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
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Strunk and White, Yuk!
Missed this one when it first appeared. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum trashes The Elements of Style on its 50th anniversary: “Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.” On the passive voice: “What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t.” On not splitting infinitives, S & W are wrong wrong wrong. And so forth.
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Saturday, June 27, 2009
Ev Psych on the Ropes?
No less a figure than David Brooks has declared that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek.” Evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson rushes to the defense in the Huffington Post (worth reading, more so than the take-downs).
Is this the beginning of the end?
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Sita Sings the Freakin’ Gorgeous Blues
Quite possibly I first heard about Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues in a January 2008 post at Cartoon Brew. The film had been selected to premier at the Berlin International Film Festival but Paley had to scrounge up $35,000 so she could have a 35mm print made. “Fat chance,” said I to myself. But she did it and I kept reading more about Sita here and there, watching clips, getting interested. Finally, Mike “The Curmudgeon” Barrier saw it on DVD and said “It’s one of the very few animated features of the last few decades that I can recommend enthusiastically.” And he’s seen Pixar, and Miyazaki!
That cinched it. I went link link z00m! on the internets, gave up a credit card number, and a couple of days later had my very own DVD (you can also stream it or download it free of charge).
Yes, it’s all that: imaginative, gorgeous, seamless, original, art.
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Monday, June 22, 2009
Filching and Owning Culture
David Shields and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss these matters on bloggingheads.tv. Artists have always built on materials created by their predecessors but current copyright laws put that practice under pressure. Shields and Vaidhyanathan make extensive reference to an article Jonathan Lethem published two years ago in Harpers Magazine, The ecstasy of influence:
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This whole business is put in an interesting light by the case of animator Nina Paley and the brilliant film she created over the course of five years mostly by herself: Sita Sings the Blues. Sita’s soundtrack is built around jazz recordings made by Annette Hanshaw in the 1920s. While the recordings themselves are in the public domain, the underlying songs are not. Rather than incur heroically burdensome licensing fees, Paley has made the film available free over the internet. The New York Times ran a feature on Paley and Sita back in February.
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Friday, June 19, 2009
Jump Cut 51
Jump Cut styles itself as A Review of Contemporary Media. Issue 51 has more articles than I care to list, but you can find the TOC here.
There are a number of articles on matters that have been taken up in The Valve or that strike me as being of interest to Valvesters. Running down the TOC from top to bottom: three articles on documenting torture; The Wire as narrative and metanarrative; Battlestar Galactica; Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (a bit heavy on the Marxism, but nonetheless perceptive and interesting); a documentary about Samuel R. Delany (more on sex than SF); Children of Men; two articles on The Dark Knight; WALL-E; a section on horror films. And much more.
Check it out.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Stylistics: New York Social Diary
A few years ago I stumbled on New York Social Diary, and I’ve been visiting it periodically ever since. It’s what its name implies, a site that chronicles social and civic life among New York City’s rich and powerful, five days a week (with the weekends off). Although gossip and rumor do show up on its pages, it’s not quite a gossip rag – too circumspect. Or, if you will, it’s rather more than gossip. Interestingly so.
Daily stories about lunches, dinners, parties and galas are its journalistic main course, with photo upon photo upon photo and long lists of bolded names as essential ingredients. These reports are accompanied by restaurant reviews, shopping trips, profiles of houses, articles on social history, and a bit of this, that, and the other as appropriate and available.
NYSD is the brainchild of one David Patrick Columbia. As far as I can tell – he does reveal a bit about his own life from time to time – he’s spent much of his adult life around august social circles, but he is not himself a man of wealth and privilege. He has to work for a living, and NYSD is his gig. Many of his subjects also work, but they are more highly remunerated than Columbia is.
But this is by way of background. I’m interested in Columbia’s writing style. Consider this short paragraph perhaps two thirds of the way into a recent story:
Continue reading "Stylistics: New York Social Diary"It is true that there are people in this town who have what is generally recognized as power. Can they kill people? I don’t know about that. Maybe with kindness or a harsh Fifth Avenue froideur.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Links: Cognitive Film Studies, Dreams and Emotion, The Living Parthenon
David Bordwell gives a brief recap of the history of cognitive films studies and plugs recent work as a prelude to the second annual meeting of The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image to be held on 24-27 June in Copenhagen. He asserts that the tradition favors explanation over interpretation (cf. Moretti), is mentalistic and naturalistic, is favorable to cross-cultural regularities, and is friendly to evolutionary psychology. Bordwell gives special credit to Noël Carroll’s 1985 essay “The Power of Movies” for its “concise explanation of cultural convergence through cinema.”
Time reports dream research by Matthew Walker at UC Berkeley:
REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep — dreaming, in particular — is to allow the brain to sift through that day’s events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a “nocturnal soothing balm.” REM sleep, he says, “tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way.”
Finally, the Parthenon we know and value is a stark white, but that’s now how the ancient Greeks experienced it. Giovanni Verri of the British Museum has developed a technique that has picked up traces blue pigment on its surface. Ian Jenkins, also of the British Museum, says the temple would likely have been gilded and colored in red as well as blue. Our willingness to mentally replace the original coloring with pure white is a cultural delusion that values our modern aesthetics over evidence that the lived Parthenon was brightly colored.
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Friday, June 05, 2009
Evaluating Pixar’s Up
Evaluative criticism is something’s been discussed a bit around here. While I remain skeptical about it as a central activity in the academic study of literature (and other arts), it certainly is central in considering new work. Case in point, Pixar’s Up. So far the movie’s garnered good to rave reviews, scoring 98% at Rotten Tomatoes and pumping out the routine praise and appreciation (though there are a few skeptics) at Cartoon Brew.
Mike Barrier is rather more skeptical, and has said so, giving well-considered reasons. He’s gotten some comments on his views as well, some agreeing, some not. I’ve sent him two notes agreeing with him, the film just doesn’t hang together. The component parts are not well suited to one another and to the whole.
What’s particularly interesting is that the film is just implausible. “Well of course it’s implausible,” you say, “it’s a fantasy. It’s supposed to be implausible.” And that’s what’s interesting. You go into the film knowing it’s about an old man who manages to fly his house around suspended beneath a bunch of ordinary helium balloons. You accept that as a premise going in. And still, it’s implausible. I’d say that it failed to maintain it’s own internal logic, but I’m not sure the film ever managed to assert a logic long enough to matter.
Now, making that argument well, and in detail. That would be something. But at least Barrier and his commenters have made a start.
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Monday, June 01, 2009
Plucky Heroines from Haggard to Hikaru and Buffy
This is a guest post by Timothy Perper, PhD and Martha Cornog, MA, MS, who are Book Review editors for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a scholarly journal about Japanese cartooning and popular culture. Cornog is the graphic novel columnist for Library Journal. They have written extensively about manga and anime, and their edited book Graphic Novels Beyond the Basics: Insights and Issues for Libraries is in press at Libraries Unlimited. Perper and Cornog, who are married, have also written extensively about gender and sexuality.
In a recent essay on The Valve, Bill Benzon asked a series of questions about H. Rider Haggard, a 19th century English novelist who wrote adventures set in Africa about supernatural white heroines. Haggard’s characterizations raise questions about how women and girls were portrayed in his adventure fiction, and are prescient in view of later portrayals in American and Japanese popular culture in both text and visual media.
It’s not hard to place Haggard’s views of women. In principle, he idealized the “pure womanhood” of England – for example, missionary Mackenzie’s wife in Allan Quatermain – but at the same time his work reflects his male readers’ uneasy yearning, heavily though not explicitly eroticized, for women who are passionate, active, heroic, and sexually motivated. Haggard was not writing Victorian pornography, but in his treatment of white women from Africa – ESPECIALLY white women like Ayesha in She and many other of his mature white heroines – he reveals the same impulse to eroticize the exotic that Steven Marcus saw as fundamental to Victorian pornography. (note 1) For Marcus, such pornography finds its closest genre relatives in utopian fantasy – hence Marcus’ term “pornotopia” for the worlds portrayed in such literature. In such a pornotopia, women are not passive wallflowers, timid, meek, and obedient to their masters or to the patriarchy; instead, they are active agents of their own sexual purposes and desires, intermingled with a desire and capacity to rule the state as queens and empresses. (You will find an echo of this set of attributions to women in the Empress card in the standard Tarot deck.)
Haggard, Women, and the Wild
In many ways, Flossie Mackenzie in Allan Quatermain – the 10-year old daughter of a Scottish missionary – is simply a very young version of a heroine like Ayesha. Flossie is self-reliant, unafraid, armed, and dangerous, and kills a Masai warrior with the two-barreled Derringer pistol she carries when he attacks her. Although she is therefore attractive, Haggard seems uneasily aware that such a life is somehow not right for Woman, that is, not what a patriarchal God intended: here are his comments about Flossie, put into the mouth of his spokesman Allan. When Mackenzie decides to return to England with his wife and Flossie, Allan praises him:
Continue reading "Plucky Heroines from Haggard to Hikaru and Buffy"“I congratulate you on your decision,” answered I, “for two reasons. The first is, that you owe a duty to your wife and daughter, and more especially to the latter, who should receive some education and mix with girls of her own race, otherwise she will grow up wild, shunning her kind...” [Chapter 8]
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Saturday, May 30, 2009
What’s Up with Tears?
I went to see Pixar’s Up and was unimpressed, posting this reaction at Cartoon Brew:
I thought the opening was fine, superior movie-making. The rest struck me as a whole bunch of stuff in search of a coherent film. Some of that stuff was good, some not so good, but it didn’t really hang together. Did it have moments? Oh yeah! It had moments. But moments do not a movie make.
But this post isn’t about Up or my overall assessment of it. Up‘s just a case in point.
It’s about being moved to tears or crying,* which figure in a number of reponses to the film that have been posted at the Brew (10 out of 55). And many who don’t mention tears do talk about being moved. I don’t say much myself, but I was moved almost to tears at least two times, in the beginning (where we get an incredible 4 or 5 minute recap of a couple’s lifetime together) and at the very end, where a young scout gets an unexpected badge.
What I’m wondering is about how being moved, even to tears, affects one’s judgement of the quality of a film. Most of those posting at the Brew thought well of the film, some even thought it The Best. And I suspect that being moved factors in such judgments. But I’m skeptical about the relevance of tear-jerking moments to aesthetic quality simply because such moments are relatively easy to produce (at least by pros) and fairly common.
I would, however, like to know how many people are (almost) moved to tears by this or that film, novel, play, poem, etc. and exactly where. Some empirical work has been done on this in music,** but I’m not aware of any being done for novels or films, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has done some work.
* An older post on the subject.
** e.g. Alf Gabrielsson, Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music, in Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda, eds. Music and Emotion, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 431-449.
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All Hail Our Darwinian Overlords! (NOT)
Note: This is a revised version of an older post, which I have deleted.
Joseph Carroll has been the chief theorist and proselytizer of literary Darwinism. David DiSalvo has a long interview with him at Neuronarrative.
DiSalvo first asks what literary Darwinism is:
Literary Darwinists integrate literary concepts with a modern evolutionary understanding of the evolved and adapted characteristics of human nature. They aim not just at being one more “school” or movement in literary theory. They aim at fundamentally transforming the framework for all literary study. They think that all knowledge about human behavior, including the products of the human imagination, can and should be subsumed within the evolutionary perspective.
An ambitious program, to say the least. But let’s leave it alone for a bit – I’ll offer an alternative view a bit later – and allow Carroll to continue. He talks broadly about reductionism, culture, literacy, the adaptive value of literature, an empirical study of characters in canonical 19th C. British novels, the brain, human emergence and interaction between scientists and humanists.
The conversation then returns to the future of literary studies. Here’s the downside scenario:
Literary study could continue to insist on disconnecting itself from empirically discernible facts about human nature and human cognition, or it could realize that science is not a threat and a competitor but an ally in the quest for human understanding. If it takes the former course, I think it will continue to decline catastrophically in prestige, enrollments, and funding. Its practitioners will either continue to invent arcane verbal systems designed for the superficial reprocessing of canonical literary texts, or they will resign themselves to the ever more tenuous elaboration of the sophistical quibbles at the heart of postmodern literary theory.
Unless the humanities in general come to grips with the last three or four decades of work in psychology, biology, and neurosciences, and so forth, Carroll believes “they are doomed to irrelevance and triviality.”
If, however, the humanities, and literary studies in particular, undertakes to assimilate this work, here’s the possible upside:
Continue reading "All Hail Our Darwinian Overlords! (NOT)"Let’s assume for the sake of argument that literary study manages to get past its own blockages. What then? All the world is before them: large-scale explanatory principles to hash out, a whole taxonomy to found on underlying principles of human nature, whole cultural epochs to analyze from a bio-cultural perspective, multitudes of texts to locate, with all their specific meaning structures and imaginative forms, in these yet-to-be-established bio-cultural contexts. We have before us the macro-world of human evolutionary history and the micro-world of the brain, cultural history to incorporate with human universals; neuroimaging and neurochemical analysis to integrate with tonal and stylistic analysis.
The kind of work I’m describing here would not merely offer new lenses through which to view existing knowledge. It would provide a starting point for a continuous, progressive program in creating new knowledge. Literary Darwinists have to assimilate the best insights of previous theory and criticism, but they have to reformulate those insights within a completely new framework located within the larger, total field of the human sciences. They cannot merely take concepts ready-made from existing evolutionary theories of culture. They have to absorb evolutionary theories, examine them critically, push back when the theories are inadequate to the realities of literary experience, and formulate new fundamental concepts in literary study-formal, generic, and historical. They have to participate in fashioning the linkages between their own specific fields of endeavor and the broader field of the evolutionary human sciences. They have to make the world anew.
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Friday, May 29, 2009
Bleg: Adventure Girl in the 19th Century
I’ve just written a longish post about Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1887). The post focuses on an incident involving 10-year old Flossie Mackenzie, daughter of a Scottish missionary, raised in the jungle, has her own garden, and carries a Derringer for protection.* Thing is, she’s used that Derringer, twice. Once she killed a leopard who attacked her donkey (while she was riding the donkey) and, in this very story before our very eyes, she shoots a Masai warrior who was attacking her. She’s no Becky Thatcher.
Can you think of any other fictional 19th (or early 20th) Century girls like Flossie?
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Thursday, May 28, 2009
A Rare African Flower, Saved
When flowers are not being flowers, they are sometimes put to use as symbols. I’m interested in one such usage, in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, though I don’t think it’s quite symbolic. Or rather, yes, it is easy to read it as symbolic, but to say so would be to paper over the fact that I don’t really understand how this usage works.
Regardless of exactly how the flower imagery works, it is being recruited to sexual service as suggested by the word “deflower,” but the potential victim is a 10-year old girl. While the girl escapes unharmed, Haggard has her in jeopardy for three chapters, three chapters where the reader doesn’t know what has happened or what might happen to her. Why does Haggard put the reader through this?
First I tell this girl’s story absent almost all of the flower imagery. Then I go back and present that imagery, not to analyze it in detail, but just to lay it out, to show how much of it there is and how specifically it is connected to the girl and her plight. Finally, I confront the question: Why?
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Friday, May 22, 2009
Deresiewicz on Darwinism, Literary
Writing in The Nation, William Deresiewicz looks at six books of evolutionary criticism. He observes that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers” but regards Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape of Troy as the best of the lot, “prudent, patient, thoroughly researched and very smart.” All that’s beside the point, however:
Finally, these common-sense conclusions about beauty, love and the death of the author are noteworthy only in relation to the nonsense of Theory. That such arguments need to be made in the first place only shows what a pass we have come to. If literary Darwinism does nothing more than discredit the old paradigm, it will have done very well indeed. But it will, I fear, do a great deal more. The Darwinists have a research program, and few things in the academy are more powerful than that. Gottschall wants to put readers in MRI machines to test their responses, though he is also willing to take advantage of less expensive technologies, like “simple salivary swabs that can provide hormonal indicators of emotions experienced during reading.” Carroll lauds a study that analyzed the creative process by giving subjects a personality test “to determine their position on a scale of Machiavellianism,” then had them write short stories. Hearing of such remarkable schemes, I feel I’ve been transported, with Gulliver, to the Academy of Lagado, where one sage endeavored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and another sought to restore ordure to the condition of food.
I must confess, I’m not so bothered by the MRI – which has been put to use in studying response to movies – or the salivary swabs, or even the personality test, though I do think Carroll has an overly reified sense of what those tests are about. To be sure, I think the work of these evolutionary critics needs amending in many ways, if not a whole reframing, but I doubt that my version will give Deresiewicz any comfort. He’ll regard it as just more pointless folderol in the Academy of Lagado.
But let’s allow him to continue:
It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is the nature of literature itself. That interpretation succeeds interpretation in a seemingly endless cycle is not a weakness of criticism but its essential strength. The great works persist because they have the power, in every age, to make us ask the most important questions, which are the ones that have no answers, or rather, that have only personal answers: What are we doing here? What does it feel like to be alive? What should we do with our time on earth?
Yes, a naturalist literary study is not going to answer these questions, though it might well think about why homo sapiens sapiens poses them, about why they must be posed and, even, why the answers can never be closed. And, even if naturalist criticism cannot, in principle, provide answers to those questions, it might provide knowledge that is of general interest to those seeking such answers. Until we get there, we can’t tell.
Still, one might ask to what extent those existential questions have ever been real questions in academic criticism, for it is around those questions that Deresiewicz would have literary criticism stake its defense. Is Deresiewicz in fact indicating a substantial line of argument, or is he simply retreating into old rhetorical gestures?
* * * * *
P. S. Though his comment on adaptive explanation in evolutionary criticism is a bit smug, the punch line is rather clever:
Rather than testifying to the novelty and vigor of the field, the diversity of theories within Darwinian aesthetics--Carroll’s cognitive regulation, Dutton’s sexual selection, Boyd’s cognitive play and so forth--merely shows how feeble they all are. Choosing among them would be like trying to decide which imaginary girlfriend to sleep with.
Adaptation is a critical concept in evolutionary biology, but the attention to mechanisms in evolutionary criticism is so sketchy that it seems to function more like élan vital.
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
McWhorter: Translate Shakespeare into Intelligible English
John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare’s English makes his work all but inaccessible to most contemporary speakers of the language:
The foremost writer in the English language is little more than a symbol in the actual thinking lives of most of us for the simple reason that we cannot understand what the man is saying. Listen to even ordinary Russians quoting Pushkin to get a sense of how far from our Bard we really are.
I submit--in full understanding of the actual fury I have evoked in some to whom I have ventured this suggestion--that Shakespeare be performed in translations into modern English. I do not mean the utilitarian running translations in textbooks, but richly considered ones, executed by artists equipped to channel Shakespeare to the modern listener with passion, respect and care. Kent Richmond gets this and has actually been realizing the dream; take a look and reassess whether my modest proposal is completely insane.
He goes on to observe:
Original Shakespeare should occupy the place original Chaucer does today: engaged by scholars and hard-core aficionados. However, to require intensive and largely unfeasible decoding in full three-hour live performances is to condemn us to ignorance of something that makes life worth living.
And rather shrewdly:
The irony is that people in foreign countries often possess Shakespeare to a greater extent than we do, since they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language that they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris or Moscow can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. A friend of mine has told me that first time he truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when he saw one in French!
A commenter, one hasman basman, observes:
I think this is a confused post. It confuses the poetry of Shakespeare, which is difficult poetry and has to be attended to carefully and studiously like all difficult poetry, with the drama of Shakespeare. Experiencing a Shakespeare play and missing a lot of nuance in the language will not detract from experiencing the shattering tragedy of Lear, the brooding difficulty of Hamlet, the overwhelming tragic evil of Macbeth, the paean to the intensity of young love and its foredoomed end in Romeo and Juliet, the complexity of mature love in Anthony and Cleopatra, the magnificence of the character of Falstaff in the Henry plays with their sober rejection of him in pinched rule’s need to stay sober and so on and on and on and on and on.
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