“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, March 11, 2024

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!)

Friday, March 8, 2024

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 I want this bill rescinded and I want no further contact from ADT.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." 

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

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


Sunday, February 25, 2024

...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. 

Friday, February 23, 2024

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. 

Monday, February 19, 2024

Sunday, February 11, 2024

HEL/L/OVE

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



Saturday, February 10, 2024

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: 

Thursday, February 1, 2024

"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." 

Sunday, January 21, 2024

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


Wednesday, January 17, 2024

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. 


Tuesday, January 16, 2024

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. 



Sunday, January 14, 2024

I'm Loving Sharing These New New Classes with You

 Head over to Soundcloud. 


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.