Author: Tetman Callis
“Unfortunately, we are bound up in ourselves, and we really can only perceive through our own eyes and our own heart, and what we see is us. We think we’re exploring exterior worlds, but we’re not, so undoubtedly it’s the same consciousness, the same voice. But the intellectual excitement is when you tap into the idiosyncratic, eccentric selfness that you know is time-bound and experience-bound—and I do believe this—that you’re tapping into the knowledge of the species. The fact is that you can find your truth, but it’s also the truth about human nature.” — Diane Williams (interview with John O’Brien, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2003, Vol. 23.3)
I’ve lived my entire life
afraid to live and afraid to die
How does that become a poem?
It doesn’t contain any metaphor
No imagery
No beautiful language
It’s
No, it’s not even that
There’s a man in a room
and a light is on.
“It seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do—from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ or the Pynchon of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’—is ‘give’ the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out. Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
Things happened at night and
I don’t remember which of them
was real and was happening
outside my head. Someone was
trying to break in through
the back windows or the front
door. I got up in the dark
and went to my closet and pulled
my rifle out and walked down
the hallway in the dark and hoped
I didn’t shoot someone I wasn’t
supposed to shoot. I woke up with
my wife pounding her fists
against my chest and saying, No,
I won’t! No! And I grabbed
her wrists and she woke up.
“The really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you’re smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn’t have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe just plain loves.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
You don’t have
what they want to buy.
You’re reading Thomas Aquinas
on the corporeality
of angels, spiritual substance
made manifest through form,
and not even you
will buy that.
It goes in the back room,
with the boxes of used
quill pens, and the jars
of cold and hardened
phlogiston.
Crowded back there.
Arson might be
the answer, followed by
a fire sale.
Hot embers for
a quarter, bowls
of ashes at
a dime a pound.
“What’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
“Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media unified the country geographically for pretty much the first time. Rock helped change the fundamental splits in the U.S. from geographical splits to generational ones. Very few people I talk to understand what ‘generation gap’’s implications really were. Kids loved rock partly because their parents didn’t, and obversely. In a mass mediated nation, it’s no longer North vs. South. It’s under-thirty vs. over thirty. I don’t think you can understand the sixties and Vietnam and love ins and LSD and the whole era of patricidal rebellion that helped inspire early postmodern fiction’s whole ‘We’re-going-to-trash-your-Beaver Cleaver-plasticized-G.O.P.-image-of-life-in-America’ attitude without understanding rock ‘n roll. Because rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
Edmund sat on the corner in front of the Fourth
Presbyterian Church. He rattled a battered
McDonald’s cup at passersby, Excuse me, could you
help me get a shower? Sir? Lady?
His eyes were tired, very tired. No one
stopped, no one dropped anything into
his cup. Someone had earlier,
I looked into the cup and there were
a few pennies, at least one nickel, and maybe
a dime. No quarters had been given that I saw.
I passed by him twice. I had other
business at the church. During
a break, I took a walk around
the block and saw Edmund a second time. I sat
down next to him and introduced
myself. It was a warm September
evening and the sun was still up,
though low and soon to set. I
asked him his name, he told me he
was Edmund. I shook his hand.
Before I go any further with
this—what is this? What do I
think I’m doing here? What did I
think I was doing when I sat down
on the curbing next to Edmund on
the corner in front of the Fourth
Presbyterian Church?
He told me he was homeless. He said
he’d been hit on the head with
a baseball bat, Here, he said, and he
showed me the place on the back
of his head. He said he’d been
a dealer, cocaine and heroin, and he’d
done time. I asked him if he was
clean and he said, Yes, I never used,
man, you can’t use it and sell it.
He said, I flat-lined for ninety-six
seconds, now I’m homeless and need a shower
and a place to sleep for the night.
I don’t know what I was
doing, I don’t know why I sat beside
him and talked with him, I’m no
saint, I’m not saving any part
of this world. I don’t know why
I’m writing this except writing stuff like
this is part of what I do. I gave Edmund
a twenty-dollar bill and told him, God
bless, and shook his hand again,
and don’t want you for a moment
to think I’m a good person for it,
I’m sitting here in this church at
a meeting of well-housed, well-fed people,
one of whom is me, and as far as I know,
Edmund is still sitting on the corner shaking
his McDonald’s cup, and even if he’s not and
that twenty helped him off the street tonight,
he’s almost certain to be back on the corner,
some corner, come tomorrow and the days after that.
“Twenty-five year-olds [sic] should be locked away and denied ink and paper.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
When she stops talk
ing in the mid
dle of a sentence or even
of a
word
and looks at her plate
or the table
top or her glass or
a fork or who can
tell—
it means she remembers what was said.
When she sits with
her hand in her
lap and picks at
her cuticles—
it means she prefers to be the first to draw
the blood through fresh cuts, thank you.
When she holds her hands
lightly clasped together in front
of her chest as if
in prayer or supplication—
it means she remembers begging for it to stop.
When her fingers
curl into claws—
it means they remember trying to defend her.
When she sits and stares
at the wall or out
the window or out to sea at
the farthest point of nothing—
it means everything she sees is inside.
When she screams it means it’s
here again.
“Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you’re dead, art-wise. That’s why fiction-writing’s lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It’s yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
Lunch is a plastic cup of instant noodles.
Pour boiling water in the cup and let it
sit for three minutes. Be careful serving
it to children, it is hot. You can
eat it straight out of the cup.
I am not a child. The cup of instant
noodles is beef flavor and tastes
of salt. Its aroma is that of the vinyl
shower curtain that hangs in my
bathroom. The curtain came with
the apartment and is clean and white.
The cup of instant noodles was
purchased with other such cups as
part of a store of emergency
supplies in event of fire, flood,
earthquake, hurricane, insurrection,
coup d’etat, bridge collapse, shipwreck,
bankruptcy, injury, or disease.
The job is over and the money
is gone. The emergency is now.
The ship that was expected to arrive
in port today is gone, the news
just in of its loss, run aground
and broken on a distant reef.
The cargo was uninsured.
“When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)
She knew
right away. He saw
it in the look on her
face. He never knew
how she knew. He rolled
away and said, Sorry.
I can’t
I can’t do this, she said. I can’t
—it will be six weeks before
graduation and I can’t. He told her
whatever she wanted to do,
he would be with her.
They saved their money.
There was no conversation
in the waiting room. He was
the only man. He went out
to the hall and lay
down on the thin carpet, out
of the way. He tried
to get some sleep.
It had been a long night.
She held a piece
of paper in her
hand, said, We need
to get this filled. Outside
the building, she held
a hand out to the wall
and steadied herself and bent
over and threw up. The sky
was overcast, the day warm.
He opened a can
of chicken noodle soup, diluted
it in the pan, heated
and stirred and ladled it into
a bowl. She sat at their
kitchen table and slowly
ate the soup. She said,
Thank you. He said, You’re
welcome. They never spoke
about it again.
“Examine all those epochs in a nation’s history when the scholar assumes a prominent position: those are always the crepuscular times of fatigue and decline; the times of reckless health, instinctual security, confidence in the future, are over. It does not augur well for a culture when the mandarins are in the saddle, any more than does the advent of democracy, of arbitration courts in place of wars, of equal rights for women, of a religion of pity—to mention but a few of the symptoms of declining vitality.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
There are matters of sidewalk
etiquette that now should be
addressed. Whom to say hello
to and whom not, and principles
of eye contact and gaze aversion.
The skinny old retired grey-haired
Professor of Avuncular Studies,
with his kind and gentle
smile and his friendly good
morning, to him you not only
can return the greeting, you
must. There are few ports
in the storm of the street.
Anyone else who says good
morning or hello, of course you
should return the greeting. If your
intuition tells you to initiate a
greeting, follow it; however, do not
speak to joggers unless spoken
to. They often are winded and are
concentrating on their own selves.
Do not speak to women unless
they address you first. Do not
make eye contact or attempt
to make eye contact unless they
address you first. Do not furtively
glance at their breasts as
they approach. That is a bad
habit and it must stop.
Make way for the cyclists
even when they are cycling down
the sidewalk under the sign
that clearly tells them they are
not to do that and can be
arrested, jailed, fined, and have
their bikes confiscated. They
are young and some of them carry
guns and they will shoot you down.
“All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.” — Milan Kundera (interview with Lois Oppenheim in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1989, Vol. 9.2)
Wounded people, injured, sick, they sit
out front of the Rehab Shoppe on stone
benches and in wheelchairs. People
with no legs and with tumors and one guy
who’s lost his hands in one of the wars.
They smoke their cigarettes, cigars,
and pipes and say, What does it matter?
That we smoke, what we smoke, what
difference can it make? The guy who’s
lost his hands, others hold his cigarette
for him. They hold his glass when it’s
time to drink, and they raise voice in song.
Here’s to vodka, here’s to rum, we’ll drink them
up till kingdom come. Here’s to wine
and here’s to beer, sauce us now we’ve
gathered here. Here’s to whiskey, makes
us frisky, Irish, rye, or malted Scotch.
Here’s to gin and here’s to sin, and here’s
to one last bloody crotch. Last one
dry gets to mop up the mess.
“At a certain level, prose simply makes statements. There are times when all you need to know is that it is raining, but a hell of a lot more is going on. And there are other times when you’ve got to get into every raindrop. And sometimes the sentence has to do that.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
There was only one cashier on
duty and she wasn’t
there. The manager was pissed
off and pushed the restocking
cart into one of the customers,
careful to avoid eye contact.
The automatic change dispenser
didn’t dispense any change.
The cashier arrived and told
the manager, You put it on
backwards. She unlocked her
register, rang up the customer’s
purchases, made change from
her own purse—Have a good day.
“History does not abide by traditional narrative explanations. It isn’t that narrative explanation doesn’t have its place—it is a great instrument—but uncritically examined, its assumptions about the world are, well, unlikely. Within a specific human realm, when we are busy giving meaning to human events selecting, choosing, arranging a story at a dinner party—we may be so taken with the result that we forget that another arrangement could have yielded something quite different. I am not suggesting what some have seen as an inevitable consequence of this particular mode that everything is relative; it’s much more that there are modes of explanation equally satisfactory within their own prescribed realms of discourse.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
“The artist is working with dangerous materials because he is making something that’s got reality in it, and reality is something that the human race flees from. Every culture is busy building some sort of false environment. I am increasingly impressed by how nature permits human beings to make fools of themselves in vast numbers. Cultures of great richness, in fact, can develop that are based in absolute idiocy.” — William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
Foggy morning along a beach populated
by shadows. Two in the shallows,
man and woman, she giggles, No, it’s
not…. His voice low rumbling, she says,
Because, it’s because, that’s all….
Atop each breakwater a solo
shadow, one taking morning
exercise in front of a small
jumble of bikes, two others sitting,
legs dangling over the sand while they
face the beach and wait for
what they’re waiting for. In the park
behind them, three workers
in yellow vests shovel something
from the bed of a city truck.
Back up on the streets, parents
escort their children down designated
safe routes to the stops where
yellow buses wait to carry
them to their hot and crowded
schools. A childless young
couple open the trunk of their
sedan, load it with a blue
picnic cooler, her easel and paints,
his two sets of golf clubs.
The sun is rising and the fog
will burn off long before lunch.
“You can spend paragraphs describing an old mill under the cloud-streaked moon, Chekhov writes somewhere, how the water rushes over the wheel, how heavy and dank its stones are, and nobody will actually see it; merely mention, however, how the moonlight catches on a bit of broken glass lying on a mossy flag atop the millrace … and the whole structure rises, vivid and visible, before the moon-slashed night mists of the reader’s mind!” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; ellipsis in original)
Out back of the main building
in the hard-packed khaki dirt
there’s a long and narrow tin awning
supported on slender steel poles
painted a nubby industrial beige.
Young people wearing jeans or
cargo pants and white t-shirts
and protective helemts swing
baseball bats at each other, not
attempting to make contact and do
each other any harm. The supervisor
tells the visitor, It’s just a game
to develop their martial-arts
skills, see how they smile?
The visitor sees how they swing
their bats and sweat and dance
about in the dust, hears their
calls and shouts, notices a skinny
girls whose pointy breasts poke
against her shirt. He tells
the supervisor, This is bogus.
They should be making contact,
breaking bones and cracking
open skulls, develop some
real-life skills. Give me
a bat and I’ll show you how.
The visitor is given a bat
(the skinny girl’s?) and directed
to a place at the far end
of the awning. This is where
we do that, the supervisor says.
The visitor is shown how he
is to whale away at the fender
of an old red car, scratched
and dented and the metal showing through.
This is how we make our art,
The supervisor tells the visitor,
who begins hitting the fender
with the bat as hard as
he can. Damn, this feels good!,
he grins and checks his backswing
so he doesn’t accidentally hit
any of the t-shirted participants
who have gathered round to watch
and cheer him on. Look at him go!
Beyond the fender, shaded under a tree,
there’s a pond with tiny fish.
When any piece of gravel
or splinter of wood or flake
of paint falls into the pond,
the tiny fish dart to it and
gather round it for a moment,
their noses all pointing to it
and their bodies stretched
so together they look like
a momentarily undulating asterisk.
A moment later and they dart away.
“I’m a writer. My thoughts are formed by writing. When I want to think with any seriousness about a topic, I write about it. Writing slows the thought processes down to where one can follow them—and elaborate on them—more efficiently. Writing is how I do my thinking.” — Samuel R. Delany (from interview by K. Leslie Steiner in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996, Vol. 16.3; emphasis in original)
“What a mad, unhappy animal is man! What strange notions occur to him; what perversities, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestialities of idea burst from him, the moment he is prevented ever so little from being a beast of action!” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)
Families gather in the small lakeside park
every evening. The parents and aunts and uncles
sit in folding chairs and talk. Someone grills
meats on a portable grill. Children play on the beach
and in the shallows. They squeal and scream
and laugh and shout and run around and dig
holes in the sand with toy shovels and their hands.
The children range in age from tiny
toddlers up to young teens. Missing are
the older teens. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,
nineteen, into their lower twenties, they don’t
come to the lakeside park to be with families.
They do other things, rites of power and sex
and death. A seventeen-year-old boy was
shot last night just after midnight,
his body laid out in the street,
covered with a sheet by police.
“Priests are the most evil enemies to have—why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history—but also the most intelligent haters—have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Golffing)