50 Days to Review Humanities

I signed up for the Humanities FTCE 2/5. Therefore, I need to review the subject and will subject my blog to things I didn't know or forgot. Took a diagnostic test and my weakest subject is Literature. Well, it has been over thirty years and I'll admit that reading the classics hasn't been high on my list of things to do.

Pulled out the guitar to practice a couple of pieces for the "One Nite Stand" and found out that my strings really needed to be replaced. Guitar strings usually don't last beyond 3 months. At least they are cheap.

Registered for Chamber Music and Intensive Chinese starting January. I haven't studied Mandarin Chinese since 2004 so when I received an email from the college stating 25% off the cost of the course I thought it might be good idea to review my knowledge of the language. Gosh, it's been 4 years already.

Cello has not been forgotten. Memorizing pieces for the SMA concert Saturday and after I finish all my "have-to-do's" I play around with the Breval. Maybe I can get the first movement ready for a Chamber Music recital next year.

Okay, here's my first humanities entry.
Fine Arts - Visual Arts:
Michaelangelo Merisi was known as "M" but we know him as "Caravaggio" 1571-1610. Big rep of Baroque painting and chiaroscuro (sharp contrasting lights and darks). Thought to have utilized projection using mirrors with dark rooms illuminated with a shaft of light from the ceiling as a helpful technique in achieving photorealism. Since he worked on one setup at the time, he might have been the first cut and paste artist. His overly realistic paintings were controversial as he would depict saints with dirty feet.


The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.
I remember seeing this painting but not at the Cerasi Chapel. It must have been on tour.

Literature - Poetry:
Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes (1902-1967). Born in Missouri.

First published in The Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes's signature poem, THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS, appeared in his first book of poetry THE WEARY BLUES in 1926:

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Ah, I remember this raisin in the sun poem from school but didn't know that it by a "Harlem Renaissance" author. This classification is new to me.

Fine Arts - Drama:
August Wilson (1945-2005) Playwright. German father, mother from North Carolina.
Best known for The Pittsburgh Cycle: 10 plays that span 1900 to 1990 starting with GEM OF THE OCEAN which is about Aunt Ester, a 285 year old "soul cleanser" and the people who pass by her parlor. Virginia Theater in Broadway was renamed after him.

Wilson's best known plays are FENCES (1985) (which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), THE PIANO LESSON (1990) (a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award), MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE.
Not familiar at all with this. Too modern. Wikipedia and YouTube are wonderful resources. Here's an excerpt from Fences (video's not great, but you can hear the actors dialogue clearly)

Literature - Fiction
Another Harlem Renaissance person
Zora Neale Huston: Novel - "Their Eyes were watching G-d." Set in Florida 1937
Book on order from library. American folklorist, short story novelist. Died in Ft. Pierce where they celebrate Hurston annually through various events such as Hattitudes, birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April, Zora Fest. Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.

Fine Arts - Film:
Another new category. I had clepped humanities and I'm sure the test didn't have any film questions on it back in the 1970's.
ROPE was a bold experimental film by Alfred Hitchcock that was shot so it appeared to be a continuous single take. DVD on order from Netflix.

Has anyone seen "Russian Ark" by Alexander Sokurov? The 96 minute film was shot in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and was actually created in one long continuous take.