Humanities — Blog

So - the registrar, the head of the language department, and the registrar's admin assistant walk into a restaurant...

No, it's not the start of a joke. But it was the start of a very interesting dinner.

Last week, my boss and I went out to dinner with the head of the language department (who is also the head of the honors program). It wasn't really a work dinner, though we did occasionally kick around ideas about how various programs might be improved, or our experiences with similar programs in other places.

We ended up just sitting around and talking for a long time - in fact, my boss had to leave earlier so the other professor and I stayed and chatted for a while longer. It was really nice to be able to hang out with someone else who is "overly educated." I don't mean that as a slight against anyone I regularly spend time with, just that I don't often get the chance to discuss 19th century Russian poetry translation or Central American magic realism in depth.

We also got onto the subject of the novels that I'm writing and, and she sat and listened raptly while I described characters and plot. I think I've told her more about my writing than I've told any other one person in one sitting. At one point she asked what the title of my book was. I told her The Wolf and the Sheath, but also clarified that that was just the working title. I said that I probably wouldn't decide on a final title until after I finish the book, but at the moment I like The Lady, the Wolf, and the Watcher. She said she liked the rhythm of it. (I think that was what actually lead to the discussion of literature in translation.)

Tangentially related to the above, before my boss left, we sort of reprized the discussion my boss and I had a while back about why she doesn't like the term "ladies" to refer to a group of women. (More on that here: https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2018/1/7/ladies-gentlemen ) I clarified for the new member of our group, who hadn't been at our previous discussion, that "I read a lot of fantasy. I write a lot of fantasy. To me, a lady is someone who might strap on a sword and lead a battle." And, a twinkle in her eye, she responded, "That's not a lady - that's an empress."

On Wednesday, my boss and I had a meeting with the head of the Spanish, French, and World Language and Culture department. She was late. When she arrived, she apologized, as her Spanish students had been doing their "cooking show" presentations, and in cleaning up after college students making rice pudding and churros, she had completely forgotten our meeting. I immediately forgave her, as I had fond memories of a very similar cooking unit in my sophomore Spanish class in high school, and we launched into a joyous discussion of why the history of food is important and why Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous for years.

(The acid in the tomatoes ate away at the pewter utensils. Pewter, being an alloy of silver and lead, leached lead into the food and made people sick. The new world natives - and Europeans who were too poor to afford pewter - were not affected because they were eating with different utensils or with their hands.)

Obviously, a discussion of the history of food was not why the Registrar and the head of the Honors and Language departments were meeting that day. But it did get me thinking about both my aforementioned Spanish class, and the humanities in general.

The teacher I had for sophomore Spanish was awesome. (All my high school Spanish teachers were, honestly.) In this class, we did a lot of culture units. We had the previously-mentioned cooking unit. We did a dance unit. We watched actual Latin American movies (as opposed to watching American movies in Spanish, which was the default for substitute teachers) and discussed the historical events important to the films. And we had our art unit, which was spectacular.

We studied various artists: El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, Miro, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, and Salvador Dali. We had to make and present a piece of artwork in the style of one of the artists we had studied. Most people did Miro or Picasso, because Miro and late-Picasso are super easy. I chose Goya (in his rose period) because the rosy-cheeked, picnicking couples appealed to my 15-year-old romanticism.

One of these styles is more difficult than the others...

Fast forward about 5 years. I was in St. Petersburg, Russia on a summer abroad trip for my Russian minor. I was in the Hermitage, one of their palace-turned-museums. I came around a corner and almost literally ran into a huge, doorway-sized painting. I backed up a bit so I could better see what I almost hit. Gaunt, long-limbed, grey-faced priests stared down at me. "Oh, my god, it's El Greco!" I said, not even having to read the placard next to the painting (which I could have done in English, Spanish, or Russian) to know that this was "The Interment of the Count of Orgaz."

I'm not kidding, y'all, this is a HUGE painting.

A large portion of my college experience revolved around the humanities, actually. I went to a school that was heavily liberal-arts leaning. On top of that, mine was the first class that had the option of a 4-semester Humanities course for which we could receive credit for 7 or 8 core requirements (literature, history, religion, philosophy, art history, 2 writing-intensive classes, and possibly one I'm forgetting). A lot of people took it as a way to get 8 requirements done in half the time. I took it to "free up space" in case I decided to double major.

The course was set up by time period - 1st semester was the ancient world, 2nd semester was medieval, 3rd was early modern, and 4th was modern/contemporary. In this class I learned about things in conjunction, rather than learning about art or literature or religion separately of the historical context in which they occurred. We studied the wars, religious and social upheavals, ideas, and inventions that inspired these works, or that these works were reactions to. It wasn't the first time that I had learned that these things were tied together - in that sophomore Spanish class, we had learned how the Napoleonic wars had influenced Goya's work, just as Franco's regime in the 30's is why we have Picasso's Guernica. But it was the first time we started at the beginning of civilization and said, "these ancient beliefs influenced this art style and these literary works, then this war changed the way people thought about X and that influenced the music and the architecture and so on and so on, and it's still growing and changing and evolving today."

There's no way to explain all this in a blog post, really. It takes more time. It takes more study and investigation. And its why you can't remove art, literature, or music from their historical contexts. To really know, to really understand, you have to have the whole picture.