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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
 I found a paper by Otfried Lieberknecht describing Dante's encounter with Mohammed in the eighth circle of Hell, with reference to the idea that Dante borrowed the idea for his Commedia from the Islamic tradition of Kitab al-Miraj. It is called "A Medieval Christian View of Islam: Dante's Encounter
with Mohammed in Inferno XXVIII". Seems like it will be a very useful resource in approaching Pamuk's The New Life.
 Also: Jews and Muslims in Dante's Vision, by Jesper Hede, Aarhus University, Denmark.
posted morning of May 28th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Sylvia and I saw Prince Caspian tonight -- we enjoyed it and I would recommend it to people who are fans of the books. I don't think I'd recommend it as a movie to somebody who is not predisposed to like it; I guess my reaction to it was a little bit like Ebert's reaction to the latest Indiana Jones movie.  Good things: the talking animals, great; Trumpkin, great; the beautiful scenery and handsome actors were candy for my eyes. The camera work in the opening sequence was really startlingly good. Not so good: There wasn't really anything to distinguish this movie as a different film from the previous one -- where the two books are quite distinct from one another. A lot of the battle footage in particular, which made up a huge proporiton of the film, seemed like it could easily just have been lifted out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Sylvia had a good time identifying the differences between the movie and the book, which I guess means the movie was faithful enough to the book, for them to stand out.
posted evening of May 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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 So my understanding of "allegory" is kind of vague, and I think mostly of examples of allegory rather than of a definition. So e.g. A White Bear was talking about The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wizard of Oz as examples of allegory, and I thought Sure -- ok, these stories tell about the main character being transported into an imaginary parallel reality where human character traits are cartoonishly represented by marvelous creatures, and learning/growing in the course of the experience. That matches up pretty well to my memory of learning the term "allegory" in high school English class.
So here's what I'm wondering about the Commedia: It fits that loose definition pretty well. But something is very different about it. In those books the lecturing about human virtue that is going on is beneath the surface, in the Commedia it is front and center. In those books the "main thing" is the story line and the character development of the main character, while the pedagogy is a side effect; in the Commedia the pedagogy is very much front and center, there hardly is a plot besides as much as there needs to be to keep the book moving. Is this a distinction between modern and classical allegory? Or just between these particular books? The pedagogy in The Phantom Tollbooth strikes me as much more effective than in the Inferno, but then I am not a 14th-C. Catholic.
posted afternoon of May 25th, 2008: Respond
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I've been looking through The Portable Dante -- I must admit I'm kind of bogging down in Inferno, reading it is feeling more like a chore than a pleasure. So I'm rethinking the idea of reading the full Commedia -- I prefer reading for pleasure. I was trying to compose a post about what in Dante is putting me off -- it is something to do with the difference between allegory and pedagogy, and Inferno having too much of the latter and too little of the former, but I'm not sure enough of myself writing about 
literary technique to phrase this properly.
Dante's sonnets are nice. I don't think I've read any of them before except "To Guido Cavalcante", which I've seen anthologized in several places. But the niceness of them is more to do with the imagery than with the narrative content, which seems pretty cloying to me. This line from De Vulgari Eloquentia (Book I § 2) made me laugh hard, FWIW: ...nam eorum que sunt omnium soli homini datum est loqui, cum solum sibi necessarium fuerit.
Non angelis, non inferioribus animalibus necessarium fuit loqui, sed nequicquam datum fuisset eis: quod nempe facere natura aborret....To man alone of all existing beings was speech given, because to him alone was it necessary. Speech was not necessary for the angels or for the lower animals, but would have been given to them in vain, which nature, as we know, shrinks from doing. I did a couple of double-takes going back and trying to figure out what "angels" is doing in that second sentence. Still not sure, but it makes for a lovely comic effect.
posted morning of May 25th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
posted evening of May 16th, 2008: 1 response
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
At Edge of the American West, there is a fun thread about anticipating new books by your favorite authors. There was no criterion really specified for how to choose the authors you list; here is what I used: an author all or most of whose back catalog I have read*, and if I read about a new book of whose being published, I would run out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Most books I've bought in my life have been used; buying just-published books is a pretty new experience. I think this is a complete list of the books that I've bought on the day of their publication: Mason & Dixon, The Keep, Against the Day, Other Colors. (And come to think of it, I've pre-ordered a couple of books from Amazon or similar, so received them at the time of their publication. So probably should add to the list Monk's Music, and Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk which I await anxiously, and the two volumes so far of Moomin comics.)
 *Except Saramago, I've only read two of his books.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
It occurs to me that I ought to read the rest of the Divine Comedy when I finish the Inferno, then read La Vita Nuova, and then I would probably have enough background to understand and like The New Life. Who knows, maybe I'll do it. I wonder if Dante's other works are available in reputable translations?
Update: Hmm, well seems like given that I like the terza rima, the Dorothy Sayers translation may be the only way to go for Purgatory and Paradise. All the other translations appear to be in prose or blank verse. ...Except Lawrence Binyon, which also has rhyme. Guess I will go to a bookstore and look at some of them side by side.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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"Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!"
Plutus began in a gutteral, clicking voice.
The courteous sage who knew all reassured me: "Don't let fear harm you; whatever power he has
Cannot prevent us climbing down this rock.
It seems to me like that "Pape Satàn, aleppe!" line was the first thing I ever knew from the Inferno. I think Eliot quotes it somewhere, probably in The Waste Land, and that my researching his quote in high school was the first thing that ever brought Dante to my attention. Could be misremembering though. It baffles and delights me how Dante, a pious Christian, can sprinkle pagan deities and ideologies throughout his afterlife. He basically has to do it, because all his literary reference points are pre-Christian; I like that he does not seem embarrassed about it.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
Reading the Inferno today and I was having a little trouble with figuring out what it should sound like. So I took the obvious path and started reading aloud. And what a revelation! I think I am going to read this whole book aloud -- the sound is lovely and I'm understanding it better. I think I "get" terza rima now, the way it leads you through the canto; Pinsky's introduction was helpful in this regard, but what really made it concrete was to listen to the reading. My sense of reading poetry aloud has been heavily influenced by Heany's reading (or "declamation"?) of Beowulf, which I've been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks.
Try reading this aloud:
"My son," said the gentle master, "here are joined
The souls of all who die in the wrath of God,
From every country, all of them eager to find Their way across the water -- for the goad
Of Divine Justice spurs them so, their fear
Is transmuted to desire. Souls who are good Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means." Then, the earth of that grim shore Began to shake: so violently, I shudder
And sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up
From the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter My senses -- and so I fell, as though seized by sleep. -- See how the meter leads you on through the passage. I'm finding it impossible to stop reading in the middle of a canto.
posted evening of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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I've been thinking about doing a "top 100 books" post, where the criterion for inclusion would be "the hundred books that I would recommend for you to read, in the order that they come to mind, and that I'm able to write a paragraph supporting why I think you should read them." This seems to me like a better paradigm than the traditional "top 100" list where the author(s) of the list are asserting that their judgement is a good guide to objective reality. So, not sure if or when I'll actually get to it but the thought has been going through my head. It will probably take a few weeks of working on it once I actually start, anyway. I may decide to make a birthday project of it, depending on what my weekend looks like.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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