faulker058

This was such an honor an really fun to do for Lion's Roar . Take home line: Buddhism is not about suffering at all.

Dipesh wrote yesterday to the anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, and me, about the Houston events. Dipesh, if you don't know him, is the author of a very very powerful essay called “The Climate of History,” one of the very first texts to deal full on with the Anthropocene from a humanities perspective. There's a lot of emotion here in Houston, mostly it's a toxic cocktail of boredom and fear. There's a lot to say, so expect more. But I thought this might work well for the blog: [Dear Dipesh] For me this situation is a great example of how my ability to understand things massively outstrips my ability to cope with them … One of the less pleasant aspects is the way the situation engages people’s narcissistic sadism (“look at the stupid fools over there”), magnified by cynical reason (“they are so ideologically deluded compared with me”). It has been spectacularized on the TV as Cymene and Dominic and I were discussing yesterday, in a podcast, and this means pe...

This was so good because Federico is so good. We did it on August 21; the book was published on August 22.

Stuart Jeffries does such a lovely job here . Isn't the cover just so good? Look how it seems like the designer used real bubbles on real cut paper... The design has to do with maybe the deepest concept in the book, the set-theoretical one.

This is not embed-able... click instead . Very good interviewer, Leonard Schwartz. We did it in February of this year.

Thanks Sonic Acts ! What a great archive of the adventures of the sound artists creating things with Tim's concept in Arctic Russia over three years...

Jesus H Christ: “Black demonstrators protesting the murder of teen-agers are met with tanks and riot gear; white demonstrators protesting the unpopularity of Nazi and Confederate ideology are met with politesse.” The New Yorker

“It’s not just true that there is a time for everything, as it says in Ecclesiastes (‘a time to reap and a time to sow . . .’); it’s the case that from grasses to gorillas to gargantuan black holes, everything has its own time , its own temporality.”

When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called Fawlty Towers.  Discuss.

“Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good; instead, it tells you something strange about apples in them- selves. Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of ‘pretty’. It’s strange, this feeling. It’s like the feel- ing of having a thought, without actually having one. In food marketing there is a category that developed in the last two decades or so called mouthfeel . It’s a rather disgusting term for the texture of food, how it interacts with your teeth and your palate and your tongue. In a way, Kantian beauty is thinkfeel . It’s the sensation of having an idea…”

Houston Matters has some very interesting aspects and one of them is that Craig Cohen, the host, is so reflective.

...in dialogue with Federico Campagna on the subject of my book Humankind . At 7pm.

Very recently I found out The Ecological Thought will be in Chinese by next year. There's also a Chinese translation of an essay I wrote coming, "Art in the Age of Asymmetry." Dark Ecology will be in Dutch and Croatian soon. There are a lot more things on the go, but it's hard to keep track! I'll make some inquiries.

I've been sending this to some people and I thought you might like to see it as well. There's a bunch of things I'm doing, hard for me to keep up with all of them, and I forget to tell people about them! Here's the link to the Guardian piece about me: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene-philosopher And here's Abasi Rosoborough the fashion designer. They've made a range of suits based on my hyperobjects concept and they're going to show at New York Fashion week this year: http://abasirosborough.com/contact/ Here's Newsnight, the flagship BBC news and current affairs show. They're having me on later this month: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mk25 Here's Ballroom Marfa where I'm curating an exhibition about Hyperobjects: https://www.ballroommarfa.org/ Here's the movie database page for Susan Kucera, who is directing me and Jeff Bridges in an ecology documentary: http://m.imdb.com/name/nm4848741/ An...

Gosh there are so many proofs this weekend. Four essays and the Penguin book. I haven't had a bunch like this for a while and it's nice to get stuck in to the laundry folding level of work. I love folding laundry. Do you have any? I'm very good at it. No really. Look at this. It's for Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert's Veer Ecology. It sounds good! The thing is, if you've written 185 essays, sometimes you surprise yourself with what you say or how you say it: Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. This is not a “merely” aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.

I'll be "in" (via Skype) Emilija Skarnulyte's new installation at Decad. Not quite sure of the time, I think 7pm Berlin time. If you haven't looked her up already, do so immediately. Everything she does embodies why I think art is beyond important and in particular articulates an incredibly beautiful and powerful ecological feminist post-humanism. But that's just the conceptual aspect. Skarnulyte is committed to making unbelievably precise and gorgeous objects (visual, sonic...) and is a true powerful film maker, the kind who is ready to climb into a gigantic radio telescope dish or become a mermaid and swim in freezing arctic water with a nuclear sub. I was just at this incredible film symposium in Lithuania and it convinced me that  I totally love film and filmmaking for this and many other reasons. Just days of liquid light pouring out of a gigantic screen and people ready to put their bodies in jeopardy in acts of solidarity with human and nonhuman beings....

(At least it sounds really nice lol) (this is also from the Naess essay proofs) Time isn’t nice and neat either. Because of what I’ve just argued, time itself is not a line of reified atomic now-points, but a spooky shifting that haunts itself, slightly in front or behind itself, the rippling play of light and shadow in the pond water reflected on the underside of a sundial on a late summer afternoon, a vibrant stillness that is far from static. The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present nowness, a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist, a region can’t be tied to a specific timescale. Nowness is a dynamic relation between the past and the future. According to the spectral logic I’m outlining, the present isn’t present! It doesn’t exist, at least not like that. The belief that “animals” are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now. Furthermore, past and future are art...

The basic question is, how deep do you want? Because I think you could go at least a level deeper than Naess. In order to do so, however, you have to realize something about systems theory. Here's a quotation from some proofs I'm reading for an essay collection on Naess: I need to part company with Naess a little bit, the aspects of his thought that seem to want to reduce the paradoxes I am hinting at, by reducing the lifeform to an underlying field of relations: Organisms and milieux are not two things—if a mouse were lifted into absolute vacuum, it would no longer be a mouse. Organisms presuppose milieux. Similarly, a person is a part of nature to the extent that he or she is a relational junction within the total field. The process of identification is a process in which the relations which define the junction expand to comprise more and more. The “self” grows towards the “Self.”   But the mouse would still be a mouse in a vacuum, albeit a dead mouse. There is nothing about...

This was so good. Paul had the idea of making a fire instead of the usual living room on stage set up for these things. What a great thing. I got to be the person who stokes the fire, which is great, because I'm a total pyromaniac! I think this is one of the best live things I ever did so I hope you like it too. Human-kind: A talk between Paul Johnson & Timothy Morton, 2017 from Camden Arts Centre on Vimeo .

Sorry for all the delays. My life got very busy after the Guardian piece came out. So I'll be on the BBC's flagship news and current affairs show Newsnight on August 22. Soon I'll be in Mexico City. I've managed to persuade Yoko Ono to put some of her work in my Penguin book! I did a lovely dialogue with Paul Johnson: I'll embed it here. And last week was Cinema Camp in Lithuania with some unbelievable film makers. More on all that soonest. Right now I'm proofreading my Penguin book. You should be able to order my Verso book by now. It's like $13 for the hardback in the USA, which is a total steal. I'm so excited for my Verso book coming out. I tried to think of the most offensive thing I could say, according to humanities scholars, and I say it: We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences. !!!