Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Puckish Pedagogy Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening. Maria Popova

Playing Marbles With Diamonds We each need to find our way home in this little life. Not just walk someone else’s trail. Douglas Rushkoff

NSFW Following one of Jacques Derrida’s early questions — namely, How is writing involved in speech? — this essay reconsiders the role of the tongue and the sense of taste in the oral phenomena of speaking and saying. The contact the tongue makes with the mouth or teeth is just as much a materialization of language as what is commonly called “writing.” The tongue acts as a pen and the mouth, as a blank page (or palimpsest). Mouthed writing is accompanied by sense experiences. There are various selftastes to the tastes of speaking, the tastes of words, or, even, the tastes of thoughts. ... The auto-affection of tasting-oneself-speakwriting is offered as an alternative to the metaphysical presumptions Derrida implicates in Husserl’s understanding of speech based on the auto-affection of hearing-oneself-speak. As such, writing (haunted by the trace of death) and speech (invested with living- presence) is now confronted with the selftastes of speakwriting with one’s stylangue [st...

A Finder's Keepers I am not a searcher, I am a finder. Pablo Picasso

Pivots A word after a word after a word is power. Margaret Atwood We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Intelligent Guff "It sounds terribly complicated, I know. And I suppose it's really not any better than a notebook." "Then why all that guff? I don't get it." "Because," she said carefully, sensing that despite his outward truculence he understood her, "it can happen that - if you practice this art - that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn't know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don't know may arise spontaneously…" "Hawksquill" and "Auberon" from John Crowley's Little, Big

Cuts To The Chase [...] the primary bias of the digital media environment is for distinction. Analog media such as radio and television were continuous, like the sound on a vinyl record. Digital media, by contrast, are made up of many discrete samples. Douglas Rushkoff 07.07.16