Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Intalksication Many fecund ecosystems are strung along edges like coastlines and forest margins. I fished for these varietous utterances along spoken ecosystems (audio, radio [appealing to the inner rather than the outer eyes] is already "marginal"), but I didn't run a steel hook through the walls of their mouths and out their gills while they goggled in horror, and I didn't club them writhing to stillness.  I re-schooled them, that's all, and it turns out they love to meet and mix with other fish, different fish, and your mind is the speilraum (playroom) play-lake of their mating while they appear to lie discrete, neither touching each other across the purity of the gaps, nor smeared over with any marmalade of music to suggest continuity or coolness. Once they parade past you, this school! Of thoughtfish, they are returned to the grand aquarium excited about other remixes, other relationships, other orgies, other play in the playroom of their sea, other cha...

Don't You Think We Should Talk This Thing Over? So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. "God," "Matter," "Reason," "the Absolute," "Energy," are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which w...

Relevant Irreverence The word "and" trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. William James i speak without reservation from what i know and who i am. i do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance, the worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences that distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated not condemned. Ani Difranco  

I Hear Voices It is a feature of twenty first century modernity that the tenets around which society is built and organized exist unchallenged. When there is only one cultural perspective and no alternative story, where is the judgment about the worth of the existing regime meant to come from? The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos. And how that mythos is maintained! By the great world enterprise, with its digital mountain of media propaganda, Hollywood-fashioned histories, global corporate HR masquerading as an education system and pseudo-religious convictions riddled with liberal ethics. Against this multi-billion dollar programme of maintenance, a few mere words could hardly be said to endanger the global regime. Yet John Dunn contends that the weak...

No Ladder, Sideways Moves "Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else's puzzle." Lawrence Kushner  Honey from the Rock thanks to Rob Brezsny

Folks, This Ain't Normal It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition. Carl von Clausewitz Without an element of the obscene there can be no true and deep aesthetic or moral conception of life... It is only the great men [sic] who are truly obscene.  If they had not dared to be obscene they could never have dared to be great. Havelock Ellis Allen Bell

Sideways To The News Every construction we make of the world is, or should be, hypothetical. It is a story we tell ourselves. Being hypothetical, it is also at best falsifiable. We believe we understand someone; we find we've been wrong when we hurt them or they hurt us. We think we know how we are perceived and valued, and learn that those around us have quite another view of us, far better or far worse. I might suggest that we are sane in the degree that out our internal narrative retains the character of hypothesis, permitting editing, necessary adjustment, the assimilation of new understanding. Fictional narratives consistently employ surprise, reversal, irony, hidden identity. The wandering Ulysses is continually confronted with prodigies that alter the effective terms of survival. Only his shrewdness, his ability to respond to urgencies that constantly change, allows him to return alive to Ithaca. Disrupted hypothesis is structured into fiction of all kinds, from Don Q...