The first window reveals a photograph of me wearing my Halloween costume when I was seven years old. My mother made the clothing and my father made the war bonnet (I helped).
I took a peek through second window a couple of weeks ago. It’s a profile I wrote for a dating site on the web. It misses a few things, especially my World Island adventure.
I wrote the professional sketch a decade or more ago, but it remains reasonably accurate. I also have longer and shorter versions.
I spun last tale sometime in the last decade. It’s rather more personal, even mythic. Think of it as the seven-year-old boy within the adult professional going adventuring, like in the dating profile.
A seven-year-old in a Halloween costume
Profile for an online dating service
I'm a writer, a musician, and photographer, and this that and the other. I've worked in a university, in software companies, a small social service agency, and as a free-lance consultant. I've driven a rickety U-Haul trailer across the country from upstate New York to Los Angeles, chartered a small plane into the Grand Canyon, opened for BB King with one band, Dizzy Gillespie with another, worked with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg on a recording, I've exhibited computer art in Long Island, and gotten a skate park built in Jersey City.
Professional biographical sketch
Bill Benzon is an independent scholar whose career runs from cognitive science, through art, music, and the web. He published Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture in 2001 and is on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. Previously he was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where he worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. Bill has taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff he has written a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.
A more personal view of my career
In the early 1970s I discovered that “Kubla Khan” had a rich, marvelous, and fantastically symmetrical structure. I'd found myself intellectually. I knew what I was doing. I had a specific intellectual mission: to find the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” As defined, that mission failed, and still has not been achieved some 40 odd years later.
It's like this: If you set out to hitch rides from New York City to, say, Los Angeles, and don't make it, well then your hitch-hike adventure is a failure. But if you end up on Mars instead, just what kind of failure is that? Yeah, you’re lost. Really really lost. But you’re lost on Mars! How cool is that!
Of course, it might not actually be Mars. It might just be an abandoned set on a studio back lot.
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