Edouard Manet

The Impressionists and the Creation of a Modern Vision

Manet is arguably one of the most important painters in the history of art. But for all his celebrity, and for all those who claim him to be their own, he is remarkably difficult to categorize or pin down. Manet would have preferred this. Opinionated, cantankerous, protective of his talent and his own mythology, Manet would exert a profound influence on the artists who were his contemporaries and those of the younger generation. This series of lectures will look at Manet and his works in the historical context of the French Second Empire and the Third Republic and show why the younger generation of Impressionists, including Monet, Renoir and Pissaro, would embrace some of Manet’s artistic theories and reject others, keeping Manet close but separate. The solitary and individualistic Manet preferred it no other way.

Week 1: Introduction: France in the 19th Century. Political and Artistic upheaval, the French Academy in Crises and the Avant-garde— the Specter of David. Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, Millet and the young Manet.

Week 2: Manet and the Art Establishment–venturing into shark-filled waters. But when one is a shark, one knows what to do. Patronage, the State, the official Salon and the desire for legitimacy.

Week 3: The young Impressionists, succeeding on the coattails of Manet? “Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?”

Week 4: The lone lion.
Manet at the end of the 19th Century: Acerbically beautiful comments on the harsh reality of contemporary life. Un bar aux Folies Bergère. The idealism and escapism of the Impressionists.

Week 5: The State of the Art before the War. Fragmentation and contention: The Post-Impressionists engage the legacy of Manet while the Impressionists dissolve into the color and light of denial.

Week 6: The End of the World and the Ideal of Beauty Dims. Late Monet and Renoir – escaping into color or reestablishing form. The reaction against Impressionism, a different Modernism and the Triumph of Manet.

No class Feb 17


Instructor: Kevin Justus

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Beethoven as a Bridge to Romanticism

Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the greatest composers in music history, was inspired by the philosophical and moral principles developed by the Enlightenment.

Beethoven’s evolution as a composer takes us from the height of musical classicism, exemplified by Mozart’s mature works, to early German Romanticism. Beethoven wrote his beautiful and innovative late string quartets and piano sonatas despite his near deafness. In fact, because of his deafness, during his last creative surge Beethoven tapped into a unique world of his own. He soared into completely uncharted territories, unencumbered by any musical influences and guided only by his unique fantasy and intuition.

We will follow Beethoven’s progress as a composer from the “heroic” phase of his creative life, which includes his Symphonies #3 and #5, his piano sonata “Appassionata” and other works, to his late piano sonatas and Symphonies #6 and #9.

Enjoy in-class performances of Beethoven’s most popular piano sonatas – “Pathetique,” “Moonlight,” “Waldstein,” “Appassionata,” and other less known sonatas, plus early Romantic compositions by Schubert and Schumann, and late Romantic pieces by Brahms.


Instructor: Alexander Tentser

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World Archaeology

From Hunters and Gatherers to the Atomic Age

Trace the development of human culture after their emergence from Africa and entrance to the Americas. Students of Tracking the Footsteps of Humanity will get the “rest of the story” as modern humans spread throughout the globe, commit to agriculture, and establish global civilizations. Students that have not taken Tracking the Footsteps of Humanity, will have no problem jumping into the story as people begin to settle down on a global scale. The course will introduce archaeological and anthropological methods, theory, and findings through the lens of 7 broad topics. Class meetings include lecture, discussion, and readings.

Week 1: Introduction to Archaeology

Week 2: Complex Hunters and Gatherers

Week 3: Domestication

Week 4: Origins of Complexity

Week 5: Archaeology of Food and Fermentation

Week 6: Archaeology of Warfare and Violence

Week 7: Archaeology of the Modern World


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Dance Fever! – Session 1

The Hollywood Dance Machine

Choose from 2 Sessions

Session 1
Session 2

Join Richard Hanson for a celebration of the greatest dance sequences in the history of the Hollywood Movie Musical. For almost 100 years, the Hollywood Dream Machine showcased the greatest dancers of the 20th Century, who fired the imagine of audiences who sat in the dark, watching celluloid images leap and spiral on the silver screen. Dance Fever! explores the rich history of dance in movie musicals.

We’ll honor the directors, choreographers, and stars who made the movies dance. Join the Gold Diggers as they Shuffle off to Buffalo at Warner Bros! Thrill as Fred & Ginger dance Cheek To Cheek at RKO! Marvel as the queens of tap Ann Miller and Eleanor Powell shim-sham across mirrored dance floors. Bow down as the Nicholas Brothers defy gravity. Salute Jimmy Cagney tappin’ away in Give My Regards to Broadway. Cheer Gene Kelly Singin’ in the Rain during the golden years of MGM!

Peek behind the screen into the soundstage and explore the creative process of the Hollywood choreographer and dancer. Revel in Busby Berkeley’s Lullaby of Broadway in 42nd St., Michael Kidd’s Raising the Barn in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jerome Robbin’s The Small House of Uncle Thomas in The King and I, Agnes de Mille’s glorious Dream Ballet in Oklahoma, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, John Travolta’s tearing the dance floor up in Saturday Night Fever and Gene Kelly’s masterpiece, the An American In Paris ballet.

The movie musical also preserved a visual history of social dance. From the Minuet to the Waltz, the Turkey Trot to the Charleston, the Jitterbug to the Hand Jive, the Twist to the Mashed Potato, or the Conga to the Funky Chicken, social dance leapt from the ball room to the screen. These film treasures show how America danced through the decades.

So, put on your dancin’ shoes and join Cyd Charisse, Gregory Hines, Bob Hope, Leslie Caron, Ruby Keeler, Jacques d’Amboise, Russ Tamblyn, Moira Shearer, Patrick Swayze and a cast of thousands in a Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! extravaganza that salutes the glorious Hooray for Hollywood world of musical movie dance.

“Come and meet those dancing feet
On the avenue I’m taking you to
Forty-Second Street!”

– Harry Warren/Al Dubin (1933)

Instructor’s Note: Dance Fever! is the second in a series of You Asked For It! classes. Dance Fever! was inspired by a 2018 Washington Post article, The 31 Best Dance Scenes in Movies which was given to me by Jill Drell. Thank you, Jill!


Instructor: Richard T. Hanson

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Dance Fever! – Session 2

The Hollywood Dance Machine

Choose from 2 Sessions

Session 1
Session 2

Join Richard Hanson for a celebration of the greatest dance sequences in the history of the Hollywood Movie Musical. For almost 100 years, the Hollywood Dream Machine showcased the greatest dancers of the 20th Century, who fired the imagine of audiences who sat in the dark, watching celluloid images leap and spiral on the silver screen. Dance Fever! explores the rich history of dance in movie musicals.

We’ll honor the directors, choreographers, and stars who made the movies dance. Join the Gold Diggers as they Shuffle off to Buffalo at Warner Bros! Thrill as Fred & Ginger dance Cheek To Cheek at RKO! Marvel as the queens of tap Ann Miller and Eleanor Powell shim-sham across mirrored dance floors. Bow down as the Nicholas Brothers defy gravity. Salute Jimmy Cagney tappin’ away in Give My Regards to Broadway. Cheer Gene Kelly Singin’ in the Rain during the golden years of MGM!

Peek behind the screen into the soundstage and explore the creative process of the Hollywood choreographer and dancer. Revel in Busby Berkeley’s Lullaby of Broadway in 42nd St., Michael Kidd’s Raising the Barn in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jerome Robbin’s The Small House of Uncle Thomas in The King and I, Agnes de Mille’s glorious Dream Ballet in Oklahoma, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, John Travolta’s tearing the dance floor up in Saturday Night Fever and Gene Kelly’s masterpiece, the An American In Paris ballet.

The movie musical also preserved a visual history of social dance. From the Minuet to the Waltz, the Turkey Trot to the Charleston, the Jitterbug to the Hand Jive, the Twist to the Mashed Potato, or the Conga to the Funky Chicken, social dance leapt from the ball room to the screen. These film treasures show how America danced through the decades.

So, put on your dancin’ shoes and join Cyd Charisse, Gregory Hines, Bob Hope, Leslie Caron, Ruby Keeler, Jacques d’Amboise, Russ Tamblyn, Moira Shearer, Patrick Swayze and a cast of thousands in a Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! extravaganza that salutes the glorious Hooray for Hollywood world of musical movie dance.

“Come and meet those dancing feet
On the avenue I’m taking you to
Forty-Second Street!”

– Harry Warren/Al Dubin (1933)

Instructor’s Note: Dance Fever! is the second in a series of You Asked For It! classes. Dance Fever! was inspired by a 2018 Washington Post article, The 31 Best Dance Scenes in Movies which was given to me by Jill Drell. Thank you, Jill!


Instructor: Richard T. Hanson

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Walt Whitman

The Good Gray Poet at 200!

The bicentennial of Walt Whitman falls only 45 years after the bicentennial of the USA. Whitman has been with us almost as long as the red white and blue flag with stars. It seems time to look at Whitman in terms of what he wrote, what he thought, and how his words have remained with us. The poet of democracy, the poet of belief in westward expansion, the poet who said he contained multitudes, the poet who wept openly at the graves of Civil War soldiers. The poet who rose from the ranks of common Americans to be celebrated in his lifetime, but whose reputation also slipped after his death, revived by modernist poets who saw Whitman as an important precursor to the task of “making it new.” Whitman the free verse proponent whose long lines seem to come out of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Whitman the Romantic elegist who celebrated Abraham Lincoln in a poem of traditional form and meter, Whitman who called for an America that lived up to its initial promise of democracy for all.

In four sessions we will plunge deeply into that song of myself which becomes a song of all selves as we discuss this founding poet of American literature, perhaps the only such poet who allied himself so completely with the American dream.

Week 1: Body and Soul
A Consideration of the young Whitman.
Reading: Biographical Sketch, Starting from Paumanok, Song of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric

Week 2: Determined, Dared, Done
Whitman’s Poetry Middle to End
Reading: In Paths Untrodden, I Hear it was Charged against Me, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Song of the Exposition, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, O Captain My Captain, Passage to India, To a Locomotive in Winter

Week 3: He Wrote Prose, Too!
Whitman’s Articulation of Ideas of Freedom, Progress, and Democracy
Reading: Preface to Leaves of Grass, Democratic Vistas, Selections from Specimen Days

Week 4: What We Made of Whitman
Ideas of Whitman from Dickinson, Woolf, Pound, Ginsberg, Creeley, Silliman, Conrad
Readings and Quotations (including from letters, poems, and essays): Pound’s sense of his “pact” with Whitman, Ginsberg’s sense of commonality and otherness with Whitman, Creeley’s spirit of the word, Silliman’s attempt a la Whitman to write everything, and Conrad’s call for a reexamination of Whitman’s ethics. A survey of Whitman’s reputation from dangerous and dark, to good and gray, to, simply, a classic.


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Tell it Slant

How to Transform Personal Experience into Creative Expression

There are many ways to approach truth in writing. Where memory is concerned, we can likely never get back to the “absolute” truth of an event. But for creative writing, do we want or need to get back to that absolute truth? Isn’t it the writer’s job to turn truth into story? Explore various ways to approach your truths and “slant” them into effective and powerful writing. Learn to hone your powers of observation and to use everyday observation as seeds for your writing. We will begin with a discussion of the Emily Dickinson poem from which the title of the course is taken and from there move on to topics to include:

  • Approaches to truth in writing
  • Connecting with our inner story teller
  • Taking risks in writing
  • Creating story by injecting conflict into observed events
  • Writing the fine line of difficult subject matter
  • How to say more with less
  • Telling our own truths slant
  • Shadow and light: using the tricks of the cinematographer
  • From vision to revision

This course is geared toward all writers—fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction/memoir/essays—and all levels of writing experience. It will include writing exercises both in class and as assignments, handouts of and links to examples of published works, and group and instructor feedback.


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The Victorians and Modernity

The contradictory evidence regarding Victorian society as the first truly modern society will make up the primary focus of the course. The diverse issues faced by Great Britain between 1837 and 1901 will constitute the emphasis on how Britain solved (or not) them. These are issues with which the contemporary United States still struggles. We will examine issues that confronted Britain and how America still struggles to agree on policy concerning them. One columnist has suggested that the present administration seems intent on repealing the twentieth century. Whether this is true is a subject for impartial discussion. These issues cover imperial, foreign and domestic policies.

Week 1: Topics to start include: dealing with its international position as the foremost global power, science and evolution, the role of unions, free trade and tariffs, income inequality, maintaining economic competitiveness.

Week 2: Contrasting definitions of liberty, law and order, sexual mores, voting rights, defense spending, tax policies.

Week 3: Education for whom and at what cost?, religious debate, feminism and women’s rights, reproductive rights, poverty and urban decay, jobs, health care.

Week 4: Environmental challenges, historic preservation, local versus central government, refugee policies, trade deficits, social concerns and Poor Law criteria, governing the empire.


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Food for Thought – Love Letter to Arizona

Love Letter to Arizona: The Story of Arizona Highways

Arizona Highways magazine was born in the early 1920s. As automobiles emerged as the preferred mode of transportation in the U.S., a handful of states throughout the country developed magazines to entice motorists to travel newly developed roads. These magazines provide a unique resource for examining how the automobile changed the history of travel and helped to shape identities of place in America. None date as far back or have featured the iconic photography that has made Arizona Highways a national treasure. Dozens of great photographers including photography legend Ansel Adams, landscape photographers Josef Muench and Carlos Elmer, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Dykinga were featured. Hear the stories behind the glorious pages of Arizona Highways, a publication that has captured the imagination of the nation and the world for nearly a century.


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More Amazing iPhone – Session 2

Master Your iPhone Companion

In today’s world technology is developing and changing exponentially, and so is your amazing iPhone. We will cover the in-depth features of the phone and prepare for future advances in Apple technology while we streamline the process of iPhone navigation. Find answers to your most puzzling technical questions and master important features such as: understanding and using the many social media options, sorting out your photos, creating an organized digital calendar, troubleshooting and so much more! This course is designed for those who have completed Amazing iPhone: Basics, Basics, Basics! or for those with intermediate level understanding of iPhone use.

When: Select ONE of the following dates:
Session 1: Monday, Feb 10, 1:00-4:00pm
Session 2: Monday, Feb 17, 1:00-4:00pm


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