The Art of Tetman Callis

“Modernity has not turned out altogether well. To the pioneers of Enlightenment, it appeared that false certainties and artificial hierarchies were the chief obstacles to general happiness. To many the suspicion has by now occurred that there are no true certainties and no natural hierarchies, yet also that individual and social well-being require some certainties, […]

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“None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in […]

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“The culture of professionalism and expertise, the bureaucratization of opinion and taste, are not merely mechanisms of social control or a failure of nerve. They are also in part a response to genuine intellectual progress. There’s more to know now than in the ‘30s, and more people have joined the conversation. Perhaps the disappearance of […]

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“The beginning of political decency and rationality is to recognize others’ similarity in important respects to oneself; that is, to identify imaginatively. Which is what one does when reading fiction. Literature is, in this sense, practice for civic life.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old […]

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“Thought is the enemy of flow.” – Vinnie Colaiuta (quoted by Rick Beato in “Why Jeff Beck is Uncopyable”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.” – Stephen King, The Stand Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance . . . or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and […]

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“Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, […]

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“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was […]

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“One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings […]

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“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men […]

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“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and […]

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“The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian […]

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“Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous […]

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“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable […]

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“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.” – Stephen King, The Stand Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Susan Sontag wrote in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ that ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’ Meaning: the interpretation of art is a tiresome pseudoscience, and the magnetism of art is what has always saved it from becoming dull, weighted down. It’s something we see and feel first and foremost, before […]

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“Literature cannot cause or make anything, because its reality is neither spiritual nor material, subjective nor objective. But as the expression of the total meaningfulness of the logos or the setting up of a world, literature uncovers the world and opens up other possible worlds.” – Pheng Cheah, What is a world? On postcolonial literature […]

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“Every tacky loudmouth of a girl is behaving strategically. For all the tiresome gender essentialism that leads people to mock girls for the obnoxious way they scream, nobody seems to acknowledge that a screaming girl knows exactly how annoying she’s being. She simply doesn’t care . . .. For a girl, a scream is a […]

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