The Art of Tetman Callis

“I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We entrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers. There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of love and of sleep. The bed […]

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“It seems to me that real love must unsettle the mind, upset the nerves and distract the head; that it must—how shall I express it?—be dangerous, even terrible, almost criminal and sacrilegious; that it must be a kind of treason; I mean to say that it is bound to break laws, fraternal bonds, sacred obligations; […]

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“However great the love may be that unites them a man and a woman are always strangers in mind and intellect; they remain belligerents, they belong to different races. There must always be a conqueror and a conquered, a master and a slave; now the one, now the other—they are never two equals.” – Guy […]

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“The didactic mission of preserving the past as an object for the future, narrated by the stark finality of ‘never again,’ renders the structural violence of the present illegible while monetizing the promises of witnessing, thus profiting from the illusion that it is possible to coexist with the past.” – Julia Michiko Hori, “Berthing Violent […]

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“The past is neither inert nor given. The stories we tell about what happened then, the correspondences we discern between today and times past, and the ethical and political stakes of those stories redound in the present. If slavery feels proximate rather than remote and freedom seems increasingly elusive, this has everything to do with […]

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“If the monuments of civilization are almost always monuments to barbarism, what would it mean to let them fall into disrepair?” – Julia Michiko Hori, “Berthing Violent Nostalgia: Restored Slave Ports and the Royal Caribbean Historic Falmouth Cruise Terminal” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The cease of majesty dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw what’s near it with it: it is a massy wheel, fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, to whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which, when it falls, each small annexment, petty consequence, attends the boisterous […]

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“The administrative staff is supposed to be at Radzivillov along with all the transport carts, but in my opinion, Brody would be more interesting, the battle is being fought for Brody. Ivan’s opinion prevails, some of the cart drivers are saying the Poles are in Brody, the transport carts are fleeing, the army staff has […]

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“The terrible truth is that all the soldiers have syphilis. Matyazh is almost cured (with practically no treatment). He had syphilis, got treatment for two weeks, he and a fellow countryman were to pay ten silver kopecks in Stavropol, his fellow countryman died, Misha had it many times, Senechka and Gerasya have syphilis, and they […]

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“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Mass production changed human life forever. For the centuries preceding we were primarily an agrarian people living in a natural world, according to our needs and the seasons. Then, literally overnight, most of us were part of some immense process, making a part of a part of something. Universal time didn’t exist until relatively recently, […]

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“When a man is tired he mistakes the hopes of children for the knowledge of men.” – Paul Bowles, “He of the Assembly” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“He took home many women, and one day he found that he had en noua. He knew that was a bad disease, because it stays in the blood and eats the nose from inside. ‘A man loses his nose only long after he has already lost his head.’ He asked a doctor for medicine. The […]

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“Tourists are people with the means and desire to seek out experiences different or absent from their daily lives. Leisure tourism is shaped around providing things that corporate work culture withholds, including such basics as sleep, sunlight, art and music, physical exercise, relief from stress, a break from surveillance and policed time, from the women’s […]

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“Generally speaking—this isn’t always true, but generally—your worst volunteer is better than your best conscript.” – Justin King, Beau of the Fifth Column, January 6, 2020 Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old. When these capacities are absent in a young child, we worry about them. There seems to be an understanding that the thing we call the arts has a critical function for kids, though we may have a hard time saying […]

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“The bounty of one single bowl of rice should be treasured till death.” – Cao Xueqin, The Dream of the Red Chamber (trans. H. Bencraft Joly) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The god of the pit is the pit … I’m not sorry I’m made of sorrow.” – Kate Colby, “Tartarus” (emphasis in original) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“In the world, there’s nothing difficult; the only thing hard to get at is a human being with a will.” – Cao Xueqin, The Dream of the Red Chamber (trans. H. Bencraft Joly) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Once you accept the fact that life isn’t fun, you’ll be much happier.” – Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (emphasis in original) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn’t any apostle-crossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the […]

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“You must take your chance on what you are. And you can’t sit still. I know this is a double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself […]

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“In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias nor being just trunkless legs; in his day […]

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“Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn’t correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn’t try […]

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“I know man’s labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, becoming them in the process.” – Saul Bellow, The […]

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“Those who fall ill on the 25th day of the 8th moon have come across, in a due westerly quarter, of some flower spirit; they feel heavy, with no inclination for drink or food. Take seven sheets of white paper money, and, advancing forty steps due west, burn them and exorcise the spirit; recovery will […]

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“There is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don’t, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop ‘September Morn.’ Nor are lowered into it with visitor’s curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted […]

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“Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into […]

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“The more you love people the more they’ll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.” – Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The advantage of lesser gods is that you can take their names any way you like.” – Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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