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 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…