Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Mavericks and Renegades Talk The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. Pablo Picasso

Purloined Poetic Polemics No sooner had the Snake beheld this reverend figure, than the King began to speak, and asked: "Whence comest thou?" "From the chasms where the gold dwells," said the Snake. "What is grander than gold?" inquired the King. "Light," replied the Snake. "What is more refreshing than light?" said he. "Speech," answered she. Goethe The Green Snake And The Beautiful Lily

Talkfish Catch A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just begins to live that day. Emily Dickinson

Playful Fucking Institutional Analysis An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Oscar Wilde

Not Only Money Talks Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with. Alain de Botton

Sophisticated Backtalk We love the opportunity to disagree and I think that's something that's at risk of being quashed to too much of an extent. And really, I think over the last couple years we've been in listening mode — I don't think any of us listen enough, I don't think we listen enough as a culture.. Marcus Mumford Mumford and Sons address their photo with Jordan B. Peterson CBC

Switchyard For Trains Of Thought To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul-  would you understand why that's much harder? Roark, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead The Outer Courtyard, where pain is... where our ego selves play out their funny little dramas... Frank Sims in the 1970's

Gifts Of Gab For You! What we do, in English, and in the humanities more broadly, what we teach, what we celebrate and investigate, is human particularity. That is why we become obsessed with individual authors, why we savor specificities of phrasing, why we pounce upon and explore a single word. It’s why we value, above all, writers capable of telling many different stories, populated by many varieties of being, articulated in a kaleidoscope of styles. It’s why I, personally, have always been most fascinated by playwrights, from Aeschylus to August Wilson: Dialogue releases us from the monologues of one mind, clan, tradition. Death of an English major By Gary Taylor, Special to the Tampa Bay Times November 9, 2018

Men and War From the audio series, The World Owes You A Living #remembranceday

Not Chitchat Harnessing social oblique is a massive part of effective manipulative propaganda. C Cawley

Dissident Provocations Much of what Lind learned about Fourth Generation Warfare he cribbed from John Boyd, America's greatest strategist, who thought Sun Tzu was without error. Boyd posited there were 3 levels of conflict: Physical, Mental, and Moral. Moral is the highest. Moral dominates. Guerrilla war is moral conflict. You can conceptualize guerrilla war also as non-kinetic. Thus, the principles of guerrilla warfare can be used in kinetic and non-kinetic warfare. JAMES SCAMINACI III

Wiggle Room What is Imagination? ...First: it is the Combining Faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions, in new, original, endless, ever varying, Combinations. It seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition. Ada Lovelace Thanks to Maria Popova

God-Given Devil's Dung Always treat language like a dangerous toy. Anselm Hollo

Some talk behind talk I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. Gilda Radner

Sliced Thought-Meat I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. Sylvia Plath

Disobedience Flirts What can I say? I will not obey. Utah Phillips

More Pronounced The Rules of Evidence Lee Robinson What you want to say most is inadmissible. Say it anyway. Say it again. What they tell you is irrelevant can’t be denied and will eventually be heard. Every question is a leading question. Ask it anyway, then expect what you won’t get. There is no such thing as the original so you’ll have to make do with a reasonable facsimile. The history of the world is hearsay. Hear it. The whole truth is unspeakable and nothing but the truth is a lie. I swear this. My oath is a kiss. I swear by everything incredible. https://leemrobinson.com/sample-poems/

Yakfest and Hullabaloo Laugh if you have to.

Think Otherwise The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time....Under the rocks are the words… Norman Maclean

Surprises Palaver I poke about quite a good deal. Walt Whitman

Genius Junkpile I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men [sic] behind whom were centuries of work … progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. Henry Ford The Business of America

Hey! This Is Intelligent! There's everything to be said. William Little

Neo- Schola As [Ann] Casement points [out], Jung was a bricoleur , i.e., one who assembles something useful from whatever materials are available: 'borrowing a metaphorical screw from here, a figurative nut from there and, from elsewhere, an imaginative bolt. This 'bricolage' reflects Jung's view of diversity and complexity of the psyche. Mark Winborn, PhD, Jungian analyst Interpretatiopn in Jungian analysis. P. 171

From the Pieholes of Makebaters Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Vincent van Gogh

Ludic Cerebration The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority Nassim Nicholas Taleb Incerto

Trap Trip Go Ahead, Open Your Trap People need the wisdom, or the imagination, of others. Who do you learn from? You might have a wise and compassionate friend. But very few people, maybe no people, can invent their own menu of possibilities. Don’t great works of art have something to teach you? Maybe Tolstoy has something to teach you. Maybe Debussy. Maybe many others. No one would deny that Noam Chomsky has special intellectual capacities. Beethoven has special capacities, Ibsen had great insight into the psychology of human beings. If we’re imagining that a better world could be created, don’t we need their help? Wally Shawn

Things That Pop Into Minds Sound is intimate. That’s why I do radio and podcast: the sound connects us, retrieving a pre-internet, pre-printing press, pre-scribal sense of community. Douglas Rushkoff

Overtalk And Undertalk There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. Saul Bellow

Nuggets For Your Weltanschauung Diversions, Reversions, Revisions, Inversions, Versions, Visions

Logos Lolol The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now. "Rush" John Crowley's Engine Summer

Direct Digressions Countercultural Counternarratives Count

Just Saying In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it's the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up. Joichi Ito

Quality Twaddle All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. We are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own. Mark Twain 

FUN! DING! Everywhere the birds can fly, your words can fly. bpNichol 

A Cultural Counter-Environment Whether slow or speedy, he that seeks will find. Always apply with both hands the pursuit. For search is an excellent guide. Rumi

Talk Treasure Train One could go even further and argue, after Walter Benjamin, that the product of the analytical mode is information, whereas the product of storytelling is wisdom. Maria Popova

A Morning At The Talk House With his fine tenor voice Joyce knew better than most that we read not with the eye but with the ear. Frank Delaney

Tangential Not Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination …  Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. Jim Jarmusch [MovieMaker] 

Well Said If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears… Arnold Schoenberg

I Hear Voices You break ranks, this is the path towards freedom, the rank-breaking path. Seamus Heaney

Ticklish Tikkun But the extremes? I know what it feels like to come racing around the corner at 90 miles an hour, sliding the car sideways. I know what gear I'm hitting it in when I'm coming around the corner and where I need to downshift. So to me, that's the fun stuff.  I think that just sitting down and having casual conversation is the hardest stuff to do. Paul Walker

Going to Pieces I remember when I was here two years ago after a long absence, I was quite startled at the upsurge of regional dialects in England as compared with twenty years earlier, and the relative decline of standard and homogeneous English, and the quite proud display of dialects that I hardly heard before when I lived here.  This drive in depth toward regional depth of culture is a normal feature of electronic forms because of this circuitry that involves us deeper and deeper in ourselves. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me [emphasis JS]   

Big Talk Candy Mountain In our world, the fragments of the oral tradition mainly exist in religious ritual and liturgy, which have taken on a new significance and relevance in our electronic time.  In fact, in a sense we are playing backwards this process described in Preface to Plato. We are moving from the written to the oral at a much higher speed than the Greeks ever disintegrated their oral culture by means of the written word. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me  

Cherry-Picking The Maremagnum If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space. Mary-Elizabeth: Croft

Cuttings To The Chase It’s not cute cat videos anymore. It’s like a Gutenberg revolution, because now the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and permanence. Jordan Peterson

Sideways! I opt for non-violent, fire-in-the-belly grail searchers. Buzz O’Connell

WordsWord S words It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. William James

A Narrative Of Intersections Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes

A Narrative Of Intersections Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes

It Gets Better The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection. Paul Rand            

All This Other Stuff Gitanjali 35 Rabindranath Tagore  Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;      Where knowledge is free;      Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow            domestic walls;      Where words come out from the depth of truth;      Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;      Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the                        dreary desert sand of dead habit;      Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening                       ...

Did You Hear? There are two possible answers to the current challenges to the arts. One is to accept the market rhetoric that dominates the rest of the culture. If you move in this direction you may possibly be financially viable but you will be doomed to fit more and more closely within the materialistic norms of our times. You may continue to function but you will lose your own souls. Alternatively, you can enliven the old traditions supported by those who believe in the importance of the liberal arts and the ability to think. You can argue for the right to think freely outside the box. You can reclaim the role of the arts as the breaker of old boundaries and the creator of new dream and visions. Robert Theobald