A Dynamite Interview (very very recent)

 Blake Chastain of Exvangelical wasted no time in posting this. 

Time Is a Mist that Flows from the Mouth of the Spirit

וַֽיְהִי־ עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־ בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃ פ

And the evening and the morning were the second day.

My First Substack Post Is about (You Guessed It?) LAWNS

 

Kicked to the Kerb: Lawn Convolute Alpha by Timothy Morton

The Silence of the Lawns (Is Deafening)

Read on Substack

Why So Much Ecological Writing Gets You Stuck in a Heat Dome

I wrote about why environmentalist writing gets trapped in a rhetorical heat dome https://t.co/RCmesNfxrM

— Timothy Morton (@the_eco_thought) June 26, 2024

Bookplate Offer!

 

Bookplate offer! Send me a note with proof of purchase of my new new book Hell and a good address, and I will send you two bookplates, one signed. If it’s hard to get the proof of purchase into a note, just email me at tbm2@rice.edu The bookplates I made myself using the poetry and imagery of William Blake. They’ll stick nicely onto the frontispiece of your copy. I’ve used about 250 so far!

- Timothy Morton

Read on Substack

Cool Water for Your Burning Brain in a Burning World

 Sick of the horror yet? 

“Blake’s Songs of Innocence cry out that we don’t have to live in a world where master versus slave, human versus nonhuman, male versus female define everything. There is always a lovely, innocent excess of reality over what we think we see, our eyes dimmed by conflict and rage and fear. This is what Blake meant when he wrote, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ Auguries of Innocence). That grain is not defined by its place in an hourglass. ‘Satan’s watch fiends’ – the ideas, ideologies, and people that master measurement (Blake’s allegorical writing lets you be wonderfully flexible) – do not have a monopoly on that tiny crystal of silicon. You could find all kinds of sparkling facets in that grain if you looked carefully enough.”

Want a Signed Copy? It's Easy!

 Message me (tbm2@rice.edu) with proof of purchase of my book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, and an address...

...and I'll send you two Blake bookplates I've made, one signed! They're stickers so you can easily put one in your copy. 

Just about to mail the third batch. That means I've signed 250 so far. 

Lovely Spirit Spiritual Songs by Lovely Beings

 This Library of Congress post is incredible. You can hear them singing. 

"I’d like to honor two prodigious collectors of African American spirituals, Becky Elzy and Aberta Bradford. These two African American women, who were born into slavery in Louisiana, remembered over one hundred spirituals and shared them with people who had the institutional means to preserve them. The result is a published book in the Library’s general collections containing 120 songs, a microfilm shared by the American Folklife Center and the Library’s Music Division containing at least 6 unpublished songs, and 3 sound discs in the AFC archive containing 10 recordings of Elzy and Bradford’s singing"

Lovely Review of the New Book

 By Frank Mills, on his wonderful website. 

Yeah I Have a Substack and I Said a Thing about a Post of Zizek's

 

I almost liked this a lot. But, come on—feeling sorry for what white people did and do, there’s no harm in it. A little bit (or a lot, even) of guilt and shame never hurt anyone. Just because it might spark a superego spiral is no reason not to go there. And looking stupid while you squirm well, that just comes with the territory. You can’t do this part beautifully. It’s called actual real conscience. Also, I’m not sure the “père” (of whatever kind) is implicitly pire-in-waiting. Even if it is, it’s being nice and irritating and oedipal for now, and that’s good enough for me, as a survivor of a pire of a father like you wouldn’t believe.

- Timothy Morton

Read on Substack

It's Juneteenth. It's Also My Birthday

 

Some Hell Interviews and Launches I'd Love You to See and Hear (links)

There are now loads of interviews and other events about Hell, which I would love you to listen to, so I'm aggregating all the links here. 

The one I just did for Future Fossils is a humdinger: two and a half hours of recording! Look out for the podcast. 

The one for KUHF's Houston Matters with Craig Cohen was so great. 

The dialogue I did at the Norwich launch is out and it was very moving and deep. 

I'm going to be on Sirius XM next Monday. 

Tomorrow I'll be doing the Deconstructionists podcast and next week it's Exvangelical with Blake Chastain. 

Miranda Melcher's New Books podcast was so great. 

My discussion with Paul Miller at the Yale Center for Sacred Music was very enjoyable. 

Andrew Keen's Keen On podcast was very compact and succinct. 

Hell: A User's Guide, the New York launch with Paul Miller was so awesome. 

Spotlights with Sam Mickey was wonderful. 

And The Traveler in the Evening with Andy Wilson was also wonderful. 

Eventually the launch at Washington University will be out on video. 

Talking of Andy Wilson, the Blake Society event was amazing. 

"Paradise," from the launch t Syracuse, was the original and really spontaneous. 

There are some interviews that I've recorded that haven't yet appeared: one with David Dault (Things Not Seen) and one with the Satanic Temple. 

"Dark Green Gods" was a seminar for a UK class on ecology and contemplation. 

The London launch is coming on video! 

This Is Wonderful and Really Important

 

Norwich Launch Photos

 

The Book Hive

The Octagon Chapel

Maurice, Joe Hedinger and Henry Layte

Joe Hedinger

Joe and Ruth 

At the London Launch

The Old Church (1563)

 

It was such an extraordinary contrast with the Norwich one. Complementary. Norwich: an eighteenth-century Unitarian church. London: the one remaining Elizabethan church in London (1563, on land noted in the Domesday Book in 1086. Norwich: pale greens. London: pinks and magenta light. Norwich: octagonal space, almost in the round, with a balcony. London: a stage with chairs surrounding the stage. 

These physical differences were matched by what we talked about. I say we because for me, thinking is a team sport, and now that I've met my cousin Lee, a bespoke suit maker, I understand the concept of decorum afresh. Decorum, a classical rhetorical concept, doesn't have to mean "fitting" language in some cookie-cutter way: language has to fit cliches, established by authority, so that dawn is always the rosy fingers of Aurora and so on... 

Decorum is TAILORING. It's doing what Harman talks about in Guerilla Metaphysics: going with the flow (or against) of the thing, following its directives. It's along the same lines as Heidegger's wonderful remark about rhetoric  as listening. 

Lee and I do the same job, that's patently clear. Lee does it with cloth; I do it with phrases. 

Audience size was the same in both cases: one hundred and twenty. But the vibe was different. I would put it this way, in terms of a radius from my personal life, my friendships, my family. Norwich had a greater radius--my life was in there, but the edge of the circle was to do with the political and literary and theological content of the new project(s). London's radius was narrower, which wasn't to say that it didn't include a lot of the book. 

But in London I had cousins, friends I hadn't seen in thirty plus years, friends I hadn't seen in ten plus years, so many wonderful people. My stepdad Maurice's friend Beverley came, a poet whose podcast I recommend most highly. 

Maurice was the continuity between both. How many times do you think I've been with my biological father to an event? Let alone out of town? Let alone to two in a  row? He did show up to one of my lectures, just one, but he didn't tell me he'd be there and I didn't see him afterwards. He did show up to a concert of my music in college, and he did show up to some of me and my brother's gigs. But trust me, it was different. 

 My childhood exemplifies Lacan's phrase "le père ou le pire": the father, or something much worse. It's a real stretch for Zizek to say that this phrase (originally ".... ou le pire") means that the "father" / oedipal authority is something that in the end needs replacing because it's intrinsically bad. I would have given ANYTHING to have a normal, slightly irritating, totally reliable and loving dad. And where do anti-Oedipal solutions go apart from into incest? Really? I'm not talking about an individual. You can imaging a commune whose authority is irritating and loving and consistent. Or you can imagine Jonestown. 

It's been an overwhelmingly wonderful week. 

Norwich Book Launch audio: Revelations of Divine Ecology

 120 people laughed and cried and hugged and every book was sold. 

Timothy Morton · Revelations of Divine Ecology

"How Deep Is Your Love" essay in a lovely new philosophy book

 ...edited by Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Elemental-Embodied Thinking for a New Era. 

Essay by Treena Balds and me! 

Houston Public Radio Interview!

 It was great to do this. Craig is very good at his job and had created a thoughtful and open atmosphere in his revamped studio. He asked incredible questions about the book. 

UK This Week!

 It'll be the first time I've been back to the country of my birth in FIVE years. 2019 was the last time. We were performing TIME TIME TIME in London to an audience of 800, that place was packed. The election had just happened and people were looking for reasons to think-feel beyond the horrors. There was a colossal standing ovation. People were crying. 

Now I'm going back to launch Hell and to be with my long lost stepfather--those two things are not really in order. I designed the trip to visit with Maurice, then people started talking with me about launching Hell, so Maurice and I will be traveling to Norwich and Stoke Newington too. I'll be signing books and inserting bookplates (they're really nice!) and talking and dialoguing with some wonderful people. For all kinds of reasons it's going to be very emotional.