December 9, 2013 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 10, or Why We Are Doing This By Alexander Aciman Farinata by John Flaxman This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! There is a circle in hell reserved for the people who stop reading Dante and never make it to canto 10. If there’s ever been any question as to whether the Inferno is really a great work of art, the answer lies in canto 10. If there is ever any doubt that Dante is worth rereading always—perhaps every year, like the Torah—canto 10 will remind us. If somehow we forget what sorrow, or remorse, or horror, or despair looks like—if we forget that sometimes human beings are at once so callous, and strangely tender, there again is canto 10. If canto 10 is magnificent, it is perhaps because Dante takes two characters who have fizzled out of history almost entirely—real nobodies, by twenty-first-century standards—and has made them immortal. After Dante, could we ever forget Farinata, the Ghibelline who took Florence from the Guelphs and defended Florence with his own sword as the city was about to be razed? Can we complete the Inferno without remembering Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, whose heart breaks right before us? If ever I forget what exactly it is about art that I love—or worse, begin to feel disillusioned by it—canto 10 reminds me. Imagine that you are walking through a field of sepulchers, lids propped open, and all of the sudden a voice speaks to you in your native dialect. The voice belongs to Farinata. Who are your ancestors, he asks. Dante identifies himself as a Guelph, and the sinner tells Dante with a sort of unabashed pride that he twice chased his ancestors from Florence. Dante retorts that his ancestors returned twice—a skill the Ghibellines had struggled to learn. There’s something charming about this witty Dante—Dante later reminds the reader that there is also a pope and a cardinal in the sepulcher. You’ll see in the Inferno that there are countless bishops, popes, and cardinals in hell; Dante got political with his commentary. Farinata is interrupted by Cavalcanti, who asks Dante why his son, Guido Cavalcanti, is not with him. Dante responds that he and Virgil are on their way to visit other sinners, some of whom Guido probably “held in scorn.” Cavalcanti bursts out—What? Did you say “he held?” Lives he not still? The moment in which Cavalcanti mourns the death of his son is one of high tragedy—Cavalcanti has, in an instant, lost everything at the hands of something as simple and as pathetic as a verb tense. Dante has broken away for a moment from his lyricism and into a sort of colloquial tone, almost as if he’s trying to elbow us in the rib, lean over, and whispering hey, remember, this is poem second, and it is art first. Of course Guido isn’t dead yet, but Cavalcanti is so overwhelmed by sadness that he falls back. Virgil warned Dante not to feel pity for the sinners, and with the exception of Pier delle Vigne, who will appear in a later canto, Cavalcanti may the easiest sinner to fall for. But after Cavalcanti falls back, Farinata continues, and responds to Dante with a powerful premonition. Yes, he says, Farinata’s own faction, the Ghibellines, hadn’t yet found a way to get back into Florence, but soon enough, Dante would learn just how hard it really is to figure out such a thing. Dante too would be exiled. To catch up on our Dante series, click here. Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.
December 9, 2013 On the Shelf Coziness Porn, and Other News By Sadie Stein Since Alice Munro skipped the trip to Stockholm, there is instead a Nobel video, and we can all watch it! David Ulin on Nelson Mandela, the writer. Here is some unabashed coziness porn: a slideshow of reading nooks. HuffPo ran it on #SanctuarySunday (which exists, it would seem) but on a Monday morning fraught with wintry mix, I daresay we need it even more. And apparently on the same page, the Guardian brings us a list of comfort reads.
December 6, 2013 First Person My First Book(s) By David L. Ulin There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. —Red Smith I I wrote my first first book over the course of three months, from July 23 to October 23, 1979. Four weeks in, I turned eighteen. This was a novel, and not the first I’d attempted; in fifth grade, I had written forty pages of a saga called Gangwar in Chicago, inspired by The Godfather and taking place in a city where I’d never been. Setting the story in Chicago meant scouring the map in World Book for locations: Canal Street, I recall, was one. I chose it because I knew Canal Street in New York, and it seemed the sort of landscape in which a gang war could take place. To this day, I have never seen Chicago’s Canal Street, despite the twenty years I spent visiting my wife’s family in a suburb on the North Shore. The other novel, the one I finished, was motivated almost entirely by a specific case of envy—of my friend Fred, who had spent the same summer working on a novel of his own. Fred and I were high school writing buddies, confiding to each other, as we wandered the grounds of our New England boarding school, that we both wanted to win the Nobel Prize. Now, he’d written a campus novel, tracing his difficulties as a one-year senior, parsing the school’s social hierarchy in a way that seemed enlightening and true. Fred was more serious, more focused; he not only knew what symbolism was but also how to use it. It made sense that he would write a novel, and that it would be good. A year later, he would write another one, and then we lost track of each other, until six or seven years later, when his short stories started to appear in magazines. Read More
December 6, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Screwball, Gothic, and Southern, to Name a Few By The Paris Review “We all find we cannot take on any more patients. We are all waiting for calls from superiors, pick up the phones each time hoping it is one of them, then find it is only another patient. The superiors of course think of us as patients and dread our calls.” Last Sunday I spent the hours between five and eleven A.M. finishing Renata Adler’s 1983 novel Pitch Dark, and they were the best four solid hours of my week. Thanks to NYRB Classics, which recently reissued Pitch Dark and Adler’s earlier novel, Speedboat, Adler is coming to be recognized as one of the great novelists of our time, on the strength of two slim books. Until now I had avoided Pitch Dark because it has the lesser reputation, and because Speedboat seemed to me so perfect, I couldn’t imagine lightning striking twice. But Pitch Dark—the story of a breakup, and of a solitary vacation gone awry—has all the suspense of a mystery, all the wit and companionability of an essay, and all the satirical worldliness I loved in Speedboat. Adler should be required reading for M.F.A students, at the considerable risk of shutting young writers down for lack of anything to say. The rest of us can read her for pleasure. —Lorin Stein When you think about it, there really are a startling number of remarriages in screwball comedies: His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth—and those are just the films in which Cary Grant ends up with an ex-wife. The philosopher Stanley Cavell takes on this phenomenon in 1981’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, and argues that the plot device was more than just a way to flirt with the Hays Code. As he writes, “Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.” —Sadie O. Stein The Fargo Moorhead Observer reports that a Fargo man has been arrested for clearing snow with a flamethrower. The man stated that he was simply “fed up with battling the elements” and that he did not possess the willpower necessary to “move four billion tons of whitebullsh-t.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
December 6, 2013 Bulletin And the Pantone Color of the Year Is… By Sadie Stein My colleagues here at The Paris Review all know that I harbor an irrational aversion to any shade of purple, which reminds me of Lisa Frank stickers, aging hippies, and wizards. (All very well in their own ways, I suppose.) So it is with some reluctance that I report Pantone’s Color of the Year 2014: Radiant Orchid. Quoth the color-choosing powers, Radiant Orchid blooms with confidence and magical warmth that intrigues the eye and sparks the imagination. It is an expressive, creative and embracing purple—one that draws you in with its beguiling charm. A captivating harmony of fuchsia, purple and pink undertones, Radiant Orchid emanates great joy, love and health. And wizards. They forgot wizards.