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Showing posts from 2012

Extraordinary Discourse 101

Here's To The Outsiders 2 of 2 And now at the edge of the year, we gather in the Edge community. I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. Bill Hicks Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: Raggedy outsiders. John Updike ...we needed three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked to be be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the powers and knowledge we always felt were our birthright--powers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back, we must cast away the habits of exile--the self-contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the wilful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning. Frederick Turner

Extraordinary Discourse 100

Here's To The Outsiders (1 of 2) We have come, along the wandering path of these podcasts, in the darkest time of winter, at a time when the news has also been dark, to the hundredth episode. Somewhere around 10,000 items so far. First day after the Mayan calendar cycle, just under Christmas, the time of family trauma and much loneliness. Let us take a leisurely stroll for a couple of episodes through the land of the Outsiders. Come with me and join the Outsiders! It didn't work in the composition of this work to drop names with every item. But listen for Margaret Visser, Robert Anton Wilson, David Cayley, Jack Kerouac, John Livingston, Bucky Fuller, Leonard Cohen, Alan Watts, Douglas Rushkoff, Caroline Casey, Derrick de Kerckhove,  John Taylor Gatto, Michael Ignatieff, Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jonathan Winters, Richard Kearney, Ivan Illich, James Hillman, Nils Christie. If I've missed any that concern you, please contact me and I'll see if I have a na

Extraordinary Discourse 099

The Current Scene Through Different Windows The strength of language doesn't consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. "Word work," Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, "is sublime because it is generative," its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. "We die," she said. "That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer's day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee."  Lewis Lapham  Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear  Huffpost

Extraordinary Discourse 098

In A Thousand Nutshells All artists are pickpockets. friend of Robert W. Fuller The right way to wholeness is a longissima via , not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus. C. G. Jung (1968 [1944] par. 6)

Extraordinary Discourse 097

Diverse Disclosure Gratitude to Old Teachers Robert Bly When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake, We place our feet where they have never been. We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy. Who is down there but our old teachers? Water that once could take no human weight- We were students then - holds up our feet, And goes on ahead of us for a mile. Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

Extraordinary Discourse 096

Playful Learnings And Teachings On Blue Morning, my big bicycle, steel crow or raven, minimally gentrified in the land of finance capitalism, dressed for the investment climate, anonymous among brokers and quant geeks, adjusting for fiscal drift and partial de-indexation, bank rates and prime rates, in the great field of consortiums, task forces, hardliners, cabinet shuffles, party hacks and scrums, among wholly owned subsidiaries, past hot money flows, bond ratings, protected by the gnomes of Zurich and the oracles of the IMF, I was on alert to push my envelope/diversify my portfolio. My strategies were dream strategies. Apocalyptic-tack-talk strategies. Hallucinatory and liberal strategies. Rhizomatic and arborescent strategies. Visionary-fairy strategies. Musical stragedies. Strategies of laughter. Today I saw powerful wind in a hurry haul a graceful maple, rakish half crown shining gold, almost horizontal: it bowed over a house and showered its dark roof with leaves. My

Extraordinary Discourse 095

Other-Wise [G]enuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. Chris Hedges

Extraordinary Discourse 094

Assisted Migration Of Ideas Any counsel worthy of the name should have culture at its core. Any counsel worthy of the name should begin to make a place in personal life for the rumoured, scattered story of who you come from where, and why. Counsel well done and honest makes a home for the orphan wisdom of personal life in the life of the world. Stephen Jenkinson

Extraordinary Discourse 093

Polytropos When Lyotard states that "every utterance [in a language game] should be thought of as a 'move' in a game", his statement is itself a 'move' in a language game. Wikipedia Jean-François Lyotard Page The time-frame is the "neo-liberal" years. The painting refers beyond the frame now and again. The deep themes are emancipation, birth and rebirth, and Play. The poet is Ernest Hemingway.

Extraordinary Discourse 092

Saturday School For Hackademics In an information-drunk culture like our own, knowledge must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life live, without killing life by getting what we want. You could say that knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom must be the place where that knowledge is fired, forged and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world. You could say that wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from what knowledge gathers. Human culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won’t live to see. You could say that people who have been bathed in grief and a love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together and sing their unknown songs to each other, and make human culture. Stephen Jenkinson

Extraordinary Discourse 091

Deeper Zingers An entertainment, and instrument of Orpheus. Utterance, that is, statutory (words legislate) and statuary (Figurines of Speech) expressive holons in fecund marshlands of coherence-probability fields. My gallery. It's seamless stitchery, like different-colored crystals in rock, for an involved dramatization. It is labor-incalculable. The gravitas of years of concentrated labor cut each of these jewels from conglomerate and earth, cooked each of these ingots out of raw mined material, and touched up with a brush that could paint variations of silence, even on fire. Much from my own garden but most, it turns out, from CBC1, a favorite radio station, "Canada's Public Broadcaster." It is to the edge of that gravitas grindwheel we could press the sudden new noses and tails of utterance (in sudden raw ways like the fish tap their noses on the glass in the Undersea Gardens. From across what to the human may appear to be a great gulf, you and this f

Extraordinary Discourse 090 Special: The World Owes You A Living: The Great Work

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Extraordinary Discourse 090: The World Owes You A Living: The Great Work This is the 8th in the World Owes You A Living suite. Episode 1 is here Episode 2 is here Episode 3 is here . Episode 4 is here Episode 5 is here . Episode 6 is here Episode 7 is here . Anyone who has dipped into my podcasts knows that a major theme of these compositions is the idea that the world owes us a living. "Something for nothing"? Yep! Well, meet me beyond the quid pro quo. An age of abundance is at the door. The arguments and illustrations for this theme run through this work like a river runs through a valley. Right behind this theme loom the wider themes of emancipation in general, Play, and the great option for maturation beyond the unfortunate scarcity-based compacts of the job system - the nightmare of history from which we are trying to awaken. In this time of change, while just about every major institution is under siege of metanoia , both Left and Rig

Extraordinary Discourse 089

Iconoclassroom Maybe editors and producers should expand beyond the usual “talking heads” and give the many important outside voices and movements some deserved coverage. Ralph Nader Time is a pomegranate, many-chambered, Nothing like what I thought. David Young Poem For Adlai Stevenson And Yellow Jackets Special thanks to Dr. Dave of Shrink Rap Radio today for Shrink Rap Radio #129, Process Work with Julie Diamond Click here for Julie Diamond's site. Song clip: Connie Kaldor , Relax

Extraordinary Discourse 088

Shape-Shifting Samizdat Inner Highlighter I read Lewis Thomas's adventure with the essays of Montaigne. Thomas said he would fold over the corner of the page if there was something on it he was sure to want to come back to-- after a while the book was much thicker with all the folded page-corners. All readers have an "inner highlighter." I have had occasion to wonder how many actually do get back to those yellow-highlighted lines of text, and what they do with them if they do get back to them. At least text is somewhat stable, it's dry land, you can find your way back to it. As for electronic media, what you don't record is gone, around the bend down the river. And yet the spoken word is human, nuanced, ensouled, grounded in a body, closer to us, you and I, as we sit here with warm breath in our nostrils. For many years I hunted (aggressive receptivity) and electrically gathered an eclectic harvest, clipped out the highlighted utterances, burned t

Extraordinary Discourse 087

Underground Railroad Of Utterances Passing We're Holding A Class Here, Beneath The School In general, this podcast can be likened unto an anti-class in the School for Intelligent Skivers and Wishers - a strong theme is Freedom Through Guaranteed Livable Income , so those who come looking for that subject will find a plentiful harvest. This is a one-stop Liberal Arts Deprogram. Listen: the class is deliberately loosely woven institutional analysis ("analysis" = loosening). There are pranksters in the anti-class, balloon-poppers who not only mock anything and everything most unexpectedly, but also spin us, pop us around with non-sequiturs and total irrelevancies and offers to change the subjext. Subjest. Subtext. Context. Non-text. We return regularly and lazily to the topics/themes, but we also go hyper-topical, in a way that is tropical, and sometimes hysterical. poetry: readers refer to Robinson Jeffers: Shine, Perishing Republic reading : Jeffers: Bat

Extraordinary Discourse 086

Moiety Bricolage Entertainment for thinking workers and players. I am willing to pass for a fool in my own desperate, perhaps foolish, efforts to persuade them to lift the veil from off the possible and future, which they hold down with both their hands, before their eyes. The most valuable communication or news consists of hints and suggestions. Henry Thoreau …men [sic] will have to be less like Achilles, imposing their will on the world, and more like Odysseus, the crafty, many-sided sojourner. Why Men Fail By DAVID BROOKS New York Times Published: September 10, 2012            Superfluous Supernumerary: more than is needed, desired, or required. Surprise    Rousseau: supplement : his word to describe writing: it means        both the missing piece and the extra piece.           Surplus           Tales out of school                                         The Stone Which The Builders Rejected           Time out.           Tour de force   

Extraordinary Discourse 085

Doodle Tonguing A gigantic cultural potluck offering countless dishes to sample. Sue Rosenthal describing the third phase of socialism. Let us meet the new era of abundance with self-chosen work and freedom… Ivan Illich, A Call To Celebration Less than 3% of DNA’s function involves protein manufacture; more than ninety percent functions in the realm of bioacoustic and bioelectric signalling. Dr. Leonard Horowitz          Pagan Parenthetical         Party Out Of Office         Parvenue         Peripheral Perk         Picnic Pluralist         Pot luck         Precession(al)         Pro-fanum         Provisional         Quiddity Rakish         Random         Ratios         Relations         Renegade         Richochet         Rogue          Secular Sheds          Sideline          Situational          Spare  (spare change, spare person) Spinoffs Sporadic          Stenochoric: of a plant or animal-  not widely distributed               geographically.         

Extraordinary Discourse 084

Steps, Stops, Stairs On The Journey Yonder Postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives. Wikipedia Jean-François Lyotard Page Profound change can happen in a click because of someone's example, or a casual comment that sinks in because it holds a truth. The power of random events to alter behaviour is grist for fiction and the real stuff of human lives. June Callwood A thought, or maybe two Dropped Threads 3 Laity  Leftovers  Loophole  Loss Leader  Lumpen: disenfranchised. Manqué?  Marginal Maverick Medlay Mezozoic mammals Moonlighting Nomad No man's land Obiter dicta (passing remark) Off the cuff Off the record  Off the wall Offbeat Offset Open category Outbuildings Outdoors Out of bounds  Out of it. Outside chance Out takes  Outside! Overland

Extraordinary Discourse 083

Field Notes From The Perimeters Kibitz, Kibitzer : 1. a spectator at a card game who looks at the players' cards over their shoulders. 2. A giver of uninvited or unwanted advice. 3. A person who jokes, chitchats, or makes wisecracks esp. while others are trying to work or discuss something seriously. "The word will shatter concrete. Solzhenitsyn wrote, 'The Word is more ancient than concrete.'" Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Hacker Heckler Helter Skelter Heterodox(y) Hors concours Impromptu Inadvertent Incidental Incognito Indirect Infidel Interval, Interest that has outstripped the principle. Interstitial Intervalism Intuitive Itinerant

Extraordinary Discourse 082

Story, Story, Aleatory This is an idea-generating jukebox/talkbox from the Edge. Songbirds select their music stands along forest edges, which means edges of roads or railway cuts or perhaps rivers as well as the edges of clearings, swamps, lakes etc. Burroughs said about text cut-ups, "cut into the present and the future spills out"… Another Burroughs wrote, “Down into Africa from the storied port of Alexandria, through Memphis and Thebae into the great unknown...” Are you ready to move on to being cut up? Jump metaphors: These utterances  were planted for the wind to catch and flip up into spontaneous tableaux vivant , encounters, unexpected engagements: this is the domain and daimon of the funny, and a stretch and oxygen cocktail throughout the dimensions that rarely get together in organized, compartmentalized days: rarely a cross-sectional party, a head-to-toe visit or two, a hunker down in the riverbed with a mad hatter and a committee.         Figm

Extraordinary Discourse 081

Exceptance Cognitive Synergy - "The state wherein two or more cognitions achieve a level of cooperation which results in an intellectual output greater than the sum of their individual contributions." Over 60 minutes of irreverent contemplation-packed fun!!

Extraordinary Discourse 080: The World Owes You A Living: Happiness

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The World Owes You A Living : Happiness This is the first of a series of islands off the shore of The World Owes You A Living series. Many of the speakers in this associational documentary are not named. Among others are Ronald Wright, Susan Sontag, Robert Thurman, Douglas Rushkoff, Jean Vanier, Thomas Berry, Robert Anton Wilson.  Song clip:  Leonard Cohen, Villanelle For Our Time, lyrics by F. R. Scott  Song: Dick Gaughan, Your Daughters And Your Sons , by Tommy Sands Dalit Freedom drumming

Extraordinary Discourse 079

Learn, Unlearn, Learn It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. Jacob Chanowski         Chance         Civilian         Contraband Convertible          Cryptozoic Detour           Deviant           Digression           Dilettante           Discretionary Dissident            Dividends            Doodles          Elliptical          El modo lirico Epiphenomenal Episodic         Errant         Ex officio                  Exception Extraneous         Experimental         Extra! Extra!         Extra-curricular         Extraordinary         Fifth column Song clip: Bon Jovi, Someday I'll Be Saturday Night

Extraordinary Discourse 078

Radical Utterance Lab All knowledge, all discoveries belong to everybody. ... All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you. William S. Burroughs, The Job Words are animals, alive with a will of their own. C.G. Jung Acte Gratuit                                              Ad hoc            Ad lib        Alias        Amateur           Amphibian         Anarchic                                          Anecdotal        Anonym         Aperiodic Apocryphal         Apostasy AWOL B-sides          Back country          Bank shot          Barbarian Bardo (between death and birth)          Between the lines         Bohemian Bonus Booby-prize         Boondoggler         Bootleg Buck-she         By the way!         Chance

Extraordinary Discourse 077

Come Outside And Play There are still many sparks of life in art, music, writing and comedy that break through the immobilizing gloom. C L'Hirondelle We can 'play up a little', meaning that we can try to 'spritefully' (as well as spiritually) 'breathe new life into old texts… Pat Kane The Play Ethic The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt. Chris Hedges Colonized by Corporations

Extraordinary Discourse 076 Special: Unmasking Modern "Medicine" 2: Are You Nuts?

Extraordinary Discourse 076 Special: Unmasking Modern "Medicine" 2: Are You Nuts? "Who am I, what power have I...?  I do my duty, I do what my boss tells me, and I do not meddle in high politics." And when you drag thousands of men, women and children to the gas chambers, you also do just what you are told to do, is that it, little man?  ...You have locked up the crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who, then, is to blame for all the misery?  Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man Each kind of madness is a distortion of privacy at its boundary with the social world. J. Bronowski, William Blake And The Age Of Revolution There is a madness which is a divine gift - the greatest of blessings have come to us through madness. Socrates We want a few mad people - see where the sane ones have landed us? G.B. Shaw Yippee!!! I am crazy!!!

Extraordinary Discourse 075 Special: Unmasking Modern "Medicine" 1

Extraordinary Discourse 075 Special: Unmasking Modern "Medicine" This Extraordinary Discourse Special is in memory of Deborah J. Millar (August 1957-June 2012). Valley of Decision The War of Armageddon, I'm given to understand, is fought in the Valley of Decision. Have you received a "terminal" diagnosis?  Have the revered medical experts plotted your upcoming death on their graphs? Do your doctors know anything about your life? Your loves, your socioeconomic situation, your gifts, your family, your history? Have they seen your home, your living conditions? No, unless they're a family friend. But they tell you to go home and die - while offering you a pleasant array of torturous "treatments" and all the "pain killers" anyone could wish for, and more super-expensive chemicals for the side-effects, and more for the side-effects of those. Some will turn to Google and look for "alternatives." But who will look

Extraordinary Discourse 074

Head Torque Almost every one of these clips applied torque to my head to turn it a little. In these times, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that my head (or neck) needs some WD-40 to  let it turn around easier - or perhaps the tightness is necessary so our heads don't continually spin. Why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually  or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives - particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? Graeber, 'The new anarchists', New Left Review quoted by Pat Kane The Play Ethic

Extraordinary Discourse 073

Quester's Kit Extraordinary Discourse is a continuous text, in which you can jump in anywhere, and jump anywhere. This is the 73rd segment but could be 1st, 50th, or 200th. The narrative is not linear, but radiating, like spokes in a wheel. It dips into different depths of time. The quality of the global conversation has to improve urgently. Pat Kane The Play Ethic Jim Andrews

Extraordinary Discourse 072

From The Vestibule Of Emancipations A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame. Ray Bradbury song clip: Charlie Major - I'm Somebody

Extraordinary Discourse 071

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Heady and Hearty Snack Banquet The Devil's Advice to Story-Tellers Robert Graves Lest men [sic] suspect your tale to be untrue, Keep probability—some say—in view. But my advice to story-tellers is: Weigh out no gross of probabilities, Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of Known instances of virtue, crime or love. To forge a picture that will pass for true, Do conscientiously what liars do— Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps That may shake down into a world perhaps; People this world, by chance created so, With random persons whom you do not know— The teashop sort, or travelers in a train   Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; Let the erratic course they steer surprise Their own and your own and your readers' eyes; Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Motive and end and moral in the air; Nice contradiction between fact and fact W

Extraordinary Discourse 070 Special: The World Owes You A Living 6

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Extraordinary Discourse 070 Special: The World Owes You A Living 6 59.38 minutes Today's Extraordinary Discourse Special is Episode 6, the final episode of The World Owes You A Living suite, a 6-part Millennial Associational Documentary. Finale. Here we employ our leisure to step out from the Hades of today's work world to survey the broad prospect. What news from the islands? We hear overarching philosophical and deep poetical views, we harken back to Athens and consider the freedom from livelihood they considered a self-evident requirement for citizenship. We recall the great drama of the soul, responding to the Sufi Khidr (guide), "man of bright prospects, leave your work and meet me at the riverside." Hey-- We're People! 16 Seminal Quotations 3rd And Last Stage Of Emancipation Veridical Visions Liberal Arts Radiant Aliveness The Joy Of Not Working What Are You Living For? Lao Tzu: "Heaven prefers no-one, but the sensibl

Extraordinary Discourse 069

Deeper Current Affairs What Joyce did to prose and Pound did to poetry, in my opinion, made those arts contemporary with both quantum physics and the films I liked. They had broken linear order into luminous fragments--quanta--which they reassembled into synergetic wholes--like a Bucky Fuller design... to read them involved stepping outside subject-predicate order into the modes of thought you find in differential calculus or in the montages of directors like Wells, Eisenstein, Kurasawa. Robert Anton Wilson

Extraordinary Discourse 068

Speil Macht Frei …very civic and public yearnings - the notion that an 'emergent democracy' might come to fruition, through some orchestration of the many articulate voices now expressing themselves through social software, like blogging and affinity networks, Wikipedia and open source. I very much hope that the rhetorics and justifications for more playful forms of life outlined by this book are taken up by these digital constituencies, and 'hacked' into better, worse or at least more interesting shapes by their passionate engagements. 'We are an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect ourselves against surprise; living in the strength of our vision, we eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.' Amen to that, brother Carse. Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

Extraordinary Discourse 067

Interlocking Conversation Pieces Try these lenses. Come to the irreverent multilogue.

Extraordinary Discourse 066

Vocal Chord Progressions Utterances by polymath autodidacts, heavy equipment operators, professors, bards, and irreverent hecklers.

Extraordinary Discourse 065

Discordian Offshots Relevant clips in odd conversations. "The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA... The bottom line was: 'Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.' This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.  One can simply use words and sentences of the human language! This, too, was experimentally proven! Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used." Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by W

Extraordinary Discourse 064

Gamechanging The Narrative Jobs , school , drugs , therapy , heckling , meat , fun !

Extraordinary Discourse 063

Utterance Wuzzle "Eliot himself, of course, argued in favour of an art which was open to the utterances of others rather than purely based on the artist's personal beliefs or concerns - see his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent . He also used the technique of bricolage in his own poetry, most notably in The Waste Land , where he described human knowledge as 'a heap of broken images', a phrase which summarises the mood and method of the poem as a whole." Edward Picot

Extraordinary Discourse 062

Flipping Work And Other Orthodoxies Social critics, poets, speakers, clowns, digressors, seekers and seers in unorthodox conversation/narrative.

Extraordinary Discourse 061

An Insurrection Of Subjugated Knowledges To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. Hitchens, June 2011 Story-based strategy views social change through the lens of narrative power and positions storytelling at the center of social change strategy. This framework provides tools to craft more effective social change messages, challenge assumptions, intervene in prevailing cultural narratives, and change the stories that shape popular culture. Vision -- How You Can Use 'SmartMemes' to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the WorldPM Press / By Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning

Extraordinary Discourse 060 Special: The World Owes You A Living 5

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Extraordinary Discourse Special: The World Owes You A Living 5 Today's Extraordinary Discourse Special is Episode 5, the penultimate episode of The World Owes You A Living suite, a 6-part Millennial Associational Documentary. Lucky enough to have a job? No security, no benefits, invasive surveillance, sexual abuse, desperate rush, no reward, no recognition, kids neglected. Bad for millionaires. Puritan underpinnings. Let's give ourselves freedom with a Guaranteed Livable Income . More On Social Fabric Overwork Drugs Loneliness Of Millionaires Religious Heritage Plenty For Everybody Guaranteed Annual Income R. Buckminster Fuller: "There is enough to go round... handsomely." Click on images for links to previous episodes: Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4

Extraordinary Discourse 059

For Radical Adults of 2012 Jobs and the soul Synchronicity, I propose, is the matrix. Or say that any great artwork is a field, that the Masnavi, like the Divan of Hafez, spreads out a spontaneously exploratory, tending region of consciousness. Coleman Barks

Extraordinary Discourse 058

Bon Mot (ley) Stirring the Humanities. Smorgasbord for Progressives. "I am convinced... that sound does something that the other senses do not do, and that is a need, a growing need. Sound addresses the interior man [sic] in a way which the other senses do not. Except for touch, but we can't go round so easily touching everybody. It is the body coming back at you. It has been neglected and now it is going to come back. There is going to be a need for the things that sound can do and that visuals don't."  Helen Thorington

Extraordinary Discourse 057

Indirections To A Better World The Zibaldone , or by full title Zibaldone of thoughts, is a personal journal which contains a large amount of notes written between 1817 and 1832 by Giacomo Leopardi. The title comes from the characteristic of literary composition, as a mixture of thoughts, like the namesake Emilian dish that consists of an amalgam of many different ingredients, and sometimes the term is used to describe a confused heap of people. Although the term was known even before, after the composition of Leopardi the term is used for annotation of notebooks or diaries of random thoughts. "Zibaldone" can also be used disparagingly for speeches or writings without logic, messy, made of heterogeneous ideas. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.  

Extraordinary Discourse 056

  Incidental Anecdotal Antidotes The individual’s memory of many surprising moments, of dawning comprehensions of an interrelated significance to be existant among a number of what had previously seemed to be entirely uninterrelated experiences, all of which remembered experiences engender the reasonable assumption of the possible existence of a total comprehension of the integrated significance, the meaning, of all experiences. R. Buckminster Fuller The mythic or iconic mode-of-awareness substitutes the multi-faceted for point-of-view. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media Thanks to Richard Grove and Associates for the best interview with John Taylor Gatto.

Extraordinary Discourse 055

Holonic Documentary Death, genius, the morality of slaves, deconstructing taxonomies, and more! I ran into this in a media magazine: years ago someone asked a kid whether he liked TV or radio better. He said radio because the pictures were better. (I think it must have been in the fifties when the radio had dramas and serials...not just doggerel music....but that's a guess.) Works for me. RE: a related story Posted by: davidg on Feb 9, 2008 6:57 PM Song Clip: G Love And The Special Sauce- This Ain't Living Thanks for the clip of the Technocracy spokesman to James Corbett, The Corbett Report Episode 217

Extraordinary Discourse 054

Horse's Mouth Hypomnemata The hypomnemata is a special type of notebook used in ancient greek society by variety of common people such as tradesmen, philosophers, theologians, and students to keep personal records and formulate opinions about the experience of the self. This habitual type of personal notekeeping was coming into vogue in Plato's time (ca. 4th century BC) and represents one of western culture's earliest technological advancements to create a conscious logos. The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation.

Extraordinary Discourse 053

The March Of Folly It's modern to use history as a kind of closet in which we can rummage around, pull influences from different eras, and make them into collages or pastiches. People are doing this with music all the time. I hear it in, say, Christina Aguilera's new album, or in the music of Sufjan Stevens. from The Ballad of Henry Timrod By SUZANNE VEGA NYT Published: September 17, 2006 One can name all kinds of great men [sic] who were not very gifted. They acquired greatness ... all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to construct the parts properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. Friedrich Nietzsche …irregularity -- that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment -- is an essential part and characteristic of beauty. Charles Baudelaire

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Diversified Portfolio From Winter at Zarathustra's House to God's Playroom, with many timely stops and starts between. The daily paper is a good example of a happening because everything that’s in it happens at the same moment. The dateline is the only organizing principle in a newspaper.  There is no connection between the items otherwise than the datelines. And if you take away the dateline from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me Utterance alone can heal the ailing spirit. Irving Layton

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We Could Play Today! Deconstructing work, school, development-- and much more! We assumed that nothing would be published from the very beginning. So the private world of my friends became the center of our artistic activities, rather than the public world of publishing, media, universities and literature. Allen Ginsberg SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In 1878, Thomas Edison perfected the phonograph, a machine that could record sounds and play them back. There had been some primitive prototypes before, but his version was a major improvement. And what were the first sounds to be immortalized on Edison's phonograph? The rush of the wind in the trees? A dramatic reading of the Song of Songs? The cries of a newborn infant? Nope. Edison recited the nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." When you make your own breakthrough in communication sometime soon, Scorpio, I hope you deliver a more profound and succulent message. Rob Brezsny, Free Will Astrology the poem