Bill Benzon is an independent scholar working on mind and culture. He published Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture in 2001 and is on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. He has taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published widely on literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, African-American music, and technical communication. He also plays trumpet and has shared the stage with Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, Frank Foster, Al Grey, and Nick Brignola. He blogs at New Savanna. Email: bbenzon [at] mindspring.com
by William Benzon I grew up in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. At some point “mutually assured destruction” entered my lexicon. I came to accept the threat of nuclear war with the USSR as something I’d live with until I died (perhaps in a nuclear war?). The Berlin Wall fell in…
by Bill Benzon As I am writing this (September 11, 2022) the Metaculus prediction site sets arrival of AGI – aka artificial general intelligence – as early as July 25, 2029, though a more rigorous setting of the question indicates that our incipient machine overlords won’t appear until May 26, 2042.[1] As people are interested…
by Bill Benzon We in the West live in societies organized around the idea and practice of work, where work is conceived as activity undertaken for economic gain. While that activity may benefit the worker immediately and directly, as in the production of food or clothing for their own use or to be used by…
by Bill Benzon 11th Street Lilies: That’s a kind of photograph that exemplifies an urban pastoral sensibility. Loosely speaking it depicts an urban setting, but one that evokes a pastoral mood. In this case the photograph is dominated by the lilies in the foreground, which are in a flowerbed in a median strip running for…
by Bill Benzon The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps…
by William Benzon Notice that I said, “discovered,” not “created.” The Metaverse has always been there, you just have to know how to look for it. Mark Zuckerberg is just one in a long line of supplicants in search of the Metaverse. Whether or not he’ll find it, who knows? Neil Stephenson named it in…
by Bill Benzon What is the blues? It is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility. Feeling blue. Feeling blue? It is a musical form, existing in its own tradition, but also as a form within the jazz tradition. The latter is what this series article is about, the blues as it functions within the evolving…
by William Benzon Jerry Seinfeld is fond of comparing jokes to machines: Jokes are tiny intricately crafted machines, where all the parts fit neatly and precisely together, moving in precise, if sometimes surprising, fashion. Last summer I decided to pit Seinfeld against the precisest (is that even a word?), most super-modern, and biggest intricate machine…
by William Benzon I forget just how I came to watch Steven Spielberg’s Jaws several years ago. Most likely I saw it on my Netflix homepage and, noting that I’d not seen it when it came out in 1975, I said to myself, “Why not?” I knew it had made Spielberg’s career and was generally…
by Bill Benzon About a month ago Tyler Cowen posed the following question at Marginal Revolution, a blog he runs with along with his collegue Alex Tabarrok: Why has classical music declined? If you do a general web-search on that question you’ll see that it’s a popular topic. The ensuing discussion has had 210 remarks…
by Bill Benzon I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz as a child growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music, often on big old 78s. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven. Walt Disney is part…
by Bill Benzon ASC, “altered states of consciousness” – I don’t know when the term was first coined, but I became aware of it late in the 1960s. I took it as referring primarily to states of mind induced by psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, mescaline, and LSD, and to states induced by meditative practice.…
by Bill Benzon About a week and a half ago I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and saw one of those tweets that was commenting on something about which I was clueless. Meta? What’s that about? Such tweets are common enough. I generally never find out what they’re about. But this little mystery resolved…
by Bill Benzon We all know that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. We also know that’s nonsense, pious and sentimental nonsense. Which is why it has been said so often. The subtext, of course, is that the cradle-rocking hand is connected, through appropriate anatomical intermediaries, to a foot that’s chained to…
by Bill Benzon The purpose of a book review, I suppose, is to tell the reader enough about the book to decide whether or not they would find it worthwhile. What do you think would be in a book entitled Spacecraft? A catalogue of spacecraft, both real (e.g. Sputnik, Voyager, Apollo) and imaginary (the Enterprise,…
by Bill Benzon I was living in the Lafayette section of Jersey City at the time, just in from Communipaw Avenue on Van Horne, next to the Jackson Funeral Home, the largest black funeral home in the city and up the block from the Monumental Baptist Church. It was only a couple of weeks before…
by Bill Benzon When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s Westerns were pervasive on television and at the movies. Where they the dominant genre of the era? Perhaps, I don’t really know. But whatever the numbers say, the were very important. Correlatively, science fiction was a relatively minor genre, both on television…
by Bill Benzon Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Permanent Crisis hits close to home. In the first place, I have been trained as a humanist, my degree is in English Literature. But I have long suspected that the sense humanists have of being…
by Bill Benzon “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” – so began James Joyce’s (infamous) Finnegans Wake. That line is but the completion of the book’s last sentence, “A lone a last a loved…
by Bill Benzon I don’t remember exactly what I was saying – this conversation took place over a half century ago – but perhaps I was explaining why I choose to become a scholar rather than a musician. What I remember is Gren’s reply: You ARE a musician. After awhile he convinced me. That is,…