Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

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.

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

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

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...

Extraordinary Discourse 050 Special: The World Owes You A Living 4 Today's Extraordinary Discourse Special is Episode 4 of The World Owes You A Living suite, a 6-part Millennial Associational Documentary. How Much Is Enough? Abusers Of The System? Workers Against Workers Competition Social Fabric Unraveling/Violence More on Rich vs Poor Why the feeding frenzy on full stomachs, the killing frenzy, and the endless energy expended to create scarcities for most people, rather than share the plenty? Why do the rich do it? Robert Heilbroner, famous Harvard economist, says they are driven by "infantile fantasies". Now we see how propaganda, "the cynical manipulation of patriotic sentiment," "weaves of itself" a very nutty world. We may be fooled by the Potemkin's villages of our residential districts and the order, safety, cheerfulness of our consumer items. Hunger, abuse, neglect of the poor, gag orders on Child Welfare workers. Wh...

Unconventional Utterances I digress. True innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate. Arthur Koestler Beyond Reductionism I will show that synergy is of central importance in virtually every scientific discipline, though it very often travels incognito under various aliases (mutualism, cooperativity, symbiosis, win-win, emergent effects, a critical mass, coevolution, interactions, threshold effects, even non-zero-sumness). Peter A. Corning, Ph.D

It's The Thought That Counts Over 80 utterance snapshots. Through analogy and symbolism, through the remote illuminations of mediating imagery, through the interplay of their correspondences in a thousand chains of reactions and strange associations, and finally, through the grace of a language into which the very rhythm of Being has been translated. Saint-John Perse Nobel acceptance speech