Author: Tetman Callis
“I began thinking about what makes a life worthwhile. And I thought of Pessoa and Kafka. We look at the lives of writers and consider them important, but what if we never discovered Pessoa’s trunk of books? What if Kafka’s work was never published? Would their lives have been worth living? And I thought of my own strange neuroses. My friends take them for granted, because I’m a writer, so I’m supposed to be this way. But if I hadn’t been a writer and still had these neuroses, I’d be ignored. I’d never get laid.” – Rabih Alameddine, “This Is Also My World” (interview by Dwyer Murphy)
“The entire Internet can never be made ‘safe.’ Vast stretches of cyberspace are already ‘dark’—full of abandoned websites, discarded protocols, huge databases, and clandestine enterprises engaged in by both criminals and political dissidents. Like it or not such wild corners will endure, for the Internet remains a faithful mirror of the human soul, haunted by the same angels and demons of our own nature.” – Jay Nelson, “Can the Internet Be Tamed?”
“It’s no secret that American education is extremely outdated. The long day divided into periods marked by bells, summer vacations, neat rows of desks, and the same subjects for everybody, were all meant to turn 19th century farm children into 20th century factory workers, clerks, and secretaries. It’s a painfully obsolete model.” – Jay Nelson, SWCP Portal, August 2012
“When a court goes beyond the arguments raised in the parties’ briefs and starts creating law on its own, it loses the clarity that comes with subjecting a proposed rule to adversarial testing.” – Justice Anne M. Burke, The People of the State of Illinois v. Carlos Cregan
“Beware of those who wish to influence your passions, and to make you dupes to their resentments and little interests—personal invectives can never persuade, but they always fix prejudices which candor might have removed—those who deal in them have not your happiness at heart. Attach yourselves to measures, not to men.” – Cato I, New York Journal, September 27, 1787
Today I posted “Abrumpo” to the “Previously Published Stories” sidebar. It was originally published in NOON last March. Diane Williams, NOON‘s editor, provided the title, tightened up the last two paragraphs, and provided the final two lines.
“We have a War College, but no peace college.” – John Ketwig, …and a hard rain fell
“If you want to live, it’s good to be friendly.” – Art Spiegelman, Maus II
“According to language, race, or nation, we set ourselves apart, and each pile up our filth to overtower the other’s.” – Ödön von Horváth, The Age of the Fish (Jugend ohne Gott) (trans. Thomas)
“When the rich plebeians in old Rome feared that the people might succeed through their plan to reduce taxes, they sheltered behind a dictatorship. And they condemned to death for high treason the patrician Manlius Capitolinus, who with his riches had tried to free their plebeian debtors from their debts. They hurled him down from the Tarpeian Rock. Since the very existence of human society, the need for self-preservation has driven men to commit crimes. But those crimes were secret deeds; men hushed them up and were ashamed of them. But today men are proud of them. There is a pestilence among us. All of us are tainted, friend and foe alike. Our souls are great black sores, and life is dying in them. They die, and we live on.” – Ödön von Horváth, The Age of the Fish (Jugend ohne Gott) (trans. Thomas)
“Marriage is like a garden I reckon. After a while, no matter what you do, it’s all too much work for not enough reward. One day you’re pulling out the same weeds you pulled out last month, or trimming the low branches off the same tree you trimmed them off last year, and you start thinking about why you’re doing it, and you can’t remember why you started to in the first place. Why you planted that particular tree, or chose that type of grass for the lawn, or why you even bothered with having a garden at all, cos the fact is, you haven’t sat your arse down out there and looked around and enjoyed it in years anyway. You was just going through the motions, doing what you did cos it’s what people do, what’s expected of you, so you just keep right on doing it.” – Harry Pants, Midlife
“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
“The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.” – Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café”
“Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.” – Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café”
“Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” – Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
“That supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”
“Work is the best antidote to sorrow.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House”
“Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The president of the United States takes an oath to support the Constitution. His ‘king’ is a legal document, a symbol of law, rather than any human authority. In this country, ultimate power is supposed to rest with the people; more concretely, it lies in the legal structure of society, and in the laws themselves. We pledge allegiance to the flag, but true allegiance runs not to a piece of cloth, or even to the president, or to some sacred text in the National Archives. Rather, our commitment is to a way of governing, a process, a set of procedures, a way of making decisions—in other words, to law. There is a shared understanding that we obey and respect the rules of the game. These rules hold society together. They are essential nuts and bolts that keep the structure from falling apart.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction (emphasis in original)
“Every society has an authority structure. Every society has high and low. No society comes even close to pure equality. There were and are many kinds of authority, many forms of hierarchy, in this country. Millions of Americans are deeply religious, and are faithful to the word of their churches. Learning, skill, and money all command respect. So does political power. There is also the authority of custom, and the authority of traditional morality. These form a kind of inner monarchy, whose commands are passed along by parents, teachers, and preachers. For many people, the old ways, or what they understand as the old ways, are a powerful source of control. Shifts in patterns of authority are relative, not absolute. Authority is hard to measure. Undoubtedly, some traditional institutions have been loosing or losing their grip, over time. There is considerable discussion, for example, of the fate of family authority. Father’s word may not be ‘law’ anymore, or mother’s, but most children do obey their parents, and they care what their parents think and say. They do their homework and they listen to teacher in school, even if they do not show old-fashioned respect or obey like little Prussians. There are millions of single-parent families and unorthodox families, but they are families nonetheless. The family changes in form, but it is still a great power. Most people, too, follow a definite code of behavior, and it is a fairly traditional one.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“My entire life I believed that we’re the good guys, that we’re the world’s leader when it comes to human rights. But that’s no longer who we are, and it saddens me. It scares me. We’re like the Russians in the 1950s and 1960s, like Chile in the 1970s, like Argentina in the 1980s. People are picked up in the middle of the night because somebody said something about them or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then they disappear.” – George Daly (as quoted by Mario Kaiser in “Death in Camp Delta”)
“The key element in any legal system is behavior—what people actually do. Otherwise rules are nothing but words, and the structures are a ghost town, not a living city.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“The central fact of American federalism is worth repeating: the United States is by and large an economic union, by and large a social union, but not a legal union, or at least not completely. State laws are, or can be, rather similar, but this is, first, because the states choose to harmonize their laws, and, second, because conditions in the states are fairly similar. A state is free to be different (if it wishes), within its zone. But since the 1860s, the central government has gotten stronger and stronger, and there has been a steady, marked change in relations between states and the federal government. It is obvious why this took place. Changes in technology and socioeconomic structure paved the way. In the age of e-mail, cyberspace, satellite communication, and jumbo jets, the country is a single entity to an extent undreamed of in 1787. When all is said and done, however, the states still maintain a substantial reservoir of power.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“Don’t be that jerk who complains when Aunt Barbara asks what you write about. Don’t say, ‘that question is impossible to answer!’ If you can’t answer what you write about then you don’t know what you write about, and that’s like not knowing what color hair you have. Do this right now (now!): figure out in two sentences how to explain what you write about.” – Marie-Helene Bertino, “Writing Dos and Don’ts” (emphases in original)
“If you brought back to life a nineteenth-century judge, he would be dumbfounded to learn about that state of civil-rights law today. He would even be amazed at what has happened in tort law, how far the courts have gone in making companies pay for damages caused by badly designed products, such as defective cold cream, soup, medicine, and automobiles. The wheels of doctrine have turned many times, in response to changes in the world outside the courtroom. True, some judges today stand on the right side of the political spectrum, while others stand on the left. But the point around which they revolve, the point from which they deviate, right or left, is determined by social forces, by the national agenda.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“In the United States, social issues often dress themselves up in legal costume and muscle their way into court. There are few countries in the world where abortion policy is decided, in the first instance, by judges. In few countries would courts draw the boundary lines of school districts or demand wholesale reform in state mental-health facilities. Yet these things happen in the United States. A movement is going on which is bringing these issues into court, which expands the very idea of what should or can be dealt with through law and litigation, and which causes ‘law’ to seep into nooks and corners where it never penetrated before. Nobody has quite found the right name for this movement or trend. We can call aspects of it judicialization, legalization, constitutionalization, the due-process revolution, or something similar. Whatever its name, it is certainly a significant trend. Courtlike procedures and habits extend their tentacles throughout government, big institutions, and society in general. Courts themselves have become final arbiters of many social issues, not just individual disputes.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“Technology is a great lawmaker and a great leveler. The railroad in many ways and in many fields practically rewrote the law books of the United States in the nineteenth century…. Accident law—the heart of the legal field we call torts—is basically the offspring of the nineteenth-century railroad; in the twentieth century, the automobile largely replaced the railroad as a source of accidents, and of accident law.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“The doctor’s main concern is to identify all the resistances that are prejudicial to the effectiveness of the curative force, and to eliminate them as much as possible. Doctors have undoubtedly, since the start of the profession, helped the patient and will continue to do so forever. But undoubtedly, too, the doctor’s action very often creates or reinforces an inhibiting effect on the curative force. This is exactly what the doctor must be aware of: that he is a danger to his patient.” – Georg Groddeck (as quoted by Catherine Clément in The Weary Sons of Freud (trans. Ball))