Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Avati starts shooting Dante after 18 years”

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pupi-avati

“Award-winning director Pupi Avati is set to start shooting a biopic on Dante on the 700th anniversary of the ‘Supreme Poet’s death, a project he has been nurturing for 18 years.

“‘I had it all clear in my mind in 2003, but never [got] anyone to say yes. Then, 18 years later, I finally got the go ahead,’ Avati said Monday.

“The film is based on fellow great poet Boccaccio’s account of his more illustrious predecessor, and sees Giulio Pizzirani as old Dante dying in Ravenna and then Boccacio, played by Sergio Castellitto, retracing the poet’s steps back to his native Florence, meeting all the figures who helped him or hindered him in his exile.

“Young Dante is played by Alessandro Sperduti.

“Avati, whose previous credits include the two giallo masterpieces, The House with Laughing Windows (1976) and Zeder (1983), said “making the film in the Italy of today, where hierarchies of who and what counts are dictated by very different things, seems unreal. I still can’t believe it.”   —ROME, “Avati starts shooting Dante after 18 years,” ANSA, June 28, 2021 (retrieved March 6, 2024)

“Shopping for Bathing Suits Online Is Its Own Circle of Hell” (NYTimes, 2021)

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Image by Vanessa Saba for the New York Times

“Emily Ratajkowski designs her own. Kim Kardashian has hers custom-made. For pretty much everyone else, shopping for a bathing suit (online, at least) can feel a bit like walking through an endless hall of two-way mirrors: Nothing is as it appears, each of your steps is being watched, and no move brings you any closer to finding a garment that fits.

“There seem to be more options than ever. One Google search for swimwear and you’ll be bombarded with ads on every possible platform for brands like Summersalt, YouSwim, Lively and Andie — upstarts aimed at disrupting the market with wider size ranges and mix-and-match separates. [. . .]”   —Bonnie Wertheim, “Shopping for Bathing Suits Online Is Its Own Circle of Hell,” The New York Times, August 5, 2021 (accessed February 12, 2024)

“Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education,” Scott F. Crider

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pedagogy

“Dante reveals to students the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. The end of a liberal education is an experience of the Love that created both the subjects of a liberal education and the human persons in need of that education, and Dante achieves that purpose. Through truth and virtue, he becomes wise, and his wisdom sets him free.”

“Without ever addressing the point explicitly with students, I can let Dante reveal to them the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. Dante certainly imagined liberal education as constituted by the trivium and the quadrivium—the arts of word (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and those of number (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music)—as propaedeutic to the study of philosophy and theology, and he imagined poetry, in a work he wrote on the Italian language, De vulgari eloquentia, to be the liberal art combining the consummate art of language and the consummate art of number: ‘Poetry [is] a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.’ For our purposes, I will hazard a tautology and say that a liberal education liberates. That is, it frees us from error into understanding of the most significant question: How should we live?”

[. . .]

“Virgil’s guidance has been necessary for Dante, but it is not sufficient. His guidance has profound limitations that make it both helpful, given where Dante was, but needing to be surpassed, given where he is going. Imperfect pedagogy, thank goodness, can still save, just not by itself. Students need more than one teacher because of the limits of the master.”

[. . .]

“The relationship between Dante and Beatrice is a suggestive representation of the tendency in pedagogic relationships to confuse the teacher for the thing taught, and to allow one’s shared love of the material to be lost in the distracting presence of the one revealing the material. Guru-ism is a perversion of a truly saving pedagogy—a distortion of a legitimate attraction. Beauty is a salvific distraction, provided the beautiful one reminds us of that which truly saves.”    — Scott F. Crider, Public Discourse, August 21, 2021

“Dante Is the Elephant in the Room” Church Life Journal Article

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elephant-image“Anyone familiar with the Western Literary Canon knows that the list of writers whose work has been informed by Dante is practically endless. My students cannot adequately understand most books from the past—as well as many books written in our own time—without knowing Dante. As a professor, I cannot teach a course in literature without frequent discussion of Dante, even if he is not on the syllabus. Dante is the elephant in the room.”

[. . .]

“It is safe to conclude that without Dante, these few works of fiction and poetry (along with many others) written over the past seven centuries would not exist—certainly not in the ingenious, artful forms they exist in currently. Though it may be impossible to state with any accuracy or completeness the enormous debt art and literature of the past and present owes to Dante, it is necessary to try.”    –Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Church Life Journal 

Read the article here.

 

Danielius Sodeika “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life…”

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danielius-sodeika

“Artworks of Danielius Sodeika are self-purposed. He doesn‘t make them for himself nor others. They appear to be more like questions leaning towards, like the way to check up if the impulse of the vector has continuance.”

“Small-scale sculptural objects from wood, metal, household elements or findings. With their form they remind religious, cultural or archetypal symbols. Storyline is more than in the objects themselves, but also in the spaces between – as signs of invisible power – that tightens chain and breaks the log. Probably it is artist’s way to speak about finality and inevitable entropy – because when it comes – it dominates over all demolishes all other meanings.”

Explore Danielius Sodeika’s exhibit here.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”    -Dante Alighieri

 

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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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