Welcome, Members of Parliament. This blog is designed to act as a student forum for anyone enrolled in my classes at a Dallas-area proprietary college, former students, and/or others who find our conversations interesting. The Parliament will be moderated to ensure civility and relevance. The directions we take, the paths we follow, and the concerns we address are all up to you.
In case anyone's interested, the pages for my new class (Philosophical Perspectives: Technology and Utopia) are up. Not complete yet, but up. So, if you're considering it for an upper level humanities elective, the basic information and a tentative schedule can be found linked to the Owldroppings main page.
Anyone enrolled in my sections of History of Art and Design II might want to hold off printing slide lists, because I haven't finished updating the list. That's in the works for this week. Ditto my Humanities intro class.
I'm already looking forward to the new quarter; hope you all are having a pleasant break and getting some well-deserved downtime.
History of Art & Design I students may remember, from our discussion of illuminated manuscripts, the image Hildegard of Bingen painted of herself receiving a vision. So you might imagine how pleased I was to read in the Daily Poop this morning about a new film, showing at the Angelika in Dallas, called Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, and directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Here's a trailer (sorry about the German--but there are subtitles).
I always recommend seeing good films that help make the past more "present" to us, and the review of the film makes it seem promising. It looks like it focuses on her visions more than anything, but she was a remarkable woman and certainly deserves to be recognized by a broader audience than antiquated art history instructors and lovers of Gregorian chant.
If you are at all interested in Medieval music, you might also enjoy this YouTube version of her Kyrie Eleison:
Real fans of the genre can check out some of the best versions of Hildegard's music, recorded by Anonymous 4; my favorite album is 11,000 Virgins (samples are available at the link).
This just in: Painless (Art) History. I got a link to this YouTube page through my daily dose of Good. The perpetrators are history teachers, and much more familiar with pop music than I am. I'll probably show a couple in class, but you may want to check them all out before finals--no matter which of my classes you're in.
In case anyone's interested, the pages for my new class (Philosophical Perspectives: Technology and Utopia) are up. Not complete yet, but up. So, if you're considering it for an upper level humanities elective, the basic information and a tentative schedule can be found linked to the Owldroppings main page.