Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
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"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
David Hewson, "Dante's Numbers" (2009)
http://www.booklounge.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385341486
"It was a warm, golden evening in Rome--a night filled with anticipation. A legendary director was premiering his new film version of Dante's Inferno. From around the world, celebrities gathered at the Villa Borghese as the paparazzi thronged among them. But within moments the event was in chaos. A man was dead. The film's star was missing--and a priceless relic had vanished. In David Hewson's masterful new novel of suspense, Detective Nic Costa, numb from the recent death of his wife, finds himself and his fellow detectives drawn into a strange and terrifying limbo—the first of Dante's nine circles of Hell..."
http://www.booklounge.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385341486
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Review of Susan Gubar, "Judas: A Biography" (2009)
Ted McGrath
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"In Judas: A Biography, Susan Gubar has amassed a long, grim and often nauseating catalog of the ways in which the Christian imagination has vented its wrath on the disciple who betrayed his master...The author of the medieval Golden Legend imagined Judas's early life, which included killing his father and marrying his mother; an Arabic legend conjured an infant Judas obsessively biting himself. Medieval artists portrayed him as a slavering brute, deploying a racist arsenal of Jewish and African stereotypes to contrast him with the lily-white Jesus. No wonder that Dante placed Judas at the very bottom of the Inferno, where he is gnawed by Satan: 'his head within and outside flails his legs.'... "
Adam Kirsch, The New York Times, April 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
http://img2.libreriauniversitaria.it/BUS/300/483/9780393064834.jpg
Susan Gubar, Judas: A Biography
http://www.amazon.com/Judas-Biography-Susan-Gubar/dp/0393064832
"If Bernie Met Dante..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15blumenthal.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
... Yes, Bernard L. Madoff went to jail on Thursday after pleading guilty to a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, and yes, he may face the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced to as much as 150 years on June 16. But if even that dose of clinical justice seems like paltry penance to his many bilked and ruined investors, including charities, they can always turn to literature for a further measure of satisfaction--and to pronounce, perhaps, another kind of final judgment.
Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante's Who's Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer...
It is fitting, Mr. Pinsky says. Betrayal destroys the trust that binds humanity, and with it, the betrayer himself. Dante was consumed by the sadness and mystery of sin--and what it did to the sinner...
Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times, March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15blumenthal.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
