The Art of Tetman Callis

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

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Entries from October 2020

October 31st, 2020 · No Comments

“Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 30th, 2020 · No Comments

“When a democracy sends riot police to beat old ladies over the head with batons and stop them from voting, something has gone badly wrong. . . . A well-run democracy must abide by the rule of law. That is what protects democratic liberties, not least the freedom of minorities to express discontent. . . […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

October 29th, 2020 · No Comments

“Whatever else may or may not be open to him on appeal, a defendant who elects to represent himself cannot thereafter complain that the quality of his own defense amounted to a denial of effective assistance of counsel.” – Justice Potter Stewart, Faretta v. California, 1975

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

October 28th, 2020 · No Comments

“The interest of the State in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” – Justice Harry Blackmun, Faretta v. California, 1975

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

October 27th, 2020 · No Comments

“Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel he may be put on […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

October 26th, 2020 · No Comments

“An assistant, however expert, is still an assistant.” – Justice Potter Stewart, Faretta v. California, 1975

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Tags: Politics & Law

October 25th, 2020 · No Comments

“The plaintiff was incarcerated with the Department of Corrections beginning in 1982. Upon admission, he was given a medical examination. The examination revealed the plaintiff was in good health and had no communicable diseases or infections. In March of 1989, the plaintiff was diagnosed with hepatitis B. One year later, he tested positive for tuberculosis.” […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

October 24th, 2020 · No Comments

“There are never any winners in a knife fight, just different degrees of losers.” – Dominic Gwinn, “I Saw a Man Who Danced with His Wife”

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Verandah

October 23rd, 2020 · No Comments

“The thing, the fact, is; and it is merely because it is. It is—that is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and that bare fact of being, that simple immediacy, constitutes its truth.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. J. B. Baillie)

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Science

October 22nd, 2020 · No Comments

“Fear of the truth may conceal itself from itself and others behind the pretext that precisely burning zeal for the very truth makes it so difficult, nay impossible, to find any other truth except that of which alone vanity is capable—that of being ever so much cleverer than any ideas, which one gets from oneself […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 21st, 2020 · No Comments

“To follow one’s own conviction is certainly more than to hand oneself over to authority; but by the conversion of opinion held on authority into opinion held out of personal conviction, the content of what is held is not necessarily altered, and truth has not thereby taken the place of error. If we stick to […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 20th, 2020 · No Comments

“We may rest assured that it is the nature of truth to force its way to recognition when the time comes, and that it only appears when its time has come, and hence never appears too soon, and never finds a public that is not ripe to receive it.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

October 19th, 2020 · No Comments

“Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is done with any one who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to any one who does not find and feel the same as himself. In other words, he […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 18th, 2020 · No Comments

“As regards philosophy in its proper and genuine sense, we find put forward without any hesitation, as an entirely sufficient equivalent for the long course of mental discipline—for that profound and fruitful process through which the human spirit attains to knowledge—the direct revelation of the divine and the healthy common sense of mankind, unconcerned with […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 17th, 2020 · No Comments

“The first instinctive reaction on the part of knowing, when offered something that was unfamiliar, is usually to resist it. It seeks by that means to save freedom and native insight, to secure its own inherent authority against alien authority—for that is the way anything apprehended for the first time appears. This attitude is adopted, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 16th, 2020 · No Comments

“That the so−called proofs of propositions like that concerning the equilibrium of the lever, the relation of space and time in gravitation, etc., which applied mathematics frequently gives, should be taken and given as proofs, is itself merely a proof of how great the need is for knowledge to have a process of proof, seeing […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 15th, 2020 · No Comments

“Examination of New Mexico statutes reveals a strong public policy that defendants have a duty to appoint and retain only mentally stable police officers.” – Judge Apodaca, Narney v. Daniels, Court of Appeals of New Mexico, 1992

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

October 14th, 2020 · No Comments

“Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all. Beauty, powerless and helpless, hates understanding, because the latter exacts from it what it cannot perform. But the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 13th, 2020 · No Comments

“What is ‘familiarly known’ is not properly known, just for the reason that it is ‘familiar’. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self−deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 12th, 2020 · No Comments

“Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself—it is externality (otherness), and exists for self; yet, in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself—it is self-contained and […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 11th, 2020 · No Comments

“While the embryo is certainly, in itself, implicitly a human being, it is not so explicitly, it is not by itself a human being.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. J. B. Baillie)

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 10th, 2020 · No Comments

“You can’t generalize about divorce, and you can’t get too specific about it, either. The subject either clouds itself up or loves the attention too much..” – Gary Lutz, “Divorcer”

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 9th, 2020 · No Comments

“It is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.” – Charles Dickens, Hard Times

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

October 8th, 2020 · No Comments

“When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape by which few but savages and hunters are attracted. But, when he is trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode; when he is aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used up as […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 7th, 2020 · No Comments

“Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 6th, 2020 · No Comments

“The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends.” – Charles Dickens, Hard Times

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 5th, 2020 · No Comments

“There is only one word for a woman who has sex without belonging to a man or without acquiescing to the burden of motherhood, and that word is witch. Or perhaps it is slut. Either way, it is terrifying, for it means that perhaps women don’t need men; and if we merely choose them, they […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

October 4th, 2020 · No Comments

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” – Sylvia Plath

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 3rd, 2020 · No Comments

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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Tags: Lit & Crit

October 2nd, 2020 · No Comments

“1857, March 3: James Birch wins a government contract to deliver mail from San Antonio, Texas to San Diego, California via El Paso. Because mules pulled his wagons, the service becomes known as the Jackass Mail.” – Leon Metz, El Paso Chronicles

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law