Today...

Today is the birthday of Pulitzer prize-winner August Wilson, whose first play was Jitney (1982), and who wrote a cycle of plays about the black experience in the United States. The cycle includes ten plays, each of which represents a single decade of the Twentieth century. The most recent plays have been King Hedley II, about the 1980s, Gem of the Ocean, about the 1900s, and Radio Golf, about the 1990s. Wilson died in 2005. The plays have yet to be published in an anthology. As usual, I think the Library of America should be on top of that. (Do you hear me, Library of America?)

And I recently watched Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments which was campy and fun. I thought it was going to be more fun than it actually was, but it was pretty hilarious all the same. John Derek is really hot and he runs around shirtless throughout the film. And I have to say, Yul Brynner (also shirtless most of the time) is really hot as well. Anne Baxter is pretty ludicrous in the film, and the movie itself is totally absurd. The titular commandments finally make an appearance during the fourth hour of the movie, and the rest of the movie is pretty much your standard biopic, except that it's about a character about whom we know almost nothing. I thought the movie was kinda racist. It's definitely anti-Semitic, but I also think it's got a strong Orientalist sentiment running through it. I don't know. It's flashy and silly and anachronistic at times. There was stuff in the movie that I had forgotten was in the Bible. Plus, I had always thought Moses' wife Zipporah (was that her name?) was black. For some reason I had that in my head as a child. In this movie she is most certainly not black. Anyway, I had never seen it, so I thought it was about time.

School is out. I have a little work to do before I'm done: final grades for the students and such. And I also have some meetings with faculty before I call it quits for the year. But it feels like this year has flown by. And suddenly the city is deserted. It's kinda crazy. I have to write a post about being friends with undergrads, too. It's so... precarious, I guess I should call it.