Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Paraliterate Memeplex To me, selected lengths of spoken words captured/recorded is the hot-warm-cool-cold cash of any literature you care to underline. Jack Saturday Man [sic] the planter, man the basket-weaver, and man the pot-maker came in after the Paleolithic man, and we've had thousands of years of the planter.  When I mentioned this to John Cage, he said, “You know, that’s very interesting, I spend my life hunting mushrooms.  I am not the least bit interested in cultivating them.”  This is a curious illustration of the difference between the two kinds of man.  The hunter is not concerned with classification or specialism or the processes of cultivation, only with discovery. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

Fighting The Bullshit The bullfighters have been losing their jobs.  The bullshit fighters have rolled up their sleeves. The superior man [sic] abides in his room. If his words are well spoken, he meets with assent at a distance of more than a thousand miles. I Ching Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Marshall McLuhan

Business As Usual NOT An artist today is never working. He’s doing what he [sic] wants to do. He’s playing and he’s at leisure at all times, especially when he’s working hardest. This one of the peculiarities of our time. The old world of the job, this is neolithic; the world of the job, little fragmented specialist tasks, is no longer bearable. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me

Special: Books, Readers, and Writers Book love is your pass to the greatest, the purest and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. Anthony Trollope All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words. Amy Lowell If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. Don DeLillo To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Susan Sontag Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish  I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not di...

Anything But On Institutions And The Individual Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist. Marshall McLuhan, Contemplating Me Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. ...without freedom there can be no morality. C. G. Jung "Know all men [sic] by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk, and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then ha...

Along The Way The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings. C. G. Jung

Nuggets Dark And Bright I am a vain fellow, and have a great many ideas on all sorts of subjects, and like to put them into words and harass the human race with them. H.L. Mencken Such as Women's issues in an abundance economy, Nutsy Land, and fun with Death! Jack