“HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF TENNESSEE, IN THE FIELD, October 12, 1864 – To the Officer commanding the United States forces at Resaca, Georgia. SIR: I demand the immediate and unconditional surrender of the post and garrison under your command, and, should this be acceded to, all white officers and soldiers will be parolled in a few days. If the place is carried by assault, no prisoners will be taken. Most respectfully, your obedient servant, J. B. HOOD, General.
“HEADQUARTERS SECOND BRIGADE, THIRD DIVISION, FIFTEENTH CORPS, RESACA, GEORGIA, October 12, 1864. To General J. B. HOOD: Your communication of this date just received. In reply, I have to state that I am somewhat surprised at the concluding paragraph, to the effect that, if the place is carried by assault, no prisoners will be taken. In my opinion I can hold this post. If you want it, come and take it. I am, general, very respectfully, your most obedient servant, CLARK R. WEAVER, Commanding Officer.”
– from Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
Do-It Do-It
“AROUND ALLATOONA, October 5, 1864. – Commanding Officer, United States Forces, Allatoona: I have placed the forces under my command in such positions that you are surrounded, and to avoid a needless effusion of blood I call on you to surrender your forces at once, and unconditionally. Five minutes will be allowed you to decide. Should you accede to this, you will be treated in the most honorable manner as prisoners of war. I have the honor to be, very respectfully yours, S. G. FRENCH, Major-General commanding forces Confederate States.
“HEADQUARTERS FOURTH DIVISION, FIFTEENTH CORPS, ALLATOONA, GEORGIA, 8:30 A.M., October 5, 1864. – Major-General S. G. French, Confederate States, etc.: Your communication demanding surrender of my command I acknowledge receipt of, and respectfully reply that we are prepared for ‘the needless effusion of blood’ whenever it is agreeable to you. I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, JOHN M. CORSE, Brigadier-General commanding forces United States.”
– from Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
Motherless Child
“The king and the head men loved much, and overmuch, covetousness in gold and in silver; and recked not how sinfully it was got, provided it came to them. The king let his land at as high a rate as he possibly could; then came some other person, and bade more than the former one gave, and the king let it to the men that bade him more. Then came the third, and bade yet more; and the king let it to hand to the men that bade him most of all: and he recked not how very sinfully the stewards got it of wretched men, nor how many unlawful deeds they did; but the more men spake about right law, the more unlawfully they acted. They erected unjust tolls, and many other unjust things they did.” — From the entry for A.D. 1087, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (trans. Ingram & Giles)
A Thousand Times No
“I peremptorily required that all the citizens and families resident in Atlanta should go away, giving to each the option to go south or north, as their interests or feelings dictated. I was resolved to make Atlanta a pure military garrison or depot, with no civil population to influence military measures. I had seen Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans, all captured from the enemy, and each at once was garrisoned by a full division of troops, if not more; so that success was actually crippling our armies in the field by detachments to guard and protect the interests of a hostile population.
“I gave notice of this purpose, as early as the 4th of September, to General Halleck, in a letter concluding with these words: ‘If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.’
“I knew, of course, that such a measure would be strongly criticized, but made up my mind to do it with the absolute certainty of its justness, and that time would sanction its wisdom. I knew that the people of the South would read in this measure two important conclusions: one, that we were in earnest; and the other, if they were sincere in their common and popular clamor ‘to die in the last ditch,’ that the opportunity would soon come.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
Male Human Sexuality
“In a certain technoutopian view of the future, we are headed toward a post-property world. The shift from ownership to access is supposed to liberate us, enable greater sharing of resources, fuel human creativity, create more prosperity, and lead to greater equality. What we so often forget to ask, however, is who controls access? Who builds the highways?” – Whitney Erin Boesel, “Spotevangelism”
In the late 1990s I produced a series of experimental sound recordings in Studio C at KUNM radio in Albuquerque. I called this series Descartes’s Dreams, from the title of the vocal portion of its longest track.
These recordings were stashed away in a plastic bag for over a dozen years before I decided to convert them to mp3 format and post them here. They’ll appear one per day on the sidebar to the left, and also here in the new posts.
Here’s the first, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Puttin’ on the Ritz
“When the time comes that knowledge will not be sought for its own sake, and men will not press forward simply in a desire of achievement, without hope of gain, to extend the limits of human knowledge and information, then, indeed, will the race enter upon its decadence.” — Charles Evans Hughes (quoted by David Eugene Smith in The Teaching of Geometry)
Shiprock, 1982 by Tetman Callis
“In the present utilitarian age one frequently hears the question asked, ‘What is the use of it all?’ as if every noble deed was not its own justification. As if every action which makes for self-denial, for hardihood, and for endurance was not in itself a most precious lesson to mankind. That people can be found to ask such a question shows how far materialism has gone, and how needful it is that we insist upon the value of all that is nobler and higher in life.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (quoted by David Eugene Smith in The Teaching of Geometry)
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1982 by Tetman Callis
“One of the essential properties of intelligence is flexibility. What does it mean to be an expert at something? What makes someone an expert is her ability to respond to a completely novel situation—to solve original problems, for example. Expertise does not only involve having command of a huge amount of factual knowledge—it does not mean being a human data bank. It involves the capacity for flexible response. It is a form of creativity. This description applies equally to the notion of ‘understanding.’ Understanding is a kind of expertise. A true measure of intelligence is this capacity for flexible and original response.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1979 by Tetman Callis
“I see people who do not read: they are so limited in their lives, even in the good things. They do not see beyond their immediate surroundings; they are incapable of changing anything because they neither know what there is to change, nor how to go about it. They don’t understand other people, not even their own loved ones, because they do not have the habit of reflecting on the yearnings, motives, and passions of human beings. And whatever thing they experience makes much less sense than it does for someone who reads. Besides, what would a man see in the fields of La Mancha who does not know who Don Quixote is? Dusty roads, nothing more.” – Agustin Cadena, “Why I Read” (trans. Mayo)
San Miguel Mountains, Colorado, 1979 by Tetman Callis
“Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century. Its implications are so far reaching that it is difficult to overestimate them. Gödel’s result puts intrinsic limitations on the reach of deductive systems; that is, it shows that given any (sufficiently complex) deductive system, there are results that are beyond the reach of the system—results that are true but cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the initial set of axioms. The new result might be proved by adding new axioms to the system (for example, the result itself) but the new strengthened system will itself have unprovable results.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
Hell’s Canyon, Idaho, 1979 by Tetman Callis
“Facebook can seem at times an enormous simulacrum of the Pussycat Lounge, full of voyeurism and cynical, semi-professional exhibitionism, but obviously the divide between performer and audience that structures the flow of money, power, pity, and contempt in strip clubs has been largely obliterated online. Instead, there is the ambiguous simultaneity of consuming and producing spectacle, of performing the self, of spectatorship as performance, in a medium that immediately allows you to substitute yourself for any performer with broadcast responses of your own. This stew of contradictory and self-negating impulses makes up what now often gets described simply as sharing. It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took. Online we all have a million hearts to give.” – Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict”
Arizona, 1979 by Tetman Callis
“Mathematics is not a body of facts arranged and justified by a stringent logical structure. To give a dynamic metaphor that stems from the related field of fluid flow, it is like a turbulent river. The flow of the water is extremely complex, but every now and again you see the appearance of stable structures, eddies and whirlpools. These stable structures correspond to the propositions and theorems of mathematics. It is the logical structure of mathematics that gives these theorems their stability, but when we look at things in this way we see that the stability is not absolute. The data can be structured in many different ways corresponding to what we are interested in and in the mathematical ideas that arise to do the structuring. These ideas arise in response to the question, ‘What is going on here?’—that is, from the attempt to make sense of the phenomena in question.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
Arizona, 1979 by Tetman Callis
“Revise! Read writing that inspires and challenges you. Write about what really matters to you and do it so well that it is compelling to others. Keep editing your work. Be strict with yourself, but patient with your own process.” – Lisa Cohen (from David Low interview in The Wesleyan Connection)
White Sands, New Mexico, 1984 by Tetman Callis
“Art requires suffering, just not the kind you thought.” – Hugh Sheehy, “Getting Outside”
West Texas, 1981 by Tetman Callis
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic: ‘Man in the Arena’”
Bear River Range, Utah, 1979 by Tetman Callis
