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 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…
by Bill Benzon One day several years ago I waited an hour in traffic to go a quarter of a mile so I could enter the Holland Tunnel and cross under the Hudson River to my home in Jersey City. While sitting in the queue I kept thinking why why why? Why? After saying a…
by Bill Benzon As many of you know John Brockman is literary agent for a parliament of well-known scientists, science journalists, and others – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, George Dyson and a cast of, if not thousands, perhaps hundreds. Each year he poses a question and they answer it. Then the answers are…
by Bill Benzon What then are we to make of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an event as preposterous as the title of this essay? However fervent his supporters were, and are, it appears that, come Election Day, not even Trump thought he would win. And now he’s stuck…
by Bill Benzon Dan Everett. Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. University of Chicago Press, 2016. I want to approach Everett’s dark matter indirectly. In 1973 David Hays, who soon became my teacher, published an article entitled, “Language and Interpersonal Relationships” [1]. It begins with a simple one-sentence paragraph: “How does language…
by Bill Benzon Jamie is a young man in his early twenties. He has Down syndrome and is the son of Michael Bérubé and Janet Lyon, who teach at Penn State. Michael has just published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (Beacon 2016). Here’s how Michael characterizes his book (p. 16):…
by Bill Benzon Martha Mills came to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer, looked racists judges, lawyers, and Ku Kluxers in the eye, and never backed down–in court or out. Small in stature, huge in guts, as far as I was concerned she was the smartest, bravest, and just plain toughest of that corporal’s…
by Bill Benzon These songs of mine have to be played. They mustn’t be lost, they have to be out there….They’re Byzantine and their ‘roads’, their tunes are ancient. –Markos Vamvakaris To read this book, this as-told-to autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris, is to confront how strange is this thing we call writing, the child of…
by Bill Benzon and Mary Liebman On April 27, 2016, Donald Trump opened a foreign policy speech by declaring that he would “develop a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.” He closed by assuring, “American will continually play the role…
by Bill Benzon The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. —Yeats One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. —Kafka I woke up at 1:17 AM a couple nights ago, a dream…
by Bill Benzon My paternal grandfather, Axel Benzon, was a Dane. He and his wife, Louise, immigrated to America early in the 20th Century. He was trained as an engineer, was educated in the classics, and took up photography and woodcarving. He ended his professional career as chief engineer of the main U.S. Post Office…
by Bill Benzon William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress, c. 1946. Duke Ellington was one of the great composers and bandleaders of the last century, and his band was one of the great bands. Touring, however, is unforgiving. Long hours sitting in a bus, meals if and when you can grab them, and gigs every…
by Bill Benzon Well, it wasn’t quite like that. For one thing, they weren’t really trumpeters. They held the horns and blew through them, but not much came out. If those guys were trumpeters, then my name’s James Bond and I’m a secret agent who’s saved the world from countless psychotic megalomaniacal industrialists. Bond isn’t…
by Bill Benzon There are people who read rags like Star, Globe, The National Enquirer, and so forth to find out what’s really going on in the world of celebrities and people in the news. What’s the scoop with Madonna? Is Kanye really like that? Did Brad and Angela get another kid? Why do we…
by Bill Benzon In Playing in the Dark, a set of essays on race in American literature, Toni Morrison is led “to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature . . . are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. . . . Through significant and underscored…
by Bill Benzon These days the circus is, for better or worse, an exotic and marginal form of entertainment. By contrast, it was a major form of popular entertainment in the United States and Europe in the 19th Century and well into the 20th. Elephants were central to the entertainment. As Janet Davis noted in…
by Bill Benzon The idea has been around since 1793 when Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote an essay “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” Rush was a Philadelphia physician, the founder of Dickinson College, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, he served in the Continental Congress, and he was a signer of…
by Bill Benzon No, I don’t think it is, morally repugnant; quite the contrary. But it IS controversial and problematic, and that’s what I want to deal with in this post. But I don’t want to come at it directly. I want to ease into it. As some of you may have gathered, I have…
by Bill Benzon What about television? The movies? Or, even, heaven forefend! the book? But then, what is a mind that it can be wrecked, or not? The brain we know about, and what rots it. Cancer rots the brain. So do drugs of the wrong kind, and there are lots of wrong kinds, though…
by Bill Benzon After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem. I, being an American citizen in good…