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. 

Publicity Meeting

 I'm excited. It's twenty-five minutes before my first meeting with Columbia's publicist. I want to get a picture of what they're going to get up to, in order to promote Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. 

If you're of one of the causes the extra one hundred and fifty thousand hits on this blog since I announced this book, I'm so glad you're here and you can really really help me out by telling me more about why you're into the idea of this book. You're more interested in this book than people were interested when I wrote something with Björk. 

I'm talking to my best best people about writing on the back of this. I was taught at school that these were called endorsements and that blurbs were descriptions--but like the word "font" the meaning has shifted over time. ("Font" used to mean the size of what was called the typeface.) 

Two Hundred Thousand

 Two hundred and one thousand actually at the time of writing. That's how many of you are tuning into the Hell-oriented blogging. If you're new here, welcome! I'm so honored to be a part of your day. 

How come there are so many of you good people? I think I just accidentally wrote a book for the Exvangelical movement. That's one way I explain this to myself. 

Could it be my existing writing? It can't be. The stats on the blog indicate that that only drew up to 50,000 hits a day. 

I've wanted to talk to my fellow Americans since forever. Maybe you see something you might want to hear, at last. You wouldn't believe, if you haven't been out of the country, the extent to which I've been on TV and performing operas to thousands of people and organizing art shows...in Europe. How there's a book about me...in Japanese. How there was a huge spread on me...in the Guardian newspaper. 

The one book I thought was going to connect, Being Ecological, just didn't--not yet anyway. That's why we'll be releasing it again six months plus after Hell comes out. 

As responsible grown up I recognize that this is my fault. It's got to be, since I've never managed to convince an agent to take me on, and my manager quit because they didn't see the point of organizing all the trips everywhere else except for in the USA. 

I think it's because I'm about to say words like "Jesus" in print. 

What do you think? I would genuinely be interested. Interest in this book is now 20% bigger than interest in what I wrote with Bjork. 

The Return of Blake's 7

 "Blake's 7, that's how I remember it." The security guard was explaining to ten-year-old me how to find the William Blake in The Tate Britain. In those times he was exhibited in a gorgeous smoked glass room smack in the middle of what was then called the Tate Gallery. 

I was crestfallen to find ten years ago that Blake had been shoved upstairs like the madwoman in the attic of the Clore Gallery, where they house the Turners. 

So crestfallen, I penned this. The gallery seemed to have been invaded by BP, not just funded by it. I hated it. 

I was thus really happy today when my friend Cliff posted this on Facebook. In short, they've moved Blake to a much better position--and he's in a room 7 again...

Thank you Cliff! I wrote to the Tate at once. It's as if they listened. Or as if they got wind of Hell. I do talk about the Blake unpleasantness in that book, so I'll be happy to amend it when we copy edit (coming right up). 

Nineteen Thousand

 ...citations of my work in scholarly prose, as of today. I was looking at something I wrote in the later 1990s, and feeling very sorry for it. It was trying to say so many different things at once, the noise drowned the signal. I'm very glad I figured out how not to do that. But it took a few tries. 

Todo el arte es ecológico

 From Editorial GG. 

The Stuff of Life audiobook coming soon, read by me

 Have you read The Stuff of Life yet? It has some dynamite...stuff in it. 

It's an OOO memoir. I am very keen on it. It was hard to write it: I had to push through a lot of defenses to write it. 

There is all kinds of writing in there on my childhood--very much that's the emphasis. But there are also chapters on other moments. Gender features hugely in there. There's a chapter on concealer. 

Another "object" in the book is grief. I consider myself at this point something of a grief specialist, not that this means anything to do with mastery. It's more like, I'm okay with being mastered by it. 

A study of the phenomenology of grief reveals a lot of truths about object-oriented ontology. 

I'm very happy to announce that I'll be recording the audiobook, next week in fact! This is the first time I've been asked to record a book of mine, and I personally think that's a good decision, because I've often been told, by total strangers (and by the BBC LOL) that I have a lovely radio voice. 

Here's That Interview (embedded)

 

So I Did This Great Interview

 ...with Paul Chamberlain, of Smart Funny Tortured. I do a lot of interviews, so I wasn't sure what to expect, just looking forward to it as usual. But this one turned out to be a really deep one. Paul has also done the most wonderful job of telling you about me as you'll see on the page. 

My School's Newspaper Interviews Me (Congratulations to Hadley Medlock)

 Hadley did such a wonderful job with this! I think you will enjoy it. 

Those Galaxies Last Week and This Week, a Human Structure Half a Million Years Old

 In Zambia. I love it when the empirical world exceeds our ability to theorize it. If you've been reading this recently you'll recall how excited I got about those galaxies from way "too far away" (too long ago) for any of the going theories of our cosmos to hold up. Galaxies that show up in the Webb telescope image...

One writer observed that it was like looking at a photo of your grandparents as children, only to find your own grandchildren also in that photo. 

Well how about this. The idea of "prehistory"—the very idea that evolution and history have a telos, a forwards gear—the very idea of progress—took a catastrophic hit a few days ago when archeologists published their discovery of a wooden structure in Zambia that is 476,000 years old. And as for that fucking charlatan Hegel...

It brings into question the very notion of "hominin" (which the science is using), "hominid," "humanoid" and all those uncanny-valley categories that define the human according to implicitly racist notions of the "missing link," and so on and so on. So I'm calling it a human structure. I believe that in the end this will prove to be MORE scientific than splitting hairs. 

This brings to mind a whole deconstructive question about adjectives. When you say something is "human" like when Captain Kirk calls Mister Spock's self-sacrifice "human," aren't you...etc... 

We have no idea what this is. We have no idea what kind of thing this is, the kind of being who made it...I LOVE it. 

My New Colleague Denva Gallant Made This Music and You Should Hear It

 Wow...with the composer Christopher Stark. Denva joined Art History just this term. Talking of Christianity and ecology as we were...

Christopher Stark · From The Life Of Macarius

Fan Letter

 I don't know whether I've ever told you this, but it's actually very touching and moving to get letters about my work, in particular from high school and undergraduate students. 

In Cumbria in 2019, at Wordsworth's house (Dove Cottage), I was giving a lecture and during the Q&A a mother and her daughter told me that they had flown over from Ireland to thank me for my work. 

At Northwestern in 2014, about 100 high school students crashed a lecture--they swarmed in after the dialogue part, held in a crowded library on the top floor...there weren't enough seats and  they sat on the floor. Twenty of them surrounded me at the end of the lecture and told me they were fans of my work. 

It happens a lot actually. The Lexile score for Hyperobjects puts it at a reading level suitable for an eleven-year-old. That's part of it. But Claire Colebrook once said that one of the reasons high school and undergrad students like me is, I actually give them ideas to think about that can help them... 

Anyway, here is part this letter I received yesterday: 

Hello! My name is *****  I am a current sophomore undergraduate student at ***** one of the locations of the *****, and am currently pursuing a B.A in both Political Science and English.  

Over the past year, I have grown to be extremely fond of your works, specifically your books on Dark Ecology, Hyperobjects, and Humankind. I have an immense passion in the fields of critical theory, philosophy, ecology, and literature. Your accomplishments in these areas have been tremendously enlightening and have greatly enriched my academic and personal journey.

I was so touched I thought I would share it with you. 

What If It Was Too Easy...Being Ecological Redux

My Hell book means so much to me. So much that MIT and I have agreed to re-issue Being Ecological next year! Yes that's right. The US version of Being Ecological, published by MIT press, will be re-appearing in later Fall of 2024. There'll be extra material by me and a new cover design, and I'm already planing some events around it. 

For example, I'll be giving some major philosophy lectures at Kent State University--yes, that's right, the site of the massacre. 

Being Ecological will appear a good six months plus after Hell appears, to give that book some lead time. It's not good to overlap books too much. 

I'm already hard at work on the Preface. It's so interested to revisit work I did five to seven years ago. Things have changed, haven't they, and not for the better. This makes the core message of Being Ecological even more important: what if it was too easy to take an ecological stance towards the world? What if what was really difficult was thinking and acting like we weren't a part of everything else? 

I'll be talking about that book quite a lot too here, from now on. Stay tuned...

This Really Is a Thing (and I'm Very Grateful to You for It)

 Hi Everyone, 

So eyeballing it, interest in Hell is now about double the interest shown here about the book I wrote with Björk. 

I really am very grateful to you for being this interested in something I'm doing. I've been pouring everything into it, as you'll see as soon as you open it. Maybe as soon as you see the cover! Time, resources, thought, heart...since my daughter came in the kitchen in November 2021 and said "Daddy, we're in Hell" with tears streaming down her face. 

I'm also so grateful to Columbia University Press for believing in this project this much. 

Does Anyone Else Love This?

 I love this. I LOVE it. So the James Webb telescope. It's the largest smoothest mirror ever made and it's the furthest away from Earth's gravity ever, and so it acts astonishingly. 

And astrophysicists are beginning to notice things in it. 

Like, there are way more galaxies, from way longer ago. Longer ago than they should be. 

They say this is as weird as looking at a picture of your grandparents, yet you see your grandchildren are also in it. There's grandpa Steve, standing outside the garage where his old Buick is waiting for him to apply the hose. It's a hot Sunday afternoon. And just behind him you glimpse someone. They're familiar. They're Eddie, your little grandson. Eddie is smiling out of the picture as if nothing at all were the matter. 

But you're freaking out because Eddie shouldn't have been born yet. 

What. Has happened. To time. 

All the models. Maybe all of them, literally. Maybe they're all about to give way. Like phlogiston and the ether, dark matter and so on were just brought in to balance some equations. Equations with known fudges. There are two Hubble constants, depending on how far back or not you're looking. 

Equations that pertain to a universe where your grandparents are clouds of gas and black holes. But there are galaxies amongst them. Galaxies strewn like necklaces by some carefree drunken partygoer across the divan of the universe, devil may care. 

Physical reality currently outstrips the theory, giving humans who can understand what this means a glimpse of profound object withdrawal. A withdrawal that can't be explained (away) by more matter, just invisible matter, that devilish metaphysics of presence rearing its ugly head to spoil the party over and over again, and since scientists don't think philosophy much, they default to it, because it's in the air. It's in the white supremacy. 

But reality smiles and scatters far, far away, like those galaxies leaving us with a wink and a smile, way, way WAY further out than they should be. They should still be at the party. But wait...they showed up in a photo of  your grandpa on the wall. You're saying bye-bye to the guests, and you look at the photo of your family in the lobby, and there's little Eddie, like I say, smiling away, with his shining milk teeth. Galaxy, milk, galactose. That chocolate you ate in the 1970s. That toothy grin. That necklace Letitia left on the sofa in 1924, only she just left according to  your watch. But it's  an antique necklace. Hasn't been worn for decades...How could she have...

Isn't that refreshing? 

Isn't that lovely? 

Dialogues

 I am having a wonderful time conversing with the many Christians who have indeed been reading this blog--thank you all and I'm really looking forward to sharing my new work with you and everyone. 

If any of you have any suggestions about people to whom I ought to talk regarding this book, I'm all ears. Please regard me as a totally naive and happily educable newbie in this domain, because I am! 

It's extremely nice when one realizes one does't know something. 

More News from Hell

 Feeling like a bad dad is what being a good dad feels like. Feeling like a bad teacher is what being a good teacher feels like. Feeling like a bad person is what being a good person feels like. Feeling like a “bad” country, really paying attention to the “original sin” of slavery for example, is what being  a GOOD country feels like. 

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, coming on Earth Day 2024.

Oh my WORD

 A kind person on Twitter (or X, pronounced "Euch") showed me this. The keys are, in my opinion, even more incredible than the horns on the album. And the guitar solo is really something. But I just do have to love those keys so much. And Meshell is a god as ever. 

A Concise Description of Hell

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology

Timothy Morton (Columbia University Press, Earth Day, 2024)

Escaping global warming Hell requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery. 

Environmentalism desperately needs an “I have a dream” moment, a planet-scale call of spiritual magnitude that inspires even people who feel complicit, or despairing, or just numb and uncaring, to create a better future. Enough of the yelling, enough of the revenge speak. 

And environmentalism needs to connect to anti-racism, to feminism, to anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia…

Conversely, religion needs to land on Earth and stop fueling Apocalyptic stories of the necessary destruction of Earth. 

And we are only too well aware of the all-out Christian-fueled assault on “woke” and LGBTQ people, fueled by a demonic sense of being the “goodies.” 

There is a profound relationship between what religion and environmentalism need. 

What if there was something about religion that was deeply environmental, ecological…biological? What if there was something about ecology that responded deeply to religious, or spiritual, or mystical feeling? 

This book finds a solution in a radical revaluation of Christianity. The point is to create a nonviolent army: vulnerable, blessed with a sense of irony, ambiguity, humor and beauty; to see the biosphere as a beautiful accident, driven by the sheer contingency of natural selection, sexual display and symbiosis. 

Ecological politics requires a language of mercy and forgiveness, and Christianity needs to remember mercy and forgiveness. 

The key to both? An all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting worldwide today in white supremacy and patriarchy. How humans treat each other is how they treat the biosphere. 

• A surprising positive vision of Christianity from a woke humanities scholar?! Wowzers! 

• A call for a worldwide antiracist environmental movement. 

• A marriage of science and Christianity that doesn’t reduce one to the other. 

• A lavish and loving guide to living with the help of William Blake. 

• A weirdly simple fusion of biology and mysticism that puts race and gender issues front and center. 

• Provides off-ramps for people who are feeling awful about religion, but also provides on-ramps, and  this curious spirally thing is a feature not a bug!

• Beauty is totally trans! You find peacock tails beautiful? I rest my case. 

• Joe Truck Driver knows something that makes him immune to the discourse of ecological revenge: Jesus loves him anyway. Even the stupidest version of this is superior to every possible revenge discourse. 

• The sacred is the feel of biology. Who knew? 

• Life is a beautiful accident. Life and thought are magnified quantum theory.  

For All You Exvangelicals Out There

 “British Rail once announced that what was delaying their trains was the wrong kind of leaves. What is delaying a lovely marriage of ‘religion’ with the biosphere is the wrong kind of Satanism. Christianity is all too often the wrong kind of Satanism. But before we get started on that, we need to talk about racism. And abortions. And Hell.”   

Excerpt from Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, coming your way Earth Day 2024. 

This is guaranteed to jerk a tear or several right out of my damp eyes, and verse one is the epigraph to the above. I saw Meshell live in 1995 when she was playing this. I play bass and sing and I just can't even. Talk about rubbing your tummy and patting your head. Meshell is a divine being. Knock and the door shall be opened: the four smarting totally in sync snare hits going rat-a-tat-tat just before the midsection make you want to die:

If You're Christian and You Know It Post a Comment

 Well hello everyone, FINALLY it's a damp day in Houston after over two months of heat wave preceded by heat dome hyperobject hell. Talking of which, my book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is now in production at Columbia. Yay! We are expecting proofs to arrive in December. 

Thinking is a team sport, and publishing is most assuredly a team sport, and I understand very well that the term "team player" is kind of horrible, but it does in fact describe me quite well. 

You, dear reader, have helped me very much over the last couple of weeks, by suggesting journals and organizations and other outfits that might be keen to read or review or talk with me about Hell. 

Now I'm curious about whether there are indeed any Christians following this blog; or Christian-curious or Exvangelical or otherwise oriented towards Christianity, or away from it. Please feel free to post a comment. If you're shy to do that, then please email me at tbm2@rice.edu. I understand that right now Christianity has a bad rap for all kinds of reasons, and that fessing up to it might be difficult. 

So please know that Hell is not a criticism of Christianity, not a head-on one at any rate, but rather a critique in the Kantian or Adornian sense, a thorough exploration from the inside...but one that provides off-ramps for exvangelical people, as well as on-ramps...I can't help being a bit of a spirally deconstructive nonbinary person! 

One reason for asking is, there has never been this much interest in my blog, and it's sustained. Interest has now surpassed what I call the "Björk spike" of 2015, when I announced that Björk and I had written a book. There was a huge spike in interest (about 200,000 people!). But now there's a kind of ridge of jagged peaks, they're smaller than that but in aggregate they're much larger. 

Since I told you I was putting Hell together, interest in my blog has pretty much quadrupled. So this is a thing. So I want to find out whether I'm connecting to people not in my usual bailiwicks (philosophy, art, cultural criticism, ecological humanities, etc). 

It All Started When My Daughter Said "We're in Hell"

 Welcome to Hell. My daughter Claire walked over to my house one evening in November of 2021, weeping big fat tears. She was seventeen years old.

“Daddy, This is Hell. We’re in Hell.” Claire wasn’t kidding or exaggerating. She was very tearfully saying something she thought was true. Claire had just seen a video made during a school shooting, but this was just the latest in a series of awful news. Claire is deeply concerned about the Hellish state of the globally warming world; she is a passionate and creative soul who wants to know as much as she can about politics and culture. Sites such as YouTube and Reddit have malign side effects on me, and I can’t imagine the impact on younger minds. Very often the most cynical voice (quite possibly someone not much older than a seventeen-year-old) rises to the top and presents radical content in the key of total paralysis. They say they are about liberation; but the how is ‘You have no idea how grim and how messed up and how prisonlike this world has become, compared with me. I am more intelligent than you, because I am more depressing than you.” For a vulnerable mind struggling with what it means to be a person in this world, the side effect overwhelms the content. 

“Daddy, this is Hell.” Claire didn’t mean it metaphorically. The look of anguish on her face said so. What to do? Just deny her reality? Insist on being cheerful? What? 

“Okay, so this is Hell,” I replied, fumbling for those parent skills. Join your child. Don’t delete their experience. “So, how to live, now we know this is Hell? We still have to live. We have to figure out what to do with Oliver the cat. How to feed him, it’s still an issue isn’t it?” 

Then I started to think oh, Claire was right. 

This is Hell.   (Extract from Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Columbia UP, Earth Day 2024)

On the California Senate

 I'm watching something on Nancy Pelosi. It turns out she might want Adam Schiff to run for Senate, whereas Gavin Newsom would like a Black woman to run. If more than two senators per state were allowed for such a populous state as California, this would not be a problem. The senate rule is a slavery artifact. 

Hyperobjects Sold...

 Twenty-seven thousand copies, even. 

I'm Quite Surprised by This

 ..because of producing Hell and because of really caring about it, I'm gathering some sales figures. I never do this. So was quite stunned to find how many copies of three books had sold. The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature have both sold over ten thousand copies, while Humankind has sold over fifteen thousand. I am surprised, especially by the reach of Humankind, which I was not expecting to have done so well over its six-year lifespan. 

Help Me Find Religion Journals, Magazines, Websites

 Okay everyone, I need your help. I'm a philosopher and a literature scholar who has taken a theological turn, and I need to find out who ought to receive copies of Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. It comes out on April 22, 2024 (Earth Day). 

Did you know that interest in this book has caused my blog to get double the hits it was getting during the Hyperobjects days, where from 2010 to 2013 I was doing a lot of lectures on that topic and publishing all kinds of things, the book included, about them? 

When I say double I mean up to 100,000 a day. Did you know the blog could get those kinds of hits? Neither did I!? And I haven't done a single lecture or interview about the new book. Hyperobjects sold out its first edition before it even appeared on Amazon. 

Hell is going to be huge. 

So I'm pouring a lot of effort into really thinking about who ought to receive this book. As you may know, I don't have an agent, and I do all this stuff all by myself. 

But I don't get out a lot. I literally have my head in the clouds. It's taken me weeks for example to remember that I was interviewed by BBC Newsnight about Humankind (did you know that?), so I could tell Columbia to contact them about this. 

So please please comment below. I will be forever in your debt. What you share can be as popular or as niche as you wish. 

Hell V: Five More Fun Facts about My Next Book

 • A surprising positive vision of Christianity from a woke humanities scholar?! Wowzers! 

• A call for a worldwide antiracist environmental movement. 

• A marriage of science and Christianity that doesn’t reduce one to the other. 

• A lavish and loving guide to living with the help of William Blake. 

• A weirdly simple fusion of biology and mysticism that puts race and gender issues front and center. 

Columbia University Press, Earth Day, 2024

Hell IV: Five Fun Facts about My Next Book

 Hell will appear on Earth Day 2024 from Columbia University Press. 

1.  A surprising positive vision of Christianity from a woke humanities scholar?! Wowzers!

2.  The sacred is the feel of biology. Who knew? 

3.  Life is a beautiful accident. Life and thought are magnified quantum theory. 

4.  Beauty is totally trans! You find peacock tails beautiful? I rest my case. 

5. Joe Truck Driver knows something that makes him immune to the discourse of ecological revenge: Jesus loves him anyway. Even the stupidest version of this is superior to every possible revenge discourse. 

Hell III: I'm excited

 ...did you know this blog has been getting up 100,000 hits a day since I started to talk about the Hell book? I'm really surprised. There was a huge spike when I announced I had been working with Bjork--200,000 hits! But this looks more sustained and it's half that size. When you consider that the normal number is about 20,000 a day, and that during the Hyperobjects time it was about 50,000, you'll get a sense of why I'm very excited to be about to share Hell with you. Hyperobjects already sold out its first edition by the time it hit the shelves...I wonder what will happen with Hell. 

I'm ready to talk Christianity. I was surprised that the readers told me I was writing theology, but since then I've come to accept it. 

I'm fed up with how people talk revenge and Old Testament vibes in my line of work. Even the crudest idea of mercy is up a level from there. Until people like me figure that out, no one else will listen to us. 

Why I wrote Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Part II

 Environmentalism desperately needs an “I have a dream” moment, a planet-scale call of spiritual magnitude that inspires even people who feel complicit, or despairing, or just numb and uncaring, to create a better future. Enough of the yelling, enough of the revenge speak. 

And environmentalism needs to connect to anti-racism, to feminism, to anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia…

Conversely, religion needs to land on Earth and stop fueling Apocalyptic stories of the necessary destruction of Earth. 

And we are only too well aware of the all-out Christian-fueled assault on “woke” and LGBTQ people, fueled by a demonic sense of being the “goodies.” 

There is a profound relationship between what religion and environmentalism need. 

What if there was something about religion that was deeply environmental, ecological…biological? What if there was something about ecology that responded deeply to religious, or spiritual, or mystical feeling? 

This book finds a solution in a radical revaluation of Christianity. The point is to create a nonviolent army: vulnerable, blessed with a sense of irony, ambiguity, humor and beauty; to see the biosphere as a beautiful accident, driven by the sheer contingency of natural selection, sexual display and symbiosis. 

Ecological politics requires a language of mercy and forgiveness, and Christianity needs to remember mercy and forgiveness. 

The key to both? An all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting worldwide today in white supremacy and patriarchy. How humans treat each other is how they treat the biosphere. 

I'm Teaching "Walking While Black" Today

 ...it's one of those essays that gets more and more amazing the more you read it. Great essays are like that. They're alive, somehow. They let you breathe. My stepdad and my wife are both Jamaican and and I know exactly what Garnette Cadogan means. 

Why I Wrote Hell

 Ecology needs its "I have a dream" moment. People who feel complicit in big oil (because they, erm, use gasoline pumps...like, EVERYONE) need to be given permission to care. Just like how white people needed permission to be anti-racist knowing at the backs  of their heads how complicit they were. 

AND. Just listen to this. Listen. 

What's in Hell?

 My next book: "Escaping global warming Hell requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.”

Czech Being Ecological

 I'm very proud to say that Ondrej Thron has done a wonderful job translating Being Ecological into Czech. Ondrej interviewed me a few years ago, a very memorable and moving occasion it was too. 

Have You Tried My Patreon Yet?

 It's an amplification, for me, of the conversations I've had with my mum for years. I just can't sit around lecturing and writing books and essays, and that's it. I need to talk with more people more of the time. 

The latest post is about the Russia situation. 

Book on Christianity and Ecology Is Now in Production

 Columbia University Press are the greatest. I've known that since they worked with me on publishing the Wellek Lectures (Dark Ecology). Their enthusiasm for the new project is infectious and the assiduity of my editor, Wendy Lochner, is astounding. I'm truly grateful to them. 

The book is now called 

HELL: IN SEARCH OF A CHRISTIAN ECOLOGY 

Brazilian Being Ecological

 What a lovely cover this is. 

Rodrigo Petronio on The Ecological Thought

 I'm so glad to see this. 

My New Book Is Out

 ...It's called The Stuff of Life and it's an OOO memoir about me in relation with a number of "objects" such as antidepressants, sound files and grief. 

Watch: Very Important

 I for one am very grateful to Treena and Carol Balds for having turned me on to MSNBC, which if you haven't watched in a while, is now terribly important. My old friend Eddie Glaude from Princeton is on Morning Joe! This is a really really important segment that aired just now. We are dealing with incipient fascism here. Get it straight. 

Aunty Shows the Way

 Well this most assuredly is my favorite one.

Infinitely preferred the "We don't need..." where the children come in to the Floyd's "We don't need..." children's choir, infinitely, for so many reasons. And you'll probably agree that she sings better than Gilmour lolololol ...bringing all the goodness of the idea of being Aunty to the dais there.

"Aunty" (sonic anagram of "Tina") is the name of her character in the Mad Max film for which this is the closing song; it's right up there in the top very few closers for me.

Oh, and, knowing you want the future to be different from the past vs the dark sarcasm of singing about dark sarcasm...

All we do want is life beyond the WWF style fascism of the all too obvious Thunderdome on the telly and in the streets. And this got me through one of the worst years of my entire life. Thank you Aunty.

18000

 Scholarly citations.

Lisa Doeland's Book

 Lisa is a good friend and a great philosopher and I'm looking forward to her new book about extinction. 

Hell: Christ's Earthly Form Divine cover idea

 Just this, totally stark and lapidary. Monolithic. 

It's Official: Hell Appears Earth Day 2024 and It's about the Devil, AI, Racism and Ecology

 Well Colombia have agreed to publish a second dark, dark, intense book. Clearly they couldn't get enough of Dark Ecology, the Wellek Lectures that I gave in the lineage of Cixous and Balibar, and now they're going to work with me to get this one out for Earth Day 2024. 

It's a book about slavery, racism, capitalism, AI, ecology, despair, religion and mysticism. It's freaking AWESOME. I wasn't quite ready to say stuff like that out loud when I last worked for Columbia. 

Because Columbia have done this, I'm now committing to them. I've been living my life waiting for approval and love in so many ways and I am DONE. Love is a thing you DO not a thing you wait for. That phenomenology cashes out to being a theater critic and in the end, all the plays are bad. Because you're waiting for them to be bad. I got really good at getting up and leaving the theater no matter where the play was at: I could see the writing on the wall. So at least there's that. But that is still...that. 

So this is my proclamation to the world. I'm with Columbia now. Like how my best buddy Jeff Kripal (the X Men actors have to read his work when they're on set) is with Chicago. It's a great thing. I kept thinking when I found that out,  he must have a lot of space in his soul to think, he doesn't have to keep waiting for people to say yes like me, who acts like they're a character in a Jane Austen novel. 

That never occurred to me until this week, when Columbia accepted Hell. But it had occurred to me in my personal life, in part because my mum's family traces their lineage back to the lower gentry in the later eighteenth century. And that's a horrible precarious place to be. My grandmother to cap it all was Welsh lower gentry. Imagine Sense and Sensibility, but set in Wales. Just horrible ancient colonial vibes. You're dead unless Mister Right sweeps you off your feet. So you have to sit around ever so politely waiting for Mister Right, not putting a foot wrong, including doing a single day of work, and you can't access your own money until said Mister Right shows up. 

This was me and book contracts. I thought it was great, a kind of naive drifting that meant I wasn't pushy and manipulative, and I'm not. But this is better. I'm not Elinor Dashwood. That energy crippled my family. Austen novels are about the terrible pain of a  precarious class, women in the lower gentry during a time of enclosure and transition from primitive accumulation to automated capitalism. 

Hell is about masters and slaves. Hell is about the Devil. Hell is about the biosphere as the Devil and ideas about the Devil as the Devil that's burning the biosphere. 

Hell is also about AI. ery directly, because it’s totally relevant. I think the real driver here is the master slave template that drives everything else (subject versus object, male versus female, active versus passive…). We need to abolish that template. The idea of creating the perfect slave that is then the perfect master is basically every story about selling one’s soul to Satan.

Treating the biosphere like that, because treating each other like that, is why AI people are blundering into this and why that feeling of “the search for AI is like an unstoppable AI” keeps happening…

I Received Rice's Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award

 ...and was nearly dying with anxiety by the time it came to me, mostly because I hadn't won a thing as an adult before, and the ceremony regressed me to the age of 15! 

But here is a very nice video Rice made about it all and you can see me bowing nicely at the beginning as I walk up, right at the end, to receive the award. 

Re-Markable

 How is that. 

I Stand in Front of You

 Just the best thing. 

The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes

 Turns out this is an actual scientific fact. OOO theory of beauty getting louder and louder. 

Prince: Naughty, but Nice

 Did you know that Salman Rushdie's most famous text was for the Milk Marketing Board of the UK? 

"Fresh cream. Naughty, but nice." 

You must've heard that if you're a certain age and lived in the UK. 

Allow my guru to explain:

Seth Myers Is Right: NPD is Alien

 Finally someone saw it. Watch to the end: 

Automating the Master–Slave Template, Again

From Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back

Like Satan, an algorithm is a servant that carries out your commands...perfectly (be careful what you wish for). Think about plantations. They're attempts to force human beings to carry out other human beings' commands perfectly. A silicon wafer is a plantation for electrons. 

So many other links but that's one huge main one.

...I used to live in Davis, CA. It was a gigantic factory, made of columns and rows and columns and rows of fruit trees and almond trees and etc, stretching as far as the eye could see. Machine-like in its precision. The Great Central Valley is so flat you can see it from space, and they use lasers to guide the irrigation channels. Workers and enslaved people also treated with this kind of profit maximizing precision aka violence.

Next step: all the dualisms that plague us, subject-object, human-animal, person-machine, masculine-feminine...are possible because of the master-slave template of Mesopotamian-style societies with a certain agricultural logistics running in the background. 

The fantasy of AI is that its personhood will be "greater than the hum of its parts" (as Daniel Dennett put it). 

This is precisely the problem. We are inventing the wheel of the master-slave duality, and hardwiring it into powerful machines made of silicon and plastics and metals, and robot dogs. Dogs have always been trained as slaves.

Ozymandias Hyperobject

 What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in? 

This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally. 

A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation. 

The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?

It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time. 

But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right." 

So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming. 

Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE. 

This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy: 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

How Wham! Made Us Ecstatic

My Jamaican stepdad Maurice was a reason why the 1990s did not cause implode. So was a little tablet called MDMA. What's good enough for PTSD soldiers in the US army is good enough for me, says I.

1983. I'm painting in the art room at school. My paintings have DO NOT DISTURB scrawled on the back in deliberately insane looking script. 

1983. So George Michael returned from DJ Alfredo's Amnesnia in Ibiza and wrote this perfect ad for MDMA. 

Club Tropicana drinks are frEeeeeeeeeee....

First rule of advertising: you sell the user to the product. Never say "MDMA is great." Pump that shit through something familiar. 

Michael had an almost frightening genius for writing lyrics that were perfectly ordinary sentences: 

Club Tropicana, drinks are free, fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone. All that's missing is the sea, but don't worry: you can suntan. 

All that's missing is the sea: this is an artificial paradise, not just an inland club, but something you swallow. Pack your bags...don't miss the flight: swallow the capsule. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...the crescendo like coming up on E.

"Let me take you to the place ... where strangers take you by the hand," says MDMA, destroying two decades of Roger Waters-induced Meddle misery ("Strangers passing in the street...Do I take you by the hand...")

But don't worry, you'll feel like your birthright as a lifeform is being given the best massage. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...

Let me take you to the place / Where membership's a smiling face / Brush shoulders with the stars. Yeah, those stars. 

The song has a perfect surface of "Rapper's Delight" fused with tropical Latinx-ness multiplied by the four to the floor of techno hidden beneatrh the Ibizan jollity. And ends with the mystic cool of Yoruba philosophy that every American has deliberately or accidentally downloaded. 

Freakin love this tune. 

AI Traffic Stop by William Shakespeare

(Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are creeping into Prospero's cell, trying to ... I don't know what, they might not know what: surprise? usurp? rag? the colonial wizard Prospero. Ariel is Prospero's I don't know what: servant? police? ideology?)

A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, and hunt them about, PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on

PROSPERO

Hey, Mountain, hey!

ARIEL

Silver I there it goes, Silver!

PROSPERO

Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!

CALIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO, are driven out

Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.

ARIEL

Hark, they roar!

PROSPERO

Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies:
Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou
Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little
Follow, and do me service.

Exeunt

"Life after the Traffic Stop": A Brilliant Podcast

 ...by Audie Cornish. 

How the Media Is Failing the Turing Test

Pretty much all the stuff on AI is part of the problem. Here's my take: 

AI should be taught to forget, and accidentally too. A person is a malfunctioning AI. What makes a person is that they are less good. The search for a super-subject, a super-master, is what scares the crap out of me. That and machine learning  robot dog Harpo Marxes with guns. Masters and their weaponized slaves. 

We are already living inside an adaptive AI. Capitalism is an adaptive AI that machine learns how to extract life from the biosphere. It would not be good to find out whether it will or will not go into an infinite loop. 

The English were as amazed by the adaptive AI they had created in 1600  as some of us are now. With this AI they could produce value at unimaginable speeds. It was almost like cheating. It was called settler colonialism and slavery. One of its brand names was East India Company. America was another.

A fascist just is a bot (Arendt). Algorithms just follow orders.

What is really wrong about AI is not the I but the A. I means that I was always A to some extent. But automating that shit on a kind of plantation called a silicon chip means you're building the past out into the future. The future becomes the metastasis of the past. 

Why Marx Was Leery of Anarchism: A Very Clever Clogs Blog Post even by My Standards LOLOL

 I just had a run-in with someone who said, this global warming stuff is bourgeois distraction and class struggle etc etc. 

I said this is white supremacist shit. 

They said "we're all humans and race is irrelevant." 

I said I knew you weren't a Marxist. 

They said you don't have to be a Marxist talk about class struggle. 

I then realized he was the kind of anarchist Marx is rightly wary of. "Who educates the educators" is going after the kind of "we're all Man underneath" Enlightenment philosophy that fuels a lot of that (Godwin for instance). 

"We're all Man and reason beats superstition and ideology is superstition, like what they think in Africa." 

Marxism needs a fecal transplant of a certain kind of anarchist thought about how to live communism. But anarchism needs a kick up its Enlightened ass. Basically this is what Humankind is about. 

Ideology is not superstition. Ideology is how the determined "objective" world of commodities and exchange and profits is based on an unconscious, fluctuating, moving too-cheap price of human labor. "Stuff is made by exploited workers" is a thing that capitalist theology already knows, relies on. 

Marx's genius, like Freud's and Darwin's, was to notice that the real issue was a flowing, unconscious mechanism that turns capitalism into a hyperobject. Freud (the unconscious) and Darwin (evolution) are also talking about things that are created by simple interactions that then have their own causal dynamic. Darwin's and Freud's and Marx's innovation was also about seeing how these invisible forces are constructed, not given. 

DJ Spooky's Peace Symphony

 This looks amazing. Follow the link. I'm working with Spooky on things for my graduate drama class next term. The title is Victorian Drama. 

My Space Laser Is Better

 I always saw deconstruction as detecting how medicine is laced with poison, and transmuting poison into medicine so it can't hurt anyone anymore. 

And I've gotten to the point where in class yesterday I noticed I can now make Heidegger make the most anti-racist, decolonial noise I've ever heard in white western philosophy. (!!!)

This is on the same day when I found out I won the Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award in my job, which is lovely timing, because this is the year in which my lovely new colleague Kiese Laymon won the MacArthur genius award, and I have committed to creating the most powerful anti-racist laser I can create as how I talk about ecology. And on that note, here's something I tweeted. Think about it: 

I write about ecology. I’m a big fan of Snoop Dogg. The BBC should hire Snoop as the next David Attenborough. I am deadly serious. 

@SnoopDogg @BBC

Their voices overlap for a start. Think about it. 

A few years ago I was one person away from David Attenborough and I was trying to persuade him that his parting gift to the world should be a show about whiteness where he turns the camera on himself. 

This show could now include him handing his mantle to Snoop. 

Who by the way is doing this, which is very similar to the Cool America tactic. Actually it IS a Cool America tactic: 

Suzanne Vega's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

The younger Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that ambiguously encapsulates an adult with unresolved childhood trauma, a need for basic fundamental holding. Ambiguously, because there's a child in there too: 

This is perhaps someone who is being loved for real, who allows themselves to be small, to be held in someone's "pocket," to be parented by their partner. That's how I saw it when I was eighteen. 

 The older Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that less ambiguously gets to the child version of something like that feeling:

This is perhaps someone who doesn't have enough of a loving parent. Who is exposed to something. Who feels funny even when they're in that parent's pocket, so to speak. 

Gosh I love this song so much. It is one of my go-to PTSD grief release songs of all time. 

Which one is more disturbing? 

Is that the wrong question? 

Isn't it interesting that sometimes a caring genius grown up can find the child aspect of a thing better than a younger person reaching for the "grownup" sound? They feel safer so they can find the vulnerability with more confidence? 

And isn't it amazing a younger adult can find what is terrible or hypocritical--or in this case, broken and unresolved—about the older adult stance? 

Isn't it? 

And isn't it interesting how 18-year-old Tim who heard young adult Vega's version totally loved it and had a pretty accurate intuition that it could be about a grown-up with unresolved childhood trauma? 

And isn't it interesting how now-Tim who hears that and the older Vega's version can't decide which one is better? Loves them both? Sometimes loves one better, sometimes equally? And neither "both" nor "either" kinds of loving are better kinds of loving, because loving is loving and tuning to that love beam is the only thing that makes sense the older you get? 

What are Blake's songs? Who are they for? 

One thing about the older Vega version: there is more silence in it. The younger version's narrator is straightforwardly ambiguous, split between grown up and child feelings. 

The older version's narrator is however ambiguously straightforward. They allow for a lot of silence around the singing line. Like a child who doesn't need to fill in the space. Who doesn't know they are signaling how much danger they are in, to a caring grown-up, in that very quietness. 

From the very first two lines of "Luka," you know something is terribly wrong. It's the very straightforwardness with which they go, "My name is Luka. I live on the second floor." To someone they may have seen on the stairs but have never spoken to. To a stranger they need to talk to because...

I actually can't listen to that one, not because I don't like it but because, see remark about PTSD. Because it's so on the money. 

Then there's the fact that planet Earth is a small blue turning thing and condensation and evaporation and scattering like light...how babies think they're the universe. 

Like I say, this is a genius song. 

Here's a Thing from the Book

 Imagine Toad of Toad Hall escapes from prison disguised not as a washerwoman but as a jazz-funk bass guitarist. Hang on. Don't. No one wants to imagine that. 

I freakin love this. And it was the first thing that summon the Grief, who (it is a who, I feel), the being I call "The Inner Bodyworker" in The Stuff of Life. 

So much that it's made it into my memoir with humans in it, Escape from the Morgue. I've written 55,000 words in six days! 

See, if you want to cry, always use the major key like the medievals say. 

By the time Barbara holds up the sign that says "MUSIC" I belong hopelessly to this video with the ocean coming out of my eyes. Erm, that's in the first frame :))))

Just to make it much "worse" listen to the albeit bad recording of Allan Holdsworth does to this when he's their guitarist for a couple of glorious years (below). 

If you want to add to crying thing, just play that keyboard riff so that it's now in the major. Nice one Allan, understated Tim. Then slide it Latin-ly under the tune, a gentle caress. Really really nice one, Allan. 

Which enables him and King to have the most wonderful conversation in the last chorus and a new coda...Good Grief indeed.

Here Is the Stuff in The Stuff of Life

Concealer

Secret Door

Grief

Teddy Bear

Cowboy Costume

Antidepressants

Train Station

CPAP

Sound file

The brain

Afterimages

Power Station

Small Blue

 

Epigraphs (Beginning and Ending) of Escape from The Morgue

 Beginning; 

End: 

Description of Escape from The Morgue

[redacted]

So writes Timothy Morton in this courageous, intense, passionate, funny and heartbreaking memoir about how his father shaped him. Here at last is the book Morton has been working tirelessly on his whole adult life, pouring countless hours of research and lecturing and writing into never ever imagining it, let alone writing it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll realize everything in this blurb is accurate. If you have a pulse slash Complex PTSD slash care about mental health, race and gender activism, ecology or how to resist fascism both inside and outside your head, this book is for you. 

Get Me an Agent

 I mean it. Lovely crew, help get me an agent. Help me publish Escape from The Morgue. If you believe in my work then this is the one. Drama too, and Hell and The Stuff of Life, all of them happening now, all related because they're so personal. But this one is...

Drama was intense. But I wrote that in 20 hours over a couple of weeks. This was 40 plus hours over five continuous days. I need to do more, but I have it now, another totally unscheduled book. It's 45,000 words. I wrote 10,000 since yesterday afternoon. 

Demon is leaving. I can feel my brain falling asleep and jerking awake.

It was like Contact, downloading instructions for building a ship, in my case a bathysphere, made of music on rotation. It’s now 45,000 words.

I want an agent or a crowd of loving fans to get this published good and proper with a heavy duty press when I’m done. 

This is the first book I’ve shared before I’ve finished and what a doozy … it’s because finally I’m in my being totally and really enjoying it, no need to fabricate some cute persona to be lovable or whatever. Just being open. Realizing I have pals.

Book will be of huge benefit to trauma sufferers and it’s a death ray to the anti-w*** people (refuse to say or spell it). 

At the end are maxims and tips and how-tos. Book goes from dark to light. 

I also have a short book of of those maxims which will cause Peterson’s to collapse like metal helmet of Witch King of Angmar and that fraud Harari to blow away like ashes.

The Even Later Latest Book

 See immediately below. I've written 9000 words a day for five days. I won't stop, like the hip hop song. 

This Often Happens Part 2

 The trouble is if you have an original idea, it hasn't been published yet, and that's already scary because it doesn't come in the form of a pre-existing shiny book that costs something. And you sometimes can hardly explain it even to yourself: that's the joy of it, really. 

This Often Happens

 Happened in New York City, 2019. Author of New Yorker piece about me? "Never heard of him." (Manager having been to Ivy X too (I assume, why they know this agent) takes note and will eventually drop me.) Plans for new books? "Everyone's writing that book." Other proposal? "I don't really see what this book is about." Thank you Mitchell and Webb for helping me to process...

Hip Hop's Proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

 Have you seen the film? Deep Cover I mean. This song belongs to the closing credits. 

Haunting, this song is. That LA feeling of quiet suburbia laced with absolute menace. The single piano chord with semitones, the augmented fourth bass line. 

I studiously avoid anything that sounds like acting Black. Frat boys with sideways baseball caps at CU Boulder helped. My stepdad Maurice being from Jamaica helped. But, I have strong feelings about Deep Cover, because it reminds me of parts of my childhood. The drugs and the criminal gangs part of my childhood. Nothing scares you once you've met a Kray Twins assassin. In your dad's living room. At age 12. I'm coming for you De Sadist. And this is the song for the closing credits.

Strongly identify with some of it, overlap in the region of 12-year-old Tim walking through his dad’s neighborhood, “Fairyland” aka Maryland, "an island of lost children," as he said with characteristic sinister poetry. Roy the junkie lives over here, who one Christmas Day showed up on Dad's doorstep and died on the spot in his doorway, Dennis over there, similarly addicted, keep walking Tim, through a bombed out post-WW2 misery space on the edge of Hell. Then, far worse—arriving at Dad's house where on any given day the police might show up and arrest his partner for possession of 1000 tabs of acid and a lot of speed, everyone from off the street and worse piled in his living room. A place where the worst thing you could be was not a murderer or a thief or ... but a snitch. 

That LA noir feeling of quiet suburbia right up next to not-suburbia (but what is it...what), laced with absolute menace. The sound of a car rounding the corner two blocks away. The single piano chord. Snoop Dog like a cartoon mouse on a 1920s Disney loop, “Creep with me as I crawl through the hood…” His utterly strange and uncanny intonation of “187…” like a teenage ghost descending from a broken traffic light. That incredible line that slips over the bar like a kid slipping down an alleyway to avoid the cop cars and the not-cop cars: “But I got the hook up with somebody who knows how to get in contact with him.” 

This song and the film are the most wonderful noir loop, anti-racism’s proof of Monty Python’s proof of Turing’s proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Mathematical objects (numbers) in deep cover as logical propositions sticking it to the bad guys then sticking it to the really bad guys, the cops, and then the really really bad guys, the government (logic). How you have to be ridiculously smart just to cope…how much RAM that takes up. How badly I feel for anyone who has to calculate just to get across the street without being shot. 

The Monty Python version, called "Argument Clinic," is handy and also comes laced with its own kind of genius menacing grin: 

For every sketch, there can never be a police officer with enough authority to arrest everyone in it for violating the Strange Sketches Act, since every time an officer enters the sketch they are in the sketch. 

Change "sketch" to Dad's house.