Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Written Word Archive
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"Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage"
"The roots of the butcher as an icon of cool might be found in the writings of Bill Buford, who fashioned an operatic meat hero out of Dario Cecchini, a towering, Dante-spouting butcher from the Chianti countryside. Mr. Buford immortalized him in an article for The New Yorker and in his book 'Heat.'"
Kim Severson, The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
Check out Buford's book, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany and his 2006 article about Dario Cecchini in The New Yorker.
Monique Wittig, "Across the Acheron" (1985)
From Publishers Weekly:
"Serving as her own protagonist, Wittig... confronts implications of female oppression as she struggles against gale winds and knifelike sands on her way to Acheron, the river of tears. Led by a woman always referred to as "Manastabel, my guide," "Mana" embodies the idea of universal order. Wittig's alter ego passes through various circles of Hell and Limbo, occasionally ascending to such earthly gathering places as a laundromat and a parade ground. Wherever she goes, she sees women flogged and tortured, castrated and dismembered, collared, chained and dragged unprotesting by their male masters through streets awash with blood, bones and excrement.
"In the midst of feasting, the women starve, dragging their emaciated bodies to serve their masters and afterwards licking up the half-chewed bits of skin and gristle, the spewed-out bones. Yet in the Angels' Kitchen the copper gleams, the fruits glisten, cauldrons bubble, and the women chorus, "Soup, beautiful soup." A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice's tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved."
Nick Reding, "Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town" (2009)
"Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of Methland, Nick Reding's unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear...
"In the grisliest passage of Methland, which deserves to be quoted at some length so as to convey its hellish momentum, he invites us to share in the torments of Roland Jarvis, a paranoid small-time meth cook, in the Dante-like interlude after the combustion of his improvised home lab (just one of hundreds in the area).
"Jarvis looked down and saw what he thought was egg white on his bare arms. It was not egg white; it was the viscous state of his skin now that the water had boiled out of it. Jarvis flung it off himself, and then he saw that where the egg white had been he could now see roasting muscle. His skin was dripping off his body in sheets. . . . He'd have pulled the melting skeins of skin from himself in bigger, more efficient sections but for the fact that his fingers had burned off of his hands. His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat."
Walter Kirn, The New York Times, July 1, 2009
"Madoff Is Sentenced to 150 Years for Ponzi Scheme"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/business/30madoff.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"...Burt Ross, who lost $5 million in the fraud, cited Dante's The Divine Comedy, in which the poet defined fraud as 'the worst of sin' and expressed the hope that, when Mr. Madoff dies -- 'virtually unmourned' -- he would find himself in the lowest circle of hell..."
Diana B. Henriques, The New York Times, June 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/business/30madoff.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"A Guy From Green Bay Plays the Other Football"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/sports/soccer/28cup.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"...Beasley was soon headed to Europe, and [Jay] DeMerit would even beat him there, but Beasley's career was flying first class while DeMerit's was stowed in baggage. He had a gnawing feeling that he could be a professional, but while Beasley ended up first at PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2004, DeMerit alighted in 2003 at Southall, a semiprofessional team outside of London. If Dante had a seventh circle of soccer hell, this was it..." Jere' Longman, The New York Times, June 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/sports/soccer/28cup.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Hell in Crisis
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/06/hell-in-crisis200906
"Think things are grim for Wall Streeters in the here and now? Envision the scene in hell, where the Devil is talking bonus cuts, the Pit of Remorse is packed with frustrated financiers, and trophy wives are weeping over the eternal torment of their broke husbands' company. Related: A gallery of Edward Sorel's rogues."
Edward Sorel and Richard Lingeman, Vanity Fair, June 2009
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/06/hell-in-crisis200906
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Dead Celebrities on Twitter
(Tweeji: like "Ouija" [often pronounced WEE-gee])
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija
"You're not really dead until you're tweeting on Tweeji. Tweeji is the original dead celebrity's [sic] website. We've brought together some of the most intriguing personalities from Twitter so you can follow the latest 'from beyond,' all in one place. You can even sign in to your Twitter account right here and reply, re-tweet and follow the dead without leaving Tweeji."
http://tweeji.com/about/
Dante's site:
http://tweeji.com/person/dalighieri/
Contributed by Jess Esch
"Where Have All the Muses Gone?"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242927020125473.html
"Whatever happened to the Muse? She was once the female figure -- deity, Platonic ideal, mistress, lover, wife -- whom poets and painters called upon for inspiration. Thus Homer in the Odyssey, the West's first great work of literary art: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, of twists and turns driven time and again off course.' For hundreds of years, in one form or another, the Muse's blessing and support were often essential to the creation of art...
"Yet for sheer chutzpah, you cannot beat Dante Alighieri's invocation, in the Paradiso -- the last part of his Divine Comedy -- not just to the nine muses, but also to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and Apollo, god of poetry and music and the muses' boss, as it were.
"Dante's Divine Comedy, completed in the early 14th century, is a turning point for musedom. By the end of his massive poem, the muses have been left behind by the heavenly Christian music of the spheres, 'a song,' writes Dante, 'that excels our muses.' The pagan nine had been replaced by the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. That, in turn, freed artistic inspiration to go seek more earthly sources.
"Dante's source was an actual person, a young girl named Beatrice Portinari whom Dante claims he first saw on the street in Florence when they were both nine. He fell in love with her, but she died in her early 20s. Dante paid tribute to Beatrice first in a breathtaking volume of sonnets and prose poems he called La Vita Nuova -- The New Life -- and then made Beatrice a central figure in The Divine Comedy, where she is cast in the roles of teacher, guide and sacred ideal.
"Beatrice symbolized both earthly love and Christian truth -- the poet's lust became 'sublimated,' as we would say, into spiritual longing..."
Lee Siegel, The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242927020125473.html
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
Kim Paffenroth, "Valley of the Dead" (2009)
http://authorbobfreeman.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/coming-soon-from-dr-kim-paffenroth/
"For seventeen years of his life, the whereabouts of the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri is unknown to modern scholars. All we know is that during this time, he traveled as an exile across Europe, while working on his epic poem, The Divine Comedy. In his masterpiece he describes a journey through the three realms of the afterlife. The volume describing hell, Inferno, is the most famous of the the three.
"Valley of the Dead is the real story behind Inferno. In his wanderings, Dante stumbles on a zombie infestation, and the things he sees there--people being devoured, burned alive, boiled in pitch, torn apart by dogs, eviscerated, impaled, crucified, etc.--become the basis of all the horrors he describes in Inferno. Afraid to be labeled a madman, Dante made the terrors he witnessed into a more 'believable' account of an otherworldly adventure with demons and mythological monsters, but now the real story can finally be told."
http://authorbobfreeman.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/coming-soon-from-dr-kim-paffenroth/
See also http://gotld.blogspot.com/
Contributed by Kim Paffenroth
"Three Lost Cantos From Dante's Inferno" Open Salon Blog
http://open.salon.com/blog/con_chapman/2009/02/15/three_lost_cantos_from_dantes_inferno
XXXV: Cell-Phone Users
The users of cell-phones in quiet places
Have merited scorn from all classes and races.
They talk to their pals with cocky assurance
While you bury your head in your book with endurance.
The gestures they make are of course unavailing
It looks like unseen taxis that they are hailing.
Their punishment, as each millennium passes,
Is to be drowned out forever by the braying of asses.
XXXVI: "Reply-to-All"-ers
We came to the furthest reach of hell-
A place that email users know well.
The woman or man whose unmitigated gall
Causes him or her to hit "Reply all".
I don't mean to work myself into a snith
But they ought to know better-it clogs server bandwidth.
For these folks a punishment fit for their crimes-
They're surrounded and hounded by fast-talking mimes.
XXXVII: Credit Card Coffee Buyers
The lousy cup is called a "tall"--
the cost of it is rather small.
Those who chose to charge the price
In this ring are treated not-so-nice.
If plastic was the tender you used to pay
While the time of those in line wasted away
You will for eternity be burnt like toast
With free trade coffee, decaf dark roast.
Con Chapman
http://open.salon.com/blog/con_chapman/2009/02/15/three_lost_cantos_from_dantes_inferno
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
