by William L. Benzon The first time I heard the phrase – “white black man” – Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a July 4th party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, three-quarters of a life ago, I had originally become…

by Bill Benzon There can be little doubt that President Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney was an extraordinary performance and a powerful statement about the state of race relations in the United States of America. But it is also a bit puzzling, for that statement took the form of a sermon. As such, it was…

Introduction by Bill Benzon This month I've decided to turn things over to my good friend Charles Cameron, whom I've known for somewhat over a dozen years, though only online. He's a poet and a student of many things, most recently religious fundamentalism and its contemporary manifestations in terrorism. He characterizes himself as a vagabond…

by Bill Benzon Frank Wilczek, theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate at MIT, has recently published his speculation on what physics will yield over the next 100 years [1]. It’s an interesting and provocative read, if a bit obscure to me (I never studied physics beyond a mediocre high school program). And, of course, I had…

by Bill Benzon On Saturday April 25, 2015, some 20-30 graffiti writers and street artists converged on the now empty Newport Pep Boys store in Jersey City, New Jersey. What were they there for? To “get up” as the lingo has it. To spray paint on walls. That activity is vandalism in Jersey City, as…

by Bill Benzon Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter. —Bruno Latour, An Attempt…

by Bill Benzon By the middle of the previous century anthropologists had come to argue that each culture has its own patterns and that those patterns pervaded its social practices, its practical arts, it’s beliefes and attitudes, and its expressive culture. The central expression of this conception can be found in Ruth Benedict's seminal study…

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 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…