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 didn’t even know he had written a book set in New York City in the wake of catastrophic climate change. By “he” I mean Kim Stanley Robinson. But there it was on the table, New York 2140. A couple quick glances told me that, yes, it was set after the sea…
by Bill Benzon Courtesy of SpaceX Sometime back in February I saw a gorgeous thing. Maybe it was February 6, when it happened. More likely it was a day or two later. What I saw was the all-but simultaneous landing of a pair of booster rockets from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. It pretty near took…
by Bill Benzon We are now less than a year away from the scheduled release of Disney’s live-action remake of Dumbo, the studio’s fourth animated feature. It is in some ways dark and sinister–animals jaded from the daily grind of performing and being on display; cruel, exploitive, and drunken clowns; and the snobbish elephant matrons…
by Bill Benzon A couple of weeks ago I was making my online rounds. When I checked YouTube I saw a link to a conversation between Steven Pinker and Joe Rogan. I’m quite familiar with Pinker and have correspond with him a bit, though I’ve not read his most recent book. And the name, “Joe…
by Bill Benzon When I was a child back in the nuclear-anxiety-Cold-War 1950s I went to see a film called Godzilla, King of the Monsters. I probably noticed that the people on screen didn’t look like Americans. They looked – well, I don’t know what I would have called them then, but they were in…
by Bill Benzon Like many musicians, I was in a marching band in middle school and high school, the Marching Rams of Richland Township in Western Pennsylvania. We were a very good band. We marched in the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. in 1965. That experience was a rich one. But it was also…
by Bill Benzon I don’t know just when it was, but let’s say it was half a dozen years ago. I’m on an email list for trumpet players and someone had sent a message suggesting we check out the Mnozil Brass. Strange name, I thought, but I found some clips on YouTube and have been…
by Bill Benzon Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works…
by Bill Benzon I must confess, my title is more of a figurative come-on than an accurate indication. I’m not really going to talk about the sixth century pope, Saint Gregory the Great, but rather about the liturgical music that has taken his name, Gregoring chant, aka plainsong. I am, however, going to talk about…
by Bill Benzon Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Literary Lab have collected a number of their pamphlets into a book: Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism by Franco Moretti (Author, Editor), Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Holst Katsma, Long Le-Khac, Dominique Pestre, Erik Steiner, Amir Tevel, Hannah Walser,…
by Bill Benzon Also known as Tottle and Stutter. But the real name was Tudor and Stuart: The Tudor and Stuart Club. The Tudor and Stuart Club was a literary society at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – yes, they insist upon that “the” before “Johns” – and I was the club secretary for…
by Bill Benzon Coal, by Alexander G., April 7, 2012 No, I wasn’t a miner. But the job WAS all about coal. And you know what? I for damn sure know more about the coal business than President Trump. Let me explain. I spent the first three or four years of my life in Ellsworth,…
by Bill Benzon Donald Trump, of course, is the forty-fifth President of the United States. He is a real person, but Leroy Jethro Gibbs is not. He is the central character in NCIS, one of the most popular and longest running shows on network television. Gibbs is a Senior Special Agent in the Naval Criminal…
by Bill Benzon In 1889 a young Paiute Indian named Wovoka fell ill with a fever and, in his delirium, visited heaven. While there he talked with God and saw that all the Indians who had died were now young and happy doing the things they had done before the White Man had come upon…
by Bill Benzon One of the most interesting effects of the Trump presidency has been the response various cities and states have had to the Trump administration’s blindness to global warming: They have decided to bypass the federal government and go their own way on climate policy, even to the point of dealing with other…
by Bill Benzon Back on June 14 Kenan Malik published an op-ed, In Defense of Cultural Appropriation, in The New York Times. I liked it; it was a good piece. But, said I to myself, he’s going to catch hell for it. And he did. Three days later he posted a series of replies on…
by Bill Benzon Some years ago I was reading an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy”. The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with…
by Bill Benzon In 1938 Walt Disney decided to bet the farm on an extravaganza originally entitled The Concert Feature. He would use the power of animation to present Classical Music to the Masses. Get it out of the concert hall, into the movie palace, and dress it up. But he also wanted to showcase…
by Bill Benzon The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1921. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese. A Japanese ten-year-old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in…
by Bill Benzon Some years ago I was looking for a way to open the final chapter of a book I had been writing about music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. The chapter was to be a quick tour of black music in 20th Century America, starting with jazz and blues and ending…