Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Lee Breuer, La Divina Caricatura (2013)

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“She has floppy ears, eyes of exquisite sadness and an operatic tendency toward ecstasy, anguish and other big emotions. Leave her alone in a thunderstorm, and she may fall into despair. She is a dog named Rose, and her Dear John letter to the man she loved is the battered heart of Lee Breuer’s dark, joyous and utterly splendid musical fantasia La Divina Caricatura, Part 1, The Shaggy Dog, at La MaMa, in a co-presentation with St. Ann’s Warehouse. An East Village tale told in a subway, it’s a doomed cross-species romance inspired by The Divine Comedy, but Mr. Breuer uses Dante more as catalyst than template. The strongest classical link is to Japanese theater’s Bunraku.”     –Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times, December 19, 2013

Review of Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, Promise Land (2014)

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promise-land-jessica-lamb-shapiro-2014“It’s ingrained in human nature to look at ourselves with a weary awareness of all that’s wrong within, and the optimism that someone, somewhere can tell us how to fix it. As Jessica Lamb-Shapiro points out in her ambitious if unfulfilling new memoir-cum-odyssey, Promise Land, we’ve been gobbling up self-help advice for nearly as long as the written word has existed, devouring it in the ancient Egyptian Sebayt writings and the Book of Proverbs. But our contemporary mania for the wisdom of Dr. Phil is different from what generations past gleaned from Epictetus or even Dale Carnegie, and Lamb-Shapiro aims to explain how. Along the way, she’s on a quest to fix herself. Lamb-Shapiro, who has written for The Believer and McSweeney’s, is a witty and enjoyably self-aware writer. She’s certainly a far more entertaining guide through hellish terrain — like a preshow interrogation by a ‘Dr. Oz’ producer — than Dante was given.” [. . .]    –Mary Elizabeth Williams, The New York Times, January 3, 2014

Petra Greule-Bstock, “Beauty awakens the soul to act.” Dante Alighieri

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greule-bstock-beauty-awakens-the-soul-to-act-dante-alighieri“Beauty awakens the soul to act. Dante Alighieri is one of many works Petra Greule-Bstock creates based on inspiration from a famous quotation. On Greule-Bstock’s blog, she provides background information about herself and her artwork: “I love to paint with natural pigments mixed and prepared like a meal, it’s like working in a color kitchen. Also I use oil pastels, Chinese ink, well let’s say just all I can find in my studio. I love the sensation of feeling lost in colors, materials and forms. Since I was able to keep a paint brush in my hands for the first time, painting was, still is and always will be necessary for me. It’s impossible living without. I was born in the south of Germany and lived there until 2000 before moving to France/Burgundy. Since 2011 I have my studio in Barcelona. Mostly I live with the feeling: I’m not going through the world but the world is going straight through me. The world, the daily life, people, surrounding, colors, smells, views, buildings, plants… all is impressing me, touching me, forming me. Painting is the way of how the “footprints” of all the impressions entering into my body, into my soul, my brain, my senses can communicate with those who are watching the result. With my paintings I’m offering a sight into the mirror of my emotional universe and it is like a dairy of subconsciousness, left footprints, dreams, . . .”    —Petra Greule-Bstock

Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum’s Café G

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cafe-g-isabella-stuart-gardner-museumAn introductory note on the menu of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum’s Café G:

“Isabella Stuart Gardner’s love for the medieval extended to literature as well as to art, and she was particularly devoted to the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Gardner was a member of the Dante Society and collected several rare copies of the Divine Comedy, including a manuscript of the poem written within a century of the author’s death. She stored these precious books alongside a death mask of the poet in the ‘Dante Case’ in the museum’s Long Gallery. [. . .] We hope you enjoy this special menu, inspired by Inferno. It features fiery hot peppers in a variety of different forms.”    —Café G Menu (click to see full menu)

Contributed by Nancy Vickers

“Ziggy Stardust’s Reading Habits”

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ziggy-stardusts-reading-habits“Plenty of music fans could have guessed that David Bowie was a fan of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since Mr. Bowie once aspired to produce a musical based on the novel. Now we have 99 other book recommendations from the Thin White Duke…”

“Elsewhere, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Iliad and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Min‘ by Julian Jaynes. As the A.V. Club put it: ‘David Bowie has once again shown that he’s not only far richer, sexier and more fabulous than you, but probably smarter.'”    –John Williams, The New York Times, October 1st, 2013

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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