Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Juggle The Hand You're Dealt If you are a writer or reader of a certain temperament, you celebrate the “postmodern condition,” in which the flux and flow of events dethrone the narrator’s assured voice. If you are a scholar exploring “posthumanism,” you might believe that the human subject can no longer speak as the master of circumstances. Yet if you are an ordinary worker, you need to find your voice. You need, like our Renaissance forbearers, to find principles of continuity and unity in how you account for your material experience. “Voice” is both a personal and a social issue. To hold fragmentary experiences together in time requires the capacity to step back from the power of each event to hurt or to disorient. To find one’s voice requires establishing some distance from the immediate, from the noumenal; sheer surrender to the moment weakens one’s voice. Of course in the midst of the most traumatic events, like a civil war, stepping back can occur only after the event...

Walks Outside The Box Art has made us myriad-minded. Oscar Wilde

Dots Connected And Otherwise Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions. Walter Benjamin  In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally. Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues

Pivoting The Discourse Commission By Ezra Pound From “Contemporania” Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied, Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention, Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors. Go as a great wave of cool water, Bear my contempt of oppressors.       Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds. Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis, Go to the women in suburbs.       Go to the hideously wedded, Go to them whose failure is concealed, Go to the unluckily mated, Go to the bought wife, Go to the woman entailed.       Go to those who have delicate lust, Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted, Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world; Go with your edge against this, Strengthen the subtle cords,       Bring confidence upon the algae and the ...

All These Things And More 2014! Leaping in. The topsoil of this "arcades project" is around 30-some years deep, with, as all good soil, deeper bits and newer shit. I consider myself a longtime player in the underplayground in these 30-odd "neoliberal" bullshit years. Here is my collection of stuff I picked up in my underground tunneling, under the mall, beneath the school, beneath the bottom line. Jump in anywhere, from the first in the series to the most recent - they are equally relevant, their themes endlessly entwine and blend. Jack Anson Rabinbach, editor of New German Critique summarizes Benjamin’s thought […]: The world is… dispersed in fragments, and in these fragments, the fragments of the world that God has now turned his back on, reside certain presences, which attest to the former existence of their divine character. You cannot actively go about to discover these divine presences, but they can be revealed. According to Rabinbach, Be...

Bit Of A Melange But to live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by an accident of birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed. Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues General Abner Doubleday wrote to Bachelder in this chastened spirit five years after the congressional appropriation: "It is difficult in the excitement of battle to see every thing going on around us for each has his own part to play and that absorbs his attention to the exclusion of every thing else. People are very much mistaken when they suppose because a man is in a battle, he knows all about it." Gettysburg Regress By John Summers New Republic

Key Excerpts In Rough Narrative We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. Sharon Salzberg Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. Vincent van Gogh