Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

House of Excerpts On the other hand, if I count the number of hours I spend listening to the radio, I am glad that I don't have to buy a license for it, or pay by the hour. My radio is on nearly all the time at home. Someone once said 'You get better pictures on the radio.' and they were right. When I hear a drama or comedy programme, I create the faces, costumes, special effects and scenery myself. No television producer can create a different programme for each viewer. Radio Has The Best Pictures More important, we will search out the hidden connections among events that on the surface seem unrelated. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave Actually, I'm getting a little sick of the word 'discourse.' Do I sound irritable? There is a very noisy playground across from where I am writing. Guest Editor Billy Collins Introduction best American poetry 2006

Pathways Through a Medicine Forest Work hard!  Keep quiet! Drug the kids! A well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure. Robert Graves We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched. Bob Black

Fractal Documentary For you if your head is also alive. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Cristopher Hitchens, June 2011 Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool: the essence of human intelligence. To forge links, to go beyond the given, to see patterns, relationships, context. Marilyn Fergusen, The Aquarian Conspiracy Thinking that is alive involves seeing connections between seemingly different phenomena. Mary Daly Arthur Koestler has even gone so far as to argue... that jokes represent the primitive basis of creative thought, because they bring together ideas that a...

Diversified utterance portfolio from Rumi to GLI. History teaches that when verbal taboos are broken, free discussion and changes for the better occur. Ralph Nader If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways. Daniel Quinn

Discourse Delicatessen For activists and introverts. I side with the Schlegels, with Nietzsche, Bataille, Jabes, and others, for whom the fragment is crucial to an understanding of contemporary life... Alan Sondheim Yet he was to spend much of the next two decades putting the facts he had been taught together again in a historical pattern of his own, and excoriating the academic system. What his complaint amounted to was this, that the system imparted the facts but had only a received and inert sense of the relations between the facts. These were dynamic relations, whereas syllabi are static affairs of language and period. Hugh Kenner, on Ezra Pound

Vocal Uncommonplacing I seek to develop among my students a taste for doing the Liberal Arts and humanities by opening up discussion about free places, outside work, career, and the domain of "the professional," where sport, art, critical analysis, value creation, and language-- in short the humanities, can be regained and what Jurgen Habermas called the "collapse of the discussional" might be reversed. Benjamin Hunnicutt Your intellect is in fragments, like bits of gold Scattered over many matters. You must scrape Them Together, so the royal stamp can be pressed into you. Cohere, and you'll be as lovely as Samarkand With its central market, or Damascus. Grain by grain, Collect the parts. You'll be more Magnificent Than a flat coin. You'll be a cup With carvings of the king around the outside. Rumi

Deep News From The Radical Margins The Word of course is one of the most powerful instruments of control ... now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system. William S. Burroughs I think the highlighter more sacred than the text. Jonathan Zap Thanks to Peter Schickele's P.D.Q. Bach Classical Rap