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 ( 7356 )
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Sushi Ecstasy
I am willing to believe that the sushi was THAT good. But I'm sure this writing is ripe for parody:I remember precisely the dull luster of Mr. Read more
Posted on 11 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind
I was looking at Mary Douglas’s checklist for ring forms and realized that each item on it had a plausible interpretation in the domain of computation. So that’... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Notes on Literature, Form, and Computation
This post is a concatenation of three older posts, all dealing with the idea of actual process of computation. These notes are intended for people who find the... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ring Form Opportunity: King King – and Some Notes on How to Do It
David Bordwell just sent me the following note:Long ago I remember the French critic Thierry Kuntzel giving a talk (which he never published, I think) on KING... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola: A Working Paper
I've uploaded another working paper to my SSRN page. It is edited from two blog posts, From Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now and Lévi-Strauss and Contemporar... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Andy Variations & the Evolution of Macintosh Graphics Over 20 Years
The Andy, of course, is Andy Warhol. And the influence should be obvious, even if the tools are not. He used silkscreen printing to produce various versions,... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity
No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.—Bruno Latour...we are not to attempt t... Read more
Posted on 08 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Burke on Nelson Mandela
Tim Burke is a historian on the faculty at Swarthmore. He studies Africa in the 20th Century and has done fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The IBM Watson Team: Collective Creativity
The team that built IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson was put together by David Ferrucci. This is from an article he wrote for the NYTimes last January:From the... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Art Market: Chinese Up, Contemporary Up, Everything Else, Down
So says the NYTimes:Mr. Moses said his data indicated that traditional Chinese art had gained a compounded annualized rate of return for the 10 years ending in... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Don't Forget the Flowers
What I did during my summer vacation.July 13, 2010, on 11th Street in Hoboken, NJ.Though it wasn't a vacation, really.July 21, 2010, on 11th Street in Hoboken,... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola
This one's going to take awhile; it's got 5800 works, plus several tables. You might want to have some snacks ready and make sure the cell phone's been silenced. Read more
Posted on 06 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Saturday Night Fever, It’s Worth Thinking About
In 1977 John Travolta became a star by playing the lead role of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Manero worked a nowhere job in Brooklyn and lived for the... Read more
Posted on 06 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
RGB in Tooth and Claw (mostly Tooth)
Posted on 06 December 2013
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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When’s the “Revolution” in Literary Studies Going to Happen?
I’ve just looked through the preface to Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Here’s the opening paragraph:The... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computing Meaning: Topics and Divisions in Prose
With a note on poetry tacked to the endIt’s a little thing, really, how one divides a long piece of writing into subsections, if one does so at all. Most of my... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Meditation on Golf: What Would Dad Think About Liberty National?
Thinking about golf and trying to master it takes one’s mind away from other troubles.– William Benzon I think a lot about golf as a metaphor for life. The... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It's a Blockbuster World, Maybe
Kelefa Sanneh reviews Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment by Anita Elberse, of Harvard Business School. Read more
Posted on 04 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cyberbabe Reveals All
Posted on 03 December 2013
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Baby Feet: What’s Up With Representation?
Despite the fact that it has no photographs, this post a companion piece to What’s Photography About, Anyhow? Consider the following image, which is not a... Read more
Posted on 03 December 2013 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
