I really enjoy reading the comments at 3QD. The overwhelming majority of them are intelligent discussions of the subject at hand and often lead to spirited and useful conversations in the comments sections of posts. But (you knew a “but” was coming!) recently some commenters have started to abuse the privilege that we grant them to express their views in our space.

In the last two days I have banned several commenters from 3QD and sent warnings to several others and deleted their comments. In the last year or so, I have noticed an increasing abusiveness in the comments and there are certain repeat offenders. I want to put them on notice that I am now going to have a new very low tolerance for that sort of thing. I do not have the time to write explanations of why I am deleting a given comment each time I do it but as long as you engage the argument being made in the post in a respectful way and stay on topic and desist from ad hominem attacks against either the author or the 3QD editor who posted the item, we welcome your contribution to the discussion. If you make ad hominem attacks, use nasty language, are disrespectful, call the motives of the authors or editors into question, or stray outside the topic under discussion, your comment will be deleted and you may also be blocked from commenting permanently. And this will be done without any explanation to you. I do not have the time to engage in discussions with people about why I think they are jerks.

Some commenters have been personally abusive to me or insinuated ulterior motives on my part in my choice of posts and other 3QD editors have also been attacked as well as the authors of the articles we have posted. I used to tolerate this type of thing but I will not any longer. I just don’t see why we should allow people to call us names on our own website. You can disagree with me as much as you like but you cannot insult me or question my motives. I will do the same for you. One person (whose comment has been deleted) just today, for example, called Noam Chomsky a “clown” and a “buffoon”. What sort of person has the insane chutzpah to say such a thing? Needless to say, we will not be hearing from him again at 3QD. I have absolutely no patience for this kind of thing anymore. I’ve had it.

I encourage you to argue against the views (sometimes we don’t even agree with them, we just find them interesting) that we post but insist that you do it in a civilized manner.

To the vast majority of you who do not engage in boorish commenting behavior: thank you for all your stimulating thoughts and please keep engaged in the conversation here. I love hearing from you.

You can see our very simple comments policy here. Scolding over. 🙂

Charles C. Mann in Orion Magazine:

THE PROBLEM WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).

Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species? Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells! Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all? This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.

More here.

Lydia Davis at the Paris Review:

Not long ago, I was chatting with an older friend who is a retired engineer and also something of a writer, but not of fiction. When he heard that I had just finished a translation of Madame Bovary, he said something like, “But Madame Bovary has ­already been translated. Why does there need to be another translation?” or “But Madame Bovary has been available in English for a long time, hasn’t it? Why would you want to translate it again?” Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn’t occur to people—or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original. Instead, a translation is a translation—you write the book again in English, on the basis of the French, a fairly standard procedure, and there it is, it’s been done and doesn’t have to be done again.

A new book that is causing excitement internationally will be quickly translated into many languages, like the Jonathan Littell book that won the Prix Goncourt five years ago. It was soon translated into English, and if it isn’t destined to endure as a piece of literature, it will probably never be translated into English again.

But in the case of a book that appeared more than one hundred and fifty years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions.

more here.

Me at The Smart Set:

It takes Satan to bring out the true spirit of Thanksgiving. That’s because it can be hard to give thanks unless you know why you are doing it. Plenitude is lovely. Abundance is a delight. I think of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell. A large American family sits around a comfortable table as the venerable mother carries a moose-sized turkey as the centerpiece. The painting was originally titled “Freedom from Want” and was part of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series, meant to promote the buying of war bonds during World War II. If there is an unsettling message hidden in the Rockwellian sentimentality, though, it’s that these people, this nice American family, knows nothing of want. They are giving thanks for an abundance that is taken for granted.

When the devil is on your doorstep, however, thanks takes on a different timbre. The American most consistently preoccupied with thoughts of Satan was probably Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne never trusted in the good times. He saw the devil lurking in every moment of pleasure, waiting for the chance to pounce on the unsuspecting reveler when his guard was down. Hawthorne’s story, “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving,” is appropriately evil-obsessed. Utterly bleak, it is a difficult fit in the traditional American story of goods asked for, goods delivered, thanks given.

more here.

Mahmood Mamdani in LRB:

Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.

The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986. When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans – a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions – the government simply fixed the result in its favour. In the violence that followed, more than a hundred people died, including six white farmers and 11 black farm labourers. Some of the violence was government-sponsored and most of it state-sanctioned. The judiciary was reshaped, local institutions in rural areas narrowly politicised, and laws were passed which granted local agencies the powers necessary to crush opponents of land reform. Denouncing his adversaries in the trade unions and NGOs as servants of the old white ruling class, Mugabe authorised the militias and state security agencies to hound down opposition, as repression and reform went hand in hand. In 2003, the leading independent newspaper, the Daily News, was shut down.

More here.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them. – Phyllis Diller

"Mothers of teenagers know why animals eat their young." ~ Author Unknown

"It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge." ~ Phyllis Diller

"My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it." ~ Mark Twain

I’ve been married 14 years and I have three kids. Obviously I breed well in captivity. – Roseanne Barr

My mom's favorite Stevie Wonder song is, "I Just Called to Say Someone You Don't Know Has Cancer"
– Damien Fahey ‏@DamienFahey

There are three ways to get something done: hire someone to do it, do it yourself, or forbid your kids to do it !

"You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around – and why his parents will always wave back." ~William D. Tammeus.

"My mother's menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it." ~ Buddy Hackett

Motherhood is like Albania—you can’t trust the descriptions in the books, you have to go there.
– Marni Jackson

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.
– Nancy Stahl

The reason I don’t call my mother more often is that I get tired of her complaining that I never call. – Melanie White

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of clergy. – Spanish Proverb

Video length: 1:22:36

(Not so) random selections from Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth,
(a section of a larger collection-1982) which, when I read them
this morning occasionally glancing out the window at a new day’s
emerging shadows, were shaded beautifully but sadly by Now.
.

Returning to Earth

She
pulls the sheet of the dance
across me
then runs, staking
the corners far out at sea

***

So curious in the middle America, the only “locus”
I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing
up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see
a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance,
two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares
returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred
miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight
hundred miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.)
I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific.
When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo
“I thought it would be bigger.”

***

I widowed my small
collection of magic
until it poisoned itself with longing.
I have learned nothing.
I give orders to the rain.
I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net.
The stars seem a little closer lately.
I’m no longer afraid to die
but is this a guidepost of lunacy?
I intend to see the 10 hundred million worlds Manjusri
passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden.
Taking off and landing are the dangerous times.
I was commanded in a dream to dance.

***

O Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself.

***

O I’m lucky
got a car that starts almost every day
tho’ I want a new yellow Chevy pickup
got two letters today
and I’d rather have three
have a lovely wife
but want all the pretty ones
got three white hawks in the barn
but want a Himalayan eagle
have s planet in the basement
but would prefer the moon in the granary
have the northern lights
but want the southern cross

***

The stillness of this earth
which we pass through
with the precise speed of our dreams

.
Jim Harrison
from, Selected & New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1982
.

Working the Stacks

Reach up for the light cord and tug through its little knot
of resistance, and there’s Samuel Johnson,
sharing the floor with Nietzche,
Anthony Trollope, Franz Fanon, Osbert and Edith Sitwell,
German small-print dictionaries,
black bound insurance tables,
histories of 1920 trolley companies that failed,
Even before you locate a book,
you can feel its weight
in your hands, the self-sufficiency
of 1870 geographies, the erotics
of steam engines. You’re pushing the whole language
ahead of you, leaning your shoulder
into the cart and, when that doesn’t work,
falling against it
till, just when you’re certain that it won’t budge,
it starts to roll as if it’s considered the prospects
of staying in the same spot forever
and decided, instead,
to revel in the fact that it has wheels,
Hitler rides the same cart up with Marcus Aurelius,
Big Bill Haywood, the Marquis de Sade,
and Salvador Dali. Of course
you talk to yourself, but it’s really more a hum,
the kind one keeps up
moving among bodies slumbering so deeply
they could be dead, music
that doesn’t require the mouth to be open,
as the mind sings to itself
day in and day out,
working alone,
on its way to words or on its way back.

Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
The University of Arkansas Press, 2006
.

Olive Oatman

It was the charcoal they couldn’t stand.
Sister Maddy tried and tried
to get it out —bleach and scrub
till my skin peeled—
but the marks stayed,
black as the stripes
on a hawk’s wing.

Maddy took the mirror away—
each day I saw those marks
took me back,
away from the silk bustled dresses,
the shoes like vices,
the bobs and nods and mouthy words.

Back to the camp by the river.
Smoke blue as morning,
children so quiet
I was afraid at first.
He brought me tied on the back of a horse.
They took my dress,
burned it, and laughed,
put me in deerskin —so soft—
laid me on a bed of pine
with the skins circled ‘round,
a smell of earth and sweat and hide.

I choked on the smell,
couldn’t get used to the work.
Water from the river in bark buckets,
firewood in a clump on my back,
scraping the dead things he brought me—
blood, skin, and sinew
torn from the hide
like all I’d left behind.

The women hated me at first;
no one talked, just pointed,
even when my belly grew round.
Nothing changed until the night
my son was born. I’d seen
and heard how it was done.
I grabbed the sinew the old woman gave;
I stuffed my mouth with rags
and pressed my back. No sound,
no sound at all,
until his head burst out so black
the women smiled; I shouted then.

He loved me the way a hawk loves.
I’d seen them once,
talons locked in air,
falling over and under each other,
screaming,
my God, I tried to tell Maddie
she stopped her ears,
I’d forgotten the right words.
You never can go back—once you know.

Three sons in four years.
Learned how to bead moccasins,
dig cattail roots,
weave mats, and split a hare open
in one slit. I was rich as a moon
in the sky, the stars around.
That day by the river
I heard them too late,
smelled them too late,
tried to bury myself in sand;
they caught my hand
and threw me on a horse. “Home,”
they said.

Took my deerskins away,
stuffed me in black silk—
what had I don’t wrong?
Scrubbed all day at the tattoos.
Kept watch on me day and night,
for years and years.
I could not go back
to the circle of hides,
my three sons like stars,
and Him—no words for that.
I never forgot,
and when I see hawks sailing high,
talons outstretched
in a wild, tumbling fall,
I cry.

by Ann Turner
from Grass Songs
Harcourt Brace
.

Accounts
.

Light was on its way

from nothing

to nowhere.

Light was all business

Light was full speed

when it got interrupted.

Interrupted by what?

When it got tangled up

and broke

into opposite

broke into brand new things.

What kinds of things?

Drinking Cup

“Thinking of you!

Convenience Valet”

How could speed take shape?

*

Hush!

Do you want me to start over?

*

The fading laser pulse

Information describing the fading laser pulse

is stored

is encoded

in the spin states

of atoms.

God

is balancing his checkbook

God is encrypting his account.

This is taking forever!

by Rae Armantrout

Poetry (January 2011)
.

Ballad in A

G. Sampath reviews Talal Asad's book on suicide bombing in The Hindu:

This is one book you may want to avoid reading on a plane. Its title is On Suicide Bombing. And the author is a Muslim, with an Arab name: Talal Asad.

I came to it via a lecture by the American philosopher, Judith Butler. Her subject was ‘the human condition’. She talks about the questions Asad poses in his book: Can suicide bombing be thought? What resources do we need in order to think it? I was intrigued enough by Butler’s remarks to get a copy of the book.

Asad is an anthropologist by training. As an Arab Muslim in American academia, he is uniquely placed to offer an anthropological perspective on the discourse of terrorism in liberal democracies. ‘On Suicide Bombing’ is a collection of lectures he delivered in 2006. It has three chapters: ‘Terrorism’, ‘Suicide terrorism’ and ‘Horror at suicide terrorism’.

Asad begins with the most spectacular instance of suicide terrorism in recent history, the September 11, 2001, attack in the U.S., which sparked worldwide outrage, and rightly so. The mass killing of innocents is simply wrong and condemnable. There is nothing to debate here.

Nonetheless, Asad wants us to temporarily reserve our judgement, so that we could arrive at an understanding of the moral ground from which we pass judgment.

More here.

by Holly A. Case

Suzi Dada. Budapest, 2014 "plus or minus 8 years"

A few years ago someone took a photograph in Budapest of a slight young woman blowing on a street sign that appears to bend under the superhuman force. From a passing car an astonished driver looks on. The woman is Suzi Dada. She's funny, but her superhuman strength is real, and it's serious.

Dada is forever getting into the right kind of trouble. She's been confronted by police, the Hungarian secret service, and members of the extreme right party Jobbik. Unable to rely on her parents for support since starting college around the turn of the millennium, she has long been independent and self-reliant, not to mention a free radical. It took her nearly ten years to finish her university degree in history and education, but during that time she started an underground art group called Szub-Art Club for the Support of Contemporary Artistic and Subcultures, and co-founded a prankster street art group known as the Two-Tailed Dog that has since become a locus of opposition to the nationalist, anti-pluralist government of Viktor Orbán. Her attitude about almost always being the only woman who's doing what she's doing is, "I don't do it as a woman. I just do it."

Suzi went to university in Szeged, a quiet college town near the Serbian border with a good cinema, very good ice cream, and a lot of students. Back in the 1990s, many of them were looking outward while reflecting inward: devouring literature, learning languages, hosting concerts and dance parties, and traveling the world every chance they got. In the 2000s, Dada's generation got into electronic music, extreme sports, and street art. These subcultures were little known and barely tolerated in Szeged, so Suzi organized a demonstration of skateboarders' skills for local retirees who had hitherto viewed the youngsters as "street kids with baggy pants," rather than the winners of international skating competitions that many of them were.

Read more »

Maluma and Takete

No offense to Shakespeare, but I've never quite bought into the philosophy that names are immaterial. Calling a rose by another name might not affect its smell, but it could well impact our association with the flower.

Read more »

He changed the way we view ourselves, our world, the universe itself. On this day, we celebrate the birth of possibly the greatest intellect of all time: Isaac Newton. He was born 362 years ago in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. It is shocking how few realize what he did. When asked what Newton’s achievement was, most people reply, “He discovered gravity.” When pressed to say what exactly that means (after all, people had known that things fall down, not up, for quite some time), many will say, “Well, he quantified gravity.” When told about Galileo’s laws, and how we knew quite a bit (quantitatively) about how gravity affects objects well before Newton, most people become confused. But when told about Kepler and his laws of planetary motion, and how Newton realized that they and Galileo’s discoveries about balls rolling down inclined planes could be explained in one fell swoop using a couple of equations, and shown to be the result of the same phenomenon (gravity), they are usually and finally suitably impressed. Hence, Newton connected what was known about the heavens (Kepler’s Laws) with what was known about earth (Galileo’s Laws). This stupendously imaginative act of integration is what encouraged Einstein to do the same with the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell, and the experimental results of Michaelson and Morley regarding the speed of light. And it is what keeps physicists today hopeful about one day discovering the one true Theory Of Everything.

To celebrate Sir Isaac’s birthday, give yourself a gift, and read S. Chandrasekhar’s (yes, Nobel, physics) Newton’s “Principia” for the Common Reader:

Representing a decade’s work from one of the world’s most distinguished physicists, this major publication is, as far as is known, the first comprehensive analysis of Newton’s Principia without recourse to secondary sources. Chandrasekhar analyses some 150 propositions which form a direct chain leading to Newton’s formulation of his universal law of gravitation. In each case, Newton’s proofs are arranged in a linear sequence of equations and arguments, avoiding the need to unravel the necessarily convoluted style of Newton’s connected prose. In almost every case, a modern version of the proofs is given to bring into sharp focus the beauty, clarity, and breathtaking economy of Newton’s methods. Chandrasehkar’s work is an attempt by a distinguished practising scientist to read and comprehend the enormous intellectual achievement of the Principia.

Buy it here or elsewhere.

Amidst the twaddle and bilge written about modern “media culture” (e.g., bad academese, exhibit one , and bad academese, exhibit two ) some serious and insightful commentary on the role of images in everyday life still somehow manages to get written. One of the many morals of the past century must surely be that “we” have a weird fascination not only for images of celebrities and of the “lifestyles” of the insanely wealthy, but also for photographs of “Others” – preferably when they are compromised, suffering, in pain, and /or dying. However disturbing, this fascination is nothing new (e.g., Goya’s “Disasters of War” ).

The photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison, the internet broadcast of beheadings, and the lynching of American soldiers have collectively posed some truly basic but interesting and knotty questions: should pictures of the dead and dying be published? Should we even be looking at these kinds of images (and if so, to what end? and if not, what is lost? – is it better to see these kinds of military engagements from afar, as cinematic fireworks raining down on some far away city, or to see the casualties see up close, made to face the mutilated bodies of the dead…)? and finally, the big question: why are we so drawn to such things, anyway? Luc Sante wrote one of the most compelling essays on the Abu Ghraib scandal, which can be found here . The indispensible thoughts of Susan Sontag on “regarding the pain of others” can be found here. If you want to read an intelligent critique/commentary on Sontag’s book, (it’s an email conversation b/w Luc Sante and novelist Jim Lewis), you can find it here . Rightly or wrongly, no iconic images seem to have emerged from 9/11 (unlike the Abu Ghraib scandal, which produced at least one remarkably iconic image, the one you no doubt know, which can be found here . Art critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau has written a brilliant essay on one image that might fit the bill. That weirdly beautiful image is a photograph of the falling body of a man positioned precisely between the two towers, plunging Icarus-like to the pavement far below. Although this photograph was initially reprinted widely (the NY Times, for example, published it), it was quickly taken out of circulation, and has rarely been seen since. You can find that photograph, along with an essay by the photographer, here . There clearly IS something unsettling about finding images of catastrophe and suffering somehow beautiful (although one wonders about how an image like this will be viewed in the future…we seem to require an icon to suggest national trauma: one thinks of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother). Anyhoo, all discussions about what images mean tend to hinge upon (economic, social, aesthetic, or historical context); if you want to indulge in the rare pleasure of viewing photographs some guy found and put up on the internet (i.e., photographs with no context whatsoever), you can find some great ones here .