Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Beyond Sheherazade

Applied to cultural heritage asset presentation, this non-linear, many-to-many model of communication has the potential to significantly impact the dominant modes of representation, most notably that of the linear, expository narrative. ... Of particular relevance here is the Australian Aboriginal storytelling tradition in which territory is not perceived of as a piece of land enclosed within borders but rather as "an interlocking network of 'lines' or 'ways through'" (Chatwin 1987). Sung into existence by the ancestors, these stories actually function as maps of their terrain that can be augmented by travelers to account. Interactive in the beginning with the advent of the written medium, storytelling, however, evolved into a non-interactive narrative style. ... In the primitive digital sense, technology like hyperlinking allows the weaving of myriad paths through an otherwise linear presentation... ... While having identified a problem regardi...

AAA A Wandering Caravan of Radical Utterances In English Parataxis (from Greek for 'act of placing side by side'; fr. para, beside + tassein, to arrange; contrasted to syntaxis) is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, often without the use of conjunctions. It is a style much favoured by historians and writers of crime fiction. It is also used to describe a technique in poetry in which two images or fragments, usually starkly dissimilar images or fragments, are juxtaposed without a clear connection. Readers are then left to make their own connections. Ezra Pound, in his adaptation of Chinese and Japanese poetry, made the stark juxtaposition of images an important part of English language poetry. This week I want to direct your attention to the works of David Cayley, producer of some of the best radio documentaries on the planet. Thanks to CBC Ideas for airing his work.

I saw a sort of fat bottle, like a pot with a narrow mouth. I think it was made of clay and it was covered with little pieces of mirrors. When it reflected the light, each little mirror of the pot gave forth a particular image. Everything around it found in it a singular reflection and, at the same time, the whole resembled a rainbow of images. It was as if many small histories came together to compose a larger history, but without losing their own distinct self. I thought that, perhaps, the history of the EZLN could be told, looked at, and analyzed like that mirrored pot. Subcomandante Marcos Special thanks to CBC Radio One's Tapestry , with Mary Hynes and guest host Jian Ghomeshi, for their talk with Toni-Lynn Blackman (sp?), and Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In The Sky .

So by making this connection with Eliot and the idea of bricolage, via Northrop Frye, Jack Saturday is placing his work in the tradition of modernist art, which tends (amongst other things) to exchange the more purely and intensely personal insights of the Romantics for a fragmentary arrangement or collage of disparate voices, viewpoints and styles. But he also offers another quote, from the politically radical "news dissector", television producer and independent filmmaker Danny Schechter, who in turn quotes the Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick: Filmmaker Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent and other films) calls on all media workers to promote the new digital revolution. He calls for a fight against the "apocalyptic, mega-media locusts; old Hollywood; old Fictive Fantasy; Old Reality; Old News: Old World, Old Vision; Old In-humedia: Old Disembodied corporate dreams." He wants a "multi-logue" not a monologue. And so do many of us. Edward Picot...

Literature continues in society the tradition of myth-making, and myth-making has a quality that Levi-Strauss calls bricolage , a putting together of bits and pieces of whatever comes to hand. Long before Levi-Strauss, T.S. Eliot in an essay on Blake uses practically the same image, speaking of Blake's resourceful Robinson Crusoe method of scrambling together a system of thought out of the odds and ends of his reading... I soon realized that Blake was a typical poet in this regard. Northrop Frye, intro. to The Great Code

Like an archipelago, this seemingly disconnected string of islands is all connected beneath the surface. Douglas Rushkoff