Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Indie Spiel It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid. Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illumi...

At The Edge Of All That We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, where a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this “distributed generation,” and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. And it can make use of dispersed energy, instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements. Can We Pull the Planet from the Brink of Catastrophe?   Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit TomDispatch   Stories move in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.   Deena Metzger  Writing for Your Life

Deep Twaddle Freedom, then, to do anything and to become anyone? Informality and spontaneity as the ends of life? Pico emphatically rejected this. Born indeterminate, he says, human beings have to find unity in their lives; a person must make him or herself coherent. In Renaissance Humanism, this quest meant uniting conflicting ancient ideals by bridging the Hellenic and the Christian mindset; in Pico’s own philosophy, it meant making the one and the many cohere, or as philosophers would put it today, discovering unity in the midst of difference. Spinoza, two centuries later, was grounded in just this Humanist project. What does the Humanist quest for unity in the midst of difference mean for us today? Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience. Pico dwelt, we would now say, on the phenomenon of...

We Need To Talk Fun institutional critique. …not an interview or a 'conversation' - although it has elements of both. It grows in many directions, without an overall ordering principle. To use Deleuze's term, it is the book as war-machine, the book as 'rhizome'. There is no hierarchy of root, trunk and branch, but a multiplicity of interconnected shoots going off in all directions. Hugh Tomlinson Barbara Habberjam Translator's Introduction Deleuze, Dialogues II Thanks to CBC radio's The Current for Marie Wadden's documentary, Still Sinking: Remembering the Ocean Ranger Disaster

Outside The Scheduled Day I have wanted, in sum, to explain in this essay why the label “humanist” is a badge of honor, rather than the name for an exhausted worldview. Humanism’s emphasis on life-narratives, on the enriching experience of difference, and on evaluating tools in terms of human rather than mechanical complexity are all living values—and more, I would say, these are critical measures for judging the state of modern society. Looking back to the origins of these values is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is rather to remind us that we are engaged in a project, still in process, a humanism yet to be realized, of making social experience more open, engaging, and layered. Humanism Richard Sennett THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 13, NO. 2

Humanities Manoeuvers The rigor of an architectural design is so relentless it can easily appear repetitive and boring. Hopper designed this shortcoming with his use of sunlight, which further complicated the architectural patterns with patterns of his own, privileging certain plains, creating brilliant shafts and vivid diagonals. Hopper's buildings are so alive because they fracture space in such interesting ways. What one has here is cubism without the theoretical baggage. Geoffrey Bent Edward Hopper And The Geometry Of Despair Boulevard Two boys team up and build a full-scale replica of the raft in Huckleberry Finn, using hand-axes for authenticity, and cart it on a trailer to school. It seems the perfect symbol of our object: to get away from the prim widow Douglas and float free for a while. Garret Keizer Harper's

Mothers and Fathers Mom! Dad! Can you hear me? Mother and Father stories At its very best the family can be what many people say it is: an island of acceptance and love in the midst of a harsh world. But too often within the family, people take out on each other all the pain and frustrations of their lives that they don’t dare take out on anyone else. Instead of a ready-made source of friends, it is too often a ready-made source of victims and enemies--the place where not the kindest, but the cruellest words are spoken. This may disappoint us, but it should not surprise or horrify us. The family was not invented, or has it evolved, to make children happy, or to provide a secure emotional and psychological background to grow up in. Mankind evolved the family to meet a very basic need, in small and precarious societies: to make sure that as many children as possible were born--and once born, physically taken care of until they could take care of themselves. “Be fruitful and m...