Dr. Tim and Bjork

Regarding "He mind-melds with Björk" (Sunday pg G3), at first I couldn't decide if the article was parody or not.  After all, a story about a self-absorbed university professor communing with the the biggest flake in pop music so as to achieve a higher state of consciousness just cries out for parody.

Take the opening sentence: "The first time I met Rice University professor Timothy Morton, we were in a party of 50 or so, consuming blue-green algae water and sardine skeleton chips during artist Marina Zurkow’s conceptual dinner “Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geologic Time.”"

Is there anything about this passage that is not precious?  Without reading further, all I wanted to do was bundle writer Molly Glentzer, Dr. Tim, Bjork and as many conceptual dinner throwers as could fit into my seaweed-fueled Volkswagen micro bus for a trip to either a hermetically sealed bubble where they could sustain the vibe indefinitely, or directly onto the "Further", Ken Kesey's bus of slightly larger dimensions so that they, Ken and the Merry Pranksters could expand the Eco-Babble vocabulary, courtesy of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Decisions, decisions.

In the end, I decided to simply flog my way through the rest of the article, and it was some tough sledding.  Professor Tim - holder of the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University - turned out be nothing but an existential celebrity Fan Boy, and a near-incoherent one at that, leaving one to wonder exactly what Rita Shea Guffey could possibly have been thinking.  The rest of the article was a melange of references to hip parties and obscure concepts that none of us will ever be invited to or take the time to Google.  

I began to despair as to whether Molly Glentzer would be able to tie it all together, when towards the end she told the story of Dr. Tim complimenting Bjork over some aspect of the show, and Bjork's reply: “Yeah, it’s a bit ‘Thousand Plateaus,’ isn’t it?”  Dr. Tim's mind was blown by Bjork's ability to reference an obscure "philosophy concept from the 1970s".  Mine was blown by the fact that a university professor could transform himself so completely from a respected academic to a gushing teenage girl, and still call it scholarship.

Pete Smith

Houston, TX