The Art of Tetman Callis

“With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.  All they had going for them, from the point of view of Wall Street financial engineers, was that their financial fates could be misconstrued as uncorrelated.  By assuming that one pile […]

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“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — […]

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“My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to write any other.” — John […]

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“Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)

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“If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say, ‘Less matter, more form!’  Ah, what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)

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“The power of destiny is incomprehensible. Its power on all beings cannot be averted.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhyakanda Sarga 22

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“Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods.” — Robert Walpole (quoted by John Cassidy in “Enter the Dragon”)

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“In this world a person with soft nature is treated with disgrace.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhyakanda Sarga 21

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The last of the lower-case very short stories I wrote in 1995 to be published is “latrodectus, loxosceles, lycosa tarentula,” which was accepted by Denver Quarterly in 2003 and published by them in 2006.  Last week, in “mama when she’s really pretty,” I was channeling a six-year-old girl.  This week in “latrodectus, [etc.],” I’m channeling […]

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“CDOs were flawed from the outset, used too often as a junkyard for risky and substandard assets.  CDOs survived because of changes in the credit markets that produced an excess quantity of these assets and herds of investors hungry for higher yields.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical […]

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“Not only did the rating agencies fail to examine the accuracy of their own prior collateral ratings, but in many cases, they also used other agency’s ratings without checking for accuracy.  To correct for any shortcomings in the other agency’s rating methodology, they created the practice of ‘notching,’ whereby they would simply decrease the ratings […]

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“The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin.  The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest).  Maybe the best definition […]

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“I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy.  Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)

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“The upper classes of this country raped this country.  You fucked people.  You built a castle to rip people off.  Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.  Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’” — Steve Eisman (from […]

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“A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.  How could this be?” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short

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“There are actually people who do nothing but invest in European mid-cap health care debt.  I don’t think the problem is specific to finance.  I think that parochialism is common to modern intellectual life.  There is no attempt to integrate.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)

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“Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur.  But save for a few rare occasions–falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature–they don’t occur; the big magnificence is […]

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“We live on the surface of our planet.  Human life happens on a shell as thin, relative to the size of the earth, as an egg’s, or as thin as the paint on a wall.  We have lifestyles on the surfaces of our lives: habits and culture, clothes, modes of transit, calendars, papers in wallets, […]

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This week I’m posting another of those lower-case short-shorts I wrote in the mid-90s, “mama when she’s really pretty.”  I was channeling a six-year-old girl when I wrote this.  It was published in Chiron Review, a litmag run by Michael Hathaway for nearly thirty years before folding earlier this year.

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“Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.  They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation.  They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language.  They established […]

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“A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If […]

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“Patriotism is a curious passion. It does not seem possible to love one’s own country except by hating some other country.” — Archibald MacMechan (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book II, Ch. 10)

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“I do believe in simplicity. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation from all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.” — Henry David Thoreau

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“As an explanation of the mystery of existence the transcendental philosophy makes little appeal to our own hard-headed and scientific generation; but no one, assuredly, with any measure of spiritual and poetic perception can give himself sincerely and unreservedly to one of the literary masterpieces of the transcendental school, to one of the greater essays […]

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“We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us.  But that’s often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” […]

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“The ability to listen is, perhaps, the definition of love.” — John Lahr, “Kid of Comedy”

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“It can be felt as love when you want to fuck someone and can’t.” — E. L. Doctorow, “Assimilation”

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“After the Revolution the novel-reading habit grew, fostered by American publishers and cried out against by many moralists whose cries appeared in magazines side by side with moral tales. Nearly every grade of sophistication applied itself to the problem. It was contested that novels were lies; that they served no virtuous purpose; that they melted […]

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This week I’m posting another of the very short pieces I wrote sans capitalization in the mid-90s, “the german for it, the french.”  It was first published in Quarter After Eight in early 1997.  As with everything I write, it is a true story.  That’s why I write fiction.

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“There was a great person named Kusa, born to Brahma.  He was a great ascetic of indefatigable vows, conversant with righteousness and worshipping good men. That eminent one married a princess of Vidarbha who was born in a noble descent and suitable to him.  He begot four virtuous sons comparable to himself named Kusamba, Kusanabha, […]

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