Ancient Greeks and the avant-garde

[A]n archaeologist might conclude that ancient Greece was a civilization of sensuous narcissists, antiwar activists and ardent feminists that had little patience for convention and little taste for bourgeois life. It was a culture, in other words, that closely resembled some avant-garde movements in the 20th-century United States.

Another Times article. (See tip below.)

All Greek

Greek: something hard to understand. Greek: a language intricate and rich in its powers of evocation, elegant in its archaic form, viscerally expressive in its modern one. Greek: an ancient culture that seems to have influenced everyone.

From an article in the New York Times, “Artistically Speaking, It’s All Greek to Me.”

Tip: You can read the full article on the Times site by typing “mediajunkie” (without quotation marks) as both user name and password. The magic word “mediajunkie” will get you into many free news sites that require registration.

Wheels of fire

When I told him that I was teaching Dante, my friend Rob Zseleczky mentioned that Wheels of Fire, a double-album by Cream, took its title from Dante’s description of Charon the ferryman.

Sure enough—it’s in the description of Charon in Inferno 3:

che ’ntorno alli occhi avea di fiamme rote
[who around his eyes had wheels of flame]

Cream, as anyone of a certain age will remember, was the original power-trio: Eric Clapton (guitar), Jack Bruce (bass), and Ginger Baker (drums). This poetic touch was apparently provided by sometime-lyricist Peter Brown.

Thanks, Rob!

Digital Dante

Digital Dante is a terrific site, brought to you by Columbia University. Be sure to browse the images, especially the Doré illustrations.

One Dante simile

2601 students: Here’s what I’ve written for tomorrow—

Reading through today's cantos, I found myself paying more and more attention to Dante’s similes. I was most struck by the extended comparison at the beginning of Canto XXI, in which Dante describes a scene at the Arsenal at Venice to convey to his reader the reality of the “tarry mass” (17) of the fifth pouch of the Malebolge.

This simile sparks my thinking in a number of ways. Like Homer (and Virgil), Dante turns to the simile to make an unfamiliar (and, here, supernatural) reality vivid and intelligible. His simile brings this infernal scene up, not down, to earth by invoking a familiar scene from Italian life. (I’d assume that any contemporary of Dante’s in a position to read the Comedy would likely have seen the Arsenal at Venice.)

Like Homer’s most elaborate similes, Dante’s simile grows into a separate narrative moment within the poem. We’re still in hell, but it’s as if we’ve suddenly been transported to a shipyard, as we survey, camera-like, eight different scenes of labor. Notice how much extra “stuff” there is: the simile could simply read “As in the Arsenal of the Venetians, / all winter long a stew of sticky pitch / boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships / that cannot sail,” “so, not by fire but by the art of God,” and so on (7-10, 16), cutting the simile’s length by almost half.

The extended nature of this simile is even more noticeable in the Italian text: Allen Mandelbaum encloses the description of work in parentheses, but in the Italian, it’s set off by dashes as a more marked interruption. The simile really does take on a life of its own, shifting away from the image of boiling pitch (its ostensible focus) to these varied forms of human labor.

Dante may be doing something else that’s remarkable in this simile: he seems to be commenting on the dangerous way in which the extended simile takes both reader and poet away from what’s immediately present. After the simile concludes, Dante continues to stare and stare at the bubbling tar, until Virgil, his master, says “‘Take care! Take care!’” (23). Perhaps that repeated caution is a reminder to Dante (and the reader) that the simile is, in a sense, a daydream, a moment of imaginative reverie that can take over one’s consciousness. I imagine Dante here looking at the tar and, in these terrifying circumstances, beginning to think of a more congenial scene. A similar nostalgia for the ordinary aboveground world appears in a more powerful way at the beginning of Canto XXIV, with its beautiful scene of a shepherd in winter.

Such moments of poetic reverie might help to explain how it is that Dante can suddenly find himself lost at the beginning of the poem. It’s the voice of reason and conscience, his master’s voice, that makes Dante snap back to his present circumstances. Take care!

The Sopranos in hell

A really striking image of the cast of The Sopranos in a hellish setting. Please, no New Jersey jokes.

Disco inferno

A New Yorker cartoon from January 2001. The Cartoon Bank is a dangerously addictive website.

A Fine in the Times

There’s a picture of Burton Fine, my father-in-law, in today’s New York Times. He’s in the upper left corner, playing the viola.

Tip: You can read the full article on the Times site by typing “mediajunkie” (without quotation marks) as both user name and password. The magic word “mediajunkie” will get you into many free news sites that require registration.

All Day Permanent Red

My review of Christopher Logue’s All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, published in World Literature Today, can be found here. Click on English and there’s a small .pdf file available to open or save. My review is on pages 100-101.

Christopher Logue is a British poet who refashions Homer’s Iliad into stark and startling contemporary poetry:

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.
Add the receding traction of its slats
Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.
Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are raised
And many faces change to one vast face.
So, where there were so many masks,
Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.

Trip of a lifetime

2601: Here are three on-line quizzes to determine where, on Dante’s terms, you’re headed. Warning: These quizzes contain questions that some readers might find offensive. Read at your own peril:

Dante’s Inferno Test, the lengthiest and most lurid of the three.

Which Circle of Hell Are You Going To?, a quiz with a heavy dash of pop culture.

The Sin Quiz, the most amusing of the three.