The Art of Tetman Callis

“I get a lot of inspiration from just going out and pretending I’ve never been to this planet before. It’s a great way to remember just how absurd, strange, beautiful, and unlikely everything is.” – Brendan Constantine, Rattle 58

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“The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king.” – Randolph Bourne, “The State”

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“The modern State begins when a prince secures almost undisputed sway over fairly homogeneous territory and people and strives to fortify his power and maintain the order that will conduce to the safety and influence of his heirs. The State in its inception is pure and undiluted monarchy; it is armed power, culminating in a […]

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“The normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are recuperating from conflicts in which they have […]

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“I write poetry because I am looking for home.” – Echo Wren, Rattle 59

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“I write because I am irritable and impossible to live with if I don’t.” Yamini Pathak, Rattle 59

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“My family moved from Taiwan to Texas when I was seven. I was in first grade, and I wore a navy-blue uniform that had the three characters of my name embroidered just above the left breast pocket. In America, I wore jeans, t-shirts, and purple shoes to school. In America, the three characters of my […]

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“Poems are happening in plain view every day.” – Lowell Jaeger, Rattle 59

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“I started writing poems because in the English language there is only one word for ‘dream’.” – Megan Falley, Rattle 59

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“A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of […]

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“To be a good reporter it is first necessary to perceive. The commonest mistake is to call upon the imagination to supply what the eye has not been able to take in. A reporter should be all perception.” – Ron Grossman, “Adding booksmarts to street-smart journalism”

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“The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, […]

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“Even one war in space will create a battlefield that will last forever, encasing the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that will thereafter make space near the earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes. With enough orbiting debris, pieces will begin to hit other pieces, whose fragments will in […]

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“The absence of any explicit signifier functions by itself as a signifier.” – Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith)

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“Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess.” – Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith)

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“A modern masterpiece is impossible, since the writer is forced by his writing into a cleft stick: either the object of the work is naively attuned to the conventions of its form, Literature remaining deaf to our present History, and not going beyond the literary myth; or else the writer acknowledges the vast novelty of […]

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“The multiplication of modes of writing is a modern phenomenon which forces a choice upon the writer, making form a kind of behaviour and giving rise to an ethic of writing. To all the dimensions which together made up the literary creation is henceforth added a new depth, since form is by itself a kind […]

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“It is because there is no thought without language, that Form is the first and last arbiter of literary responsibility, and it is because there is no reconciliation within the present society, that language, necessary and necessarily orientated, creates for the writer a situation fraught with conflict.” – Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette […]

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“Within a national norm such as French, forms of expression differ in different groups, and every man is a prisoner of his language: outside his class, the first word he speaks is a sign which places him as a whole and proclaims his whole personal history. The man is put on show and delivered up […]

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“If you don’t like to read, your writing’s going to suck.: – Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius

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“The Novel is a Death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into an orientated and meaningful time.” – Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith)

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“Who cares whether someone else wants to read it? If you care about it, write it.” – Jennifer Perrine (quoted in Rattle 68)

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“We are interconnected, and the sooner every individual realizes that they are connected to all living things everywhere, the sooner they will be healthy, happy human beings.” – Paul E. Nelson (interviewed by Timothy Green in Rattle 68)

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“In an explanation, simplicity is power.” – Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”

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“The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window: all they have left is cold disdain, that’s what marriages live on nowadays.” – Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell” (trans. unknown)

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“I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride, – and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!” – Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell” (trans. unknown)

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“Demands for communication are presumptuous and irrelevant.” – Clifford Styll (quoted by Paul E. Nelson in Rattle 68)

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“Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, knave, and scoundrel.” – Allen Ginsberg (quoted by Paul E. Nelson in Rattle 68)

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“At very rare, great moments—generally they are moments of death—a reality reveals itself to man in which he suddenly glimpses and grasps the essence that rules over him and works within him, the meaning of his life. His whole previous life vanishes into nothingness in the face of this experience; all its conflicts, all the […]

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“Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)

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