Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Special: Books, Readers, and Writers Book love is your pass to the greatest, the purest and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. Anthony Trollope All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words. Amy Lowell If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. Don DeLillo To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Susan Sontag Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish  I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not di...

Anything But On Institutions And The Individual Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. ...without freedom there can be no morality. C. G. Jung "Know all men [sic] by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk, and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then ha...

Along The Way The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings. C. G. Jung

Nuggets Dark And Bright I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them. H.L. Mencken Such as Women's issues in an abundance economy, Nutsy Land, and fun with Death! Jack

Confronted By The Turn I taught them all my creating, and striving to create, and carry together into one what in man is fragment, and riddle, and dreadful accident. As creator, guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future, and redeem with their creation all that has been. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra The new reality being invisible... leading industrial technology's everyday, working reality into the ultra- and infra- visible- the macrophysical and the microatomic, electronic, metallurgically alloying chemically reacting micriobiologically, astrophysically exploring ranges of the electromagnetic wave-spectrum of Universe. And 99.9% of these very real activities are non-directly apprehensible by the bare human senses and are practically discovered and coped with only through powerful macro-micro operative instruments. Buckminster Fuller

Juking The Orthodoxies The newborn infant synchronizes body-movements to speech used around her or him... speech is a body-process to the child... the name is in no way distinguished in the child's mind from the thing or event itself. The name enters into logical feedback as a component part of the event, exactly as its smell, taste, touch, and sight do.... a physical response of musculature... the child's thought process is his physical action... by adulthood, the movements have become microkinetic, discernable only by instrumentation, but nevertheless clearly detectable.... ...Talking out one's world is frowned on as the communicative, rather than identifying aspects of language are stressed and expected. Along with a continually growing demand for conformity is a demand for silence, unless communication is intended...  ... so the talking out of one's world gets internalized. The internalized language function allies with the secret self operating beneath the...

People Talking Through Their Hats SKY PIECES by Carl Sandburg Proudly the fedoras march on the heads of the some- what careless men. Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still more careless men. Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper debonair men. Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest sol- emn noodles. And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dap- per and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero marches on the heads of important men who know what they want. Hats are sky-pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat slowly; your hat is you. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought-  there to pursue your own flight. Walt Whitman Speech is a cluster of living beings, moved by rhythms like the rhythms that move the stars and planets... Octavio Paz The full  interview with Sam Polk is still available at...