The Art of Tetman Callis

The highest law

Tetman Callis — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:49:06 +0000

“Where religion is concerned, the more trivial the issue, the more violent the dispute becomes.” – Montesquieu, “Appendix 13,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)

Ground down and cast away

Tetman Callis — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:25:33 +0000

“Piety, a sign of strength in some characters, is in others a sign of weakness. It is never without significance: for if on the one hand it is attractive in those who are virtuous, it completes the degradation of those who are not.” – Montesquieu, “Appendix 10,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)

Why we never think things through

Tetman Callis — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:54:14 +0000

“To think a thing through meant only hollowing it out, letting it cave in, seeing it to a successful collapse.” – Gary Lutz, “Carriers”

Now for something completely… different

Tetman Callis — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:19:53 +0000

When you can’t even crawl

Tetman Callis — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:31:50 +0000

“When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either.” – Gary Lutz, “I Was in Kilter with Him, a Little”

Kick it, it’ll wiggle

Tetman Callis — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:58:56 +0000

“It is no wonder that criticism is a more conservative, more academically elite, more racially exclusive club than fiction writing itself. To be a critic in the manner of Virginia Woolf—the default position of the Anglo-American critic, from F.R. Leavis to Lionel Trilling to John Updike to Helen Vendler—requires more than a simple lack of humility; it requires a self-assurance that one is speaking from the center of things, that one is qualified to pass judgment on any aesthetic object that comes along. This kind of criticism isn’t interested in discussion or debate, except in a very circumscribed sense; what it seeks, above all, is a universal validation of the writer’s own subjectivity.” – Jess Row, “The Novel Is Not Dead”

Put it back where you found it

Tetman Callis — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:38:04 +0000

“Just because there is a place for something doesn’t automatically mean it belongs there.” – Gary Lutz, “Onesome”

The Congress is in session

Tetman Callis — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:21:06 +0000

“Most legislators have been men of limited abilities who have become leaders by chance, and have taken scarcely anything into account except their own whims and prejudices. They seem not even to have been aware of the grandeur and dignity of their task: they have passed the time making puerile regulations, which, it is true, have satisfied those without much intelligence, but have discredited them with men of sense.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 125,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)

Plugging in

Tetman Callis — Sat, 12 May 2012 14:39:34 +0000

“A story is a serving of palpated verbal material with feelings surging through it, and not just some caboodle of data about fabricated people and their antics. If a reader is asked again and again to travel the distance between a capital letter and a period, every sentence ought to have been routed through the writer’s nervous system and acquired charged particles of language along the way. A sentence ought to be offering a vista of the infinite.” – Gary Lutz (from Dylan Nice interview in Wag’s Revue)

Arms and the man

Tetman Callis — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:21:37 +0000

“As far as arms go, I think they’re the one part of the body that tends to get short shrift in fiction, even though they’re the place where the trouble between people usually gets its start.” – Gary Lutz (from Justin Taylor interview in Bookslut)