Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“Today I don my Debbie Downer hat to discuss the circles of Writing Hell. Not surprising, the circle is an apt descriptor of the writing process because our thoughts go ’round and ’round…and ’round some more. The bad news: There is no escape for writers. The good news: There is no escape for writers.” — L.Z. Marie, L.Z. Marie, June 13, 2015
Read the full article here.
“In the years following my melanoma removal, I sometimes found myself without health insurance. This was before the ACA allowed kids to stay on their parent’s insurance until they turned twenty-six and my post-college temp job didn’t offer health benefits.
“When I did finally get a job that offered insurance, I had to pay twice as much as my peers because of my cancer history — and if it had been higher than stage II, they wouldn’t have covered me at all.
“I was appalled because I had been cancer-free for ten years at that point and I was otherwise very healthy. But they’re no dummies. I’m pretty sure they knew the cancer would come back before it ever would have crossed my mind and they weren’t about to put money on a horse they knew wouldn’t win.” — Lanie Brewster Quinn, Stupid Cancer Blog, May 14, 2017
Read more of the article here.
“In the story Inferno from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, there were nine circles of Hell – nine phases of Hell that Dante must pass through, each worse than the last. In the modern day, most people are not as afraid of ‘sinning’ as people were back in the day of Dante. This world has a great mix of faiths and degrees of lacking one. So, ‘sinning’ in the old way of describing actions isn’t really as relevant anymore. Therefore, I believe a renaming of the Nine Rings of Hell is in order so that people of the modern day can get more of a grasp on the terror that Dante was trying to get across with Inferno.
[. . .]
“3. Too Many Stops in Your Music
Whether it be those few minutes where every radio station is on commercial or where the data is too slow to stream music, there are times when the music just isn’t playing. This is justifiably maddening because the only real reason this should happen is that ‘American Pie’ by Don McLean just came true and the music died. This circle of Hell is populated by radios that play only one line of a random song for every 24 hours of commercials or speakers that only play stints of skipping music between days of watching the ‘Loading’ or ‘Buffering’ icons pin.” — Ty Owens, “The 9 Circles of Modern Hell,” The Odyssey Online (July 18, 2016)
Contributed by Jessica Brewer (University of Kansas, 2019)
On Waiting For Doom, hosts Mike and Paul discuss “everyone’s favorite” superhero team, the Doom Patrol. In episode 107,”As In One of the Circles of Hell,” Mike and Paul talk about the Doom Patrol story that references the Inferno, “Tenth Circle.”
“We take our first nervous steps into an era we’ve never covered before…save for giving the entire run a brief recap back in Episode 7 (February 2015) because SOMEONE at the time refused to buy/read it…anyway, what was I saying? Oh. Yes. This week we take a look at the ‘Tenth Circle’ story from JLA (2004) issues 94 through 99, by John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Jerry Ordway, Tom Orzechowski and David Baron!” [. . .] —Waiting For Doom, Podbean, October 5, 2017.
You can listen to this episode and more from Waiting For Doom on Podbean, and Apple Podcasts.
To keep up with all things Doom Patrol and see all the visuals from WFD’s episode, check out MyGreatestAdventure80 on Blogspot.
Octobriana is a public domain Russian super-heroine, who first appeared in a comic strip in 1971. In the new Octobriana book, titled Octobriana: The Exotic Time Domina, there is a comic spoof of Dante’s Inferno titled “The Tenth Circle of Hell.”
In his review for Kult Creations, John A. Short writes:
“Firstly we have reprints of Reima’s two rare, out-of-print Octo strips from the early nineties… ‘Mission in the North’ (with artist Petri Tolppanen) and ‘The Tenth Circle of Hell’ (with artist Timo Niemi.) It is ‘The Tenth Circle of Hell’ that is the backbone of this book, since it runs to 37 pages and is by far the longest strip in the collection. The story sees the Spirit of the October Revolution flying her time travelling Wonder Machine to Hell to take on everyone from Cerberus, Pluto (the God not the dog), Medusa, the Devil and her own evil sister (Decabriana!) This spoof of Dante’s Divine Comedy has some great humour and cracking action all in artist Niemi’s macabre woodcut-style.” [. . .] –John A. Short, Kult Creations, October 9, 2015.
In addition to “Mission in the North” and “The Tenth Circle of Hell”, the new Octobriana book includes the comic strips “Origins”, “Wasted Time”, and “From Cuba with Love.”
This book was written and illustrated by Reima Mäkinen, Petri Tolppanen, Timo Niemi, Vesa Vitikainen and Sauli Jokinen.
You can pick up a copy of Octobriana: The Exotica Time Domina online at Turun Sarjakuvakauppa for 12,00 €.
“Yes, I know—Dante only discovered nine circles of Hell. That’s because the heathens at Amoretti had yet to practice their foul dark arts. What, you may ask, is their horrible crime? People have been befouling beer with innocent fruit for quite a while. That is, sadly, most true. And have no fear, the Tenth Circle has plenty of room for the likes of the miscreants at Corona and Blue Moon. Don’t be fooled, though, what Amoretti is doing takes the sin of fruiting the beer to whole new level—they want to industrialize it!
“Somehow—and this is a complaint I’ll certainly address—the keepers of the GABF allowed Amoretti to set up a booth of their vile wares to temp and seduce unwary beer drinkers. Right there—in the middle of the Meet the Brewer section, no less—20 some odd evil poisons threatened—what? Oh—fruit extracts. Did you hear that? Fruit extracts! The horror…” [. . .] –Jonathan Berohn, Don’t Fruit The Beer, 2016-2018.
You can read the full post here, and you can check out more of Berohn’s writing here.
You can check out Amoretti’s products on their site.
“My ‘duh!’ advice to every garbage disposal owner? Keep small metal objects FAR FAR AWAY from your sink. And, of course, always double check your garbage disposal before running it.With a fine tooth comb and a magnifying glass. ALWAYS.
“It took Stephen over an hour to pry Abe loose using a flashlight and a variety of tools. He had to detach the garbage disposal from the sink because the penny was lodged standing up against the inner wall of the garbage disposal and was nearly impossible to reach.
“Once he finally got it out, he tossed the penny to me and said, ‘I think Dante forgot to include a tenth circle of Hell for people who drop tiny metal objects into garbage disposals.'” [. . .] –Caroline Meyers, Ye Olde Sanwich Shoppe, May 2, 2011.
“Sometimes revenge is best served in literature. The poet Dante Alighieri, powerless against the forces that had exiled him from his native Florence, populated his vision of hell with proxies for his enemies. The resulting epic poem has become a masterwork in Italian literature. If only politics were so literate today!
[…]
“In that vein, here’s my own vision of Subscription Hell, reserved for those businesses that abuse the trust of their customers in increasingly despicable ways.
“Dante’s nine circles were: Limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. My vision has similar circles, populated by businesses that have misled or disappointed their subscribers, whether through intention or accident.” — Anne Janzer, “Nine Circles of Subscription Hell,” on annejanzer.com (March 15, 2016)
Robert Brinkerhoff, Professor of Illustration and Dean of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), has embarked on what he calls “an ambitious undertaking, to say the least“: he proposes to illustrate the Comedy in 100 canto-by-canto drawings. The Inferno illustrations will be completed in December 2017, with Purgatorio and Paradiso projected for a future date. In January 2017, he began blogging the Inferno illustrations on his personal blog Brinkerhoff Brimmeth Over.
Of the project, he writes, “Most of us read L’Inferno in high school or freshman lit classes in college, and its pulpy, phantasmal imagery appeals universally to youthful sensibilities. I last encountered L’Inferno (sans the rest of the poem) at age 19, my mind mired in newfound pleasures of freely available sex and beer and (finally, after 12 years of public school in which art class was shoved to the periphery) full-time dedication to art making. But in middle age I suspect the poem resonates more profoundly as it mirrors the preoccupations of people (like myself) whose paths in life are pondered with affection, regret, lost love, resentment and a desire to clarify, once and for all, the rest of the journey. Pick up Dante at age 50 and it will be a different literary experience. Spend many hours translating and drawing its tercets of terza rima and you’ll realize how much you have in common with a 14th century poet, despite the hundreds of years and linguistic traditions that separate you.” — Robert Brinkerhoff, “Introduction to Inferno: Una Selva Oscura,” Brinkerhoff Brimmeth Over, January 18, 2017
See his Divine Comedy images and follow the updates on his blog.
“Welcome to Daily Dante, a blogging adventure that follows the pilgrim Dante through his journey to hell and back, as we savor the poet Dante’s masterpiece The Divine Comedy.
“Daily Dante is a collaborative blog, written by a motley band of Dantophiles living in the Princeton, NJ area. We began during Lent of 2010, when we adopted blogging as a Lenten discipline: a canto a day (excepting Sundays, which technically do not count as Lent), which conveniently allowed us to finish more or less just before Easter. We have completed Inferno, and Purgatorio, and finished blogging through Paradiso during Lent 2012.” — homepage of Daily Dante: Dante as Lenten Spiritual Discipline
