Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Torch/Torque the Noggin In what lies the significance of human life in which machine power has grown to be the destructive factor that it now is in the hands of the Money Power? There will come a universal margin of leisure, greater rational freedom for the individual than any known by previous civilizations - but that only if the creative artist is there in his true place, the machine in his hand as a tool. Money should have no power whatever in itself. Employment is not enough! What a man [sic] wants, if democracy works, is not so much employment as freedom to work at what he believes in, what he likes to do. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City , 1963 Recommended: On Being , with Krista Tippett, for great conversations.                           CBC's Tapestry , with Mary Hynes, same.

At Least This Got Said My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company. Jane Austen

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