Rian van der Merwe in Elezea:

The Monster Engine is one of those projects that make me love the Internet for its ability to expose amazing creative talent to a worldwide audience. Illustrator Dave DeVries started with a simple question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically? In his own words:

It began at the Jersey Shore in 1998, where my niece Jessica often filled my sketchbook with doodles. While I stared at them, I wondered if color, texture and shading could be applied for a 3D effect. As a painter, I made cartoons look three dimensional every day for the likes of Marvel and DC comics, so why couldn’t I apply those same techniques to a kid’s drawing? That was it… no research, no years of toil, just the curiosity of seeing Jessica’s drawings come to life.

The Monster Engine is the 48-page outcome from that curiosity, and it looks wonderful. He describes the process as follows:

I project a child’s drawing with an opaque projector, faithfully tracing each line. Applying a combination of logic and instinct, I then paint the image as realistically as I can.

More here.

Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

by Octavio Paz

Abby Kluchin over at Rethinking Religion:

I put off writing about Gary Shteyngart’s conversation with McKenzie Wark about technology, religion, and literature—well, mostly because I had to write a conference paper. And then I went to San Francisco for the conference and I put it off again, because I took a side trip to Facebook HQ in Palo Alto—metonymically, at least, the epicenter of everything that Shteyngart’s latest novel Super Sad True Love Story laments—and I had to reconsider my reaction both to the book and the conversation.

As Ujala Sehgal and Sephora Markson Hartz have already noted on this blog, Shteyngart spoke eloquently at the talk about his encounter with books as the only religious experience available to him. He didn’t hammer home the solid, satisfying ‘object’-ness of a book as opposed to an e-reader, as opponents of such technologies frequently do, including Super Sad’s protagonist, Lenny Abramov—“the last reader on earth!”—who delights in his wall of real books in a not-too-distant future in which such “bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifacts” bring down one’s “PERSONALITY rankings” and are primarily known for their repulsive smell. Rather, he remarked that a physical book is a ‘rudimentary technology.’ You can’t, he observed, use a book to order other things; it has only one function. There is something about this rudimentary technology that in the hands of an undistracted person (should we be able to locate one) can give rise to an encounter that enlarges the parameters of ordinary selfhood, that creates a space in which something can occur, something can arrive.

In person, Shteyngart didn’t seem ready just yet to mourn the death of the possibility of this encounter, although Super Sad is certainly, among other things, an elegy for its vanishing. The question that Shteyngart, deliberately fiddling with what he called his ‘iTelephone,’ asked is, should he, as a writer (and, I sensed, equally as a reader), stick to his guns about the importance of this encounter with this singular rudimentary technology, or should he adapt? Super Sad suggests in its very form and its engagement with social media, albeit primarily in the mode of blistering critique, that Shteyngart will adapt, though, certainly, he will not go gentle into that buzzing digital night. But the conversation, as well as the audience, was filled with nostalgia. Shteyngart didn’t bring up E.M. Forster, but I thought repeatedly, as he spoke, of Forster’s famous, poignant plea from Howard’s End: “Only connect . . .” And then I went to Palo Alto.

Hello,

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Politics & Social Science Prize is over.

To browse the full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Saturday, December 10, 2011, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on December 11, 2011. Winners of the contest will be announced on or around December 19, 2011.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

PLEASE BE AWARE: We have multiple ways of detecting fraud such as multiple votes being cast by the same person. We will disqualify anyone attempting to cheat.

Cheers,

Abbas

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Pakistan: The Narratives Come Home to Roost
3. 3 Quarks Daily: The Immensity Of Killing Bin Laden vs. The Banality Of Language
4. 3 Quarks Daily: The Pao of Love
5. 3 Quarks Daily: There’s Something about the Teeth of Tyrants
6. Abandoned Footnotes: A Simple Model of Cults of Personality
7. Accidental Blogger: The mideast uprisings: a lesson for strong men, mad men and counterfactual historians
8. Andy Worthington: Mocking the Law, Judges Rule that Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Insignificant Guantánamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives
9. Asian Security Blog: I finally played “Homefront”
10. Barry Pump’s Blog: Union Membership and Welfare Spending
11. Blinktopia: Ain’t Capitalism Grand?
12. Brendan Nyhan: Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
13. Brian Thill: On the Early Iconography of Certain of the 2012 Presidential Campaign Logos, Considered Alphabetically
14. Corey Robin: Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism
15. Crikey: Could Australia’s record on arms control harm UN Security Council bid?
16. Crikey: Theorising Darwin: US may stockpile and transit cluster munitions
17. Crooked Timber: Sex, hope, and rock and roll
18. David B. Sparks: Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Vote
19. Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog: Could this time have been different?
20. Guernica: The Iron Lady
21. Heathen Scripture: Joyce, Katter, Devine: Last bastion against the Gaypocalypse
22. HLD6: Christian Persecution Complex
23. Hopeless but not serious: Pokémon gets political
24. Jadaliyya: Palestine in Scare Quotes: From the NYT Grammar Book
25. Jadaliyya: The Marriage of Sexism and Islamophobia; Re-Making the News on Egypt
26. Jeremy Scahill: DoD Investigating Nine Cases of “Terrorism-Related Acts” by US Military and Contractors?
27. Muhammad Cohen: Overheard at Ali’s Diner on Arab Street
28. Naked Capitalism: On the Invention of Money
29. Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate: Flathead: Occupy Thomas Friedman
30. Pandaemonium: Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”
31. Peter Frase: Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity
32. PH2.1: Polarization?
33. Platykurtosity: The Economics of Sex, Revisited
34. Progressive Geographies: The Killings of Troy Davis
35. RantAWeek: Here Comes Monti’s Army
36. Sagartron: Psychotropic drugs anyone?
37. Scholar as Citizen: Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)
38. Shunya’s Notes: Decolonizing My Mind
39. Tang Dynasty Times: The Persian Prince Pirooz
40. The Awl: The Livestream Ended: How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland
41. The Buck Stops Here: Charter Schools and Averages
42. The Monkey Cage: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…. Technocratic Government!
43. The Philosopher’s Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
44. The Primate Diaries: Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence
45. The Sociological Eye: The Inflation of Bullying: From Fagging to Cyber-effervescent Scapegoating
46. Thought News: Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Creativity
47. TripleCrisis: Paradigms Lost? Cowboys and Indians in the Battle over Economic Ideas
48. U.S. Intellectual History: Going beyond the “Racial Protocol”
49. U.S. Intellectual History: Great Books Liberalism
50. U.S. Intellectual History: Leo Strauss, Common Sense, and American Conservatism 
51. U.S. Intellectual History: War and the “We”
52. U.S. Intellectual History: “When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him”: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition
53. Voteview Blog: S.& P. Downgrade and the Polarization of the American Political System
54. Voteview Blog: The Ideological Makeup of the “Super Committee”
55. Vox Mentis: Democracy vs Republic – Essential differences & Speculations on Future Politics of the world
56. Zunguzungu: “The Grass Is Closed”: What I Have Learned About Power from the Police, Chancellor Birgeneau, and Occupy Cal

By Namit Arora

(Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part one of a two-part critique. Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the main course with the textual critique.)

In mid-first millennium BCE, a great spiritual awakening was underway in areas around the middle Ganga. People were moving away from the old Vedic religion—which revolved around rituals, animal sacrifices, and nature gods—to more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative ideas. They now asked about the nature of the self and consciousness, thought and perception. They asked if virtue and vice were absolute or mere social conventions. Personal spiritual quests, aided by meditation and renunciation of material gain, had slowly gathered pace. From this churn arose new ideas like karma and dharma, non-dualism, and the unity of an individual’s soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman)—all pivotal ideas in Brahmanical Hinduism.

Some of these innovations in thought soon made their way into the texts we now know as the Upanishads, setting them qualitatively apart from the earlier Vedas. All of this occurred in the context of great sociopolitical and economic changes, marked by the rise of cities, trade and commerce, social mobility, public debates, new institutions of state, and even some early republics. This was also the world of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Carvaka.

The Great War of Yore

By this time, versions of a Mahabharata story had been circulating for centuries. Perhaps inspired by a war that took place c. 950 BCE around modern Delhi (the date is tentative), the story, through oral transmission, took on a life of its own. In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Wendy Doniger writes that the earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story came from a caste of charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the Kshatriya warrior-castes. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. (No wonder God is a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna is raised by a charioteer.) In later ages and in times of peace, many bards took their performance art to lay audiences in villages and folk festivals. The story also came to be recited during royal sacrifices, where the Brahmins gradually took over its delivery and evolution, eventually writing it down in Sanskrit. Its “final form” dates from 300 BCE-300 CE and ranges from 75K to 100K verses, seven to ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. (Read an outline of the story here.)

Read more »

Afshar Malik. LR Story Told by a Reed 2008.

Photo etching.

More here and here.

From Foreign Policy:

1. ALAA AL ASWANY: For channeling Arab malaise and Arab Renewal. Novelist/Egypt:

All revolutionaries want their stories told to the world, and no one has conveyed the hopes and dreams of Egyptians more vividly than Alaa Al Aswany. The dentist turned author rose to fame with his 2002 novel, The Yacoubian Building, which charted Egypt's cultural upheaval and gradual dilapidation since throwing off its colonial shackles. Aswany used his prominence to help found the Kefaya political movement, which first articulated the demands that would energize the youth in Tahrir Square: an end to corruption, a rejection of hereditary rule, and the establishment of a true democratic culture. For his political activism, Aswany was blacklisted by Egypt's state-owned publishing houses, and security officials harassed the owner of the cafe where he met with young writers.

How times change. Aswany was a fixture in Tahrir Square during Egypt's uprising — he was almost killed three times, he said, during the running battles between demonstrators and pro-Mubarak thugs. And he has tried to keep the revolution's spirit alive since, pressing the country's ruling military junta to remove the vestiges of Hosni Mubarak's regime and assailing Egypt's Islamists for their willingness to sacrifice the movement's principles for a taste of power. In the process, Aswany has given voice to a people silenced for too long. “Revolution is like a love story,” he said in February. “When you are in love, you become a much better person. And when you are in revolution, you become a much better person.”

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Utopia