“. . .The Gift of Thanks is a scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, Ms. Visser writes, one that is more complicated and more vital than we think. Ms. Visser acknowledges that simple politeness is the grease that keeps society running and, conversely, how much hostility can build up among people when words like ‘thanks’ are not spoken.
In Dante’s Inferno, she observes, ‘at the bottommost circle of hell, the ungrateful are punished by being eternally frozen in the postures of deference they had failed to perform during their lifetimes: trapped rigid in enveloping ice, they stand erect or upside down, lie prone, or bow face to feet.’
In The Gift of Thanks, however, Ms. Visser is most interested in the kind of gratitude that is not compulsory or self-interested. She writes about the humility required to be genuinely grateful, and the essential ability to climb out of one’s own head.” [. . .] –Dwight Garner, The New York Times, November 17, 2009
“New Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange”
“For most of the 217 years since its founding under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange was the high temple of American capitalism. Behind its Greco-Roman facade, traders raised a Dante-esque din in their pursuit of the almighty dollar. Good times or bad, the daily melee on the cavernous trading floor made the Big Board the greatest marketplace for stocks in the world.” [. . .] –Graham Bowley, The New York Times, October 14, 2009
“The Devil Wears Crocs”
“With modern presidencies, we have to watch the poignant tableau of such leaders realizing that they have squandered their chance for greatness even as they suffer the indignity of rejection by those who once sought their blessing.
These painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books. . .
The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, ‘Speech-less,’ is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn’t socialism–‘We got to make this understandable for the average cat,’ the president tells his speechwriters–W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that’s hard to get out of your head.)
‘The guy is a worm,’ Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer about Latimer, adding: ‘He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn’t read The Inferno. The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.'” [. . .] –Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, September 26, 2009
Robert Olen Butler, Hell (2009)
“The fresh hell described by Robert Olen Butler’s new novel is crammed with random celebrities. . . Patrolled by Satan’s minions (among them, two of the Bee Gees) dressed in powder-blue jumpsuits, it’s filled with bookstores that optimistically open with new owners at every sunrise — only to go out of business by the end of each day. If the books they can’t sell in hell are maddeningly uneven, ever bouncing between passable wit and sophomoric giggles. Mr. Butler’s slapdash Hell deserves shelf space there. . .
“Somehow, in the course of Mr. Butler’s fever dream of a plot, Hell also includes Dante’s Beatrice, now a film noir dame contending with Humphrey Bogart, who pines for Lauren Bacall; a chorus of singing cockroaches enamored of the phrase ‘poopy butt’; Michael Jackson, doing a woefully inadequate job of singing Wagner and consigned to ‘Everland, the densely populated molester estate on the edge of the city’; Bobby Fischer, playing chess with a computer from Hadassah; Jerry Seinfeld, whose jokes all bomb; and Celine Dion, who just won’t quit singing that damn ‘Titanic’ song.” [. . .] –Janet Maslin, The New York Times, September 6, 2009
Remembering Michael Mazur’s Illustrations of the Inferno
“Michael Mazur, a relentlessly inventive printmaker, painter and sculptor whose work encompassed social documentation, narrative and landscape while moving back and forth between figuration and abstraction, died on Aug. 18 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73 and lived in Cambridge and Provincetown, Mass. [. . .]
“While attending Amherst College he studied with the printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, who was teaching at Smith College. After taking a year off to study in Italy, where his lifelong fascination with Dante began, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. [. . .]
“After seeing an exhibition of Degas monotypes at the Fogg Museum in 1968, he began exploring that medium, most notably in the monumental Wakeby landscapes of 1983, depicting Wakeby Lake on Cape Cod, and in a series of illustrations for Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, published in 1994.” [. . .] –William Grimes, The New York Times, August 29, 2009
Contributed by Richard Lindemann (2006)
See also the 2020 exhibit of Mazur’s work at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Mass.
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