“The Soloist is a buddy movie with none of the usual grace notes of the genre, and the backdrop–a skid row seemingly conjured by Dante where legions of homeless lead a feral existence –is part of a Los Angeles few ever see. In his films Mr. Wright has displayed a remarkable visual facility, and The Soloist is no exception. Instead of hills and canyons, the city is rendered in soaring concrete, brutal poverty, scary dark nights and hard sunlight.” [. . .] –David Carr, The New York Times, April 15, 2009
Dante On the Bus: Piazza San Marco, Florence, Italy
Photo by Arielle Saiber, 2009
“A Mexican Tradition Runs on Pageantry and Faith”
“The Passion Play in Iztapalapa, Mexico, has a cast of thousands. The 50 or so main parts tend to remain within local families… The Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward the play has fluctuated over the years. In the past, there were complaints that the script, which draws not only on the Bible but also on Dante’s Divine Comedy, deviated too much from sacred texts.” [. . .] –Larry Rohter, The New York Times, April 11, 2009
Review of Susan Gubar, “Judas: A Biography” (2009)
“In Judas: A Biography, Susan Gubar has amassed a long, grim and often nauseating catalog of the ways in which the Christian imagination has vented its wrath on the disciple who betrayed his master. . . The author of the medieval Golden Legend imagined Judas’s early life, which included killing his father and marrying his mother; an Arabic legend conjured an infant Judas obsessively biting himself. Medieval artists portrayed him as a slavering brute, deploying a racist arsenal of Jewish and African stereotypes to contrast him with the lily-white Jesus. No wonder that Dante placed Judas at the very bottom of the Inferno, where he is gnawed by Satan: ‘his head within and outside flails his legs.'” [. . .] –Adam Kirsch, The New York Times, April 3, 2009
“Vita Nuova” and “Inferno”: a Compact Operating System for Building Cross-Platform Distributed Systems
“People often ask where the names Plan 9, Inferno, and Vita Nuova originated.
Allegedly, Rob Pike was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy when the Computing Science Research Group at Bell Labs was working on Inferno. Inferno is named after the first book of the Divine Comedy, as are many of its components, including Dis, Styx and Limbo.
The company name Vita Nuova continues the association with Dante: his first work, a book of poetry about his childhood sweetheart Beatrice, was called La Vita Nuova. The literal translation of Vita Nuova is ‘New Life,’ which in the circumstances is surprisingly prophetic.
Plan 9 is named after the famous Ed Wood movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. There are no other connections except that the striking artwork for the products is a retro, 60s SciFi image modeled on the Plan 9 movie poster.’ —Vita Nuova
Contributed by Kavi Montanaro
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