May 5, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 28, or Unseamly Punishments By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, Canto XXVIII We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: Mohammed torn asunder. Canto 28 opens with a very self-conscious address by Dante. He tells the reader that even if his writing weren’t constrained by the dictates of meter and form, he still would’ve had trouble describing the following scene. But he had no idea what he was talking about: canto 28 is marvelous and harrowing. Canto 28 is perfect. He begins by listing famous battlefields—if all the mangled bodies and limbs and guts from all these vicious wars were combined, he says, they would pale in comparison to the ninth pit of hell. The first thing he sees here is a man “cleft from the chin right down to where men fart.” What’s remarkable about this line is not that a poet as great as Dante would use the word fart—although, let’s face it, that is sort of funny—but that it’s almost identical to a line that Shakespeare would write many centuries later, in Macbeth: “unseamed … from the nave to th’ chops.” Our unseamed sinner—with his entrails and “loathsome” “shit” sack torn asunder—is Mohammed, who tells Dante that this pit is reserved for those who “sowed scandal and schism.” The Hollanders point out that Dante must therefore have seen the prophet not as the founder of a new religion, but as the catalyst for the schism that would branch off from Christianity and become Islam. Mohammed explains how punishment works around here. He and his fellow mangled sinners eventually find that their injuries have healed—but once they’re all closed up, they’re mangled yet again by a demon. The punishment is not simply about pain and suffering, to say nothing of the inconvenience of having to carry your colon in your hands; the indignity of being mangled is equally important. Mohammed believes, for some reason, that Dante and Virgil are dead and simply taking a tour of hell before being punished. Clearly, Mohammed hasn’t quite grasped the way hell works. Read More
May 1, 2014 Arts & Culture I Did Not Approve This Message By Evan Kindley David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image. In 2010, just under two years after David Foster Wallace’s death, the journalist David Lipsky published Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, a memoir of transcripts from an interview he’d conducted with Wallace in 1996 for Rolling Stone. The book was well reviewed—it made the Times best-seller list—and late last year it was announced that it would become a film starring Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky and Jason Segel as Wallace. The End of the Tour is already in postproduction and slated for release in late 2014, but last week, the Wallace Literary Trust issued a public statement making it “clear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support” the film: “There is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage.” I was struck by similarities between this situation and the case of James Joyce and Samuel Roth, which began in 1926. In his recent book Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, the scholar Robert Spoo devotes two chapters to Joyce’s desperate attempts to defend his intellectual property against Roth, an infamous American “booklegger” who reprinted the entire text of Ulysses, as well as large portions of Finnegans Wake, without permission. Roth’s actions, like those of the filmmakers of The End of the Tour, were not illegal: Joyce didn’t possess the U.S. copyright on his works, which were originally published in Europe and—after a brief window during which he could have established copyright by securing American publication—fell immediately into the U.S. public domain. Read More
May 1, 2014 Arts & Culture A Field Guide to the Ass-End of Hell By Dave Tompkins On reading Peter Matthiessen in the Everglades. I first encountered Peter Matthiessen in a hurricane, with the roof-flown certainty that we’d never meet again. Just passing through, the memory blurs at 135 mph. I was in the Bahamas reading Killing Mister Watson, sweating out a Category 4, trying to concern myself with an Everglades outlaw who produced excellent cane syrup and, in the wake of his murder, a bunch of conflicting yarn-burners. I only made it through the beginning, apparently no further than E. J. Watson himself, ventilated by thirty-three neighborly slugs upon stepping off his boat and into his own lore. This just after the hurricane of 1910 had wasted Chokoloskee. Announced by a comet, the storm upchucked the marl, catapulted Watson’s infant son through the mangroves, and, as Matthiessen had it, “blew the color right out of the world.” My hurricane merely blew the color out of the TV. With an earful of low-pressure williwaw, I had problems getting all those Watson thoughts inside my head, preparing to duck shard as the windows bowed, wondering if the author’s next word would be my last. Kind of a morbid, if not meteorologic, approach to one’s literature, imagining the final line that accompanies you and your velocity into the whateverafter, joining LeQuinn Bass (last words: “Well, shit”), the Owl Man of Deep Wood (“Finish it”), Belle Starr (a screech—she was shot in the back, off her horse), and whomever else Bloody Watson managed to ether before it was all said and blown away. The last thing you’d want to read should be the first. Read More
April 30, 2014 Arts & Culture On Epitaphic Fictions: Primo Levi By Daniel Bosch The final entry in our three-part series on writers’ epitaphs. Read yesterday’s installment here, and Monday’s here. Primo Levi’s grave, in Turin. The poet and memoirist Primo Levi was buried in Turin in 1987. According to a notice printed in the New York Times shortly after his funeral, “His grave was marked with a simple marble headstone giving his name and the dates of his birth and death.” At some later date, a sequence of six numbers was carved into the stone in the space below his name, the same sequence that had been tattooed on Levi’s left arm upon his arrival at Auschwitz. I have not been able to discover whether or not Levi himself had left instructions in his will, or had told family members, that the sequence 174517 should be inscribed on his stone. In her biography of Levi, The Double Bond, Carole Angier explains that the six men who lowered Levi’s coffin into the grave were all concentration or death camp survivors, and that among the mourners who followed the body to the cemetery were scores of Holocaust survivors “wearing neck-scarves marked with the names of their camps.” Could the revision of his stone have been the wish of Levi’s “survivors”? However it was, the sequence is the most striking and original part of his epitaph, and, set against even a bare skeleton of Levi’s life story, its use here offers us redeeming fictions. On the marble face of his headstone, the sequence is a kind of postlinguistic, numerical poem. Read More
April 29, 2014 Arts & Culture On Epitaphic Fictions: Robert Louis Stevenson, Philip Larkin By Daniel Bosch The second in a three-part series on writers’ epitaphs. Read yesterday’s installment here. John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887 There is very little that’s puzzling about Philip Larkin’s two-penny upright “This Be the Verse” (1971): They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can. And don’t have any kids yourself. “This Be the Verse” is arguably the best-loved English poem of the last half of the twentieth century. Funny, frank, transgressive—human—the poem has stood up admirably in pub, alley, and classroom. (Of how many humans with fancy titles can this be said?) But what about that awkward title? How did a writer as good as Larkin fuck up his forms of to be? The title’s oddness is no empty gesture. The words “This Be the Verse” point us toward one of the sweetest, un-Larkin-esque poems in the language, Robert Louis Stevenson’s self-composed epitaph. When it’s published in an anthology, it usually appears as two stanzas called “Requiem,” but on Stevenson’s tomb, the epitaph is presented as a single block under his name and dates, without punctuation or title: Read More
April 28, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 27, or Let’s Make a Deal with the Pope By Alexander Aciman Amos Nattini, I Consiglieri Fraudolenti, date unknown. We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: the price of wheeling and dealing with the Pope. In Canto 27, just as Ulysses’s incandescent spirit departs, another burning sinner approaches Dante. This time, because the spirit is Italian, Dante speaks with him, instead of allowing Virgil to interpret; and though the sinner is never identified by name, the biographical information he offers suggests that he is Guido da Montefeltro, a well-known Ghibelline captain who fought a good many battles. Much like Vanni Fucci, Guido is not eager to speak with Dante. He decides to speak only because he believes that Dante is one of the damned, and will never again be among the living—he feels secure that his story will never be heard again. Oops. Guido says that Pope Boniface VIII solicited him for guidance on conquering Palestrina, a Ghibelline fortress. Guido demurred, but the Pope assured him his soul would be saved in exchange for his help—and that convinced Guido to help out, even if he had his doubts about the pope. Upon Guido’s death, St. Francis came to escort him to heaven, as promised, but a demon intervened on the grounds that no man can be pre-absolved for a sin he hasn’t yet committed. The Pope’s promise was thus null, and Guido was led instead to Minos, who deemed him guilty of fraudulent counsel. Read More