Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
In 2017, Toronto artist Nurgul Jones released the blackgaze album Upper and Lower Hell어퍼와 로어 지옥. Through soft, atmospheric industrial sounds, each track creates a dreamscape that might send the listener on a journey from “Circle 1: Limbo아지태” all the way to”Circle 9: The Traitorous배 교자.” A circle of Dante’s Inferno takes a titular spotlight on each one of the nine tracks.
Listen to and download the album on bandcamp here.
“Christopher Rooney is an artist, writer and musician. He lives in Ladner, BC. His other projects include music at soundcloud.com/desolation-sound and poetry at www.tumblr.com/blog/mondo-charisma. The book consists of haikus based on Dante’s Inferno.” –Google Books
Zone Blanche (“Black Spot” in English) is a French-Belgian series directed by Matthieu Missoffe. Two seasons are currently available on Netflix, with future seasons expected.
“The entire first season of Black Spot contains so many Dante references that any aficionado of Inferno can spot them: the deathlike forest impenetrable by sunlight; the suicide victims suspended from the trees, horribly disfigured by attacking birds; a teenage girl who cuts off her own fingers to escape a hellish coming-of-age ritual; a descent into a treacherous network of caverns to locate a missing person, assumed dead; encounters with beings who may be either alive or dead; a legendary monster called the Wendigo; a reservoir of waste guaranteed to kill what little life remains in the dying village. The careful viewer will spot yet more parallels to Dante, some of which are very subtle.
“With a vision as true as it is dark, Missoffe’s Black Spot not only recasts the evils of Dante’s Florence, but of our entire Western world.” –Contributor Jane Wineland
Contributed by Jane Wineland (University of Arkansas Ph.D. ’26)
“Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, was published in conjunction with the first major retrospective on Rauschenberg’s career since the artist’s death in 2008, this book presents the complete set of 34 drawings, and newly commissioned poetry from Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis, each reflecting on a selection of drawings and their corresponding Cantos. Young’s half of the 34 Cantos are titled “The Dark Wood” and Lewis’ are erasures of John Ciardi’s Dante’s translation, titled “Dante Comes to America: 20 January 2017: An Erasure of 17 Cantos from Ciardi’s Inferno, after Robert Rauschenberg.” [. . . ] —Poetry Society of America, (retrieved October 24, 2021)
View the poems and illustrations for Cantos II and XXIII here.
Relatedly, see the post on Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations here.
In her blog, Geraldine DeRuiter takes issue with her experience with Southwest Airlines’ seating policy, writing, “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO NOT HAVE ASSIGNED SEATING. Everyone has an “it’s me or them” mentality that extends to the entire flight. I want to sit here. . .”
“There is a special circle of hell for all of these people” [. . .] –Geraldine DeRuiter, The Everywhereist, March 8, 2017.
