Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Hors D'oeuvres For The Turning Table Quite simply, to approach any utterance as if its meaning is separable from its presentation is to disallow art in every positive sense of that word. It is to strip away the individuation that might make a work a new witness, and it is to violate the bond of reader and writer. The essence of our art lies in creating a lingering dream, good or bad, that other souls can enter. Dreaming one's soul into another's is an urgent business of the human mind: the dreaming itself, not whatever agenda can supposedly be extracted from it. As art, it plays on the nerves and senses like a dream. It unfolds over time like a dream. It makes its own often disturbing and often inexplicable appeal to memory and emotion, creating itself again in the consciousness of the reader or hearer. from On "Beauty" By Marilynne Robinson From Tin House Pushcart Prize XXXVII Best Of The Small Presses

Gadflights Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. Margaret Wheatley

Freelance Parlance We know that humankind has sat around its fires from time immemorial and told its tales and told them again, elaborating and refining, and we know that certain of these tales have become myth, epic, fable, Holy Writ. Now, because we have devoted so much ingenuity to the project, we have devised more ways to tell ourselves more stories, which means only that an ancient impulse is still so strong in us as to impel the invention of new means and occasions for telling and hearing to satisfy this appetite for narrative. At the most fundamental level, narrative is how we make sense of things - that is, our experience of ongoing life is a story we tell ourselves, more or less true, depending on circumstance. I believe this narrative is the essential mode of our being in the world, individually and collectively. Maintaining its integrity - maintaining a sense of the essentially provisional or hypothetical character of the story we tell ourselves - is, I will suggest,...

A Celebration of Fooling Around Why make a big deal of something because it is represented by a "round number"? Why not celebrate a triangular, tetrahedronal, or conic  number? This is the 200th Extraordinary Discourse documentary, or, to be precise, the 200th segment of a thematic associational documentary, which is also a long train tracking from thousands of windows the landscapes of the last 30+ years of humanity's death-rebirth process. As we apprehend and attend the process of our initiation, we must come to terms with the necessity of Play, with the necessity of celebrating our bodies, with the necessity of Food and belly-laughs and Fooling Around and Doing Nothing. Jack Saturday

Odd Corners Of The Talk Garden Maid Marion (Olivia De Havilland): “You speak blasphemy!” Robin Hood (Errol Flynn): “Fluently!”

Long Story Shorts To act otherwise, you have to imagine otherwise. Henry Giroux Spreading information is activism. Helena Norberg-Hodge

Glad This Got Said There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete... Most acquire it fragment by fragment like a laborious mosaic. Anaïs Nin