Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Written Word Archive
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Review of Kathyrn Harrison's "While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family" (2008)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Pinsky-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"In the Inferno of Dante, Count Ugolino, forced to cannibalize his children's corpses, is led to narrate the horror by Dante's offer to retell the story up in the world above. Genesis 19 not only tells the story of incest between Lot and his daughters, but proceeds to name their offspring: Moab and Ben-ammi, and the Moabites and Ammonites descended from them. Abel's blood 'cries out' with its story, and the fratricide Cain is marked."
Robert Pinsky, New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Pinsky-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Mark Mills, "The Savage Garden" (2007)
http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Garden-Mark-Mills/dp/0399153535
"A villa in the Tuscan hills is the setting for this gracefully executed literary puzzle. A Cambridge student wins a fellowship to study the villa's Renaissance garden, built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife. Consulting sources like Ovid and Dante, he is able to unlock the garden's shocking secrets."
Elsa Dixler, The New York Times, May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/PaperRow-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Matilde Asensi "The Last Cato" (2007)
Asensi's first novel to be published in English features a clandestine religious organization, a code contained in the work of a long-dead genius, a plucky heroine, and just the right combination of obscure history and plausible conjecture. Sound familiar? The Last Cato will inevitably draw comparisons to The Da Vinci Code, but this book is in many ways more compelling, if a bit less accessible. After Dr. Ottavia Salina, a nun working as a paleographer at the Vatican, is asked to decipher tattoos on the dead body of an 'enemy of the Church' from Ethiopia, she soon discovers the deceased was tied up with the Staurofilakes, an ancient order who have sought to protect the True Cross and now seem to be stealing slivers of it from around the world. The key to tracking them down? Dante's Divine Comedy. Turns out that Dante was a member of the order himself, and that the notoriously dense Divine Comedy is a kind of coded guidebook to the order's rituals. Salina and a couple companions set off, with Dante as their guide, on a rollicking, round-the-world adventure. Some of the conjecture seems far-fetched, but the research is impeccable, and the behind-the-scenes Vatican life feels utterly authentic. As engrossing as it is intelligent, this just might be the next big book in the burgeoning religious thriller subgenre. (John Green, Booklist)
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Cato-Novel-Matilde-Asensi/dp/0060828587/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209300203&sr=8-1
Anti-Purgatory: Syracuse
Pride: Rome
Envy: Ravenna
Anger: Jerusalem
Sloth: Greece
Greed: Constantinople
Gluttony: Alexandria
Lust: Antioch
Dante detective?
http://www.domenicstansberry.com/
The third installment of the Dominic Stansberry's San Francisco mystery series featuring Dante Mancuso, AKA The Pelican. Forthcoming, 2008 with St. Martin's Minotaur.
"THE ANCIENT RAIN, the third novel in a habit-forming series about Dante Mancuso, a private eye who knows everyone to talk to--or goes to the funeral of anyone unable to talk. Dante finds himself with a paying job when a federal prosecutor reopens a 1975 court case against Bill Owens, who once ran with the anarchists responsible for a bank robbery in which a woman was killed. As Dante works his sources--a vivid gallery of old-timers clinging to an eroding culture--he broods on the changes since 9/11, eloquently conveying the paranoia that can have a community seeing terrorists on every corner."
Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 27, 2008
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/04/27/books/review/Crime-t.html&tntemail0=y
Dante at a student apartment in Bologna
http://fumettotex.tumblr.com/post/26551788
"Inexpressibly happy that even in the utter chaos, Dante was able to say a few words at the party. Not what the quote wall is for, but it will do." Darren Fishell (Bowdoin, '09)
Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" (2007)
http://www.zimbardo.com/LuciferCover.jpg
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400064112/understandi0d-20
From Chapter One:
"Lucifer's sin is what thinkers in the Middle Ages called 'cupiditas.' For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme 'sins of the wolf,' the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it. For those suffering the mortal malady called cupiditas, whatever exists outside of one's self has worth only as it can be exploited by, or taken into one's self. In Dante's Hell those guilty of that sin are in the ninth circle, frozen in the Lake of Ice. Having cared for nothing but self in life, they are encased in icy Self for eternity. By making people focus only on oneself in this way, Satan and his followers turn their eyes away from the harmony of love that unites all living creatures.
"The sins of the wolf cause a human being to turn away from grace and to make self his only good--and also his prison. In the ninth circle of the Inferno, the sinners, possessed of the spirit of the insatiable wolf, are frozen in a self-imposed prison where prisoner and guard are fused in an egocentric reality."
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
"Mafia boss reads Dante Alighieri in prison"
http://www.interet-general.info/article.php3?id_article=6787
"Bernardo Provenzano, the former Godfather of the Sicilian Mafia who is serving life in prison, is spending his time reading Dante and writing to a pen pal... 'I have read the Inferno,' he wrote. 'And especially where it says that on life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.' The former boss of all the bosses--who ordered the assassination of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, a pair of anti-Mafia investigators--told Bonavota that 'when reason and force collide, force wins and reason is lacking.' "
Malcolm Moore, Telegraph.uk.co, January 28, 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/25/wmafia125.xml
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
David Owen, "The Afterlife: Cutting Back"
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine
"[...] Keeping murderers and warmakers submerged in boiling blood, for example, is manageable in the near term but cannot be sustained for all eternity, since the energy expenditure required to heat blood forever will eventually constrain even Our ability to undertake other desirable projects, such as the continuance of the universe as a whole. We face a similar energy crisis with regard to evil counsellors, whom We have promised to incinerate everlastingly; with regard to blasphemers, sodomites, usurers, and doers of violence against Us, who must be tortured without end on heated sand; and with regard to Count Ugolino, Archbishop Ruggieri, and others who are permanently frozen in ice. The avaricious could conceivably be put to work ceaselessly twisting the heads of diviners and fortune-tellers, or keeping flatterers covered with filth, or cladding hypocrites in leaden mantles, but not even We can unwrite the terms of Our own first law of thermodynamics. [...]"
The New Yorker, January 7, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/01/07/080107sh_shouts_owen
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Stephanie Rosenbloom, "Putting Your Best Cyberface Forward"
"In general, scholars do not think of impression management as an intentionally deceptive or nefarious practice. It is more like social lubrication without a drink in your hand. Those studying it online have found that when people misrepresent themselves, it is often because they are attempting to express an idealized or future version of themselves--someone who is thinner or has actually finished Dante's Inferno."
The New York Times, January 3, 2008
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/01/03/fashion/03impression.html&tntemail0=y
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
