Laura Chatellier, FSU ’23

“Ophidiophobia”: Eva Del Soldato and Marco Aresu on INF. 25 for “Canto Per Canto”

May 14, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

A conversation with Eva Del Soldato and Marco Aresu.

Watch or listen to the video of “Inferno 25: Ophidiophobia” here.

Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time is a collaborative initiative of the Department of Italian Studies and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU together with the Dante Society of America, conceived during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in anticipation of the seventh centennial commemoration of Dante’s death in the year 2021. Members of the Dante Society recorded conversations with friends and colleagues on their favorite cantos, reflecting on what Dante has to say to us now, in our time. All 100 cantos of the Divine Comedy will be published at a rate of two cantos per week over the course of a year, starting in September 2020.

“America in the Eighth Circle”

April 19, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Such a world, naturally, produced every manner of sin imaginable, and all these sins are carefully chronicled in Dante’s descent into the Inferno. The nine circles of the infernal city are, as Dorothy Sayers reminds us, Dante’s picture of human society in decay; the further Dante and Virgil descend, the more radically corrupt and degraded the society becomes. The pilgrims pass relatively quickly through first seven circles of hell. All the sins of appetite and violence are contained in the first half of the cantica. Then the travelers reach the Great Barrier, and here the poem slows down. Dante and Virgil plunge into the abyss of the eighth circle, which houses the fraudulent. Alas, the various sins punished here read like a cross-section of our ruling classes in Washington, New York, and Hollywood: we meet pimps and seducers, flatterers, hypocrites, and thieves, bribe-taking officials, false counsellors, and sowers of discord. They come at long last to the tenth and final ditch of the eighth circle. Here we find the liars—those who perpetrate the purest form of fraud, the one that unites all the others. Their stench is overwhelming.” [. . .] –Ben Reinhard, Crisis Magazine, September 21, 2020.

“Keeping Cool”

April 19, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“The thing is … I love air conditioning. And I hate, haaaaaaaaaaaate being hot. ‘Oh, thank you Jesus,’ were my first words upon entering our 68-degree oasis with a carload of groceries on a 90-plus degree, muggy summer day where the outside feels like a shvitz or the third ring of Dante’s Inferno. Central air conditioning is grace for me. But what if my blessing is a curse for someone else? Like, say, the rest of the planet? Air conditioning hurts the environment, quaffs energy, and hastens global warming. But is my air conditioner evil? What would Jesus do? For one thing, Jesus recognized the Jewish kosher laws. A fairly new movement in Judaism today called eco-kashrut (aka ‘eco-kosher’) expands on the ancient dietary laws to look at what’s kosher in terms of ethical living, fair trade, the ecological concerns involved in food production, consumerism, and lifestyle, including whether to air condition or not.” [. . .] –Cathleen Falsani, SOJOURNER, October, 2009.

“Into the Dark Woods”

April 17, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“This year I was drawn to Mark’s ‘certain young man’—the one who flees naked from the violence in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives (14:51-52), leaving behind his linen cloth. Scholars vehemently disagree about who this young man was. Many deduce that it’s the writer of Mark’s gospel inserting himself into the story. Others say he is reminiscent of King David fleeing from Absalom on the the Mount of Olives. Or that he foreshadows the ‘young man’ in a white robe who will meet the women at Jesus’ tomb. Whoever he was, in the midst of an encounter with violence, this “certain young man” lost what thin protection he had and fled into the night, into the selva oscura, as Dante calls it, those ‘dark woods.’ Toward what, we do not know. As the human soul matures, we are confronted with moments that force us to let go of yet another thin veil of self-delusion. The “right road,” the moral high ground, sinks into a thicket of gray.” [. . .] –Rose Marie Berger, SOJOURNERS, May, 2012.

Louis Armstrong

April 17, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Jazz critic Gary Giddins chortles as he recounts the tale, pointing out that if these American Brahmins had simply deigned to take a train south from Boston to New York City, and stepped into the Roseland Ballroom on a Thursday night, they would have experienced the American Bach, Dante, and Shakespeare all rolled into one: Louis Armstrong.

“Born to a 15-year-old who sometimes worked as a prostitute, raised in a New Orleans neighborhood so violent it was known as ‘the Battlefield,’ sent to a juvenile detention facility at 11 for firing a gun into the street—his early years would surely put him on the pipeline to prison today.

“Had that occurred, the distinctly American music that Louis Armstrong created might never have happened. The American songbook, as we know it today, simply would not exist.” [. . .] –Eboo Patel, SOJOURNERS, July, 2016.

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