Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Written Word Archive
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Immigrant conditions likened to Dante's Inferno
... " 'The problem with Turkey must be made an international issue,' Spyros Vougias, the deputy minister for public order, said in an e-mailed statement. Last month, Mr. Vougias ordered the closure of the Pagani center -- a converted warehouse that had been housing 1,300 migrants -- saying it was 'worse than Dante's inferno.' " ...
Niki Kitsantonis, "Migrants Reaching Greece Despite Efforts to Block Them," The New York Times, November 18, 2009
Rogue American Woman
"Of course, the subtitle of Sarah Palin's book is An American Life. Because she is the lovely avatar of real Americans -- ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing, common-sense, good, ordinary, real Americans. If you are not living an American life, you are, to use a Palin coinage, living 'bass-ackwards.'...
"I approached reading her book with trepidation, worried I might learn that I am not a real American, dang it, just another dreaded, jaded 'enlightened elite.'
"I was born and live in Washington, D.C., after all. Now you'd think that this would be a rather patriotic city to call home, but Palin paints it as a cross between Sodom and Dante's Fifth Circle." ...
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, November 17, 2009
Margaret Visser, "The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude" (2009)
"...The Gift of Thanks is a scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, Ms. Visser writes, one that is more complicated and more vital than we think. Ms. Visser acknowledges that simple politeness is the grease that keeps society running and, conversely, how much hostility can build up among people when words like "thanks" are not spoken.
"In Dante's Inferno, she observes, 'at the bottommost circle of hell, the ungrateful are punished by being eternally frozen in the postures of deference they had failed to perform during their lifetimes: trapped rigid in enveloping ice, they stand erect or upside down, lie prone, or bow face to feet.'
"In The Gift of Thanks, however, Ms. Visser is most interested in the kind of gratitude that is not compulsory or self-interested. She writes about the humility required to be genuinely grateful, and the essential ability to climb out of one's own head..."
Dwight Garner, "Gratitude's Grace Can Be Itself a Gift," The New York Times, November 17, 2009
Penny Arcade, "Fabulous Prizes"
Contributed by Charlie Russell-Schlesinger (Bowdoin, '08)
"New Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange"
"For most of the 217 years since its founding under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange was the high temple of American capitalism. Behind its Greco-Roman facade, traders raised a Dante-esque din in their pursuit of the almighty dollar. Good times or bad, the daily melee on the cavernous trading floor made the Big Board the greatest marketplace for stocks in the world."
Graham Bowley, The New York Times, October 14, 2009
"The Devil Wears Crocs"
" With modern presidencies, we have to watch the poignant tableau of such leaders realizing that they have squandered their chance for greatness even as they suffer the indignity of rejection by those who once sought their blessing.
"These painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books.
"...The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, 'Speech-less,' is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a 'Devil Wears Prada' betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn't socialism--'We got to make this understandable for the average cat,' the president tells his speechwriters--W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that's hard to get out of your head.)
" 'The guy is a worm,' Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer about Latimer, adding: 'He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn't read The Inferno. The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.' " ...
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, September 26, 2009
Robert Olen Butler, Hell (2009)
"The fresh hell described by Robert Olen Butler's new novel is crammed with random celebrities... Patrolled by Satan's minions (among them, two of the Bee Gees) dressed in powder-blue jumpsuits, it's filled with bookstores that optimistically open with new owners at every sunrise -- only to go out of business by the end of each day. If the books they can't sell in hell are maddeningly uneven, ever bouncing between passable wit and sophomoric giggles. Mr. Butler's slapdash Hell deserves shelf space there...
"Somehow, in the course of Mr. Butler's fever dream of a plot, Hell also includes Dante's Beatrice, now a film noir dame contending with Humphrey Bogart, who pines for Lauren Bacall; a chorus of singing cockroaches enamored of the phrase 'poopy butt'; Michael Jackson, doing a woefully inadequate job of singing Wagner and consigned to 'Everland, the densely populated molester estate on the edge of the city'; Bobby Fischer, playing chess with a computer from Hadassah; Jerry Seinfeld, whose jokes all bomb; and Celine Dion, who just won't quit singing that damn 'Titanic' song."
...
Janet Maslin, The New York Times, September 6, 2009
Justin Cartwright, To Heaven by Water (2009)
In the two-page prologue to Justin Cartwright's new novel, To Heaven by Water, two brothers, "no longer young," are sitting by a campfire in the Kalahari Desert. The elder is smoking dope and reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins's tongue-twisting, syntax-bending sonnet "The Windhover": "I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. . . ." (This can't be very good weed he's smoking, since he makes it through all 14 lines without losing his way.) In response, the younger "feels a rushing, unstoppable love" for him, which he expresses by mouthing the conclusion of the Divine Comedy: L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle. (Cartwright goes on to translate for us, though such a familiar line needs Englishing far less than Hopkins does.) The scene ends with Cartwright's own image of the stars, "implausibly bright, scattered carelessly like lustrous seed across the southern sky."
...
David Gates, The New York Times, August 13, 2009
David Eggers, Zeitoun (2009)
"Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. He would find anger and pathos. A dark fable, perhaps. His villains would be evil and incompetent, even without Heckuva-Job-Brownie. In the end, though, he would not be able to constrain himself; his outrage might overwhelm the tale...
"But within a week, the sense of menace and edgy despair becomes overwhelming. Now Zeitoun's days are like a watery version of Dante's Inferno, with flood and disease and tough moral choices around every bend: rescue or paddle on?"
...
Timothy Egan, The New York Times, August 13, 2009
Caught in the Deceit of the Web
By Michelle Slatalla, The New York Times, August 12, 2009
"Given my firm moral bearings, cheating online should make me feel bad. A cheater is a fraud, after all, a class of person so despicable that Dante consigned them all to the depths of the eighth circle of hell. (He rated them worse than murderers, who got to live it up in the seventh circle.)..."
Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book
"So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, "The Cartoons That Shook the World," should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What's more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children's book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Dore' of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante's Inferno that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dali'..."
Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, August 12, 2009
Cover of The New Yorker, April 21, 1997
Seen in the Edward Sorel illustration are three tiers of political sinners - "Politicians Who Promised to Cut Taxes," "Politicians Who Promised to Balance the Budget," and finally (and most egregiously) "Politicians Who Promised to Cut Taxes and Balance the Budget" (detail shown below).
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
