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 Bill Benzon I was hanging out on Twitter the other day, discussing my previous 3QD piece (about Progress Studies) with Hollis Robbins, Dean of Arts and Humanities at Cal State at Sonoma. We were breezing along at 240 characters per message unit when, Wham! right out of the blue the inspiration hit me: How…
by Bill Benzon How do we get there from here? Evolution, revolution, or revolution through evolution? I don’t know, but as the smart kids are saying these days, I have my priors. As does everyone else. A movement begins Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in…
by Bill Benzon When I was a child I sought out the first blossoms of spring. The forsythia bushes were first. Then tulips perhaps? I don’t really remember. I’m guessing, though the guess is not groundless. Daffodils, yes daffodils, yellow and white. But I DO remember the irises. Not vividly, for it was a long…
by Bill Benzon This pandemic changes everything, we can’t go back to the way we were. That’s what everyone is saying. Well, not everyone, but I don’t know how many times I’ve read some version of that over the past month. I would like to reflect on that theme, albeit in perhaps and oblique and…
by Bill Benzon Of course I would write about the COVID-19 pandemic. What else is there? Two maybe three weeks ago I told myself, this changes everything. The next day I saw interviews and articles on that theme. Everything will be different in two, three, years. Apocalypse. Singularity. Different. But what do I, what could…
by Bill Benzon Frank Foster leading and fronting the Count Basie Orchestra in 1994 I headed off to the State University of New York at Buffalo (aka UB) in the Fall of 1973. While I was going for my Ph.D. in English Literature, I was also interested in the school’s music offerings. I’d just gotten…
by Bill Benzon I’ve been binging on TwoSet Violin for the last month or so. Of course the duo is not, as my title suggests, in the business of music education. But you will learn, or be reminded of, a great deal about (mostly) classical music by listening to them. They are, rather, musical comedians…
by Bill Benzon Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm: : How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall (Basic Books 2019) is nothing less than a comprehensive review and synthesis of the academic literature on social life in humans and a wide variety of animals, including, among many others, ants, whales, jays, wolves, and chimpanzees. While written…
by Bill Benzon I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, how we regulate our minds. It can be simply things, like listening to some music, taking a walk, taking a few deep breaths, a time-out, maybe we take in a movie, or have some coffee, wine or liquor? perhaps smoke some weed – it’s…
by Bill Benzon AI – artificial intelligence – is all the rage these days. Most of the raging, I suspect, is a branding strategy. It is hype. Some of it isn’t, and that’s important. Alas, distinguishing between the hype and the true goods is not easy, even for experts – some of whom have their…
by Bill Benzon Early in the 20th century physicists restored us to time. That’s not how the story is generally told, but it is a good way to think about it. Having been restored to time, we must now realize that we are time travelers, not just Dr. Who, and his – but I believe…
by Bill Benzon September 4, 2019: Adam Satariano, “The World’s First Ambassador to the Tech Industry”, The New York Times, September 3, 2019. In 2017, Denmark became the first nation to formally create a diplomatic post to represent its interests before companies such as Facebook and Google. After Denmark determined that tech behemoths now have…
by Bill Benzon While cruising the web on the evening of July 22, 2019, I learned that Dick Macksey had died earlier in the day. He was a legend at Johns Hopkins University, had been for years – a prodigious polymath who speaks who knows how many languages, a tireless teacher, a genial host, and…
by Bill Benzon I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about it, as it does for many. After all, the norm in Western musical practice has been to read music that someone…
by Bill Benzon How, then, do we get from H. Rider Haggard to Anthony Bourdain? Let’s start with the easy and straightforward. Both are white men, as are Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola for that matter. Haggard was British; he was born in the 19th century and died in the 20th (1856-1925). Bourdain was…
by Bill Benzon Music has been extraordinarily important to me. I’ve listened to and been moved by a lot of it, of all kinds, polka, jazz, classical, rock, and who knows what else. And I’ve performed in various settings – dive bars, concert halls, the streets of New York, weddings, even a funeral or two.…
by Bill Benzon Seder-Masochism, the whole film Nina Paley recently finished her second feature film, Seder-Masochism. Her first, of course, is the award-winning Sita Sings the Blues, a retelling of the Ramayana from a feminist point of view which Paley released in full in 2008. However, she had started posting segments to the internet several…
by Bill Benzon A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power. – Leopold Kohr, Breakdown of Nations This insight was the late Thomas Naylor’s lodestone; it informed and animated everything he did. Primarily an economist – who taught at…
by Bill Benzon I don’t know what Damien Chazelle was thinking as he was crafting First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong and his moon landing in Apollo 11, but to create the film we saw he had to “cleanse” it of four decades of space-adventure films. “But why,” you might ask, “would he want…
by Bill Benzon I first found Freud in the basement of the house on Luther Road. There was a small closet in the corner and my father had a box or two of paperback books in it. I don’t remember but a few titles; in fact, I’m only sure of two: Wodehouse on Golf, which…