Month: May 2013

You would think this would be obviousYou would think this would be obvious

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:21 am

“Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety-valve is to the steam engine: every discontent is by means of it immediately relieved in words—indeed, unless this discontent is very considerable, it exhausts itself in this way.  If, however, it is very considerable, it is as well to know of it in time, so as to redress it.”– Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Law and Politics” (trans. Hollingdale)

We’re shocked, just shockedWe’re shocked, just shocked

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:10 am

“Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal.  We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Ethics” (trans. Hollingdale)

Good luck with all thatGood luck with all that

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:52 pm

“If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it.  But if you do that you will produce nothing great.  If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy and the Intellect” (trans. Hollingdale)

He’s not the guy in the adHe’s not the guy in the ad

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:53 am

“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.” – William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Beyond god and evilBeyond god and evil

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:26 pm

“If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact.” — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Truncation for the profit of othersTruncation for the profit of others

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:28 am

“The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking.  What young man is by nature diligent, sober, and regular in his habits?  Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth?  Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring?  One in ten thousand, perhaps.  Bur for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time,’ one will be allowed to get on with living.  The situation is the most commonplace in the world.  I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard the ‘social order’: they know that, short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires.” – R. J. Hollingdale, Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms

The order of chaosThe order of chaos

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:59 pm

“In a society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by millions of people–and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its banks.  Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less than does civilized society: it is just that they operate from the bottom up, not from the top down.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

Making meaning in the back roomMaking meaning in the back room

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:05 am

“What is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty?  Is it the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina?  Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions.  It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here.  Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them.  The same can be said about how we respond to music.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

Within and beyondWithin and beyond

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:25 am

“When you do not think good and when you do not think not-good,what is your true self?  You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it, you cannot admire it, you cannot sense it.  It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.  When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed.” — Mumon, The Gateless Gate (trans. Senzaki and Reps)

Double visionDouble vision

Tetman Callis 2 Comments 4:33 am

“There’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—‘Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist.’  Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between a writer’s knowledge if what is and his vision of what ought to be?” – Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

And that’s how he stoppedAnd that’s how he stopped

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:52 pm

“What matters is that my uncle wouldn’t stop doing drugs. And that one night he got so wasted, he passed out on the railroad tracks and his friends left him there. Because there are people who will leave you on the railroad tracks and there are people who would never do something like that. Not to a friend, not to a stranger, not to an animal, not to a leaf.” — Leesa Cross-Smith, “Five Sketches of a Story About Death”

Welcome to warWelcome to war

Tetman Callis 2 Comments 4:27 am

“You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded.  That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated.  It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents.  It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others.  Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot.  Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or a rabbit’s foot.  Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him.” — John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra

Breathe deepBreathe deep

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:50 pm

“Nothing else really matters but inspiration, being in an inspired relation to being, so that the activity of making art, the act itself, is more important than anything else, it’s more important than the artifact it produces, the thing that everyone sees or hears or reads, the thing they buy or sell, accept or reject.” — Mary Ruefle (interviewed by Bradley Harrison in Denver Quarterly)

Looking at the world through word-colored glassesLooking at the world through word-colored glasses

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:57 pm

“There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”

The fat of the landThe fat of the land

Tetman Callis 2 Comments 4:33 am

“The most important predictor of obesity remains income level. Fast-food companies are dropping obscene amounts on advertising in low-income communities of color, and are targeting children. African-American kids see at least 50 percent more fast-food ads than do white children their age. A full 25 percent of all Spanish-language fast-food advertising in the U.S. is from McDonalds, and the average Latino will see about 290 McDonalds ads a year. In 2006, 9 percent of Upper East Side residents were obese, compared with 21 percent and 30 percent in East and Central Harlem and North and Central Brooklyn, two of the poorest stretches of New York City. Only 5 percent of Upper East Side residents had diabetes, compared to 10 percent and 15 percent in Harlem and Brooklyn. In these neighborhoods, between 1985 and 2000, the cost of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent while the price of junk food and soft drinks decreased by 15 percent and 25 percent respectively.” – Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “Seeing Red”

Yes, no, and maybeYes, no, and maybe

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 5:00 pm

“Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part.  Scholars never agree about anything. The rabbis were interested in finding solutions to contradictions, and when three Jews meet they will have three answers to every question.” — Theodore Zeldin (interviewed in The Jewish Chronicle)

What’s the problem?What’s the problem?

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 4:41 am

“Capitalism is itself a kind of social technology, one capable of organizing and managing a massive and complex division of labor without concentrating power over the system at any one point. But it is a technology that is much better suited to some tasks than others. When maximizing the output of commodities with the least input of human labor is posed as society’s main problem, capitalism’s defenders can point to it as an historically unsurpassed technology for this purpose.

“If, however, the main problem is to maintain the ability of the Earth to support an advanced civilization, and to ensure that the bounty of that civilization is shared out equitably, then the situation looks quite different. Since the system responds only to price signals, internalizing the externalities of ecological degradation entails an unceasing campaign of enclosures and commodification, in which  every aspect of the natural world must be parceled up into pieces of private property, from carbon credits to fishing rights. And this same reliance on prices ensures that legitimacy of a person’s desires will always be equated with the money at their disposal, and the machine will reproduce a world that caters to the whims of rich countries and rich people. This is ever more of a problem when wage work is still the normal way of making a living, and yet less and less labor is actually required in production.” – Peter Frase, “Sowing Scarcity”