Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

  • Submit a Citing
  • Map
  • Links
  • Bibliography
  • User’s Guide
  • Teaching Resources
  • About

Malbolge: an Esoteric Programming Language

April 5, 2014 By Gretchen Williams '14

malbolge-programming-language“Malbolge, invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, is an esoteric programming language designed to be as difficult to program in as possible. The first ‘Hello, world!’ program written in it was produced by a Lisp program using a local beam search of the space of all possible programs. It is modeled as a virtual machine based on ternary digits.” [. . .]

“The language is named after ‘Malebolge,’ the eighth level of hell in Dante’s Inferno, which is reserved for perpetrators of fraud. The actual spelling ‘Malbolge’ is also used for the sixth hell in the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game.”    —Wikipedia

Categories: Odds & Ends
Tagged with: 1998, Computers, Inferno, Language, Malebolge

Alberto Manguel, “Thoughts That Can’t Be Spoken” (2014)

March 7, 2014 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Alberto-Manguel-Thoughts-Spoken-2014

“[ . . . ] A blood clot in one of the arteries that feeds my brain had blocked for a few minutes the passage of oxygen. As a consequence, some of my brain’s neural passages were cut off and died, presumably ones dedicated to transmitting electric impulses that turn words conceived into words spoken. Unable to go from the act of thinking to its expression, I felt as if I were groping in the dark for something that crumbled at the touch, preventing my thought from forming itself in a sentence, as if its shape (to carry on with my image) had been demagnetized and was no longer capable of attracting the words supposed to define it.

“This left me with a question: What is this thought that has not yet achieved its verbal state of maturity? This, I suppose, is what Dante meant when he wrote that ‘my mind was struck / by lightning bringing me what it wished’ — the desired thought not yet expressed in words.”  –Alberto Manguel, “Thoughts That Can’t Be Spoken,” The New York Times, March 7, 2014

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2014, Cognition, Journalism, Language, Memoirs, Memory, Speech

Ecstatic Alphabets, MOMA (2012)

May 4, 2012 By Professor Arielle Saiber

ecstatic-alphabets-moma-2012

“In a drawing from 1966, ‘Heaps of Language,’ Robert Smithson assembled a pyramid of words about words: ‘Language’ at the apex, supported by ‘phraseology speech,’ ‘tongue lingo vernacular,’ and on down through a base of synonyms. The playful exhibition ‘Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language,’ opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, borrows Smithson’s title and runs wild with his vision of words as materials. . .
One could spend a long time here, listening to poets and staring at Bruce Nauman’s hypnotic flashing neon piece ‘Raw War.’ But that’s all prologue; the show begins, in earnest, with a short printed text by Sharon Hayes — one of four woven through the galleries and installed so close to the floor that you have to crouch down to read them. In these paragraphs Ms. Hayes puts herself forth as Virgil to the viewer’s Dante, though she also assumes the roles of spurned lover, diarist and political agitator.” [. . .]    –Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times, May 3, 2012

Categories: Image Mosaic, Performing Arts, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2012, Language, MOMA, New York City, Theater

Loreena McKennitt, “Dante’s Prayer” (Book of Secrets, 1997)

September 11, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

loreena-mckennitt-dantes-prayer-book-of-secrets-1997.jpg
When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone
I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars
Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and the fire
Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars
Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We’ll rise above these earthly cares
Please remember me

(from AZ Lyrics)

Categories: Music
Tagged with: 1997, Celtic, Dark Wood, Language, New Age

The Wire

March 21, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

the-wire

“…the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels went so far as to suggest that the beauty and difficulty of watching “The Wire” in English — the multifarious 21st-century English of Baltimore detectives and drug dealers — compares with that of reading Dante in 14th-century Italian.” [. . .]    –Wyatt Mason, The New York Times, March 15, 2010

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2010, Language, Television

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Categories

  • Consumer Goods (194)
  • Digital Media (126)
  • Dining & Leisure (107)
  • Music (190)
  • Odds & Ends (91)
  • Performing Arts (361)
  • Places (132)
  • Visual Art & Architecture (416)
  • Written Word (845)

Random Post

  • The 10th Circle

Frequent Tags

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 700th anniversary Abandon All Hope America American Politics Art Artists Beatrice Blogs Books California Circles of Hell Comics Dark Wood Divine Comedy England Fiction Films Florence France Games Gates of Hell Hell History Humor Illustrations Inferno Internet Italian Italy Journalism Journeys Literary Criticism Literature Love Music New York City Non-Fiction Novels Paintings Paolo and Francesca Paradise Paradiso Performance Art Poetry Politics Purgatorio Purgatory Religion Restaurants Reviews Rock Science Fiction Sculptures Social Media Technology Television Tenth Circle Theater Translations United Kingdom United States Universities Video Games Virgil

ALL TAGS »

Image Mosaic

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

Creative

 





© 2006-2023 Dante Today
research.bowdoin.edu