“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
“In Italy’s Dugout, Piazza Embraces a New Role”
“Piazza is one of four American coaches on the staff with varying levels of the Italian language at their disposal. As they sat in the dugout before the game, they spoke to one another in English, with one even floating a ‘Godfather’ reference in the spring breeze. Once the game started, they showed some genuine command of the language of Dante, Calvino and Boccaccio, particularly when they made references to pitches they nicknamed il cambi (the changeup) and il slider (well, the slider).” [. . .] –Joshua Robinson, The New York Times, February 27, 2009
“On Poetry: The Great(ness) Game”
“STILL, however blurry ‘greatness’ may be, it’s clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its potential loss since at least 1983. That’s the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the United States poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, appeared in The Kenyon Review bearing the title ‘Poetry and Ambition.’ Hall got right to the point: ‘It seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition–a modesty, alas, genuine. . . if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.’ What poets should be trying to do, according to Hall, was ‘to make words that live forever’ and ‘to be as good as Dante.’ They probably would fail, of course, but even so, ‘the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.’ Pretty strong stuff–and one wonders how many plays Shakespeare would have managed to write had he subjected every line to the merciless scrutiny Hall recommends.” [. . .] –David Orr, The New York Times, February 19, 2009
Philip K. Dick, The Owl in Daylight (1982)
“Philip K. Dick’s last wife has reworked the novel he was working on when he died in 1982 and is publishing the book herself, The Guardian reported. Tessa Dick, the fifth wife of the science-fiction legend, told Self-Publishing Review, an online magazine (selfpublishingreview.com), that her version of The Owl in Daylight seeks to express ‘the spirit’ of the proposed book, about which little is known. Ms. Dick said that a letter from her husband to his editor and agent revealed plans to ‘have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality,’ and added: ‘The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park.’ The letter also mentioned Dante’s Inferno and the Faust legend, she said.” –Ben Sisario, The New York Times, February 16, 2009
See also: “The Owl in Daylight” Wikipedia page.
“Smoking Ban Hits Home. Truly.”
“BELMONT, Calif. — During her 50 years of smoking, Edith Frederickson says, she has lit up in restaurants and bars, airplanes and trains, and indoors and out, all as part of a two-pack-a-day habit that she regrets not a bit. But as of two weeks ago, Ms. Frederickson can no longer smoke in the one place she loves the most: her home. . .
And that the ban should have originated in her very building — a sleepy government-subsidized retirement complex called Bonnie Brae Terrace — is even more galling. Indeed, according to city officials, a driving force behind the passage of the law was a group of retirees from the complex who lobbied the city to stop secondhand smoke from drifting into their apartments from the neighbors’ places. . .
At a local level, the debate over the law has divided the residents of the Bonnie Brae into two camps, with the likes of Ms. Frederickson, a hardy German emigre, on one side, and Ray Goodrich, a slim 84-year-old with a pulmonary disease and a lifelong allergy problem, on the other. . .
‘I came around the corner, and there was just a giant puff of black smoke, and I knew I wasn’t going to last five seconds in that,’ Mr. Goodrich said. ‘It was like Dante’s inferno up there.'” [. . .] –Jesse McKinley, The New York Times, January 26, 2009
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