The Art of Tetman Callis

Words don’t often fail me.  More often, I fail them.  This week, I’m posting to this site a work of poetry I wrote six years ago, called The Book of Lamentations.  I had previously published it to my Yahoo website in 2006, where I took it down after a week or two, and to my […]

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“If  no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will be separate and independent of the body.” — Plato, Phaedo (trans. Tredennick)

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“Vortex reigns, having expelled Jupiter.” — Aristophanes, The Clouds (trans. Hickie)

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“Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?” — Plato, Crito (trans. Tredennick)

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“Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy”. — Aristophanes, Lysistrata (trans. Lindsay)

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“Art is imitation, not of things, but of the nature of things, and man is an imitator, not a creator.” — Huntington Cairns, The Collected Dialogues of Plato

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Amtrak runs the Southwest Chief between LA and Chicago.  Last week, Susan and I took it eastbound from Albuquerque.  She was born and raised in Chicago* and we went there to be wed and to honeymoon. (*Onion-town, the legendary, big-shouldered, fog-footed Kenyan capital of the glittering island kingdom of Kansas, where edible dogs are raised […]

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“You cannot make up for the evil things you do–they’re there forever.  You can only add better things to your list of deeds in hopes of creating some kind of cosmic balance.” — Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Deer

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“The forces called electricity and chemical affinity are one and the same.” — Michael Faraday, quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII

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“Men of genius work from the centre outwards.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII

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“At this time, interest in natural philosophy was widely disseminated, and, in science, as in politics and literature, new ideas were readily welcomed.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VIII

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The Weekly Alibi is an alternative paper in Albuquerque, going on twenty years old.  I don’t often read it these days, as I am getting older and and am feeling the pressing need to slough off the unnecessary.  But back in the 1990s and on up until the middle of the last decade, hardly a […]

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“We always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like.” — Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?”

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“If any ventured to rise in opposition, he was presently put to death in some convenient way, and there was neither search for the murderers nor justice to be had against them if suspected; but the people remained motionless, being so thoroughly cowed that men thought themselves lucky to escape violence, even when they held […]

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“Though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving successful.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VII

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“Sir Thomas Gresham, writing on the coinage, lays it down as a principle that, if you have in a country good coins and deteriorated coins of the same metal current side by side, the bad will drive out the good, and Gresham’s law may often be applied to literature, to art and, especially, to journalism. […]

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“Among English-speaking people, it is difficult to make a great reputation out of short stories.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. III

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“While life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, regarding the work of Ruskin

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“We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.” — Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land”

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“The virtue of men in office is briefly this, to do their country as much good as they can, or in any case no harm that they can avoid.” — Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Ch. XVIII (trans. Crawley)

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“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” — Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Ch. XVII (trans. Crawley)

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“God forbid you should have to live with the consequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head, turning from this side to that, tossing between wrong and right.” — Nathan Englander, “Free Fruit for Young Widows”

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There was a different story I was going to post this week, but I got a piece of fan mail drawing my attention to “The Year Our Children Left”, so I’m posting that story instead.  It was published last year in Neon, a sharp online litmag out of the UK.

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“Publish and be damned.” — Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1824

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