In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, “the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad.” The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's “The Men That Are Falling,” was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, which reads, in part:

These stand among the most uncharacteristic lines that Stevens ever published. Coming upon them in the elegantly compressed compass of the new Selected Poems, it's difficult to imagine that the author of a quietly unnerving pentameter like “The river that flows nowhere, like a sea” could have written the line “Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips.”

more from James Longenbach at The Nation here.

The history of America is the history of the automobile industry: it starts in fields and garages and ends in boardrooms and dumps; it starts with daredevils and tinkerers and ends with bureaucrats and congressmen; it starts with a sense of here-goes-let’s-hope-it-works and ends with help-help-help. We tend to think of it as an American history that opens, as if summoned by the nature of the age, early in the last century, when the big mills and factories were already spewing smoke above Flint and Detroit, but we tend to be wrong. The history of the car is far older and stranger than you might suppose. Its early life is like the knock-around life one of the stars of the ’80s lived in the ’70s, Stallone before Rocky, say, picking up odd jobs, working the grift, and, of course, porn. The first automobile turned up outside Paris in 1789, when Detroit was an open field. (The hot rod belonged to the Grand Armée before it belonged to Neal and Jack.) It was another of the great innovations that seemed to appear in that age of revolution.

more from Rich Cohen at The Believer here.

Brad Delong notes that this is the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, and also of Auden's phenomenal poem “September 1, 1939” (first published in October 1939). In my humble opinion, these 99 lines constitute perhaps the finest political poem every written in the English language. Joseph Brodsky used to lecture on the poem with such happiness and insight that we would all walk away even more overwhelmed by Auden. (A decent transcript can be found in Less Than One.) It is the poem I most frequently recite to myself, still.

Auden was unhappy, perhaps even embarrassed by the line “We must one another or die.” Unless I'm mistaken, he once changed it in one version to “We must love one another and die,” which fails, I think. Brodsky suggested that the line really was trying to say “We must love one another or kill,” but then the rhymes fail.

Read more »

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

The negative comments on my previous column (there were many positive ones too) fall neatly into two groups, the attacks on me and the attacks on my ideas.

Let’s do the ad hominem stuff first. More than a few posters declared that while I talk the talk, I don’t walk the walk. Eric issues a challenge: “So Mr. Fish, how about teaching some comp classes yourself?” English Professor is confident that “we can safely assume that Mr. Fish has never actually taught a composition class himself.” Ditto anonymous writing instructor: “I’m sure that Fish is paid too dearly for his opinions here and elsewhere to actually teach composition classes.” Maeve asks, “By the way, when’s the last time you taught a freshman composition class?”

That one’s easy. The last time I taught a regularly scheduled freshman composition class was my last year teaching in a liberal arts college. That was 2004-2005, and in the years before that, when I was the dean, I taught the course every fall. Since 2005, I’ve been a faculty member at a law school where there are no freshmen to teach, so I’ve had to make do with offering a non-credit writing workshop on Mondays; it’s my version of pro bono work and last fall 50 or so students and a few colleagues took advantage of it.

More here.

Quddus Mirza in Himal Southasian:

The Pakistani state no longer forces the country’s artists to comply with stringent political or moral diktats – but it doesn’t have to.

“We live in a postmodern age, everything is simulation, everything is reference, even dictatorships.”
– Dubravka Ugresic

A young man writes a love letter to his fiancé, and adds a line or two about the government of his country. He posts the letter, but soon after dispatching he realises that if it is opened in the censor office, he is going to suffer because of the casual negative remark he made. In order to avoid such consequences, he decides to apply for a job in the censor department, so he can try to get hold of his letter. To his surprise, he does indeed get a position, and thus starts learning his new tasks. Several months later, during the course of normal post-checking, he finally comes across his letter. He opens it and reads the content. But instead of hiding it or throwing it away, he writes a note that the sender of the letter has committed a crime against the state and must be punished.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

More here.

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 September 8, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Daniel C. Dennett, will be announced on September 22, 2009.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

Ladan Boroumand in Dissent:

In a clumsy remake of an old-time Stalinist show trial, a pale and underfed individual with a distraught gaze recites more or less convincingly a story whose plot is ever the same: A self-told tale of (highly improbable) contacts with American or Israeli agents is put forward as “evidence” of the hapless defendant’s nefarious desire to topple the Islamic Republic.

This treatment is not reserved for oppositionists alone. On the contrary, prosecutors have administered it liberally over the years to former mid- or even high-ranking regime cadres who made the mistake of daring to question some higher-up’s wisdom or claim to command. On April 23, 1982, for instance, the confession of former IRI foreign minister and broadcasting chief Sadeq Ghotbzadeh aired on Iranian state television. He accused himself of plotting a military coup against Ayatollah Khomeini, an alleged crime for which he would be shot that September. A few days later, the highest-ranking Shi’a ayatollah, Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, was given a text to read on television “proving” his connivance with Ghotbzadeh. Shariatmadari’s real “crime” was his disapproval of political rule by the clergy, but the trumped-up confession gave the IRI the legal fig leaf that it needed to silence the ayatollah and keep him under house arrest until his death in 1986.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I've always been suspicious of the birds. Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above. The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces. They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell. They wondered whom the birds were working for. Poor Prometheus was punished for the simple and humane act of giving fire to mankind. It is no accident that he was punished with the torture of an eagle eternally feasting on his liver. The birds will always sell us out for a pittance.

Our latest humiliation at the hands of our feathery friends comes in the unexpected realm of art criticism. The birds, it seems, enter any arena if there is the chance of making us look like fools.

Here's what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children's paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name 'good' pictures.”

More Leave a comment

September 22, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.

September 11, 2009, NOTE: The list of nine finalists can be seen here.

September 8, 2009, NOTE: The list of twenty semifinalists can be seen here.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Professor Steven Pinker, on June 21st. We have decided to do the prize in philosophy next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in philosophy. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add upto three wildcard entries of their choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Daniel C. Dennett, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. Professor Dennett will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. 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.

* * *

The winners of the philosophy prize will be announced on September 22, 2009. Here's the schedule:

Today:

• The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of philosophy by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after August 23, 2008.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

August 31, 2009

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date, so there is only a week to submit nominations.
• The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

September 7, 2009

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

September 22, 2009

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Graham Little. Untitled. 2005.

Colored pencil and gouache on paper.

More here and here.

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: Penne For Your Thought
2. 3 Quarks Daily: The Temporal Prospects of Humanity
3. Another Heidegger Blog: Interview with Jeffery Malpas
4. Biophilia: Altruism Through Genocide
5. Biophilia: Holy Gibberish!
6. Blog & ~Blog: Graham Priest’s Theory of Change
7. Brain Hammer: Bandwidth and Storage in the Human Biocomputer
8. Cognition and Culture: Descarte’s Skull
9. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche’s Causal Essentialism
10. Duck Rabbit: Can words be used incorrectly?
11. Engage: Conversations in Philosophy: Empathy, Equity, and the Wise Latina Judge: Sotomayor and the Supreme Court Oath of Office
12. Evolving Thoughts: Aristotle on the Mayfly
13. Evolving Thoughts: “Class” War
14. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, Atheism, and the Catholic Church
15. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, God and Chance
16. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance
17. Evolving Thoughts: Definitions of Atheism
18. Evolving Thoughts: How to derive an ontology in biology
19. Evolving Thoughts: Information and Metaphysics
20. Evolving Thoughts: Laws, Theories and Models
21. Evolving Thoughts: Phenomena
22. Evolving Thoughts: Philosophy and Evolution
23. Evolving Thoughts: The Doctrine of Double Truth
24. Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
25. How Not to Win A War: Light ’em up, Baber!
26. How Not to Win A War: On Ideology
27. Hyper Tiling: Unheimlich Realism (and Zombies)
28. In Living Color: Can you be blamed for forgetting?
29. In Search of Enlightenment: The Availability Heuristic and the Inborn Aging Process
30. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
31. Larval Subjects: Object-Oriented Ontology and Scientific Naturalism
32. Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
33. Let Us Philosophize: Against Much Erudition
34. Matters of Substance: How Many Regions of Spacetime Actually Exist?
35. Methods of Projection: Wittgenwanker
36. Minerva’s Howl: On Retrospective Prophecy
37. MSU Philosophy Club: Philosophy and Video Games: Idealism and Closure
38. Object-Oriented Philosophy: English Stylists and Related Matters
39. PEA Soup: Constraints: Agent-Focused or Victim-Focused
40. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
41. Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology
42. Philosophy, et cetera: Reflecting on Relativism
43. Philosophy Sucks!: The Contestability of (P & ~Q)
44. Philosophy Sucks!: Reflections on Zoombies and Shombies Or: After the Showdown at the APA
45. Possibly Philosophy: Uncertainty in the Many Worlds Theory
46. Public Reason: On Public Reason and Justificatory Liberalism
47. Specter of Reason: Discovery, Demonstration, and Naturalism
48. Specter of Reason: The Language of Consciousness
49. Specter of Reason: Wise on Intelligent Design in the Classroom
50. Strange Doctrines: Third-World Zombies and (Ana) Qualiac Reference
51. The Edge of the American West: Part 1, All noble things are as difficult as they are rare
52. The Edge of the American West: Part 2, The Best of All Possible Worlds
53. The Edge of the American West: Part 3, Why should we be loyal to reason if it pushes us into the abyss?
54. The Garden of Forking Paths: Defining Determinism and Such
55. The Garden of Forking Paths: To Hell With the TNR Principle
56. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
57. The Prosblogion: An Opinionated Play-by-Play of the Plantinga-Dennett Exchange
58. The Space of Reasons: A Counterexample to Setiya
59. The Space of Reasons: Dilworth’s Functional Consonance
60. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
61. Tomkow: The Good, The Bad and Peter Singer
62. Underverse: Refuting “It,” Thus
63. Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism
64. Yeah, OK, But Still: An Ethics of Honor

To vote, click here.

Shandana Minhas in Pakistan's The News:

I would like to begin by asking when Ramzan or Ramazan officially became Ramadan? It is the month the natural born Pakistani's intrinsic need to feel holier than thou — a necessary if trying counterpoint to the self loathing we traditionally embody– manifests itself to an alarming degree.

Celebrities begin their yearly plummet off the cliffs of prudishness at the onset of the month, like lemmings but without the charisma. Chiffon clad women wrap themselves in an extra layer of piety as they harangue their Hindu maids. Those who imbibe swear off the stuff for the duration, as if it isn't haram all year around.

Mosque loudspeakers' volumes are raised an extra notch, a crude but effective way to ensure all in their immediate vicinity bridge the class divide by being equally susceptible to inner ear damage. And salespeople ringing up midday food purchases do so with such a contemptuous superiority it is a wonder they are able to stay seated and not inadvertently levitate straight to heaven, bottoms up. And should the topic of inappropriate sanctimonious be brought up in conversation with, say, a person who has broken a red light in their rush to get home for Iftar and nearly totaled your car in the process, do you know what you are likely to get in response? I cannot possibly eat humble pie: I am fasting.

I'm generally not so negative but this year things got off to a bad start for me thanks to the pick up truck that parked outside the apartment complex I live in during the wee hours of the first night and proceeded to harangue all inmates with demands for charity over a megaphone, which is never a nice thing to do to anyone in bed.

Then, reeling from both sleep deprivation and the knowledge of my own helplessness in the face of wanton, unprovoked wailing, I read about the directive issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs to all provincial governments directing them to ensure full implementation of the Ehteram-e-Ramadan Ordinance. The ordinance, promulgated in 1981 under Zia-ul-Haq, makes it illegal for anyone – young, old, infirm, pregnant, lapsed – to eat, drink or smoke in public and applies across the board to Muslims and non-Muslims. In other words, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

More here.