Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

A Narrative Of Intersections Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes

A Narrative Of Intersections Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J. M. Keynes

It Gets Better The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection. Paul Rand            

All This Other Stuff Gitanjali 35 Rabindranath Tagore  Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;      Where knowledge is free;      Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow            domestic walls;      Where words come out from the depth of truth;      Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;      Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the                        dreary desert sand of dead habit;      Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening                       ...

Did You Hear? There are two possible answers to the current challenges to the arts. One is to accept the market rhetoric that dominates the rest of the culture. If you move in this direction you may possibly be financially viable but you will be doomed to fit more and more closely within the materialistic norms of our times. You may continue to function but you will lose your own souls. Alternatively, you can enliven the old traditions supported by those who believe in the importance of the liberal arts and the ability to think. You can argue for the right to think freely outside the box. You can reclaim the role of the arts as the breaker of old boundaries and the creator of new dream and visions. Robert Theobald

Think Again Saluting Maria Popova: Brain Pickings celebrated its seventh birthday last week [2013]. Since day one, it has been my belief that we create by amalgamating different pieces of knowledge from various fields, with various sensibilities, and from various time periods — knowledge that may seem useless but ultimately isn’t — into new combinations that we call our own ideas; by cultivating a certain way of operating that allows for the remixing of our existing ideas; by creating a rich personal micro-culture that lends itself to such alchemy. Creativity is, in other words, combinatorial and it’s reliant upon a vast, eclectic pool of such intellectual resources. Brain Pickings has always been a sort of library for these diverse building blocks of combinatorial creativity. Maria Popova

The Smart And The Wise Originality often consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected. W. I. B. Beveridge