I Spoke with Phuture about the Future in Ibiza

 Yes. One of my heroes. The reason I write so much of what I write. DJ Pierre, who turned an envelope filter on the Roland TR-303 baseline and changed music. Who made scary dance music, an innovation in itself: acid house. 

I was on a panel with him at IMS Ibiza this week, having given the keynote to set the tone for the whole conference of about 1000 DJs, producers and musicians. Other panelists included DJ Madame Gandhi, who was brilliant, and Georgia Taglietti, who seemed to have read everything I had ever done, Maria May and Ruth Daniel, who both spoke plangently on the ethical and political dimensions of techno. 

Paradise (Hell lecture)

 500 people, Syracuse University Art Museum. Thank you thank you to Edward Morris and Susannah Sayler! 

Timothy Morton · Paradise

Earth Day Rant from Hell

 I made MAGA. I did. Well not just me. 

1. I can only take responsibility myself for what I see in the world. 

2.  People like me stopped talking about God to our students. 

3. Ecological language is Old Testament revenge speak and Joe Truck Driver has something BETTER: Jesus loves him anyway.

4.

5. Seriously I never got the memo about not speaking about God from theory class, at which I am a bona fide alpha plus student. A never given grade at Oxford which I got for my theory exam. The top is alpha minus. Believe me I can destroy you using Hegelian Marxism. But I shan't. Because it sucks. 

6. Until people like me talk forgiveness and mercy and Jesus we have ceded a HUGE area to the ultra right. 

7. This is the main reason I wrote Hell. It's coming. 

8. All the scientistic yelling has done jack lshit. 

9. Scholars created the internet as the Wild West forgetting about the legacy of slavery and what would happen if there was a new Wild West. 

Hellspike for Earth Day

 The single fang of Björk and the molars of books versus the triple snaggleteeth of Hell LOLOL

"The Marriage of Religion and the Biosphere" (massive awesome interview (MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF BLAKE))

 

Great New Interview

 

Hell Launch in Houston: What Happened

 I can do no better than send you extracts from an email I sent to my publisher and others: 

Club night was amazing. Stefano [Cagol] came FROM VENICE (he had invited me to give the first ever Hell lecture, in the Dolomites on Zoom, last year). Ed came from Syracuse (yes, that Ed[ward Morris], from that lecture! [I gave one at Syracuse in February]). Paul [Miller aka DJ Spooky] was so great not only behind the decks but as an amazing host. 

We sold so many copies of Being Ecological! Many many! It was lovely to sign them.  There was a huge line. 

Lecture was also amazing. I’ve done dialogues many times and that was the BEST. Paul was very enthused about the book and he knows everyone. He wants to launch it in NYC. He got Cornel and Slavoj together at the New School last week. He wants to hook up with Columbia etc etc. If anyone can make it work in NYC it’s Spooky. 

So much lovely conversation. I have a thing about “I have a dream” [MLK] that is much more than even in the book now, I’m so happy with it. And I felt at home with the U of H Downtown students, many continuing ed, genuine, emotionally connected people, great students of all ages. There is now other stuff that isn’t in the book. I researched the original Greek in “But deliver us from evil”—it’s really really really powerful and nothing like what I was taught, ever. 

I was TERRIFIED. Not since my first big keynote in 2005 have I been terrified like that, with cotton mouth. I talked about it and made people laugh. I read Thomas Merton’s “Moral Theology of the Devil” at the start. I did a really heavy powerpoint like I haven’t done since Hyperobjects. Ed [Morris], an artist who had persuaded me strongly to do a presentation, was impressed. 

I handed out the 100 flyers for the book promotion at Brazos Bookstore! 

It was such an honor and a privilege to launch the book this way. 

The Sound Resounds Underground

 Thanks to Andrew Melchior for sending me this incredibly interesting article about recordings of life in the soil. 

Register free for this Zoom lecture on Blake and ecology and religion: 11:30 LA 1:30 today CST, 2:30 EST, 7:30 London, 8:30 Europe

 It's gonna be so great to talk to the Blake Society! 

https://blakesociety.org/product/timothy-morton/

Order Hell from My Favorite Store and Get a Signed Bookplate Designed by Me!

 Brazos Books is one of those local treasures that you just want to live in, hidden in a corner. It's like a bakery of books, that freshly baked book smell. They do readings and all kinds of events. And right now they're running a promotion. If you order the new book from them, they'll include a bookplate I've designed (based on the art of William Blake, with a lovely quotation that Blake genius Andy Wilson found), and more, signed by me. 

Here We Go

 My fourth Hell lecture, the first specifically about Blake, the first ever for the Blake Society. I'm nervous! 

There's still time to register. It's at 1:30pm my time, 7:30pm UK time. 

International Music Summit next week

 

Register Free Here for the Hell Club Night in Houston!

 Ten days from now, two world class DJs will spin Hell into existence (as it were LOL) along with celestial cocktails and more, at the acclaimed Avantgarden club in Houston. You can register free here. 

New Website: Christian Ecology

 I decided to start a Facebook page dedicated to the subtitle of Hell. It's going to be less intense than the YouTube page, more contemplative and softer. Take a look if you wish and I would be honored if you followed it. 

I'm Honored to Be a Part of the National Book Awards This Year

 What a lovely thing that I was invited to be on the Nonfiction panel. 

I Am on TikTok (Heaven Help Me?)

 ...Heaven indeed, for I am Professor from Hell. I'm posting little things about the book and the launch (4.18, Houston, Avantgarden!)

If You Use ADT, The Burglar Is Already in Your Home

From the Daylight Robbery Department: 

 "I am rejecting this response because: No other loan I have ever paid off early requires me to pay the interest I would have paid if I had not paid it off early. None. I am paying two mortgages. I have paid off two mortgages. I have bought three cars. I am paying one mortgage off in half the time (approximately), 15 rather than 30 years. ADT's "early termination fee" would be like the mortgage company charging me for the 15 years of interest I saved. Or like having to pay the rest of my car loan's interest after I paid off the loan in four years rather than ten. This is entirely unacceptable and, I suspect, not legal. This is a scam. I want this bill rescinded and I want no further contact from ADT. 

I am the author of 25 books (46 translations in 19 languages), and I have a fairly big presence in the media. There are pieces about me in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Guardian. I have worked for the BBC, I have made a movie with Jeff Bridges and have written a book with the pop musician Björk. If ADT persists in trying to charge me for interest I SAVED by paying early for the equipment, I will immediately start a conversation with my media contacts. I suspect ADT must be doing this to a large number of customers. 

Sincerely,

Timothy Morton"

Context: I paid about $2500 for alarm equipment because Treena's mom (in Jamaica) was terrified of gangs of armed MAGA thugs. I bought it early. ADT are charging me over $2500 as an "early termination fee." 

"Further to my response to ADT, I would like to add the following: 

1. Throughout the complaint ADT have lied about when I was charged for the full amount of the equipment. I was NOT charged when I asked to cancel my account. I was charged after an error that they did not tell me about. 

2.Throughout the complaint ADT have lied (perhaps based on a false technician's report) about the incident with the thermostat. The technician declared that he was unable to fix the thermostat. It had not been connected to the internet or bluetooth for weeks. 

3. Since getting ADT they have been confusing, discourteous and drastically prone to error. One customer service person told me I had a thermostat they had not sold me, and nearly made me break the existing one. My method of payment was stopped when a machine ate my card, and they didn't tell me. They just started charging me late fees and sending me red letters. I believe that this is the cause of me being charged the full amount for the equipment, without warning. At no point did anyone call me to alert me to the problem with my account." 

Those Hell Blurbs

 ...and they rock so hard, there's no need for a description on the back. It's all there: 

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology/Timothy Morton

  

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

—Laurie Anderson

 

“Timothy Morton journeys with the restless and radical spirit of William Blake through Hell, seeking synthesis and reconciliation between the methods of science and the spirit of religion. Signaling to us through the flames of their own personal hell, Morton shapes a space where we—freed from Cartesian subjectivity and the demands of old, vengeful gods—may glimpse the prospect of a new Jerusalem, one built on love.”

—David Dorrell, writer, curator, cofounder of LOVE, member of M/A/R/R/S

 

“Hell 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, journalist, editor, writer

 

“Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic 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

 

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.

 

978-0-231-21470-4 cloth

978-0-231-21471-1 paper

...yet I Did Get Carried Away into Aggression at Syracuse

 ...I'm really examining the micro actions, including speech, right now. I'm noticing how a strong desire to impress people led me to a cheap place, once, in my lecture at Syracuse. I talked about killing people, with relish. Something compelled me to go beyond what I was saying, which was about nonviolence. 

I am struck by how Gandhi says, you have to be ready to kill in order to be nonviolent, otherwise you're a coward. That was the context. Then I got carried away. 

There is a very seductive language of violence, for instance when it comes to ecological action. I was speaking out against blowing up a pipeline--it would only hurt nonwhite people, and nonhuman beings, and so on. But I felt I needed to prove that I was equally capable of imagining violence. 

I'm very grateful to my hosts, because this new project is bigger than Hyperobjects, and I truly need to gig it and road test it before I've really "thought" it, which his how that book became so incredibly great. 

Well that was great. Great, I tell you

 I'm about to get the shuttle to the airport in Syracuse NY after giving a lecture to about five hundred people at the Art Museum on the occasion of the opening of Assembly, a wonderful exhibition curated by Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris. They've produced a gorgeous book too, for which I'll be writing an essay. Thank you everyone! I road tested some Hell and it seemed to work really well. 

There are some very key neurological ideas, one very simple and another intriguing and deep, which line up with religion so beautifully. 

Read My First Theology / Philosophy Essay with Treena Balds

 QR takes you to it. 

Have You Joined My Patreon Yet?

 

Here it is 

Be There

HEL/L/OVE

 Avantgarden club, Houston, April 18. Hell launch party. Devilish DJs and libations. Be there. 

I Talk Theology for a Course on Contemporary Spirituality (interview)

 Big News: There is a huge resurgence of interest in Christianity in the UK in Green circles and I just accidentally wrote a book for you. I talk about all this and more: 

"Natural" and "organic" Now Deployed by the Ultra-Right

 ...once again proving a central argument of this, which made a case for "ecocriticism" as fascism lite:

Examples? Read this about the Taylor Swift panic. They're right to panic or course. Here is a white woman who doesn't suck, a white woman in an all-American girl embrace with a football star. Reminds you that their fascism is a dead end. I wondered why the previous president referred to the rabid supporters in New Hampshire as "organic." 

An Extract from Hell

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

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

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

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

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

Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology

Jesus He Knows Them

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

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

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

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

I'm Loving Sharing These New New Classes with You

 Head over to Soundcloud. 

Timothy Morton · Prosody Narrative Drama 3

I'm Proofreading Hell

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

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

Timothy Morton · Hell- A Brief Description

This DJ Set Interview Is Sublime

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

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

Eyes Get Wet in Dry January

 

Timothy Morton · No More Goodbyes

Plus Plus Plus

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

Big Big News

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

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

My First Book Published First in Spanish

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

I Write Music Sometimes

Timothy Morton · Relativistic Jet Module 1 (Quantum Data)

Leaf Blowers

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

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

I recorded the sound from about fifty yards away.

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

Timothy Morton · Menil Leaf Blowers