“More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of short prose by Samuel Beckett, first published in 1934. The stories chart the life of the book’s main character, Belacqua Shuah, from his days as a student to his accidental death. Beckett takes the name Belacqua from a figure in Dante’s Purgatorio, a Florentine lute-maker famed for his laziness. . . The opening story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ features Belacqua’s horrified reaction to the discovery that the lobster he has bought for dinner must be boiled alive. ‘It’s a quick death, God help us all’, Belacqua tells himself, before the narrator’s stern interjection to the contrary: ‘It is not.'” —Wikipedia
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).
Ancient, “The Cainian Chronicle” (1996)
This Norwegian metal band’s second album contains a track called “At the Infernal Portal (Canto III)” which consists of the original Italian and an English translation of Inferno III, 1-9.
