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 This post, which will be brief as my posts go, consists of three parts. The second is a letter that my friend and colleague, Charlie Keil, has sent to the Vatican where he hopes it will come to the attention of Pope Francis. He urges us to send the letter as well.…
by Bill Benzon This essay argues that Western culture is an ideological fiction. There is no such thing as Western culture if by that you mean a coherent and internally unified cultural entity that started back in ancient Greece and the Jewish Levant, took hold in and flourished in Europe, from which it eventually set…
by Bill Benzon Talcott Parsons I am going to continue the psycho-cultural argument I introduced in my previous 3DQ post, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. The core of my argument somes from an old article in which Talcott Parsons, one of the Grand Old Men of 20th century…
by Bill Benzon During the course of my adult life I have witnessed the collapse of the political culture of my nation, the United States of America. To be sure, there have been some good things – the Civil Rights movement, for example – but the framework that served from the nation’s founding through the…
by Bill Benzon “The interests of humanity may change, the present curiosities in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind in the future.” One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity…
by Bill Benzon In The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age I argued that digital criticism was the most important development in contemporary literary studies because it is the only line of investigation that presents us with new objects of thought. I’m continuing that argument in this post, where I consider some…
by Bill Benzon, appendix by Charlie Keil Writer’s Cypher, UMMI Living Village Community Garden, Jersey City, NJ Adolescents seem gifted in the belief that, if only the adults would get out of the way and grow up, the world would be a much better place. In that sense I am still, at 66 going on…
by Bill Benzon Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press 2013. 229 pp. This is a strange book, for it is three. There is the book that is easy to praise for its range of topics – quantum mechanics, La Monte Young, global warming, The Matrix,…
by Bill Benzon …though many don’t think of it as art at all, but as crime. After all graffiti – by which I mean the styles that originated in New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s – was born when kids and young adults began spray-canning their names on other…
by Bill Benzon Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time photographing graffiti in Jersey City, which is on the West bank of the Hudson River across from lower Manhattan. Most of that time I’ve photographed a handful of sites, over and over again, week after week, month after month. What…
by Bill Benzon Distant Reading and Embracing the Other As far as I can tell, digital criticism is the only game that's producing anything really new in literary criticism. We've got data mining studies that examine 1000s of texts at once. Charts and diagrams are necessary to present results and so have become central objects…
by Bill Benzon The other day I was reading an old post an eBuddy of mine, Michael Cobb Bowen, had written about the possibly of a female viagra-type drug. Michael ended the post by observing: Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. You have to get naked and vulnerable. In fully formed human beings, that takes…
by Bill Benzon My earliest memory is of a song about a fly that married a bumblebee. I've been told–I don't really remember this–that early one morning I played that record so often that it drove a visiting uncle to distraction. I don't know how many people count music as their earliest memory, but I…
by Bill Benzon Tiger Woods is only the most recent in a long line of fine black golfers. In saying that I refer to players other than the moderns such as Charles Sifford, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and Renee Powell. Truth be told, the tradition of sepia swing masters started in…
by Bill Benzon Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in…
by Bill Benzon For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all comers: politicians, scientists of all kinds, and disgruntled letter writers. And always the defense comes down to this: we provide a holistic and…