Extraordinary Discourse 123

Cuts Against The Grain





Scholars get their knowledge with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.
Robert Frost


This podcast is bullshit!

This podcast series is really one long seriously playful associational documentary, like a circus train of thought with (so far) 123 one-hour packed boxcars, or showcars. A train that both wanders and stays on track. That affirms the sound-bite as a vehicle of in-depth social analysis ("analysis" = loosening). That presents both individual voices and a strange chorus. That grows from the "neoliberal years", 1980s to the present/future, the years of money-greed (scarcity mentality) in dominance. Therefore it is not asking for money: no fare to be paid for this ride. To jump metaphors, it is, to the project(s) of the progressives, a contribution of soil-building, an adding of aireation, manure, and mulch of many voices. So those who call it "bullshit" are not so far off.



Let none assume to till the land but farmers.
I only speak to you as one of them.
You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,
Poor cast-away of commerce, and so live
That none shall ever see you come to market-
Not for a long long time. Plant, breed, produce,
But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,
Eat it or plow it under where it stands
To build the soil. For what is more accursed
Than an impoverished soil pale and metallic?
What cries more to our kind for sympathy?
I'll make a compact with you, Meliboeus,
To match you deed for deed and plan for plan.
Friends crowd around me with their five year plans
That Soviet Russia has made fashionable.
You come to me and I'll unfold to you
A five year plan I call so, not because
It takes ten years or so to carry out,
Rather because it took five years at least
To think it out. Come close, let us conspire-
In self-restraint, if in restraint of trade.
You will go to your run-out mountain farm
And do what I command you, I take care
To command only what you meant to do
Anyway. That is my style of dictator.
Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself
Until it can contain itself no more,
But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.
I will go to my run-out social mind
And be as unsocial with it as I can.
The thought I have, and my first impulse is
To take to market— I will turn it under.
The thought from that thought—I will turn it under
And so on to the limit of my nature.
Robert Frost