The Art of Tetman Callis

“Any idea made public will sooner or later turn on its author and confiscate the pleasure he got from thinking it.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)

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“A vicious person can never relinquish his sinful habits—virtue never resides in the abodes of impious persons.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Aranyakanda Sarga 50

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“Culture is a very fine thing, indeed, but it is never of much account either in life or in literature, unless it is used as a cat uses a mouse, as a source of mirth and luxury.” — Joel Chandler Harris (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book III, Part […]

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“Music is love in search of a word.” — Sidney Lanier (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Ch. IV, Sec. 32)

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“The moment you believe you are entitled to something is exactly when you are ripe to lose it to someone who is fighting harder.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“Winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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It had been my plan to post my earliest published poetry this weekend, but last week I found in my archives one more previously published story I had overlooked and hadn’t posted yet.  That story is “Tossing Baby to the Tiger,” originally published in 2003 by Salt Hill.  It is what I posted this week.  […]

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“One of the most dangerous enemies you can face is complacency.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on your souls.  May God bless your souls.” — Troy Davis, September 21, 2011 (quote from BBC News)

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“Success is the enemy of future success.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“A durable love is one that’s dynamic, not static; long-running, not long-standing; a river we step into every day and not twice.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)

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“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.” — Goethe (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“Nothing is more dispiriting than ‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ which means, in information entropy terms, ‘And then nothing interesting or noteworthy ever happened to them again for the rest of their lives.’” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human

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The Weekly Alibi is an alternative newspaper published in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  From 1996 to 2000, it published a baker’s dozen of my poems in its annual Valentine’s Day poetry contest.  It also published one of my haiku in its 2000 haiku contest.  This week I’m posting those poems here on my blog.  I’m not […]

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“Our legal system is adversarial, founded, like capitalism, on the idea that a bunch of people trying to tear each other apart, plus certain laws and procedures preventing things from getting too out of hand, will yield, in one, justice, and in the other, prosperity, for all.  Sometimes this does happen; other times, it doesn’t.  […]

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“We hear communications experts telling us time and again about things like the ‘7-38-55 rule,’ first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from the tone of your voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words […]

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“A great deal of fairly recent developmental psychology and a great deal of research in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and so forth has suggested, at least, that the idea that there would be a true ‘you’ that comes into the world unaffected, unadulterated by the influence of the social environment in which you develop, is a […]

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“You question the assumptions of physics and you end up in metaphysics–a branch of philosophy.  You question the assumptions of history and you end up in epistemology–a branch of philosophy.  You try to take any other discipline out at the foundations and you end up in philosophy; you try to take philosophy out at the […]

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“Games have a goal; life doesn’t.  Life has no objective.  This is what the existentialists call ‘the anxiety of freedom.’  Thus we have an alternate definition of what a game is–anything that provides temporary relief from existential anxiety.  This is why games are such a popular form of procrastination.  And this is why, on reaching […]

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“We must choose a standard to hold ourselves to.  Perhaps we’re influenced to pick some particular standard; perhaps we pick it at random.  Neither seems particularly ‘authentic,’ but we swerve around paradox here because it’s not clear that this matters.  It’s the commitment to the choice that makes behavior authentic.” — Brian Christian, The Most […]

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“The Usual Story” is another of the stories I initially wrote about a dozen years ago and which was published early this year in Mad Hatters’ Review.  It’s the last previously-published story I have in my inventory.  Next week I’ll have to post something else.  Probably poetry.  There was a call some weeks back from […]

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“What defines us is that we don’t know what to do and there aren’t any revelations out there for us waiting to be found.  Profoundly disoriented and lacking any real mooring, we must make it all up from scratch ourselves, each one of us, individually.  We arrive in a bright room, wet, bloody, bewildered, some […]

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“The truest tests of skill and intuition come when everything looks quiet and we aren’t sure what to do, or if we should do anything at all.” — Garry Kasparov (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“I suppose when you get down to it, everything is always once in a lifetime.  We might as well act like it.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human

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“Every child is born an artist.  The trouble is how to stay one as you grow up.” — Pablo Picasso

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“The reason to wake up in the morning is not the similarity between today and all other days, but the difference.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)

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“Life is not about maximizing everything.” — Glenn Murcutt (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“Vitrine” is another story I wrote about a dozen years ago that finally found a publisher, being one of the four stories of mine Mad Hatters’ Review published early this year.

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“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.” — Jason Fried & David Hansson (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make.  Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko.  No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak.  Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human

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