Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

High-value flotsam on the rising tide That rocks all boats I think it's [the Occupy movement] thrown open an almost kaleidoscopic sense of possibility... We have no idea yet where it all might lead if the democratic culture we're trying to build really does take root. The main thing Occupy did was to throw open the imagination, to get us to start thinking on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times. David Graeber 'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility': Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America Lynn Stuart Parramore AlterNet

Chopped Chautauqua There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit Sometimes game-changing, immensely lucrative epiphanies lie on the far side of seemingly esoteric inquiries. Questioning the Mission of College New York Times By FRANK BRUNI Published: April 20, 2013

Freedom Dossier Fun with fear, death, slavery, and much else! I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play. Nietzsche In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy. The Talmud In the language of enchantment, there is this sense of a living continuum that cannot be cut up or divided because of the symbiotic interactions and interpenetrations of everything within it. The lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. Everywhere, categories overlap. Surprise synchronistic connections lead us into spell-binding ecstasy. Things configure in their own way, woven together as if in some divine aesthetic kaleidoscope. This is not doctrinal religious practice, but an aspect of "opening to shakti"-the dynamic life force that animates everything. One could say that these works are beautiful, except that the word itself all but vanishes in the glit...

Liberation Miscellany We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize. Stephen Jenkinson

Hints from the Edge Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. Jesus, Matt 13, 47 The chorus of springtime sings: Commodity labor for necessities sucks. It is a mass distraction, a miserable diversion from our evolutionary potential, which is teetering on the edge of a birth - or our death. These long trains of thoughts, past towns familiar and unfamiliar, are hints from the edge, looking down and in (depth psychology) and out to the socioeconomy in contractions or throes or both.

Unauthorized Trails Between the crucifixion and the resurrection. And it is still narrative - just not in the closed-ended Aristotelian way. It doesn't have a simple crisis and conclusion. It just keeps going. Douglas Rushkoff

Spoken Scrapbook Work-life balance?... ...oh, oh, if one but had the body for it one would live out one’s days in van Gogh’s room at Arles, eating up comfort and beauty and having it too, there in one last fell binge of boyhood.... to be there on the featherbed, on the oilcloth-looking floor amid one’s things... You wouldn’t even have to worry whether you can afford it. What, this poor Goodwill stuff...? ...I’d pay my life out there gladly, not so much a hero as a loving dilettante of idyll, using only the plain equipment of beauty. Substituting the hard work of freedom with the even harder work of contemplation... There are worse character flaws than sloth. Nationalism, I think, patriotism, the too-forgiving love of tribe, maybe even of family itself. All the flaws of a restrictive loyalty, whatever makes us want to be part of a small idea, whatever makes us dangerous or allows us to entertain, even for a moment, the idea of a Mother of Battles. Much better to wait it out a...