About Bill
Bill Benzon is an independent scholar who has been working and publishing on the 'newer psychologies' and culture for three decades. He is also a trumpeter who has opened for Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, and Al Grey.
Email Address: bbenzon@mindspring.com
Website: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/
Posts by Bill
Friday, May 09, 2008
Friday3: Other Disciplines
Tim Burke had just gotten back from a visit to Maine’s College of the Atlantic and has blogged about it:
The college doesn’t have departments, and its faculty try very consciously to branch out and explore connections between different kinds of knowledge and methodologies. There is a lot of emphasis on guiding students towards independent study and in changing the curriculum to respond to new problems and shifting student interests. They focus on what they call “human ecology”, which I think is potentially specific enough to give the curriculum a clear set of boundaries while flexible enough that it doesn’t get stuck in a particular place and time or in a specific social or political project like a fly in amber. ... The students I met, as well as the faculty, also seem to have a very clear drive towards applied and practical uses of what they teach, though not at all narrowly vocational. The emphasis on student independence pays off, from what I can see: the students I talked to were among the most confident, uninhibited and yet non-snobby undergraduates I’ve met.
In praise of Deadwood: Alan Taylor reviews a comprehensive American history aimed at the general public: Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea. He finds it an inadequate antidote to American triumphalism:
To achieve his goals, Kluger needed to make a cleaner break with the tropes of Turner’s day. Indeed, he missed a golden opportunity to reform Turner’s frontier thesis--which can be rescued from its distorting character types. Although Turner got almost all of the details wrong, he knew where to look for the distinctive nature of American society. The frontier thesis rightly regards expansion as central to the development of American institutions and values through the nineteenth century. That expansion created this nation’s wealth, and its distribution of property and power, and much of its historical memory. But that distribution of property and power was profoundly unequal--it was, in other words, at odds with the democratic aspirations also generated by the frontier experience. Before HBO’s series Deadwood succumbed to David Milch’s rhetorical excesses, it brilliantly explored the tension between frontier illusions and realities--and particularly between the frontier ambitions of common people and the consolidating power of capital. Had Richard Kluger similarly illuminated that tension, he would have earned the pulpit to preach history to his readers.
Alan Wolfe reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007), a biography by Richard Reeves. "In contrast to both Continental and analytic philosophy, give me John Stuart Mill any day, and give me a biography as fascinating to read as the one written by Richard Reeves.”
I am no philosopher, so perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking that Mill has gotten a raw deal from those who are. For a book I have just completed on what we can learn from the tradition of liberal political philosophy, I read a good deal of Mill and came to value him, not only for his seductive writing but also for the relevance of his ideas to such contemporary issues as free speech, women’s suffrage, and the role that religion should play in a democracy. It therefore bothers me that Mill is not taken as seriously as he should be, either in philosophy or in my own discipline of political science.
Reeves calls Mill “unquestionably the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain — and perhaps even the world.” Such praise is too excessive, even for me. But I share Reeves’s argument that, as well known as Mill may be, he nonetheless deserves a rediscovery.
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Sunday, May 04, 2008
Nussbaum on Philosophy does Shakespeare
Martha Nussbaum reviews three Shakespeare books in The New Republic. She sets up three criteria early in the article:
To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher’s study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?
A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, does poorly on all three counts. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, does better, but not much: “McGinn does not offer anything subtle or new; he just identifies familiar philosophical themes that figure in the plays. The impression conveyed is that Shakespeare has gotten a good grade in Phil 101, with McGinn as his professor and his superior in understanding. This is a terrible way to approach Shakespeare’s complexity.”
Nussbaum then goes on to praise Stanley Cavell’s work on Shakespeare by way of getting to the third book under review, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, by Tzachi Zamir. Cavell scores high on her first two criteria, but not the third. Zamir scores well on all three.
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Friday, May 02, 2008
Time to Make the Sausages
Some Friday links: Iron Man gets good reviews in NYTimes, Salon, and Slate, while Times readers talk about their favorite action heroes.
Over at Language Log we learn that “general abstract nonsense” and “logical abstract nonsense” are terms of art, with the latter a subfield of the former. Unlike “Theory,” as the term is sometimes used at The Valve, these are not terms of opprobrium; rather the opposite. Only the cool mathematical kids dabble in varieties of abstract nonsense.
Meanwhile Larval Subjects has hosted a long discussion on the subject of the difficult style, that style whose difficulty is offered up as a necessary means to the higher truth. Sinthome doesn’t buy it; Kotsko has coined a term, “Academic Stockholm Syndrome." A good time was had by all. (Think of it as counterpoint to Holbo on argument.)
For those interested in historicizing and culturally situating the neural sciences, Pink Tentacle has published pictures from an early 19th century Japanese anatomy treatise. Here’s the brain:
(Hat tip to Of Two Minds.)
Over at Scienceblogs, Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) has a post about Literature, Psychology and the Elites. He’s bouncing off a post by Razib (of Gene Expression) that concludes:
Why does any of this matter? For one, I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
So am I full of crap?
Well, is he? Enquiring minds want to know.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Racism, Censorship, Cartoons
The New York Times recently had an article on 11 Warner Brothers cartoons “that have not been shown in authorized release since 1968,” but they keep showing up on YouTube, and keep getting removed. Warner Brothers has kept them under wraps because it regards them as racially offensive. As far as I know, I’ve only seen one of them, Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. I think it’s hilarious, a superb cartoon, and racist. I also think it should be reissued so that those who want to see it, may do so.
But I’m not here to argue those questions. Rather, I just want to create some pointers to the most recent round of discussions on this matter. Here’s a link to Cartoon Brew where at least 49 comments have been made so far, many of them having links to other remarks. Michael Barrier has posted comments on Coal Black by several several people. I find it instructive to read through these comments, which are all over the map, and wonder. What’s happening here?
I would like to think that critical developments of the last three decades given us useful tools for thinking about the aesthetic and cultural issues presented by these cartoons.
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Saturday, April 26, 2008
Writers Rising
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio says that writing and publishing are on the way up:
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”
Self-publishing is on the rise and the big retailers are getting in. Barnes & Noble has a deal with IUniverse, Borders with Lulu, and Amazon.com owns BookSurge. More college-level writing programs too:
Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Juxtaposition as Structure
The [Sopranos] undertook to find how many variant aspects of each of these characters could be revealed. We circled around them and studied them from different angles, taking all the time necessary to contemplate these clearly limited yet somehow infinitely mysterious beings. The process could never really be completed except in death—and death would arrive for many. – Geoffrey O’Brien
My previous two posts on The Sopranos have discussed how the show interweaves multiple plotlines. This post continues that discussion, but the angle of regard is different. My first post was about the thematic underpinning of a particular episode, “Boca,” and argued that its intertwined story lines both exemplified a concern with the proper separation of business and personal life, though in different ways. My second post looked at two scene-to-scene transitions in “D-Girl,” pointing out that they involved visual links between two independent story lines. In these cases it would appear that I was pointing out ways to bring about coherence among independent story lines.
But why have independent story lines in the first place? Let’s say it’s an obvious way to structure episodes in an open-ended ongoing story. The tightly plotted three-act structure of the Hollywood feature presupposes closure. Closure is one thing you don’t have in a serial. Having multiple lines of action in an episode gives you room to move around. Looking back, you can pick and choose from materials you’ve laid down. Looking forward you leave many opportunities for new developments.
Still, how do you create a coherent episode from such materials? Yes, we have thematic linkage and visual continuity, but we also have a logic of juxtaposition. That’s what this post is about. I offer no generalization, no overall theory, just explorations of three episodes. I have no particular reason to believe that these episodes are somehow representative of all the episodes. They’re just episodes that attracted my interest. I will consider the episodes one by one and the offer some general comments at the end.
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Friday, April 18, 2008
Hooked on Irony
A certain kind of interest in matters cognitive leads one to attend to details of construction. Just how, exactly, is this thing put together? David Bordwell is the pre-eminent cognitive film analyst and theorist, and has been looking at such details for three decades. He has recently published (on his website) an essay on “The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema.”
It’s about mid-level transitions in film. Not the high-level structure of acts (generally three or four), nor the low level structure of shots, but in between, groups of shots traditionally called a scene or a sequence. Bordwell estimates that the modern feature generally has 30 to 50 scenes. He observes:
Typically the scenes develop and connect through short-term chains of cause and effect. Characters formulate specific plans, react to changing circumstances, gain or lose allies, make appointments, act under deadlines, and otherwise take specific steps toward or away from their goals. Part of the screenwriter’s craft is to find ways to fit the short-term actions into the overarching movement toward resolution.
The hook, then, is a device that “links a specific causal element at the end of one scene to that at the very start of the next. The second, in a concrete way, completes the element we see or hear at the end of the first scene.”
But it’s not a modern feature that interests me. It’s The Sopranos. Feature films generally run between an hour-and-a-half and two hours. Episodes of The Sopranos run about 50 minutes. I’m not prepared to offer any generalization about how many scenes are in a typical episode. But I’ve counted them in two episodes. Episode nine of the first season ("Boca") has 36 scenes while episode four of the second season ("Commendatori") has 42. So we’re in roughly the same structural and temporal ballpark.
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Family Business
I’ve now seen 17 episodes of The Sopranos – the entire first season plus the first four episodes of the second season – and I am getting a feel for the show. But that doesn’t mean I understand it in any critical sense, though I certainly enjoy it and think it very good. Fact is, I’ve now seen enough that I’m wondering: What’s it about?
Yes, I know, it’s about Tony Soprano, his shrink, and his two families. The one family, of course, is his wife and kids and so forth, while the other consists of his business associates in the mob. There is some overlap between the two groups, and that is certainly one of the things this series is about, negotiating one’s life between home and workplace. That is hardly a novel problem; on the contrary, it is ubiquitous. Most adult Americans face it in some way, but not quite this way. Perhaps that is part of its appeal, a defamiliarizing look at a familiar situation.
This particular theme was brought home to me in episode nine, “Boca,” as in Boca Raton, but also, according to the Wikipedia, a pun on bocca, Italian for “mouth,” and, by extension, gossip. Corrado Soprano, Tony’s nominal boss in the mob (and his uncle as well; he’s often called “Uncle Junior”) takes his long-term mistress to Boca Raton, where they enjoy a satisfying romantic interlude in which she compliments Junior on his skill in cunnilingus. I want to set this plotline aside, however, to look at the other one, which involves Ally Vandermeed, a friend of Tony’s daughter, Meadow, in an affair with the coach of the high-school soccer team.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Progress in Psychology and Psychiatry
The Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner, at the NYTimes, has staged a roundtable on progress in these areas, with comments by David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz. He asked: “How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made in the last century? Do we know enough about the human psyche to prescribe the medication that we do?”
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Monday, April 07, 2008
Vonnegut, Fish
Writing in Salon, Steve Almond reviews as posthumous collection by Kurt Vonnegut, Aarmageddon in Retrospect. Most of the pieces are set in Dresden and chart the trajectory of Vonnegut’s evolution to Slaughterhouse Five. From a letter Vonnegut wrote to his family in May of 1945:
On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. [T]heir combined labors killed 250,000 [sic] people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Stanley Fish gives us the scoop on deconstruction: properly understood, it has no political implications whatsoever; the culture wars of the 1990s were a mistake. Fish plays off French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, by Francois Cusset. Of deconstruction:
It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it — one epistemology — has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked “What’s your epistemology?” you’ll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.
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Sunday, April 06, 2008
Philosophy Rising
The New York Times reports that the number of undergraduate philosophy majors is rising:
Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.
. . .
Nationwide, there are more colleges offering undergraduate philosophy programs today than a decade ago (817, up from 765), according to the College Board. Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s.
The article notes that these students gravitate toward interdisciplinary approaches. “Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology.”
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Sunday, March 30, 2008
Beyond Good and Evil?
As the final season of The Wire moved past its midpoint I began reading assertions and arguments that it is one of the three best (dramatic) shows that has even been on TV; The Sopranos and Deadwood are the other two (for example, see this discussion by three TV critics). In point of principle I don’t know about “the best,” but I do know that Deadwood and The Wire (I’ve not seen the last season) are very good. I’ve only seen the first seven episodes of The Sopranos and believe they’re very good. The level of excellence, however, is not what most interests me.
What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about? Is it merely a random circumstance, or does it speak to our historical moment? If the latter, what is it saying?
I don’t have a fine-grained knowledge of just how common such stories have been or, in a large sense, how common they are now. Come stories and lawless frontier stories have been around for a long time. My sense, however, is that they have not always been so sympathetic to the bad guys. Why now? And how long has this been going on?
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
RIP Arthur C. Clarke
From the New York Times:
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Clarke had post-polio syndrome for the last two decades and used a wheelchair.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008
Harlan Ellison
Andrew O’Hehir has an interesting interview with Harlan Ellison at Salon. The occasion is a biographical film about Ellison, “Dreams with Sharp Teeth,” by Erik Nelson. Part of the interview is transcribed at Salon, but most of it is not. There’s a link to mp3 audio. Listen to it, especially the last half.
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Thursday, March 06, 2008
High Castle and Inner Truth
I’ve just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle and find it pretty interesting – and sophisticated as well. It seems to be a meditation on the nature of history and of fiction, but without the self-conscious hijinks one finds in, say, John Barth. As you may know, it’s set in an alternative history of the mid-20th century in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The eastern seaboard of the USA becomes German territory while the western seaboard becomes Japanese territory. The central area remains more-or-less independent.
One Hawthorne Abendsen lives in that central area, near Cheyenne. He’s the man in the high castle, though he does not, in fact, live in a high castle. Nor is he a central character in the novel, though he’s quite important. He’s written a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that is quite popular in what remains of the USA, but is banned from the German and Japanese sections. Why? Because it is an alternative history in which the Germans and Japanese have lost the war, that’s why. We see this history only in little bits here and there, as characters in the book either read or discuss Grasshopper. Those fragments are enough, however, to tell us that that history is not of our world, the history known to Dick’s readers. Rather, it is a second alternative alternative history.
Grasshopper is not the only book within the book. We also have the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text often used for divination. One character in each of the book’s loosely linked plots consults the I Ching regularly. Beyond that, Abendsen, whom we meet at the very end of the book, made constant use of the I Ching in plotting Grasshopper. According to the Wikipedia article, Dick himself used the I Ching while plotting The Man in the High Castle.
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