width of the stereo image, which I find amazing. 

It's an incredible piece of gear. It can definitely record bands. You can set it up to have a mix of ambient, direct, lapel, etc mics to get that perfect sound. Once you've scrolled through its menu a few times, you realize that it has very intuitive controls. At least if you've been around musicians all your life, which I have. Did you know? Mum was a concert violinist and Dad was the go to violin player for all the psychedelic  and prog bands of the late sixties and early seventies. Best thing? The solo on "Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part 1" ... no, that's not Cross; that's my dad. He took a fee so as not to spoil the image of the band as the best musicians. 

The Cool America Manifesto 2

PART 1  

Cool America is a charitable foundation whose purpose is “to educate the American public about global warming.” 

Cool America is a group of rebel scum. 

Cool America has no educational materials other than its name. 

Cool America is surrealist performance art. 

“And here in the studio, we have Tim Morton, from Cool America,” says the Fox anchor. Whatever comes out of my mouth next doesn’t matter. The message has already been delivered. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. He can go about his business. Move along. 

Cool is the scissors to the paper of Great. Great requires inflation. Great requires red faced balloons that explode. Cool is…cool. We’re going to be little Fonzies here. What’s Fonzie like? (Have you seen Pulp Fiction?)

Cool is not an idea. Like Great (I trust I don’t have to spell out that awful slogan), Cool is an affect. Cool is a psychosomatic sensation. 

Cool is the feel of thinking, without the content. 

I’ve learned this from writing and lecturing. You have to give people the feel of having agreed with you. Then you can drop the idea, or not. It drops in their head anyway, if you make the sofa of accepting that idea comfy enough. 

Cool America, to non-American ears, sounds like Here come the cavalry. Cool America: remember us? 

Cool America: cool down the temperature. Use coolness to battle heat, on every level, symbolic and real. 

Cool America is an imperative verb and an adjective and a noun stuck next to the word America. 

Cool America would be a great idea, just like Gandhi said about Western Civilization. Make America Cool Again. 

I don’t have to tell you the history of cool as a mode of Black resistance, in the deep structure of all this, the refusal to give an inch to the dominators, the real toughness underlying the slack. 

Cool trumps Great, there’s no doubt of that. 

Please feel free to do other kinds of activism involving ideas and persuasion and etc, elsewhere. It’s probably great, whatever you’re thinking of saying or gluing yourself to. I’ve done it myself. All hands on deck! 

But it’s not Cool America. Cool America is this. 

Lovely Brazilian Interview (with English translation)

 I really enjoyed this. I'm pasting the English below. It's on the occasion of the Portuguese translation of Being Ecological. 

1. Your book opens our mind to see another perception of reality and how symbiotic life is, which helps us to understand and deal with climate and environmental changes. But how can we dialogue and convince people who profess scientific denial and refute global warming and the respect for the "others"?

That’s what this book is trying to do. I’m trying to talk nicely to people who think they don’t care. I really wrote this for Americans but it hasn’t done very well yet, because I don’t talk about Jesus. I’m trying to fix that in a new book called Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology. 

I wrote that book in a faux naïve David Byrne voice, which is a kind of ironic American everyman voice. It’s the best I could do. We will be releasing it again on the back of Hell, because interest in the book is already making my blog get two hundred thousand hits a day. 

I think people like me have it all wrong. We spew scientific facts but they sound like the Book of Revelation. We make people feel stupid and evil. I wrote this book to help people feel smart and good. We’ve hoovered up all the people who liked to be called stupid and evil. That’s a tiny number of people. No one cares yet. We know what to do, but if we were advertising Coca Cola, people like me would all be fired for getting it wrong. We need a reason to want to do this, to stop burning fossil fuels. To love it. To wake up in the morning and think wow, I’m so glad to be working on the most exciting, sexiest, caring thing in the world! Mostly we just sound like we want people to come down to a feeling of hungover misery. We should be fired. 

The basic answer is, people like me should talk very very nicely. Yelling has obviously not worked. I’m sorry to sound so seemingly anti-revolutionary. But revenge is not a good look. 

 

2. Many authors are proposing that human sciences should encompass even more the study of (and the respect for) other species, especially animals and plants, in a post-humanistic perspective. How do you evaluate this movement considering so many human particularities?

I obviously think it’s really, really significant and great. But there’s a very important thing to consider here. How we humans treat one another is how we treat other lifeforms. These days I am working really hard on writing about white supremacy and patriarchy for this reason. These are areas that people like me MUST pay attention to, all the time. 

I don’t think we should care about labels like “post-humanist.” Becoming fully human would be better: becoming fully human by acknowledging and respecting our indigenousness to the biosphere, the fact that we grow out of the biosphere like apples growing off a tree. We are made out of it. We are made out of other lifeforms and we depend on them just to breathe. 

 

3. In your last book you mention and explain some ideas from great philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida and Graham Harman (an author not yet translated into Portuguese!!). From your point of view, which author or philosophic idea is the best key for facing the environmental challenges nowadays?

I don’t really recommend anyone, except for myself LOLOL. Truly, I’m afraid there really isn’t very much. I would read my book The Ecological Thought if you want to read about the deep reasons why I think the way I do. 

It’s genuinely hard to answer this question. Most of my work is a deep critical analysis of environmentalist thought, including philosophy. 

People always get philosophy wrong. They think philosophy is about obeying or respecting big ideas. This is not correct. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Wisdom means trying NOT to have ideas. There are two emotions in the word “philosophy”: love and wisdom. If you had to choose between “wisdom means a set of instructions or hints” and “wisdom is a feeling” then wisdom is definitely a feeling. The feeling of “wise.” Loving that feeling: that’s philosophy. 

Above Plato’s Academy was a sign that said, “If you’re not into geometry, leave now.” Geometry at the time meant solving problems without numbers, just feeling the Earth (geo-metry), with a straight edge and a compass. Pacing the Earth, like Jesus doodling in the sand. 

The Cool America Manifesto 1

 COOL AMERICA FOUNDATION: a charity created by me to educate the public about global warming. Directors: myself, Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe. 

Let's begin: 

Cool America: The Manifesto

Tim Morton

Part 1

Let me start by telling you a story. The story of how Buddhism came to Tibet. 

Tibet was a country of cowboys. Rugged, stubborn know-it-alls who had it all figured out thank you very much. Remind you of somewhere? 

The first attempts by Indian Buddhists at importing Buddhism were a total failure. Pandits pleaded with the cowboys, talking to them on and on about compassion and how they would go to hell if they didn’t follow the Buddha, and so on. 

Legend has it that whenever they tried to build a temple, the local deities would come and tear it apart. Whatever really happened, that’s pretty symbolic for “They just could not get through to the rugged cowboys who actually lived in the land they were trying to persuade so desperately.” 

This was terrible, right? For them, the cowboys were going to hell in a hand basket and the world would not be saved. 

Remind you of anyone or anything or any kind of tactic someone may have tried about something lolol….

That’s when Padmasambhava showed up. Padmasambhava was a magician, a tantric yogi. 

Padmasambhava didn’t bother with persuading people. 

He just blew the cowboys’ minds. He performed miracles. He flew. He resurrected people. He persuaded all the local deities to come onside and they became fierce, powerful, devoted protectors of the dharma. They went from destroying the temple to kissing the ass of Buddhism. 

Buddhism has been a rock-solid part of Tibet ever since. 

I think you can see where I’m going with this. 

And that’s where Cool America is going. 

PART 2

The Power of Christ Does, Ahem, in Actual Fact, Compel You

 Parsifal is a criminal moron who makes the fascist Grail Knights great again. 

They didn't vote for Trump despite his moron criminality, they voted for him BECAUSE of it. 

Do you get it now? 

Read this. Think about it. Read it again. Realize this is the one big reason I wrote Hell. People like us need to start talking. Talking to these people. I don't mean arguing with them. I don't mean reasoning. I don't even mean accusing. I mean blowing their fucking minds. 

Only miracles work now. You have to think of it as exorcism. You are exorcizing demons. You can't persuade them to come out. You have to make them. Compel them. 

In the next post or so I'm going to start sharing with you the Cool America manifesto, which is based on this too. We're way past persuasion. We're even past yelling. You think the demon in The Exorcist would be scared of yelling? They'd get off on it. 

You have to do miracles. You. You have to. Yes you. You have to figure out how to do miracles and then you have to do them. Real soon. 

Taylin Nelson on Animal Revolution

 Yes, that's a thing. Specifically it's a nice nice book by Ron Broglio called Animal Revolution, and I always wanted someone to follow up on the challenge of Humankind and start with that line from the Communist Manifesto! ("Animals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.")

I also wanted hedgehogs with Che Guevara hats on the cover, sporting bandoleros. Now I might get them, thanks to the brilliance of Marina Zurkow, an artist I've championed a bit, if she's feeling kind. If they ever reissue that book Humankind, that's what I want on the cover. She's got these really zippy illustrations in the Broglio book, viz: 

Well, my awesome Ph.D student Taylin Nelson has reviewed Broglio's book thus, and it's a banger. 

What the Hell: An Exordium

 I just re-read the preface to Hell. It's called "What the Hell: An Exordium," because I really need people to read it. Need, not want. There are reminders in the first few chapters to look at it! If you can make it through the Exordium, you can understand the whole thing. 

"What the Hell" is really memoir-like, intensely person, often painfully son. I've never written anything like it. I say a lot of things. A lot. Even those of you who have read a lot of me, carefully, will be surprised. 

Let's just say that my "OOO" memoir, The Stuff of Life (just came out) was easy to write. Easy by comparison. Paradoxically it took much much longer to write. Maybe I could feel what was coming. I could feel the inner pressure building up. It took a year to write the memoir. It took an afternoon to write "What the Hell." 

I think I'm going to post an excerpt or two here later.