Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7816 )
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Tim Morton in a Paragraph, and Some Tomato Sauce
Ted Hamilton reviews Tim Morton's Humankind in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here's Morton's recent career in a paragraph: Humankind is the latest in a... Read more
Posted on 09 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Videogame Based on Islamic Geometric Art
Most Western video games about the Middle East involve killing, shooting, and war. This game from Iran, however, is about the beauty of Islamic art. And its cor... Read more
Posted on 08 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kim Stanley Robinson's Been Reading Object Oriented Ontology
I've been reading Kin Stanley Robinson's New York 2014. Big book, 613 pages. I'm on 399. The title tells you what the book's about. Read more
Posted on 07 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Difference Between Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Analytics (CA)
A tweet stream from this year's MLA Convention, ongoing in New York City. Still thinking about the "Varieties of DH" panel yesterday #mla18 #s347. Read more
Posted on 06 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Psychoactive Drugs and Culture: We Use What We Seek
At the beginning of "Drugs Du Jour" (Aeon) Cody Delistraty points out that Aldous Huxley was opposed to psychoactive drugs in the middle of his career, but... Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Morning Light in Hoboken
Posted on 05 January 2018
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Daphne Merkin, Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Hav...
Daphne Merkin, Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings, NYTimes. Near the end: What happened to women’s agency? Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Youthful Metaphysics
The first guess from one of my 1st graders was “death” and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that... Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Signs of the Pending Apocalypse/implosion in Academic Literary Criticism
I just posted the following as a tweet stream on Twitter: Signs of the lit crit apocalypse/implosion, #1) 2011: Andrew Goldstone asks: "Just what is that... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The New York City Subway is in Desperate Need of Repair
Here's an estimate in the context of the economic output of the area: Just this partial list — I haven’t included the platform doors, for instance — brings the... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Natural Language is Irreducibly Computational
Not so long ago I made three assertions: The process whereby word forms, whether spoken, written, or gestured (signed), are linked to meaning/semantics is... Read more
Posted on 02 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
When Ravi Bhalla Was Sworn in as Mayor of Hoboken US Senator Cory Booker Spoke o...
Sometime in the late summer or early fall of last year, 2017, I noticed that Ravi Bhalla, who was running for mayor of Hoboken, where I live, was holding a... Read more
Posted on 02 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Criticism in an Age of Delirium: Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy,...
I don’t know when I first learned of Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), but it was some time after it had won the Modern Languag... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Communes, "intentional Communities" Anyone?
Marina Benjamin, "Utopia Inc", Aeon: Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rahsaan Works the Crowd
Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of my favorite musicians. I first heard him on his album, Rip, Rig, and Panic, probably in the summer of 1966 or perhaps that fall. Read more
Posted on 30 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Christmas at My Sister's Home in Philadelphia
Posted on 29 December 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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My Kind of Photo – WILD! Lions, and Thunder, and Dragons – Well, Lions Anyhow...
I love shooting into the sun, and I was certainly doing that here. It was late afternoon – in the topiary garden at Longwood Gardens outside of Philadelphia –... Read more
Posted on 28 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Women Posing for a Photographer and Having (delicious) Fun [#naked]
Ove four years ago I went to an exhibition of photographs by the Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki. Many, but by no means all of them, were of women,... Read more
Posted on 28 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Textual Closure
Note: This consolidates several older posts and, in the last section, adds a bit of detail.Roman Jakobson’s poetic function[1] is one of the best-known and... Read more
Posted on 25 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The World of Children's Competitive Dance
Lizzie Feidelson in the NYTimes:The children who enter these competitions train up to 30 hours per week, primarily on weekends and after school. Read more
Posted on 25 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
