Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Eclec Ticktalk Time What is known is apt to be identified with what the common language readily describes, and novel combinations are so difficult to achieve that people gifted that way are given the special name poets, and run the special risk of having their communications thought insubstantial. Hugh Kenner (On Buckminster Fuller)

Rock The Boat You know, the Greek word sophia, what we’ve translated as the word "wisdom," comes from crafts—carpenters and hand work. The earliest uses of the word "sophia" is the tiller—the man at the tiller of a boat. He’s always making little moves to keep you on course. That’s all it is. It’s not big sentences. It’s just little moves. That’s the way I think about wisdom, so I don’t use the word. It’s usually used in our culture in terms of big platitudes. James Hillman

Thoughtpile of a Wordchopper What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

A Big Hatful Of Talk ...he did realize that any such changes would become intertwined with a kaleidoscopic and immensely profitable expansion of choices and forms of expression. Thus Marcusean analysis is immensely useful in understanding the profusion of tattoos and pornography, the Internet and smart phones, coffee houses and art fairs, T-shirts and jeans, oral sex and divorce, yoga and foreign travel, Twitter and Facebook, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, “your comments” on everything under the sun. A combination of movements and markets led to a space freer, more inclusive, more interesting and diverse, and humanly and socially richer than any of us would have imagined upon closing the pages of One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse Today Ronald Aronson Boston Review

Wit And Wisdom Of Witty Wise Persons We are still bullied into serving the boring boring boring idiots, our lives deftly determined by beliefs we know are totally false. … How amazing is it that even young people knew back then, almost a half century ago, how horrific the world of work was becoming. Never give up calling out the phonies, goosing the world, and remembering you are a human, and not a chair. Judy Parker 

Maverick's Melange That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. John Stuart Mill

Train of Open Traps Neoliberalism has upended how language is used in both education and the wider society. It works to appropriate discourses associated with liberal democracy that have become normalized in order to both limit their meanings and use them to mean the opposite of what they have meant traditionally, especially with respect to human rights, justice, informed judgment, critical agency, and democracy itself. It is waging a war over not just the relationship between economic structures but over memory, words, meaning, and politics. Neoliberalism takes words like freedom and limits it to the freedom to consume, spew out hate, and celebrate notions of self-interest and a rabid individualism as the new common sense. Equality of opportunity means engaging in ruthless forms of competition, a war of all against all ethos, and a survival of the fittest mode of behavior. The vocabulary of neoliberalism operates in the service of violence in that it reduces the capacity for hum...