Dan Brown’s Infernal Riddle
Soon after its publication Dan Brown’s Inferno predictably spawned an ecosystem—tweets, blog-posts, essays, books—telling us how he used and abused Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy in this thriller named for the poem’s first and most famous part. A Dante scholar by trade, and an unrepentant fan of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons to boot, I was genetically susceptible to the contagion. Shamefully easy prey for the book’s marketing campaign, I auditioned for a spot among Dante’s over-spenders in Circle 4 by paying an extra charge to have UPS deliver my copy right on the much-ballyhooed release date. Brown chose May 14, 2013—5/14/13—for his book launch because the numerals in reverse (31415) match the first digits of pi, the irrational number essential to the symbolic properties of circles, including the fact that they can’t be squared (except by God), as Dante reminds us in the finale to his poem. . . .
Read more in Dante Notes, March 22, 2018
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What Rod Dreher Ought to Know About Dante and Same-Sex Love
Dante treats homosexual and heterosexual lovers equally as they complete their purification. Like all the spirits in Purgatory, they have been saved and are destined for eternal life in Heaven. . . . The point can’t be made often or forcefully enough: getting Dante straight means getting him gay, as well. When it comes to the sex or gender of the people we love best, Dante doesn’t give a fig. This is something that Dreher and other serious readers of Dante ought to know. . . .
Read more in PopMatters, January 21, 2016
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Dante and Don: The Word Made Flesh and the Word Made Cash
The party for Dante’s 750th birthday was extensive — he was a Gemini (21 May – 21 June) born in 1265 — with nearly 200 events taking place in Italy, and another 173 sponsored by Italian Cultural Centers around the world. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti kicked off the festivities by reciting the opening lines of Paradiso, Dante’s poem recounting his celestial voyage, while orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station. The medieval Florentine, whose imagining of the afterlife stands as one of the world’s greatest forays into virtual reality, surely appreciates the birthday wishes sent by people around the globe at Twitter hashtag #dante750. . . .
Read more in PopMatters, September 1, 2015