Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Yes Back Talk I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'. Zachary Quinto

Unexpected Paths Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the p roject of civilization is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are. THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO

Prophet Margins My favorite thing is to have a big dinner with friends and talk about life. Carla Gugino

Back Talk And Side Talk I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. Ursula K. Le Guin

Talk It Through Propositions, sentences, sentence-tokens, statements, concepts, beliefs, thoughts, intuitions, utterances, judgments, declarations, explanations, questions.

Excerptional Excepts Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth. Byrd Gibbens

F Your "Curriculum" …art was perhaps this—the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it. However it comes out—whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway—we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art. It consoles and heals something in us. That’s why that aspect of things is so important, and why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art—because it’s a living medicine that we can still use. It still works. We feel it working. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely. Music, maybe, most intensely of all. Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry No. 71 Paris Review