Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

People Saying Interesting Things Tour Carol Snow Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path  and then placed camellia blossoms there. Or -- we had no way of knowing -- he'd swept the path  between fallen camellias. My words itch at your ears til you understand them. Walt Whitman

Here's To The Outsiders 2 of 2 And now at the edge of the year, we gather in the Edge community. I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. Bill Hicks Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: Raggedy outsiders. John Updike ...we needed three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked to be be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the powers and knowledge we always felt were our birthright--powers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back, we must cast away the habits of exile--the self-contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the wilful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning. Frederick Turner

Here's To The Outsiders (1 of 2) We have come, along the wandering path of these podcasts, in the darkest time of winter, at a time when the news has also been dark, to the hundredth episode. Somewhere around 10,000 items so far. First day after the Mayan calendar cycle, just under Christmas, the time of family trauma and much loneliness. Let us take a leisurely stroll for a couple of episodes through the land of the Outsiders. Come with me and join the Outsiders! It didn't work in the composition of this work to drop names with every item. But listen for Margaret Visser, Robert Anton Wilson, David Cayley, Jack Kerouac, John Livingston, Bucky Fuller, Leonard Cohen, Alan Watts, Douglas Rushkoff, Caroline Casey, Derrick de Kerckhove,  John Taylor Gatto, Michael Ignatieff, Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jonathan Winters, Richard Kearney, Ivan Illich, James Hillman, Nils Christie. If I've missed any that concern you, please contact me and I'll see if I have a na...

The Current Scene Through Different Windows The strength of language doesn't consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. "Word work," Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, "is sublime because it is generative," its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. "We die," she said. "That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer's day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee."  Lewis Lapham  Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear  Huffpost

In A Thousand Nutshells All artists are pickpockets. friend of Robert W. Fuller The right way to wholeness is a longissima via , not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus. C. G. Jung (1968 [1944] par. 6)

Diverse Disclosure Gratitude to Old Teachers Robert Bly When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake, We place our feet where they have never been. We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy. Who is down there but our old teachers? Water that once could take no human weight- We were students then - holds up our feet, And goes on ahead of us for a mile. Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

Playful Learnings And Teachings On Blue Morning, my big bicycle, steel crow or raven, minimally gentrified in the land of finance capitalism, dressed for the investment climate, anonymous among brokers and quant geeks, adjusting for fiscal drift and partial de-indexation, bank rates and prime rates, in the great field of consortiums, task forces, hardliners, cabinet shuffles, party hacks and scrums, among wholly owned subsidiaries, past hot money flows, bond ratings, protected by the gnomes of Zurich and the oracles of the IMF, I was on alert to push my envelope/diversify my portfolio. My strategies were dream strategies. Apocalyptic-tack-talk strategies. Hallucinatory and liberal strategies. Rhizomatic and arborescent strategies. Visionary-fairy strategies. Musical stragedies. Strategies of laughter. Today I saw powerful wind in a hurry haul a graceful maple, rakish half crown shining gold, almost horizontal: it bowed over a house and showered its dark roof with leaves. My...