Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Crafted Convo ...as network television has given way to the Internet, it has become easy for people to create their own idiosyncratic mix of sources. Henry Farrell

Synthe Tic Talk Time If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. Joseph Campbell

Torch/Torque the Noggin In what lies the significance of human life in which machine power has grown to be the destructive factor that it now is in the hands of the Money Power? There will come a universal margin of leisure, greater rational freedom for the individual than any known by previous civilizations - but that only if the creative artist is there in his true place, the machine in his hand as a tool. Money should have no power whatever in itself. Employment is not enough! What a man [sic] wants, if democracy works, is not so much employment as freedom to work at what he believes in, what he likes to do. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City , 1963 Recommended: On Being , with Krista Tippett, for great conversations.                           CBC's Tapestry , with Mary Hynes, same.

At Least This Got Said My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company. Jane Austen

Eclec Ticktalk Time What is known is apt to be identified with what the common language readily describes, and novel combinations are so difficult to achieve that people gifted that way are given the special name poets, and run the special risk of having their communications thought insubstantial. Hugh Kenner (On Buckminster Fuller)

Rock The Boat You know, the Greek word sophia, what we’ve translated as the word "wisdom," comes from crafts—carpenters and hand work. The earliest uses of the word "sophia" is the tiller—the man at the tiller of a boat. He’s always making little moves to keep you on course. That’s all it is. It’s not big sentences. It’s just little moves. That’s the way I think about wisdom, so I don’t use the word. It’s usually used in our culture in terms of big platitudes. James Hillman

Thoughtpile of a Wordchopper What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent