The Art of Tetman Callis

Some of the stories and poems may be inappropriate for persons under 16

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Entries from January 2016

Playing the trump card

January 31st, 2016 · No Comments

“Who of us has not destroyed our enemies in our heads. Suppose but a whisper of our wishes leaked out and half a continent was ready to rise and do your bidding? Orders are easy. Liquidate the trailer parks. Murder motorbikers. Silence the soaps. Clean up the town. Bust up the trusts. It is the […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law · The Second World War

This will be on the final

January 30th, 2016 · No Comments

“History, I do believe, is not a mighty multitude of causes whose effects we suffer now in some imaginary present; it is rather that the elements of every evanescent moment endeavor to hitch a ride on something more permanent, living on in what lives on, lengthening their little life by clinging to a longer one, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Undisguised

January 29th, 2016 · No Comments

“To be free is the greatest blessing the world never gives.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

You will not be the last one left

January 28th, 2016 · No Comments

“Death, they say, is democratic. Right? It makes no class distinctions: richer or poorer, better or worse, sick or well, white or black, jew or gentile; o mortal is mortal o, don’t we moan? and mother will go though she suckled us, and father will go though he paid our way, and brother will fall […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

It’s just another word

January 27th, 2016 · No Comments

“It’s a war of lie against lie in this world where we are, fancy against fantasy, nightmare throttling nightmare like two wedded anacondas, and anyone who’s taken in is nothing but a bolo and a bumpkin. But that’s just exactly what we all are—hoddydoddies—aren’t we? Aren’t we all so hungry, anxious, eager to believe? like […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

We do so love our rights

January 26th, 2016 · No Comments

“To love is to trust another with your self-esteem. And then to see them measure you, to see the red line drop into the bulb at the bottom—my god, how you hate yourself, then, for the gift of your vanity, the care of your conceit! Think of it: you have given someone else the right […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

There’s bees and spiders in there

January 25th, 2016 · No Comments

“If we had the true and complete history of one man—which would be the history of his head—we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

All against all

January 24th, 2016 · No Comments

“Clashes are perfectly normal, what is the purpose of the pitiless bronze? certainly labor and management cheat one another—are suspicious, sullen, lazy, greedy, deceitful, Mafia-manipulated—you name it, no surprises, ordinary shiftlessness, ordinary exploitation, ordinary rapacity; physicians pill their poor patients to death and then bill the estates, which are already being fucked over by lawyers […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Rats on a treadmill

January 23rd, 2016 · No Comments

“What will we do when we lose the war? Prepare for the next one.” – Julius J. Epstein, Cross of Iron Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law · The Forever War · The Second World War

Ugly pictures

January 22nd, 2016 · No Comments

“Each generation will rewrite history in its own image.” – Halvard Leira, “International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

They’re not going to pay you, anyhow

January 21st, 2016 · No Comments

“Amateurism is obviously differentiated from professionalism, but the criteria for differentiation here is not payment or quality. What distinguishes an amateur is not that he or she is not paid, nor that he or she is doing something in an inexpert way. Rather, the central notion of amateurism is the motivation to engage in a […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

Not to mention any readers

January 20th, 2016 · No Comments

“Disciplinary boundaries and boundary-keeping circumscribe which channels of publication are seen as relevant and also where specific types of work will be acceptable. Hence, they are also ultimately decisive for the possibilities of getting tenure and promotion.” – Halvard Leira, “International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

Haters gotta hate

January 19th, 2016 · No Comments

“Lay the length of a lasting love alongside any hate, that of the Armenians, for instance, the Turks for the Greeks, the Serbs for everybody. Do you suppose if the Armenians had been done a good turn back then, instead of being thinned, they would remember? three square meals and clean clothes in corded bales […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

And not a garter, my friend

January 18th, 2016 · No Comments

“Who wants to stir up even a chicken if it hankers to be a snake?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Not even in there

January 17th, 2016 · No Comments

“I know that men are capable of anything; that all of the things possible to men are therefore possible for me. There is no final safety from oneself.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Guilty as charged

January 16th, 2016 · No Comments

“It should be clear—plain to any person—open to any eye—that historical chronicles are chronologies of crime, and that any recital of the past constitutes an indictment.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Flavor-of-the-month club

January 15th, 2016 · No Comments

“O yes, O yes, O yes, O yes, I am aware, O how I know, that there are those who write like tenors, stock their books as though each were a fish pond, dry goods, hardware, or a pantry; who jerry-build, compose sentences like tangled spaghetti, piss through their pens and otherwise relieve themselves, play […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

What’s the price on that?

January 14th, 2016 · No Comments

“Everywhere nothing now but a revocation of the muse. Cancel Clio, cross out sweet Calliope, for history’s been buggered by ideology, and farts its facts in an odorous cloud, while poets have no breath whatever, are in another business presently, where Parnassus is a pastry, and produce their poems promptly on request like short-order cooks […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

And this is why the Internet is free

January 13th, 2016 · No Comments

“Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves, not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

Busybodies on the government payroll

January 12th, 2016 · No Comments

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” – Justice Louis […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

Catch it if you can

January 11th, 2016 · No Comments

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

To be so clean again

January 10th, 2016 · No Comments

“We lie with the Fates from our first conception; for it is said—and truly too—that the flesh is built up over the bones at birth by the caresses of those star-guarding harlots whose pawed passage clings there like a cloth, just as the soul in our life is the silted delta of the senses, their […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

It might not prove the joist we sought to hammer

January 9th, 2016 · No Comments

“We live in a world of whirling air just as Anaximenes concluded, a world of whiffs, puffs, breaths, zephyrs, breezes, hurricanes, monsoons, and mistrals; and if they all died away suddenly, and we were Sargasso’d in a sea of circumstance, then one small draft through a winter window might drive us at our destiny like […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Fancy a fancy-eating tree

January 8th, 2016 · No Comments

“A flat and wooden style, words nailed like shingles to the page, the earnest straightforward bite of the spike, is the one which suits sincerity; sincerity cannot gambol, cannot play, cannot hedge its bets, forswear a wager, bear to lose; sincerity is tidy; it shits in a paper sack to pretend it’s innocent of food; […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

To be young and upright again

January 7th, 2016 · No Comments

“Classicists cannot soil themselves with simple-minded seeing the way empirics do: empirics are too dewy, eager, brash, young, innocent, naive. No. And not because experience couldn’t bring them to wisdom better than the Greeks, either, but because experience is broad and muddy like the Ganges, with the filthy and the holy intermixed in every wash; […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

And reparations cannot be paid

January 6th, 2016 · No Comments

“Neither guilt nor innocence are ontological elements in history; they are merely ideological factors to which a skillful propaganda can seem to lend a causal force, and in that fashion furnish others—in disguise of their greed as it may be, their terror sometimes, pride possibly, remorse even, or, more often, surly resentment—a superficially plausible apologia […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

No

January 5th, 2016 · No Comments

“Is writing to yourself a healthier insanity than talking to yourself?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Capital preservation

January 4th, 2016 · No Comments

“The Reichskommissariat Ukraine had certain features in common with Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau: the pervasive terror; the obligation to witness public beatings or executions; the happy music during sad occasions; and the frequency with which captors observed their subjects with disgust or pretended not to see them at all. It is not surprising […]

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Tags: Economics · The Second World War

Murderous tyrannies all

January 3rd, 2016 · No Comments

“Western Volhynia, less than thirty thousand square kilometers, inhabited by 1.5 million people, including 250,000 Poles, experienced in 1943 mass killings of Poles and a Polish-Ukrainian war. At the very least 15,000, and possibly many thousands more, Polish men, women, and children died at the hands of Ukrainian partisans and villagers in one of the […]

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Tags: The Second World War

German efficiency

January 2nd, 2016 · No Comments

“Starting in 1942, the predominant Nazi reaction to partisans was to kill and burn, with careful planning and horrible precision. One of the earliest casualties of these assaults in the Reichskommissariat [Ukraine] was the village of Kortelisy near Ratne in Polissia. In May 1942, a partisan unit of some fifty locals and former Red Army […]

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Tags: The Second World War