Author: Tetman Callis

The glorious nose of dogThe glorious nose of dog

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:44 am

“A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient.  It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast.  Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey.  But its true glory is its nose.” – Burkhard Bilger, “Beware of the Dogs”

Here’s looking at youHere’s looking at you

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 6:06 am

“We have come to take for granted comprehensive lateral surveillance. We have grown used to regarding friends as also spies, whose allegiance is uncertain; they are agents who are liable to identify us in photographs, keep tabs on our whereabouts, spread misinformation or disinformation in permanent, public forums on our behalf — or to our detriment, who can be sure? Even intimates can become inadvertent double or triple agents in the infinite regress of strategies and counterstrategies in our intricate social-media self-presentations, which we can never really be sure aren’t false-flag operations. Why do people share what they share? And since they know I will be asking that question, how has that affected their choice to express that enthusiasm over that Stanley Cup playoff game, or Obama’s kill list, or the kale they had for dinner? How do I respond? Everything is a move in a complicated game that social-media surveillance makes sure we are always playing. Control over even our own identity slips away from us, as we lose sense of what is spontaneous and what is mere tactical performance in the midst of such recursive reflexivity. We sense our own fragile fakeness, which can only confirm our suspicions of others.” – Rob Horning, “Agents Without Agency”

A usual cruel punishmentA usual cruel punishment

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 7:31 am

“Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in ‘supermax’ prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo ‘exercise.’  (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)” – Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”

Welcome to LockuptownWelcome to Lockuptown

Tetman Callis 3 Comments 6:59 am

“For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say.  For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones.  More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives.  Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.  In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.  Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.  That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.” – Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America” (emphasis in original)

“Road Rave” published by Fox Chase Review“Road Rave” published by Fox Chase Review

Tetman Callis 4 Comments 4:30 pm

Fox Chase Review has published my story, “Road Rave,” as part of their Autumn/Winter 2012 issue.  I could post a link here that would take you straight to the story, but instead I’ll post the link that takes you to the front page.  It’s a nice-looking page.  From there you can find your way to my story if you like.

http://www.foxchasereview.org/

In about three months, if I remember, and I probably will, and if I’m still alive and healthy, as I hope to be, I’ll add the story to my “Previously Published Stories” widget hereabouts.

Rising and fallingRising and falling

Tetman Callis 0 Comments 9:42 am

“We sometimes think that the historical imagination is the gift of seeing past — seeing past the surface squalors of an era to the larger truths.  Really, history is all about seeing in, looking hard at things to bring them back to life as they were, while still making them part of life as it is.” — Adam Gopnik, “Inquiring Minds”

The imp of the originalThe imp of the original

Tetman Callis 2 Comments 6:37 am

“Originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”