Bbenzon
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 ( 6824 )
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Jersey City Future: the Twilight Zone
I’ve been feeling that there’s something afoot in Jersey City, but I don’t know quite what. For example, here’s an empty block in Lafayette as it was two years... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brain "Decoding"
There's an interesting piece in Nature about how neuroscientists are learning to "decode" brain activity, that is, to identify, e.g. what a person is looking... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The New Interdependence
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Domestic Institutions Beyond the Nation State: Charting the New Interdependence Approach (PDF) Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli. Read more
Posted on 24 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Narrative and Abstraction: Some Problems with Cognitive Metaphor
I’ve had problems with cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) since Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By (1981) – well, not since then, because I didn’t... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Description 2: The Primacy of the Text
I've uploaded another working paper to my SSRN site. As this post's title indicates, it's about description. Here's the link. I've appended the abstract and... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Organic in Black and White
Posted on 23 October 2013 CULTURE, PHOTOGRAPHY -
A Leak in Cool Reason
The cool reason I have in mind is George Lakoff and Mark, More than Cool Reason (1989), one of the founding texts of cognitive poetics. Read more
Posted on 23 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jabba the Hutt, Or How We Communicate
They're having an interesting discussion of conversational turn-taking over at Language Log (see the comment HERE). So I thought I'd dig out this three year... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Is “Kubla Khan” Important?
A week ago I’d decided to put an end to my quest to find a poetic grammar centered on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. The intellectual landscape has changed so much... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Describing a Painting
Harvard art historian bills her article thus: The Power of Patience: Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention. OK. Read more
Posted on 21 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Entrainment in Human Conversational Turn-taking
Margaret Wilson has a guest post at Language Log that's questioning a recent article arguing that marmoset vocal interactions have a similar style of... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Problem Solved: A Brief Note About Carman Moore
For the purposes of this post I’ll place Carman Moore in the Western classical tradition, since that’s where his training is (Ohio State and Julliard). But his... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does Jersey City Have More Creative Potential Than NYC?
Can Mana Contemporary make the transition from NYCArt in Jersey City to scene weaver?It’s time to revisit a question I posed a couple of months ago in the wake... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Civics 101: The Basis of Democracy
We all know these words, from the opening of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Thinkers at the Fringe
There's an article, by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, about David Birnbaum, a jeweler to the stars turned metaphysician and has written a Big Book entitled... Read more
Posted on 20 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Skymusic Soars & Carman Moore is Effin’ Brilliant
Ornette Coleman says that Carman Moore, a recent Guggenheim Fellow, is “the greatest composer...in the whole world”, and who am I to question Mr. Coleman in suc... Read more
Posted on 19 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is This New World, This Pacific of the Mind?
Yesterday, or the day before, I asserted that a lot of new intellectual tools have been created since I first set out to figure out what’s going on in “Kubla... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mana Contemporary: Is All the World Its Stage?
Greg and I took another trip out to Mana Contemporary yesterday. There it is, this multi-building complex on the west side of Jersey City, next to the PATH... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Of Music and Life Stages
From Medical Xpress, contrary to the common belief that musical preferences are fixed in adolescence, Arielle Bonneville-Roussy from Cambridge's Department of... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Me and Music, the First 30 Years
My first memory of music is also my first memory of any kind. It is of listening to Burl Ives sing about a romance between a fly and a bumble bee. Read more
Posted on 17 October 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY