Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Even As We Speak We delay because it is argued that talking is too risky – but experience suggests the real risk lies in not talking. How to talk to terrorists Jonathan Powell Tuesday 7 October 2014 The Guardian

Deviant Curricula You will notice that I have said nothing about the accommodation for the actors. If course it is always terrible, but even here there has been a change. In the old theatres they had smelly kennels in which to change their clothes. But nowadays after the School Board has cut the estimates and changed the plans, they have nothing at all. Have you ever tried to transform yourself into a great character of drama in a schoolroom? The ghost of dead mathematics teachers clutch at your costume and smear your make-up actors of an earlier day dressed in bad conditions too, even in barns, but the barns were unmistakably associated with Life; those schoolroom dressing accommodations speak of education, of repression, of being kept in after four, and their air vents whisper of lingering and chalky death. Humor is put to silence, Passion is rebuked, and Imagination is made to dance in chains. Robertson Davies How To Design A Haunted House

Intellectual Horseplay The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that. Nagle Jackson

Rescued From Old Contexts The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. Ursula Leguin True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.  A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. Tom Robbins

Stroll This Arcade …what the poet nevertheless demands is a kind of society in which tranquility, withdrawal, is a natural right. He must be able to go into the press and out of it as easily as he passes from his own house into the street. The charge he makes against the modern world is that it has invaded his house of quiet, invaded it with cares and rumors, insistent political and totalitarian wars. The poet is therefore compelled to demand, for poetic reasons, that the world shall be changed. It cannot be said that his demand is unreasonable: it is the first condition of his existence as a poet. Herbert Read , Introduction To Hell With Culture

Spare Game Change Utterance by W. S. Merwin Sitting over words very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing not far like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark the echo of everything that has ever been spoken still spinning its one syllable between the earth and silence

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