Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Overton Window! Jump! I don't want to be in a position that could make me vomit, like air travel. I've purloined airsick bags and stuffed them everywhere, just in case I ever feel the need to throw up. I haven't vomited since 1977, but I think about it all the time. I recognize that it's irrational, but I'd rather jump out of a window than vomit. Scott Stossel

Ecotone of Voice If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal. Paulo Coelho

Ways Out And Through   The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of these looms is enormous—thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully, for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world. In this sense, the world is made of words. Olga Tokarczuk Nobel Lecture

Playing The World’s Edge       Dedicated to Richard Vick, artist, father, adventurer Who just departed on the big one. He suffered and he loved. That was once his choice for a tombstone inscription. Bon Voyage, old sailor.         Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Human Condition in Process The Wrong Planet tribe are the pranksters, the court jesters, the comedians, the Bohemians, the flower children, the nomads and vagrants, the free spirits. Without these the world would be full of humans who are little more than robots. Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet Searching for your Tribe

Jack-Outside-the-Box Art Pedal = your tongue The Flag of Your Country = your tongue

Tinkering With Thinkers The little things? The little moments? They aren't little. Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dancing With Clio Today I'm out wandering, turning my skull into a cup for others to drink wine from. Rumi

Anti-Kaching Thunk Chunks Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks. Daniel Levitin

Long Story Shorts What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war. Pablo Picasso 

The Roving Remixer Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. Erik Pevernagie 

Zagging Samizdat Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free. Bertrand Russell

Free Range Seeking And Finding Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding. Langston Hughes 

Other Wise A product can live on one great idea. An interior needs 1,000 great ideas to really live, which makes interior design a whole orchestration of this art of juxtaposition, placement, and combination. Marcel Wanders

Smart Ass School The first quality that is needed is audacity Winston Churchill

Free Thought-Lunch For Free Thinkers To abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. McKenzie Wark's Hacker's Manifesto

To Chez Repartee Imagination is the highest form of research. Albert Einstein

Gamechanger Markers The play concept as such is of a higher order than seriousness, for seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness. Johan Huizinga,  Homo Ludens

Logos Superceding Doxa We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. Gilles Deleuze

I heard Voices. I Listened.

All Thoughts are Toys We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Geniuses and Jesters This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Michael Joseph Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

Colloquy A La Carte Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Derek Walcott \

Oh, Yeah? Conversation is a dynamic interplay between each person’s choice to speak or listen. When those choices are conscious and respectful, conversations tend to be more productive and enjoyable. Oren Jay Sofer, When to Speak and When to Listen

Surprise Conversation Chorus                          The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!                                 Richard Greenberg

Chautauqua Chop When you say “old school,” I say “new playground.”

Midrashic Aporia Midrash is biblical exegesis by ancient Judaic authorities, using a mode of interpretation prominent in the Talmud. Midrash and rabbinic readings "discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces," writes the Reverend and Hebrew scholar Wilda C. Gafney. "They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions." Wikipedia Iris DeMent, Livin' in the Wasteland of the Free Krista Tippett, On Being 

On Beyond Second Thought There is for me an utterance bare and grand as the colossal chisel of Phideas, or trowel of the Egyptians, or pen of Moses or Dante. R. W. Emerson

Orthogonal The writer who has spent some time in the collection and subsequent analysis of material is liable to feel ready to start putting it all into a script. But the result can be disappointing if what is really needed is a story, a concept. The data may be at hand, the subject has been explored and represented, but what about the idea? It remains to be found... There is, of course, no practical system for assuring that a good idea will come next. Good ideas, feeble ideas, marvellous ideas - they all seem to have life of their own, arriving unannounced. In fact one way to discourage their visit is to be too impatient. It's not so much something you do, it's something that happens. Why then does it seem to happen more to brilliant men and women than to stupid ones? The answer may be because of the two earlier stages. Materials collected and then placed in a frame of reference are stored in memory, and the more that is accumulated the more likely the inspired short-cir...

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

A Big Hatful Of Talk ...he did realize that any such changes would become intertwined with a kaleidoscopic and immensely profitable expansion of choices and forms of expression. Thus Marcusean analysis is immensely useful in understanding the profusion of tattoos and pornography, the Internet and smart phones, coffee houses and art fairs, T-shirts and jeans, oral sex and divorce, yoga and foreign travel, Twitter and Facebook, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, “your comments” on everything under the sun. A combination of movements and markets led to a space freer, more inclusive, more interesting and diverse, and humanly and socially richer than any of us would have imagined upon closing the pages of One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse Today Ronald Aronson Boston Review

Wit And Wisdom Of Witty Wise Persons We are still bullied into serving the boring boring boring idiots, our lives deftly determined by beliefs we know are totally false. … How amazing is it that even young people knew back then, almost a half century ago, how horrific the world of work was becoming. Never give up calling out the phonies, goosing the world, and remembering you are a human, and not a chair. Judy Parker 

Maverick's Melange That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. John Stuart Mill

Train of Open Traps Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the wider society. It works to appropriate discourses associated with liberal democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings and use them to mean the opposite of what they have meant traditionally, especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense. Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of the fittest mode of behavior. The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for hum...

Dissidance Eloquence is a kind of architecture, and there is the old adage that ‘God lives in the details’, in small places, in the space between the words, in the hesitations, in the punctuation. I mean, these things are all as mandatory to achieving deep eloquence as anything that’s between the periods and the commas. You know that’s what punctuation is: It’s an attempt to recreate the vocalizing and the style of expression and the moment in which it’s expressed. Stephen Jenkinson

Deeper Dabbling Life is not that sweet all the time. Sometimes, you just need to awake your brain and feed it with hopping words. Ayuba Muhyideen Kolawole

Prime Cuts, Facultus Ludendi People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Terry Pratchett Awake and in play Peregrinations

Critical Interventions Yeah. Yeah. You’re talking about an eloquence in the ear there. You could say that eloquence is a free floating life form, and when it attaches itself to a particular language or practice it’s mistaken for that language or practice. But you know all forms of deep artistic merit really require disciplined practice, of years-long duration, without an audience, without any witnesses, so that the depth of the thing, the depth of eloquence in the made world, has a chance to respond to the pleas which are the practice of disciplined learning and hearing. Stephen Jenkinson

Portentous Remarks Mastering our minds begins with mastering our mouths. We spend the first 10 years of our lives learning “elementary right speech”: how to interact politely, respectfully, and inoffensively; when to speak, when not to speak. Then we spend another decade learning to express more complex feelings and ideas to others. We might call this intermediate right speech, although what we study even on these two preliminary levels is bottomless. Even something as simple as when to speak and when not to speak can’t be determined by a formula; it is a skill refined over a lifetime. Krishnan Venkatesh How to Practice Right Speech Anywhere, Anytime, and With Anyone

Playing With Sophia It’s astounding to make these little observations, really. Linguistic differences are more than just windows and doors. Sometimes they’re barred windows and chained doors. Sometimes there are no walls at all. Sometimes they’re a little bit of a tent out in the desert, where everything is blowing through and the sky is there just above your head. Stephen Jenkinson