Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Written Word Archive
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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
"In Italy's Dugout, Piazza Embraces a New Role"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/sports/baseball/28mets.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"Piazza is one of four American coaches on the staff with varying levels of the Italian language at their disposal. As they sat in the dugout before the game, they spoke to one another in English, with one even floating a 'Godfather' reference in the spring breeze. Once the game started, they showed some genuine command of the language of Dante, Calvino and Boccaccio, particularly when they made references to pitches they nicknamed il cambi (the changeup) and il slider (well, the slider)..."
Joshua Robinson, The New York Times, February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/sports/baseball/28mets.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
John Agard and Satoshi Kitamura, "The Young Inferno" (2008)
http://www.satoshiland.com/tyi.jpg
"A funky and powerful book. Agard takes Dante's famous poem about a visit to Hell and reworks it to appeal to today's youngsters, mingling 21st Century street cred with ancient mythology. Kitamura's stylized black and white illustrations draw the reader effortlessly in..."
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Inferno-John-Agard/dp/1845077695/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235638380&sr=8-1
Contributed by Virginia Jewiss (Humanities Program, Yale University)
"On Poetry: The Great(ness) Game"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"STILL, however blurry 'greatness' may be, it's clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its potential loss since at least 1983. That's the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the United States poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, appeared in The Kenyon Review bearing the title 'Poetry and Ambition.' Hall got right to the point: 'It seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition--a modesty, alas, genuine... if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.' What poets should be trying to do, according to Hall, was 'to make words that live forever' and 'to be as good as Dante.' They probably would fail, of course, but even so, 'the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.' Pretty strong stuff--and one wonders how many plays Shakespeare would have managed to write had he subjected every line to the merciless scrutiny Hall recommends..."
David Orr, The New York Times Book Review, February 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
P.K. Dick's "The Owl in Daylight"
http://www.philipkdick.com/aa_g-fame-cat.html
"Philip K. Dick's last wife has reworked the novel he was working on when he died in 1982 and is publishing the book herself, The Guardian reported. Tessa Dick, the fifth wife of the science-fiction legend, told Self-Publishing Review, an online magazine (selfpublishingreview.com), that her version of The Owl in Daylight seeks to express 'the spirit' of the proposed book, about which little is known. Ms. Dick said that a letter from her husband to his editor and agent revealed plans to 'have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality,' and added: 'The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park.' The letter also mentioned Dante's Inferno and the Faust legend, she said."
Ben Sisario, The New York Times, February 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/books/17arts-NOVELBYPHILI_BRF.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_in_Daylight
There is also film in progress on the life of P.K. Dick using The Owl in Daylight as the title and starring Paul Giamatti as Dick.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840404/
"Il Viaggio di Dante: Un avventura infernale" (2008)
A children's book.
Text: Virginia Jewiss
Illustrations: Aline Cantono di Ceva
Idea: Christiana Castenetto
Italian version:
http://www.ibs.it/code/9788874611102/jewiss-virginia/viaggio-dante-avventura.html
An English version also available as Dante's Journey: An Infernal Adventure.
Stephenie Meyer, "Eclipse" (2007)
http://z.about.com/d/bestsellers/1/0/m/2/-/-/eclipse.jpg
"This was beyond the seventh circle of Hades."
p. 59 of Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (NY: Little Brown Publishing, 2007)
Contributed by Audrey Adams (Oklahoma University, '09)
"Smoking Ban Hits Home. Truly."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/us/27belmont.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"BELMONT, Calif. -- During her 50 years of smoking, Edith Frederickson says, she has lit up in restaurants and bars, airplanes and trains, and indoors and out, all as part of a two-pack-a-day habit that she regrets not a bit. But as of two weeks ago, Ms. Frederickson can no longer smoke in the one place she loves the most: her home...
"And that the ban should have originated in her very building -- a sleepy government-subsidized retirement complex called Bonnie Brae Terrace -- is even more galling. Indeed, according to city officials, a driving force behind the passage of the law was a group of retirees from the complex who lobbied the city to stop secondhand smoke from drifting into their apartments from the neighbors' places...
"At a local level, the debate over the law has divided the residents of the Bonnie Brae into two camps, with the likes of Ms. Frederickson, a hardy German emigre, on one side, and Ray Goodrich, a slim 84-year-old with a pulmonary disease and a lifelong allergy problem, on the other...
" 'I came around the corner, and there was just a giant puff of black smoke, and I knew I wasn't going to last five seconds in that,' Mr. Goodrich said. 'It was like Dante's inferno up there.' ..."
Jesse McKinley, The New York Times, January 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/us/27belmont.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
