“This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.” [in reference to a large garbage dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia] [. . .] –Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, January 14, 2008
Guy Raffa, “Danteworlds” (2007)
“It’s not a video game and it’s not CliffsNotes–Danteworlds is ‘an integrated multimedia journey’ through Dante’s Divine Comedy. Situated somewhere in cyberspace between EverQuest and Solitaire, it’s a terrific way to lose a month’s worth of lunchtime in a cubicle. Most literary texts don’t lend themselves to the ‘integrated multimedia’ approach, which often just whisks readers off the page into biographical or literary analysis land and strands them there. But, in the case of The Divine Comedy, and perhaps other epic poetry–the Odyssey comes to mind–the approach is a perfect marriage of medium and message, launching the reader right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension.” [. . .] –Vicky Raab, The New Yorker, January 9, 2009
Richard Wilbur, “Terza Rima”
Found at The New Yorker.
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)
“Aftermath of a Revolt: Myanmar’s Lost Year”
“In one sense, things have improved in recent years. Once a scene from Dante’s hell–the few outsiders who visited sometimes described thousands upon thousands of half-naked men, women and children clawing into the rock in search of jade–the mining is now a largely mechanical process executed by industrial backhoes and dump trucks. A few mines still employ human diggers, and earlier this year one such site collapsed, killing 20.” [. . .] —Daniel Pepper, The New York Times, October 4, 2008
Andrew Davidson, “The Gargoyle” (2008)
“Seeing the angel wings on Marianne’s bare back, the burn victim starts to melt. He also likes Marianne’s captivating conversational style. (‘For now, may I tell you a story about a dragon?’) He wonders if, how and why she is crazy. He finds a reassuring internal consistency to the string of lovelorn fairy tales she tells him, and to the 14th-century biography she claims is her own. He finds it fitting that she wants to take a badly burned man on a guided tour of Dante’s circles of hell. . . Although The Gargoyle is defiantly uncategorizable, Doubleday is hard at work taming it. (Suggested question for book club group discussions: ‘What sort of tailor-made suffering might Dante have invented for you?’).” –Janet Maslin, The New York Times, July 31, 2008
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