“There’s a new edition of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ that’s recently begun appearing in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says, ‘The literary classic that inspired the epic video game.'” [. . .] –Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times, January 29, 2010
Hue Rhodes, “Saint John of Las Vegas” (2010)
“There is one joke in the first-time filmmaker Hue Rhodes’s pretentious indie road comedy, “Saint John of Las Vegas,” that plays off its inspiration, Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ with witty ingenuity. The image of a sinner burning eternally in hell becomes a carnival performer, Smitty (John Cho), known as the Flame Lord, who after a technical malfunction finds himself trapped in his protective suit that bursts into flames every 20 seconds. Approached by John Alighieri (Steve Buscemi), a ratty-looking insurance-claims adjuster investigating a possible fraud, Smitty pleads for a cigarette.
The greater hell, of course, is Las Vegas and its environs, filmed to look like a terminally seedy and desolate wasteland peopled by loonies. John, who sporadically narrates the movie, is a compulsive gambler who has fled Las Vegas to live in Albuquerque, where he works for an auto-insurance company. His office is its own little circle of hell, whose unscrupulous, money-mad overseer, Townsend (Peter Dinklage), is determined never to pay a claim if he can help it.” [. . .] –Stephen Holden, The New York Times, January 29, 2010
Aidan Harte, Inferno Sculptures (2009)
“I’ve been working on this collection since I came back from Italy, and thinking about it for a lot longer. For what I want to do, combine realism with imaginative expressionism, sculpture is the perfect medium. In print and TV, we’re pepper-sprayed with visuals every hour of every day these days. It’s become very easy to tune it out as visual noise – somehow, for me at least, sculpture isn’t like that. Maybe it’s because it’s not an image of something but (seemingly) the thing itself – with mass and dimension, that it still demands our undivided attention. And maybe that’s why bad sculpture is so offensive, and great sculpture so sublime.
I’ve worked hard to try to make these pieces capture the imagination in the way Dante captured mine.” —Aidan Harte, July 7, 2009
“Dante obsessed me when I studied sculpture in Italy. The Inferno contains a world of characters, but I chose to sculpt only those which spoke to my life. Each piece relates to a verse, recreating Dante’s journey in Hell….” —Aidan Harte (retrieved on January 16, 2010)
See more sculptures by Aidan Harte at Sol Art Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.
Contributed by Guy Raffa
“My Dante,” Frank Ambrosio and Edward Maloney, Georgetown University
“Conceived as a digital incarnation of the medieval illuminated manuscript, My Dante fosters an entirely new type of contemplative reading experience. MyDante encourages readers to experience the poem in a way that is profoundly personal, while at the same time enabling a collaborative experience of a journey shared by a community of readers.
MyDante was originally developed for a philosophy course at Georgetown University, and a public version is currently in development that will be free and open to anyone.” —My Dante Blog
Visit Georgetown’s My Dante site.
Car Talk
One of the Magliozzi brothers says, “And even though Dante says ‘OK, make it 10 circles!’ whenever he hears us say it, this is NPR, National Public Radio.” –Episode 0945, “Good News! It’s Going to Cost a Fortune!”, Car Talk, November 7, 2009
http://www.cartalk.com/ct/review/show.jsp?showid=200945 (retrieved December 29, 2009)
Contributed by Alex Bertland (Niagara University)
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