About Bill Benzon
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 Benzon
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
James Woods on Fiction
Rohan Maitzen posted on James Woods, How Fiction Works, at Novel Readings on 12 March, and at The Valve on 27 March. Now Salon, Slate, and The New Republic (Frank Kermode) have decided to follow.
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Monday, July 21, 2008
My Comment Policy
As some of you may know, I have recently decided to close comments on two threads that I started, Who Was Shakespeare? and The Raw Critic: “The Dark Knight." These actions reflect my personal decision and should not be taken as indicative of any change in policy at The Valve. Valve policy, as far as I can determine, is rather loose.
Why did I do this? I suppose I just got fed up. In the case of the Shakespeare thread, the issue is one that invites circular discussions and I couldn’t see any particular reason to keep spinning this one out. The Batman discussion seemed rather circular as well. Beyond that, as I explained in my concluding comment, I had a particular reason for creating that thread and the discussion pretty much destroyed it for me: I actually wanted to discuss the film.
Will I do this with other threads that I initiate? I don’t know, but I suppose I will. Will I give any sort of warning? I don’t know; I didn’t in these two cases. But now that I’ve decided that closing down discussion is something I’m willing to do, I suppose I’ll consider giving warning in the future. What are my criteria for doing this? The best I can do is offer those two threads as examples. I’m making this up as I go along. I don’t mind thread drift and I don’t mind argument and debate. I do mind whatever it is that was going on in those two threads.
Whatever that is, it is common in blog discussions, and common enough at The Valve. I don’t see any reason why I should encourage it. If that means that I’ve got to act in an arbitrary way to shut down a thread, well, I’ll do that. I see no reason why John Emerson should get all the curmudgeon points around here. Note that this applies only to threads that I initiate. I do not have the capability to turn comments off for threads initiated by others and wouldn’t do so if I did. They’re responsible for conversations they initiate.
What do I like? Cooperative discussion. Cooperative discussion doesn’t preclude either thread drift or disagreement and argument. But it does require a sense of limits. At the moment Rohan Maitzen’s discussion of Adam Bede seems to be working in this way. More of that would be a good thing.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Raw Critic: “The Dark Knight”
I saw the two Tim Burton Batman flicks, and then the third, Batman Forever, but that’s it. In particular, I didn’t see Batman Begins which, so I’ve heard, restarted the franchise. As the summer began I was vaguely aware that another installment was on the way, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was more attuned to WALL-E, which, BTW has dropped in my estimation since I wrote about it. I read another review, did some more thinking, and it just fell apart. But I digress.
Last week it seemed that wherever I went online I’d see pictures of Heath Ledger in Joker make-up. Strange. And then the first reviews hit: The Dark Knight is the greatest thing since sliced bread! And then there’s the theme struck in the opening line of Christopher Orr’s review: “How far can an idle entertainment be bent toward art without breaking?” This film is suspended somewhere between art and entertainment, and that’s good.
I guess.
If you want a recommendation: Sure, go see it. I’m likely to see it again; I may even venture into Manhattan to see the Imax version.
Comments have been closed, but I have preserved them below the fold. Why have comments been closed? Because they had little to do with the film.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Who Was Shakespeare?
Back when I was in grad school at SUNY Buffalo I was roaming the library stacks one day and came across a whole section devoted to books seeking the true Shakespeare; most of them dated from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I knew that the question had been raised, but I didn’t realize it had attracted so much attention back in the day.
The question still lingers. These days the issue seems to have as much to do with distrust of academics, who aren’t much interested in the question, as it does with the state of the rather meager evidence. Bardiac considers the issue in four posts, with comments by some anti-Strafordians. Here’s the fourth post, with links to the earlier three.
UPDATE: Comments are closed, but are listed below the fold.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Young Man With Another Man’s Horn
I suppose I was somewhere between 11 and 13 years old when I saw Young Man With a Horn on TV. It had a powerful effect on me. I played trumpet, not terribly well in any absolute sense, though I was pretty good for my age. And I was discovering jazz.
A movie about a jazz trumpet player was thus a natural. The actual trumpet playing was superb, as it was done by Harry James, a man who knew the craft—though I didn’t know much about him at the time. The film starred Kirk Douglas as Rick Martin and told a standard tale of conflict between the requirements of commercial success and the need for artistic freedom. It also told a standard tale of a man caught between a mysterious woman who’s no good for him and the wholesome woman who’s just what he needs, though he doesn’t find that out until he’s all but destroyed himself pursuing the mystery woman.
But this essay is mostly about the music, not the romance. And about the racial characterization, not only of the music, but, by implication, of one’s soul, one’s inner self. But let’s hold off on that for a moment while I continue to wax nostalgic.
There’s a scene early in the film where Rick Martin is sitting in bed playing his trumpet while his teacher looks on. I thought this was so cool that, as soon as the movie was over, I went up to my room, sat in my bed, and played my trumpet. That’s how it got me. I soon discovered, however, that cool though it may have looked, sitting in bed is no way to play the trumpet. It makes breathing and breath support difficult. Without breath, the trumpet is nothing. I thus learned to be skeptical about what you see in movies.
End of digression. This is not about what I learned from this movie when I was a kid. This is about how the movie staged the social relations of jazz.
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Sunday, July 13, 2008
Graffiti Update: Colorful Writing (Sonet)
This is a detail from a piece that I shot yesterday:
I don’t know exactly when this went up, but it wasn’t there on 30 May 2008, the last time I was down in the Erie Cut.
I like it a lot. The style is distinctly different from any of the other graffiti styles in this part of Jersey City. There’s a flatness about it that I find very pleasing.
Below the fold I have full photos of this piece, the one next to it, the two of them, and some more detail photos. I also have a shot of another piece in the same area that’s a few months older. Judging from the style, it is by the same writer.
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Monday, July 07, 2008
Links: Humanities, Mao, Word Order
Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Wilfred McClay chides Stanley Fish for his frivolous defense of the humanities and notes that “This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and mostly negative response from the Times’ online readers. To read through the hundreds of comments is to be reminded that Americans do seem to have a strong and abiding respect for the humanities.” He goes on to offer his own defense in traditional terms:
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.
Such means are not entirely dissimilar from the careful and disciplined methods of science. In fact, the humanities can benefit greatly from emulating the sciences in their careful formulation of problems and honest weighing of evidence. But the humanities are distinctive, for they begin (and end) with a willingness to ground themselves in the world as we find it and experience it, the world as it appears to us—the thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and memories that make up our picture of reality. The genius of humanistic knowledge—and it is a form of knowledge—is its commensurability, even consanguinity, with the objects it helps us to know. Hence, the knowledge the humanities offer us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge.
Meanwhile, Jed Perl castigates the cult of Mao in current Chinese art. Here’s the opening paragraph from his review of a show at the Guggenheim:
There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.
From later in the review:
The power of totalitarian regimes to wipe out a visual arts culture generally exceeds their ability to obliterate a literary culture, and it is by no means clear that such traditions can be revived. Recall that in Russia at the start of the twentieth century the visual arts were flourishing as never before, with Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall, and many others at the beginnings of extraordinary careers. Lenin and Stalin put an end to all that, and it has never come back. This is not to say that there is nothing of value going on in China today: I do not know all there is to know about art in China. What I do know is that the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious.
Finally, Language Log has two posts (one, two) covering recent research suggesting that Agent, Patient, Action (Subject, Object, Verb) is an innate cognitive schema, but not a syntactic one. The research shows that to be the order people use when acting in charades and is independent of the word ordering typical of their language.
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Thursday, July 03, 2008
Pond Scum
Another Urban Pastoral.
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Raw Critic: WALL-E
I went to see WALL-E on Friday. It’s Pixar’s latest film and, as someone with a particular interest in animation, I had to see it. I’d seen trailers last year and read chit-chat on the web. Late last week I read some of the early reviews, in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Ebert, and one or two others (Metacritic links them all). So I was primed.
This has been my standard practice for years. I also read reviews afterward, more so than ahead of time. And I talk with people about a film.
The point is that my movie-watching takes place in the context of other peoples’ observations and reactions, and that those opinions and reactions affect me.
Did I like WALL-E? Yes. No surprise there. But I’m still mulling things over, still trying to understand my experience of the film. Sure, it’s my experience, but that doesn’t mean that I understand that experience. Things aren’t so simple.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Neurocinematics
Some folks at NYU have been doing some interesting work on how the brain responds to movies. They use a technique called inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC) in which regional responses were correlated across different subjects. Take some brain region, call it zleg. Monitor activity in the zleg of a half dozen different people as they watch, say, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and compare the time course of that activity across subjects. What you are interested in is how the level of zleg changes over time. Did Francine’s zleg go high (or low, or stay the same) at the same time as Fredo’s? as Molly’s? and Jason’s? and so on. The answer depends on what they are watching. In the case of GB&U, more or less yes. But if they’re watching a single 10-minute shot looking at New York City’s Washington Square Park, then the answer is no. The critical difference, of course, is that GB&U isn’t a single continuous shot; it’s a bunch of shots skillfully edited together to keep the viewer viewing.
There’s much more the the study than just that - or one thing, the didn’t monitor just zleg, but also yipyip, xaneb, whap, all the way through to corgon, binkets, and astrup. But that much will get you started. Here’s NYU’s press release, which is useful. Here’s a link straight to a PDF of the study (543 KB). Here’s a link to the web page of NYU’s Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory. I’ve put the full abstract below the fold.
I may make a more detailed post on this once I’ve had a chance to study and digest the work.
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Thursday, June 19, 2008
Literature and Linguistics
Language Log has had two posts that may be of interest. On Tuesday Mark Liberman complained that “English departments are among the last places on campus where you’re likely to find any indication of interest in any form of linguistic analysis whatever.” That post as so far generated 42 replies, including one by me in which I gave a little history lesson.
Liberman’s complaint had been stimulated by a comment to yet an earlier post, this one about a gross misunderstanding about grammar. This one has generated 48 comments. If you scroll down you’ll come to a comment by Arnold Zwicky that does a succinct job of explaining the significance of Chomsky’s views about language.
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Sunday, June 15, 2008
What’s the Original?
When an editor decideds to do a new edition of a classic text, he or she has to decide just what text to print. A text is likely to exist in several different forms - several printings of several editions, perhaps a manuscript or two - which differ in various ways. Some differences among versions may reflect printer error, others are matters of authorial or editorial choice; but it may not be easy to assign causes to variations. Whether the variations are minor or consequential, the editor has to decide just what to print in the new edition.
Similar problems arise in preparing a DVD transfer of a film. David Bordwell discusses these problems while reporting remarks by Grover Crisp, Senior VP of Asset Management, Film Restoration, and Digital Mastering for Sony:
Grover offers this nugget of wisdom: It is almost impossible to get an older film to look the way it does when it was originally released. The color will never look as it did, nor will sound sound the way it did. Film stocks have changed, printing processes have changed, technology in general has changed. Every version is an approximation, though some approximations may be better than others. Take consolation in the fact that even when the movie was in circulation, it may have already existed in multiple versions.
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Thursday, June 12, 2008
Professors and Intellectuals
Frank Donoghue has just published The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. He’s interviewed at Inside Higher Ed:
For a hundred years, humanists claimed to follow Matthew Arnold’s exhortation to promulgate the best that has been thought and said. As universities have more and more come to function as occupational training centers, places where students come for vocational credentials, this charge has been emptied of any real meaning. It’s no longer relevant to the mission of most universities. And at those institutions where the liberal arts still flourish, prestige has taken the place of the Arnoldian mottoes. That is, the best universities now steer prospective students away from the content of the curriculum (literature, philosophy, history) and toward the signaling power of the institution itself.
Over at the NYTimes, Barry Gewen blogs about Daniel Drezner’s recent essay, “Public Intellectuals 2.0” (doc file download) on the current flowering of public intellectuals:
He argues that contrary to what has become the conventional wisdom, there has not been a decline in the quality of American intellectual life from the postwar glory days of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and others who constituted the circle now known as the New York Intellectuals. Drezner goes on to list a battalion of contemporary public intellectuals to prove his point, everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Wolfe to Samuel Huntington.
Gewen objects, arguing, for example:
Drezner includes, for instance, Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power. I yield to few in my admiration for these two writers, but for them to be considered public intellectuals in the old New York Intellectual sense — with its commitment to cultural “centrality” — I think they would have to demonstrate greater breadth than they have so far displayed. Zakaria would have to write, say, a thoughtful essay on the novels of Philip Roth and Power a book on the history of the blues.
So which writers today have this range, this moral, almost religious, even monkish, commitment to the life of the mind?
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Singularity Watch, where fiction becomes fact
Calling all SF fans, futurists, transhumanists, and techno-utopians!
John Tierney of the NYTimes has a column about The Singularity, that point in the future when machine intelligence will reach or exceed human intelligence. He points to a special issue of the IEEE Spectrum devoted to the singularity, with articles by various folks, including Vernor Vinge, and a guide to thinking machines in pop culture. Tierney’s piece quotes Ray Kurzweil’s reply to the skeptics.
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Monday, June 09, 2008
Flobots - Handlebars - This Rocks!
A little YouTube fix:
Empowerment, whoaa! where’d that come from? Hat tip to Mark Crispin Miller.
Music video by Flobots performing Handlebars with Dirty UK [Video Director], Phil Tidy [Video Producer] (C) 2008 Universal Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
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