Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Voices, Choices Some parts of the gigantic oeuvre of Walt Whitman remind me of the huge canvases of the masters of Renaissance painting. If, looking at those canvases, we direct our attention to a detail, we discover a multitude of carefully painted small scenes. The same is true in Whitman: there is something like a mosaic, composed of units that are autonomous. Czeslaw Milosz A Book Of Luminous Things

Mixing Jar Love in the Classroom Al Zolynas —for my students Afternoon. Across the garden, in Green Hall, someone begins playing the old piano— a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive, full of a simple, joyful melody. The music floats among us in the classroom. I stand in front of my students telling them about sentence fragments. I ask them to find the ten fragments in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five. They’ve come from all parts of the world—Iran, Micronesia, Africa, Japan, China, even Los Angeles—and they’re still eager to please me. It’s less than half way through the quarter. They bend over their books and begin. Hamid’s lips move as he follows the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax. Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up, legs crossed, quick pulse minutely jerking her right foot. Tony sprawls limp in his desk, relaxed as only someone can be who’s from an island in the South Pacific. The melody floats arou...

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...