Humanities

HUMANITIES IS THE CREATIVE ART OF INTELLIGENCE

Humanities describes the creative talents of human intelligence in the artistic realm. As with music, literature evidenced with humane ideals is attractive as an art form of human expression and communication, nurturing individuals’ interaction in society. Appreciation for humanities promotes higher levels of personal awareness, exploration, discovery, and spiritual enrichment. This page features art suitable for most audiences. Feel free to develop your own ideas and share your insights for humanities, as well.

Humanities is, in general, any system of thought or action that attains a predominant interest to the interests and preservation of humanity as a whole, as compared with the supernatural or the abstract. A related word, Humanism, was specially applied to the movement of thought that in western Europe in the 15th century A.D. broke through the medieval traditions of scholastic theology and philosophy and devoted itself to the rediscovery and direct study of the ancient classics.

The Humanities movement is essentially a promotion of the intellect and free expression, especially aligned with beauty, a natural inclination toward conscience, and society. A similar tendency in humanities has marked influence over the development of modern Christian theology, inclining against an inflexible conception of the separate existence and overlordship of gatekeepers in the view of life, God, and the science of nature.

HUMANITIES MUSIC

In ordinary language, the adjective “humane” is known as sensibly “kind-hearted” and “unselfish,” whereas the generally artistic field of humanities has the sense of “that which pertains to the human race,” derived in this case with the companion adjective “human”.

ARTIST DESCRIPTION OF ALAN LEWIS SILVA

Alan is a singer-songwriter of original music. His musical style is lyrical folk, rock, blues, fado, and reggae.

Musical Shadows is a book of his songs from 2003 to 2016, which corresponds to 20 albums of music. Musical Shadows is over 50,000 words of poetry arranged in alphabetical, alphanumerical order. It collectively tells the story of a millennial generation adapting to the climate of southern California during the information age. It is indie style folk music, with elements of rock, blues, fado, and reggae. It is comparable to country music.

Many of the songs feature an 6/8 rhythm, which is uncommon by contemporary music standards. The 6/8 tempo explains whence some of the reggae influence applies. Alan’s songs are highly lyrical and will create mental images by the listener’s own imagining and interpretation of the words in each story of every song. Some songs have a grunge or alternative rock feel. Musical Shadows also features impressions of fado culture, blues, and the singer-songwriter oeuvre as a genre.

15 CALIFORNIA AUTHORS Alan Lewis Silva (2009)

16 I BEEN LIVING Alan Lewis Silva (2010)

18 J2C 1-7 SOUNDTRACK Alan Lewis Silva (2012)

20 ASH CITY Is a World Alan Lewis Silva (2014)

21 BE YOUR MAN Hot Cow Alan Lewis Silva (2014)

22 THE MOON WAS BLUE Alan Lewis Silva (2014)

23 SONGS FOR MERCEDES Alan Lewis Silva (2015)

24 MUSICAL SHADOWS Escapade Alan Lewis Silva (2016)

25 MUSICAL SHADOWS Glint Art Alan Lewis Silva (2016)

27 PLAYLAND CALIFORNIA Alan Lewis Silva (2018)

3 ROSE BLOOD Volumes I & II Alan Lewis Silva (2005)

5 BIG GREEN COUNTRY Alan Lewis Silva (2005)

6 MOUNTAIN STAIRS Alan Lewis Silva (2005)

8 CHANGING THE GUARDS Alan Lewis Silva (2006)

10 HUNTERS AND HUNTED Alan Lewis Silva (2007)

11 NUMAS ESTRELAS Alan Lewis Silva (2007)

12 GOLDEN PALACE Alan Lewis Silva (2007)

13 FLOWER PEOPLE Alan Lewis Silva (2007)

All songs composed music and lyrics by Alan Lewis Silva, who also performs these 28 albums of 408 tracks.
All songs copyright © 2004 – 2023 by Alan Lewis Silva. All rights reserved.

BOA SINA

Coal Mine
Was Loving You a Mistake
Another Refugee
Vanished Like into the Air
Suicide Creekbed
Frozen Leaves
Rainy Song Man
People Really Don’t Know
Genie
Une, Des, Trois
Station Blues
Paradise Café
Treatment with Forceps
Suicide Creekbed (Live)
Rainy Day Window
Sooner or Later
Tied to an Anthill
Talk About Getting Married
Station Variation
Ballad of Dan & Suzanne
I Am the Moon
Portland’s Song
Jack and Jill
New Orleans
Utopian Deli
Dream (Live)
Rio Negro
Cement
O Maria
Manzanita
Cold Mountain
The 8th Man
Huey vs. The Sun
El Dorado
In This Town

MYSTERY HOUSE

Big Green Country
Railroad Dream
Sand and Foam
Gypsy Flies
Walk Through Paris
Emperor of Ice Cream Blues
Gotham Marie
Hear Me Out
Manchild
We Can Go
Don’t Give Me Too Much

SUMMER GIRLS

We Like Weird

Don’t Jam Me Up
Valley Corn Stand
Big Sur Sound
High School Boats
Brides Made
Summer Girls
Puff Adder
Boardwalkers
Sound Is the Light Fountain
A Picture
California Author

HUMANITIES LITERATURE

BIOGRAPHY OF BRET HARTE

American author, Bret Harte (born Francis Brett Hart) was born in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1836. His father, a professor of Greek at Albany College, died during his boyhood. Harte’s ancestry came from British, particularly English roots, with the meaningful exception of his absentee Jewish paternal grandfather. After a common-school education, Harte at seventeen relocated with his mother to California in the mid-1850’s.

Afterwards Harte worked as a teacher, miner, printer, express-messenger, secretary of the San Francisco Mint, and editor. He married Anna Griswold in 1862, and they started their family in California in the San Francisco Bay area of California and having four children together in the course of life.

Bret Harte’s first published literary endeavor was poetry, particularly sentimental and pro-Union Civil War era poetry. Some of Harte’s spiritual ideas were influenced by his friendship with Thomas Starr King, a pro-Union Unitarian minister, his friendship with Samuel Clemens, and his great fondness for the novels of Charles Dickens and British literature, which he shared with his parents.

Harte’s first major literary venture was a series of Condensed Novels (parodies of popular fiction by well-known authors), which he, while also serving as editor, published in The Californian, a weekly periodical). Harte subsequently reissued these writings in book form in 1867.

Bret Harte introduced his creative writing to large audiences who interested themselves in exotic stories of far-flung California. Many of Harte’s most popular stories came about while he was writing fiction for The Overland Monthly (the earliest considerable Anglo-American literary magazine on the Pacific Coast) established in 1868 with Harte as chief editor. His sketches and poems appeared in The Overland Monthly’s pages during the next few years and attracted attention in the eastern American states and in Europe.

Bret Harte was an early master of the short story, and his Californian tales were regarded as introducing a new genre into fiction. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869), the later sketch “How Santa Claus came to Simpson’s Bar,” hundreds of stories, multiple novels and novellas, major novel Gabriel Conroy (1875), and collected poetry such as the narrative verses entitled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” combined to great effect his literary voice and uniqueness.

With humor, pathos, sympathetic treatments of the outsider, elegance in language and description, and power of character portrayals, Harte parlayed familiar motivations and archetypal scenes in a manner that combined and transformed these inputs. In turn, this conveyed readers to an entertaining and imaginative realm, somewhat fantastic and rather regaled of mining-gulches, gamblers, settlers, pioneers, displaced and unassimilated oddballs and mainstays of Old West society, amid a predominately picturesque and varied landscape of often California.

In popularizing the American short story as a professional fiction writer, in Bret Harte we find a rare delineator of California and storytelling lore to the remote and varied audiences of the globe. Harte, a sort of California Author, preceded also in kind the equivalent of many conventional elements of cinema and audio-visual broadcasting subject to the claims of identity ongoing. Bret Harte’s forty-four original books were published between 1867 and 1898, with numerous uncollected stories and poems located in periodicals from 1861 to 1902.

After a year as professor in the University of California, Bret Harte lived in New York, 1871–1878; was United States consul at Crefeld, Germany, 1878–1880; U.S. consul at Glasgow, 1880–1885; and after 1885 resided in London. He died in Camberley, England, on May 5, 1902.