Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Sedulously Seeking He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. Henry Thoreau, Walking

Tongue-Tail Party for Wise Wags The bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads. Paul Valéry Sure you can listen intoxicated. Or lace up the boots, put in the earbuds, take the dog, and walk this talk.

Hors D'oeuvres For The Turning Table Quite simply, to approach any utterance as if its meaning is separable from its presentation is to disallow art in every positive sense of that word. It is to strip away the individuation that might make a work a new witness, and it is to violate the bond of reader and writer. The essence of our art lies in creating a lingering dream, good or bad, that other souls can enter. Dreaming one's soul into another's is an urgent business of the human mind: the dreaming itself, not whatever agenda can supposedly be extracted from it. As art, it plays on the nerves and senses like a dream. It unfolds over time like a dream. It makes its own often disturbing and often inexplicable appeal to memory and emotion, creating itself again in the consciousness of the reader or hearer. from On "Beauty" By Marilynne Robinson From Tin House Pushcart Prize XXXVII Best Of The Small Presses

Gadflights Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. Margaret Wheatley

Freelance Parlance We know that humankind has sat around its fires from time immemorial and told its tales and told them again, elaborating and refining, and we know that certain of these tales have become myth, epic, fable, Holy Writ. Now, because we have devoted so much ingenuity to the project, we have devised more ways to tell ourselves more stories, which means only that an ancient impulse is still so strong in us as to impel the invention of new means and occasions for telling and hearing to satisfy this appetite for narrative. At the most fundamental level, narrative is how we make sense of things - that is, our experience of ongoing life is a story we tell ourselves, more or less true, depending on circumstance. I believe this narrative is the essential mode of our being in the world, individually and collectively. Maintaining its integrity - maintaining a sense of the essentially provisional or hypothetical character of the story we tell ourselves - is, I will suggest,...

A Celebration of Fooling Around Why make a big deal of something because it is represented by a "round number"? Why not celebrate a triangular, tetrahedronal, or conic  number? This is the 200th Extraordinary Discourse documentary, or, to be precise, the 200th segment of a thematic associational documentary, which is also a long train tracking from thousands of windows the landscapes of the last 30+ years of humanity's death-rebirth process. As we apprehend and attend the process of our initiation, we must come to terms with the necessity of Play, with the necessity of celebrating our bodies, with the necessity of Food and belly-laughs and Fooling Around and Doing Nothing. Jack Saturday

Odd Corners Of The Talk Garden Maid Marion (Olivia De Havilland): “You speak blasphemy!” Robin Hood (Errol Flynn): “Fluently!”

Long Story Shorts To act otherwise, you have to imagine otherwise. Henry Giroux Spreading information is activism. Helena Norberg-Hodge

Glad This Got Said There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete... Most acquire it fragment by fragment like a laborious mosaic. Anaïs Nin

Nutsy Land A free lunch of food for thought.

Ear Drum Taps When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. John Muir

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

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...

Some Is Diss, Samizdat Despite what Archie Bunker said, Edith was never a dingbat. Dingbat is a printer's term for a device that divides text, recognizing some pause deeper than the space between paragraphs, but less profound than the full stop at the end of a chapter. Dingbats dance in the gap. Dingbats come out into the indecisive twilight. … Dingbats are helpful when you're not making sustained, connected sense. Just put in a dingbat, and there's oneiric ellipsis. Coleman Barks, Introduction, The Soul Of Rumi Song Clip: Guy Clark, Cold Dog Soup Utah Phillips,  Loafer's Glory

Weighing In On Ways Out …this fertile border zone, contested marginal land inhabited by those seeking refuge from the law or the sprawl or the iron custody of the market, those who would cross over in search of freedom, or shelter, or belief… Campbell McGrath, January 17 The Best American Poetry 2013

Bushwhacking The Cognitive Map Harvey Wheeler, out on the West Coast at the centre for  the study of democratic institutions, has a view of democracy in which he argues that the great discovery of democracy was to transform every citizen into a guerilla fighter.  The targets of his [sic] guerilla activities were the establishment. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

A Libertine's Microbrew there's a cold wind blowin' through the old east side it cuts with the devil's curse they're turning our people into the streets, while the landloards line their purse with the greenback dollar of the tourist trade there's a fortune to be had make way for the out-of-towners, for the tenants it's just too bad this appears to be their attitude. kick 'em until they're down they're only welfare cases and pensioners and they're easily pushed around we've invited the world to come and stay and celebrate the fair i wonder if the world will understand the homeless walkin' there. i'm alright jack, and how 'bout you? i'm gonna catch this wave that's rollin' through and turn a trick or two i'm alright jack, no flies on me! i'm within my rights, my conscience is clear i am the profiteer Spirit Of The West - Profiteers

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Take this work ethic and shove it All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind Aristotle

Guerilla Wordfare And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. Walt Whitman

Voices, Choices Some parts of the gigantic oeuvre of Walt Whitman remind me of the huge canvases of the masters of Renaissance painting. If, looking at those canvases, we direct our attention to a detail, we discover a multitude of carefully painted small scenes. The same is true in Whitman: there is something like a mosaic, composed of units that are autonomous. Czeslaw Milosz A Book Of Luminous Things

Mixing Jar Love in the Classroom Al Zolynas —for my students Afternoon. Across the garden, in Green Hall, someone begins playing the old piano— a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive, full of a simple, joyful melody. The music floats among us in the classroom. I stand in front of my students telling them about sentence fragments. I ask them to find the ten fragments in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five. They’ve come from all parts of the world—Iran, Micronesia, Africa, Japan, China, even Los Angeles—and they’re still eager to please me. It’s less than half way through the quarter. They bend over their books and begin. Hamid’s lips move as he follows the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax. Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up, legs crossed, quick pulse minutely jerking her right foot. Tony sprawls limp in his desk, relaxed as only someone can be who’s from an island in the South Pacific. The melody floats arou...

Paraliterate Memeplex To me, selected lengths of spoken words captured/recorded is the hot-warm-cool-cold cash of any literature you care to underline. Jack Saturday Man [sic] the planter, man the basket-weaver, and man the pot-maker came in after the Paleolithic man, and we've had thousands of years of the planter.  When I mentioned this to John Cage, he said, “You know, that’s very interesting, I spend my life hunting mushrooms.  I am not the least bit interested in cultivating them.”  This is a curious illustration of the difference between the two kinds of man.  The hunter is not concerned with classification or specialism or the processes of cultivation, only with discovery. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

Fighting The Bullshit The bullfighters have been losing their jobs.  The bullshit fighters have rolled up their sleeves. The superior man [sic] abides in his room. If his words are well spoken, he meets with assent at a distance of more than a thousand miles. I Ching Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Marshall McLuhan

Business As Usual NOT An artist today is never working. He’s doing what he [sic] wants to do. He’s playing and he’s at leisure at all times, especially when he’s working hardest. This one of the peculiarities of our time. The old world of the job, this is neolithic; the world of the job, little fragmented specialist tasks, is no longer bearable. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

Special: Books, Readers, and Writers Book love is your pass to the greatest, the purest and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. Anthony Trollope All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words. Amy Lowell If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. Don DeLillo To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Susan Sontag Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish  I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not di...

Anything But On Institutions And The Individual Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. ...without freedom there can be no morality. C. G. Jung "Know all men [sic] by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk, and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then ha...

Along The Way The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings. C. G. Jung

Nuggets Dark And Bright I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them. H.L. Mencken Such as Women's issues in an abundance economy, Nutsy Land, and fun with Death! Jack

Confronted By The Turn I taught them all my creating, and striving to create, and carry together into one what in man is fragment, and riddle, and dreadful accident. As creator, guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future, and redeem with their creation all that has been. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra The new reality being invisible... leading industrial technology's everyday, working reality into the ultra- and infra- visible- the macrophysical and the microatomic, electronic, metallurgically alloying chemically reacting micriobiologically, astrophysically exploring ranges of the electromagnetic wave-spectrum of Universe. And 99.9% of these very real activities are non-directly apprehensible by the bare human senses and are practically discovered and coped with only through powerful macro-micro operative instruments. Buckminster Fuller

Juking The Orthodoxies The newborn infant synchronizes body-movements to speech used around her or him... speech is a body-process to the child... the name is in no way distinguished in the child's mind from the thing or event itself. The name enters into logical feedback as a component part of the event, exactly as its smell, taste, touch, and sight do.... a physical response of musculature... the child's thought process is his physical action... by adulthood, the movements have become microkinetic, discernable only by instrumentation, but nevertheless clearly detectable.... ...Talking out one's world is frowned on as the communicative, rather than identifying aspects of language are stressed and expected. Along with a continually growing demand for conformity is a demand for silence, unless communication is intended...  ... so the talking out of one's world gets internalized. The internalized language function allies with the secret self operating beneath the...

People Talking Through Their Hats SKY PIECES by Carl Sandburg Proudly the fedoras march on the heads of the some- what careless men. Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still more careless men. Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper debonair men. Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest sol- emn noodles. And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dap- per and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero marches on the heads of important men who know what they want. Hats are sky-pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat slowly; your hat is you. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought-  there to pursue your own flight. Walt Whitman Speech is a cluster of living beings, moved by rhythms like the rhythms that move the stars and planets... Octavio Paz The full  interview with Sam Polk is still available at...

Speaking Out And Up As he well knew, man's voice is an all-powerful charm. of Jesus, from  Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation Alexander Chen reminisces about studying with the inimitable Annie Dillard, who echoes Mark Twain’s contention that “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” Alexander Graham Bell’s assertion that "our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions derived from others,” and young Virginia Woolf’s observation that "all the Arts … imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see.” thanks to Maria Popova, Explore

Flâneur's Field Notes Let your world hear all the voices wanting to speak. Sheila J Ramsey  A certain mouse inhabiting a cornfield is invisible, being so small, but once it makes a sound, then people know it by means of its sound. And so, people are utterly immersed in the cornfield of this world, and your essence, being extremely subtle, is invisible. So speak, that they may recognize you. Rumi

It's All A Digression Consciousness is nothing more than maintaining conversation. James Hillman We've Had a 100 Years of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse

Visceral Release Lots of violence, rambunctious profanity, mass psychosis, and fun! And in case you missed some events, an extended newscast to keep you informed of what you really need to know. If for some inexplicable reason the newscast gets tiresome, the news sequence ends at just after 21 minutes in - feel free to fly over the News like Dorothy flew over the Hammerheads to the land of the Quadlings. There's great stuff after that. Thanks to Norm MacDonald Thanks to Mark Maron, WTF podcast . The term profane is derived from the Latin pro (before) and fanum (temple). …the wild realm of the sacred as it was/is before being caged into the temple of Father Time. It is free time/space. This prehistoric sacred is prior to the patriarchal sequestered "sacred" not merely temporally, but more importantly, in range and depth. Since it is not confined within the walls of any spatial or temporal temple, it transcends the "accepted" dichotomies between th...

Autodidact's Intelligence Gathering All great ideas and innovations began life as "disruptive" from the periphery, from "outsiders" -- those people just going it alone, often "outside the box." Morris Berman calls these people the New Monastic Individuals (NMI), and Berman thinks this is where the future lies. I'm inclined to agree with him. Berman puts forth a "new monastic" model of action whereby individuals/groups get on and create new ways of doing things, without fanfare or large billboard announcements. Such monastic work, so to speak, often operates below the radar, being authentic in activity rather than seeking visibility. The monastic worker, in seeking change, chooses a way of life that has meaning and that can be a heritage for the family. Often the monastic worker strives for assisting change within their own communities. They are like ink dots on the paper, slowly spreading their impact by diligent yet creative work....

Juggle The Hand You're Dealt If you are a writer or reader of a certain temperament, you celebrate the “postmodern condition,” in which the flux and flow of events dethrone the narrator’s assured voice. If you are a scholar exploring “posthumanism,” you might believe that the human subject can no longer speak as the master of circumstances. Yet if you are an ordinary worker, you need to find your voice. You need, like our Renaissance forbearers, to find principles of continuity and unity in how you account for your material experience. “Voice” is both a personal and a social issue. To hold fragmentary experiences together in time requires the capacity to step back from the power of each event to hurt or to disorient. To find one’s voice requires establishing some distance from the immediate, from the noumenal; sheer surrender to the moment weakens one’s voice. Of course in the midst of the most traumatic events, like a civil war, stepping back can occur only after the event...

Walks Outside The Box Art has made us myriad-minded. Oscar Wilde

Dots Connected And Otherwise Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions. Walter Benjamin  In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally. Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues

Pivoting The Discourse Commission By Ezra Pound From “Contemporania” Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied, Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention, Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors. Go as a great wave of cool water, Bear my contempt of oppressors.       Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds. Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis, Go to the women in suburbs.       Go to the hideously wedded, Go to them whose failure is concealed, Go to the unluckily mated, Go to the bought wife, Go to the woman entailed.       Go to those who have delicate lust, Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted, Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world; Go with your edge against this, Strengthen the subtle cords,       Bring confidence upon the algae and the ...

All These Things And More 2014! Leaping in. The topsoil of this "arcades project" is around 30-some years deep, with, as all good soil, deeper bits and newer shit. I consider myself a longtime player in the underplayground in these 30-odd "neoliberal" bullshit years. Here is my collection of stuff I picked up in my underground tunneling, under the mall, beneath the school, beneath the bottom line. Jump in anywhere, from the first in the series to the most recent - they are equally relevant, their themes endlessly entwine and blend. Jack Anson Rabinbach, editor of New German Critique summarizes Benjamin’s thought […]: The world is… dispersed in fragments, and in these fragments, the fragments of the world that God has now turned his back on, reside certain presences, which attest to the former existence of their divine character. You cannot actively go about to discover these divine presences, but they can be revealed. According to Rabinbach, Be...