Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

A Diversity of Voices If one makes a lot of speeches, one is sure to be seized at some point by the desire to stop posturing as an authority, and to borrow the motley of the clown. Robertson Davies Intro to How To Design A Haunted House It worked as astrology does work - in a sort of lurching, flouncing, vertiginous fashion that sometimes seems to produce utter nonsense, and at other times comes up with a piece of blazing truth. Robertson Davies What Will The Age Of Aquarius Bring

Shop Talk NOT Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters (…) had been absolute technological freaks. They were obsessed with the idea of recording their lives in every possible way. They kept tape recorders running all the time. They even used videotapes.They used tape-lag mechanisms. They took movies of their own lives. They kept diaries. They had strange diaries in which you couldn’t write in your own diary; only other people could write in your diary. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

Premier Free Radical Scavenge As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Wendell Berry

No Bodies! Just Voices For now imagination, a gangly vine, Grabs for a life. from Match.com/Matthew Likes Buttered Toast, Vulnerability… By Elizabeth Powell From New Ohio Review

Any hoo… My brother once commented, 'Now I get how writers work. You're magpies.' Which we both understood to mean: Writers scavenge from wherever they can, In the case of 'Divine,' I scavenged from Dante, Plato, the Bible, fairy tales, old vampire movies….  When I googled 'magpies' for this statement, I discovered they possess a few more writerly traits: they are clever and often despised, little poètes  maudits . The Chinese considered them messengers of joy, but the Scots thought they carried a drop of Satan's blood under their tongues. They are fond of bright objects. Kim Addonizio The Best American Poetry 2013

Antidotal Evidance How do we measure? In as many ways as there are things to measure. We measure in stacks and skeins and stories, a lovely word for a building's height that comes to us from Gothic cathedrals who described the heights of their constructions by the number of stacked stained-glass windows they installed. Made To Measure Sue Allison from The Antioch Review But my thoughts, I knew, moved in their own ways, logic clumping along on its path and imagination buzzing erratically from lilac to honeysuckle to rosebud, as well as violet, dandelion, red clover, morning glory, and all the other weeds I spent long afternoons prying out of the yard with a forked cultivator. Helen Keller Answers The Iron by Andrew Hudgins from   The Kenyon Review

Spoken-Word Shenanigans Doggie Daddy and Max Weber in the same pot! Or on it. Plus, of course, the unusual suspects. Title stolen from the intro to Spider Robinson's podcast, Spider on the Web . Go enjoy him! Everything that gets exchanged between people, whether it's spoken or not, is a form of such thought. Human beings are discourse. The rest is blood and bone and nerves. Call it speech, that flowing between us. Compare it to the sun, which us always warming us, even when we can't see it. This speech-sun is invisible, except when it takes form in language. Coleman Barks, The Soul Of Rumi …the Mercurius, the rogue who is sometimes benevolent and sometimes a trickster, an enemy to the law and the revenue officers, but a great friend to people of noble spirit, and to lovers. This Mercurius figure is by no means confined to this play alone: it is part of the apparatus of melodrama. Not infrequently the part was represented as being an Irishman, and...