Samuel Jay Keyser

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one.At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations.Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats--Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters. When Jay Keyser arrived at MIT in 1977 to head the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, he writes, he felt like a fish that had been introduced to water for the first time. At MIT, a colleague grabbed him by the lapels to discuss dark matter; Noam Chomsky called him boss (double SOB spelled backward?); and engaging in conflict resolution made him feel like a marriage counselor trying to reconcile a union between a Jehovah's witness and a vampire. In Mens et Mania , Keyser recounts his academic and administrative adventures during a career of more than thirty years. Keyser describes the administrative side of his MIT life, not only as department head but also as Associate Provost and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Keyser had to run a department (budgets were like horoscopes) and negotiate student grievances--from the legality of showing Deep Throat in a dormitory to the uproar caused by the arrests of students for anti-apartheid demonstrations. Keyser also describes a visiting Japanese delegation horrified by the disrepair of the linguistics department offices (Chomsky tells them Our motto Physically shabby. Intellectually first class.); convincing a student not to jump off the roof of the Green Building; and recent attempts to look at MIT through a corporate lens. And he explains the special faculty-student bond at the faculty sees the students as themselves thirty years earlier. Keyser observes that MIT is hard to get into and even harder to leave, for faculty as well as for students. Writing about retirement, Keyser quotes the song Groucho Marx sang in Animal Crackers as he was leaving a party--Hello, I must be going. Students famously say Tech is hell. Keyser says, It's been a helluva party. This entertaining and thought-provoking memoir will make readers glad that Keyser hasn't quite left.

When he married for the second time, Jay Keyser thought he and his wife would settle down on a bucolic little farm in Massachusetts, a place where the cows meet the sea. That was before he found out the awful he had married a travel junkie. While he was envisioning walks along quiet beaches, hand in hand at end of day, her sights were set on stakeouts beside the Grumeti River in Tanzania watching crocodiles take down a baboon. He didn’t want to come within six thousand miles of a crocodile, let alone six feet. But, somehow, he couldn’t let Nancy go it alone. And so, for the past fifteen years, Jay Keyser has followed his wife around this treacherous world. I Married a Travel Junkie is his chronicle. A natural born lemonade-maker, our reluctant traveler did his level best to understand not only the extraordinary people and places he visited, but his own internal conflict. As he studied his anxiety across the course of seven terrifying trips to Africa, from the Serengeti National Park to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, he gradually began to accept the profound differences between his wife and himself. Although terrified by them, he has learned from his experiences, most especially from an encounter with an angry female gorilla, who offered key insight into marriage and human nature. Jay Keyser learned to stop and smell the elephant dung.

Oscar Wilde was once asked why he wrote stories for children (for example, The Happy Giant). His answer: "I no more write for children than I write for adults. Rather, I write for those who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness." So, too, writes Samuel Jay Keyser in The Pond God and Other Stories. The stories were inspired by a Navajo shaman who once said that he had seen a god walking across the horizon. Keyser is both humorous and profound as he explores the foibles and insights of the very human "gods" who inhabit his primordial world. The stories include “How Clouds Came to Be," "How a Thief Stole the Horizon," and "How the Sun Tricked a God." Each reader of these 43 parables will bring a different perspective to the stories. Robert Shetterly, acclaimed for his illustration of William Blake's Proverbs of Heaven and Hell, captures and compounds the "subtle strangeness" of Keyser's tales in the simple, evocative line drawings for The Pond God.

A world expert in linguistics, a former Associate Provost of MIT, an engaged and curious world traveler, an accomplished musician, Samuel Jay Keyser is no ordinary man. But in the blink of instant, he suffered a medical catastrophe and became Everyman in the American health care system. His story is one of extraordinary performance by EMTs, doctors, nurses, and physical therapists, allowing him to overcome a high likelihood of lifetime paralysis. His story, though, also reflects the disjointedness of the healthcare system, the occasional insensitivity and ineptitude of those in it, and the potential for harm while under the treatment of otherwise highly trained medical professionals. Finally, his story is one of inequity, the random process by which some Americans receive the best of care at virtually no cost to themselves, while others are deprived of life-giving technologies and therapies for financial reasons.

Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive.Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril.Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) construct their iconic melodies. Furthermore, the repetition found in these tunes can also be found in such classical compositions as Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and his German Dances, as well as in galant music in general.The author also looks at repetition in paintings like Gustave Caillebotte's Rainy Day in Paris, Andy Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans, and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Finally, the photography of Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Osmond Giglia—Giglia's Girls in the Windows is one of the highest-grossing photographs in history—are all shown to be built on repetition in the form of visual rhyme.The book ends with a cognitive conjecture on why repetition has been so prominent in the arts from the Homeric epics through Duke Ellington and beyond. Artists have exploited repetition throughout the ages. The reason why is straightforward: the brain finds the detection of repetition innately pleasurable. Play It Again, Sam offers experimental evidence to support this claim.

Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive.Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril.Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) construct their iconic melodies. Furthermore, the repetition found in these tunes can also be found in such classical compositions as Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and his German Dances, as well as in galant music in general.The author also looks at repetition in paintings like Gustave Caillebotte's Rainy Day in Paris, Andy Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans, and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Finally, the photography of Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Osmond Giglia—Giglia's Girls in the Windows is one of the highest-grossing photographs in history—are all shown to be built on repetition in the form of visual rhyme.The book ends with a cognitive conjecture on why repetition has been so prominent in the arts from the Homeric epics through Duke Ellington and beyond. Artists have exploited repetition throughout the ages. The reason why is the brain finds the detection of repetition innately pleasurable. Play It Again, Sam offers experimental evidence to support this claim.