February 1, 2012
Sorry about the Google Malware warning
I think I've cleaned it up.
Google identified one infected file, which I've deleted. I've requested a review of my site, but it hasn't happened yet. Grr!
further: nope! Now I'm trapped in MovableType upgrade purgatory.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2012
Creative destruction
As in the destruction of physical bookstores.
via Daring Fireball
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:51 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2012
Watson is a blogger!
Sherlock - the 2012 version. So far quite good -- better than House. Holmes's deductions about Watson are very elegant -- especially the pocket watch translated to a cell phone (not scratches around the winder but scratches around the power port) -- but with an additional twist! The text floating over things to help us follow Holmes's work are also elegantly done.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2011
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to all!
We're having a quiet Christmas today here at the Tinkler house . . . but this evening my sister and her horde will arrive and we'll liven up.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:05 AM
December 6, 2011
Someone's looking at me . . .
. . . or at least my pictures. Someone used flickr to look at 1,555 out of my 1,650 pictures yesterday. Views of my pictures average in the high 100s, so this spike was noticeable.
Hope he or she enjoyed the pictures!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:53 PM
October 31, 2011
Team Edward? Team Jacob? TEAM BISCLAVRET!
There really were medieval werewolves. Tales, at least. From Marie de France, the 12th century lai of Bisclavret.
Idea shamelessly appropriated in that best of medieval ways from Prof. Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:26 AM
October 21, 2011
My new homepage at work
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 PM
October 15, 2011
The Assassination of James Garfield
I like narrative history a lot -- much of what I listen to from Audible.com falls into that category. Simon Winchester is certainly my favorite there (he records all of his own books). Erik Larson is good, too. I don't spend much time reading that kind of book, because I have too much piled up on my desk, coffee table, kitchen table, and guest bed that I really ought to be reading for professional reasons, but I do enjoy listening to them.
A couple of weeks ago a publicist sent me a copy of a new example of the genre (the unpaid joys of blogging -- an occasional free book!) and in a moment of resistance against the tidal wave of grading I started it. Pretty soon I moved it up in priority and finished it, while the back wash of grading sucked the sand out from under my feet. The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President is really pretty good.
Candice Millard certainly succeeded at the first task of the narrative history genre -- she got me interested in an historical episode (the assassination of President James Garfield) that I hadn't thought about before. The pace is good (or I wouldn't have finished the book off in one afternoon and a few evenings), the characters mainly well-illuminated.
The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was an interesting mad-man -- half prophet of God and half spoils-system politician. One amusing thing for me was his connection to the original Oneida Community (the pre-silver company version). A man who couldn't find sexual partners in the Mansion House must have been -- umm -- interesting. Or disturbing? A little Upstate New York weirdness always helps.
The worst actors in the book are certainly the doctors, and Millard makes the malpractice evident. However, she underplays at least once the rivalries of 19th Century medicine. Though there are some passing references to allopathy and homeopathy, she doesn't make as much of that as she might. For instance (and I'm reading an un-indexed bound galley, so this might be a mistake), Dr. Susan Edson, Mrs. Garfield's personal physician, was a homeopath.
Millard does a good job, though, on the resistance of American doctors to antisepsis, which was the only thing that might have saved Garfield in the world before antibiotics. All those nasty fingers probing his wounds are what killed him, as the doctors realized themselves after the autopsy.
A good explanation for why this episode works for a narrative history is that when we speed past this assassination in high school history I doubt anyone not from Garfield's NE Ohio homeland realizes that he lived for 80 days after the shooting. Guiteau's defense that he shot the president but the doctors killed him has some standing. The 80 day ordeal provides a good frame for the story.
So - would I recommend it? Yes. I'm going to look for a copy of Millard's previous book, one that seems to come more directly out of her past at the National Geographic: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. After the disastrous Bull Moose election of 1912 (knocking Taft out of the way and letting the execrable Woodrow Wilson win), Roosevelt went exploring in the Amazon basin. Sounds pretty interesting!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:01 AM
October 6, 2011
Imagine the suffering of the vulnerable class
Democratic pundits, that is. Sarah Palin decides not to run. I guess they still have Rick Perry to kick around.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM
September 23, 2011
sunt lacrimae rerum
Serendipity! Yesterday, while nursing a cough at home, I saw my first episode of Jersey Shore. Would that I had put on some weepy Haydn.
via Fr. Zuhlsdorf
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2011
A week from RIGHT NOW. . .
. . . I will be on my way to school for class #1 of Academic 2011-12. But for today, I still have 2 cups of coffee in the pot and my nice seat by the kitchen window. And interesting news! Libya is falling -- Saif, the LSE alum, has been captured (and the internationalistas are trying to get the rebels to hand him over to THEM). The Alawites in Syria must be trembling.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM
August 9, 2011
I really need to update my blogroll
Dr Virago's moved.... Other people have added links to me. I need to get with the program!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:37 AM
July 27, 2011
Annals of domestic care
Yesterday evening I stepped on something sharp in front of the fridge, something black lurking on one of the black tiles (I have a black and white checkerboard floor in my kitchen).
It was a short black plastic . . . thing. It's not a bolt or a screw -- it's not threaded. Its head is unslotted. Maybe it fits into a hole somewhere?
But I haven't unpacked anything, put together any household appliances, or even bought anything plastic since I got back from Rome.
Did it fall out of the refrigerator -- two days before I go on a 6 day trip (headed to Chattanooga tomorrow)?
File under: things that worry me.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:20 AM | Comments (1)
July 12, 2011
And how does it work with a hyperlink?
Like this?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 PM | Comments (2)
July 6, 2011
A Terrible indictment of our copyright regime
I can't find a YouTube version of the Marching Owl Band (the MOB) performing this. If you can, please email a link (comments are NOT html friendly). Surely they've messed with it!
One of the many reasons I like this? I've had a refrigerator magnet for some time that says, only, this too shall pass.
And if you'd like to see the amazing Rube Goldberg version....click here.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2011
Who knew Chattanooga was so FAST?
Read this. And this. Or this! I want gigabit broadband!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:18 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2011
Gene Vance, R.I.P.
Sad news is bouncing around various listserves this morning -- Gene Vance died Saturday. Linde Brocato and I were talking about him later that evening at the dance at Kalamazoo -- wondering what he was up to. The answer was: flying small planes. Gene was always a swashbuckler. He sailed avidly, and when he moved to Atlanta, where the boat-sailing on local lakes wasn't as much fun as the Atlantic off Maine, he took up windsurfing.
Gene was an emeritus professor at the University of Washington. It's harder to believe that he ever retired than that he took up flying!
My thoughts and prayers are with his widow and family.
If anyone wants to get in on a joint Emory alum memorial gift (there's a fellowship in his name already at U.W.) let me know.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:08 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2011
Sorry for the slow down...
But jet lag and incredible busyness don't mix well. Meetings with department and individual colleagues, re-acceeding to department chairdom, paper-writing, laundry, repacking, imminent departure for Kalamazoo (tomorrow morning).
At least I'm tossing and turning in my own bed.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:33 PM
May 3, 2011
Working on the ipad and things are not always easy
I mean-- why isnt there an app for MT bloggers? Or at least theres not one i have found.
Bologna. Beautiful. Happy. Relaxing. Laterz!!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 4, 2011
Photo archives online
I wonder if there's anything like the Library of Congress's photo archive (getting scanned, available for use) for Italy? Not that i can find so far. I've found the National Photo Archive, but it doesn't seem very helpful (nor are images free to use). For instance, they have something like 40,000 photos of Rome and Abruzzo...but that's excluding rather a lot of Italy!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:24 AM
April 3, 2011
I'm the first two hits on Google . . .
The first two hits on Google for "Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus" go to my pictures thereof. I must get 3 or 4 hits a day on Flickr for it. I'm delighted to see the sarcophagus is so popular, since it is entirely wonderful.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:20 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2011
Oh my! Blogger in Milano!
I got around to checking my Gmail today (I know, I'm slow) and discovered that Amy Welborn is in Milan with her crew! Great photos! Click and then scroll around.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 PM
January 24, 2011
Child Labor?
The best Unhappy Hipsters entry in a long time!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:00 PM
January 14, 2011
Gratuitous St Augustine reference
And now the Manolo must go back to bed, as it is raining and the Vandals are approaching Hippo.
This is an example of why I've always thought the Manolo himself might be Herr Professor Doktor Boethius P. von Korncrake.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:11 AM
January 9, 2011
Roma!
I'm here! And I'm exhausted!
I got here pretty easily (except that I sat behind Mr. Recline-that-seat from Atlanta to Frankfurt!). The problems began on the doorstep.... My friend Sebastiano met me at the door downstairs. We climbed the stairs, dragging suitcases (I brought too many books, I know, I know). Sebastiano had a new key which didn't work. After about 15 minutes of wrestling with the key (I didn't post THOSE pictures) Sebastiano called the Vigili del Fuoco. Yes, the Fire Department. Not a locksmith. Since he's a Roman I have to suppose he knew what he was doing. He sent me to take a coffee and a walk (yes, one prendere un caffè). So I walked the very short block to the Ponte Sant'Angelo and snapped this.
Now I knew the Bernini angels on the Ponte Sant'Angelo were carrying the Instruments of the Crucifixion. But how had I missed that one of them had the column -- and not just any column, but the weird column base from Sta Prassede? And do I have a picture of that to post on my hard drive? Not that I can find. So - now I have a Mannerist wall painting of what I can't help thinking of as the fire hydrant at which Our Lord was (not) scourged and a Baroque sculpture! I guess there's a paper in the afterlife of the relic! In other words, a great start to the semester.
Eventually I wandered back, about the same time the Vigili del Fuoco group got there -- with a big carry bag of locksmith tools. They got the key out of the lock (it was stuck!) and the door open.
LUCKILY the two key sets that were inside the apartment work much more smoothly. But in another moment of italianità, Sebastiano didn't reach for 10W40 -- he got olive oil!
But it's a GREAT apartment, I'm in, I'm exhausted, I'm partially unpacked, I've been out for 2 other wanders-about, and I'm home and trying hard to stay awake. The later I tay awake the quicker I'll be over the jet lag.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:52 PM
December 21, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XXII
Paradiso Canto XXII
The roles for Dante's guides, Virgil and Beatrice, shift around a lot. Sometimes they're stern, sometimes they're professorial, and sometimes, like here, motherly. Dante reacts thus to the great thunderclap of a shout that ends Canto XX:
I turned -- oppressed with wonder, stupefied,
exactly as a little child will run
back to the one he trusts most -- to my guide,
And as a mother comes to help her son,
who, pale and breathless, hears her ready voice
that always seems to make him strong again,
"Didn't you know that you're in Paradise? (Par XXII.1-7)
I think this is the first fear Dante has shown lately, but I'm not certain - I'll have to look next time.
Another element I'm going to be reading for next time is love-vocabulary. The two meet St. Benedict in this canto. Dante thanks him for talking to them, for his love and kindness (XXII.52). The Italian here is affetto, affection. When I get to Rome in January, I'm going to look around for a Dante concordance! Given the amount they teach in the schools, there's got to be a paperback version. I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I think this may be the first use of this word. Love is an overwhelmingly important theme in the Comedy - maybe the most important theme of all - so I should have been watching more carefully.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM
December 18, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XXI
Paradiso Canto XXI
The transitions from sphere to sphere become less and less noticeable. Here in Canto XXI, Dante and Beatrice have moved from Jupiter to Saturn in one line: "Weve risen to the seventh splendor now..." (Par XXI.13). That's all Dante needs - an assertion from Beatrice.
When they look around they see Jacob's ladder, the ladder of contemplation. Some people want to see an influence from a French translation of a Spanish version of a poem about Muhammad's Night Journey here - especially because it has a title like The Book of the Staircase to Heaven. Maybe so, but it's hardly necessary. Ladder imagery is, as the first sentence of this paragraph suggests, Biblical. And the idea of seeing Heaven is Scriptural. Did Dante know something about Islam? Maybe. Me, I insisted on showing a Byzantine version of St. John Climacus's vision, who was a 7th century monk at Mount Sinai (note the coincidence with Muhammad!). Go to his Wikipedia entry - there are a couple of versions. We have an image of the 12 century version in the collection. In fact, there's a greater chance that Muhammad knew the deuterocanonical and legendary Christian materials as there is that Dante knew anything Islamic.
The interlocutor in the sphere of Saturn is Peter Damian, a hermit-monk who, perhaps needless to say, castigates the decline of hermits and the degeneracy of monasteries. Dante can't hear any singing and asks about the silence. Peter Damian explains that the problem is that Dante's hearing is limited by his moral body; Dante is reaching the end of his ability to even see and hear, let alone express what he saw and heard for us!
The canto began with a problem with seeing. Dante was staring at Beatrice again; she explained why she wasn't smiling:
..."If I should smile,"What a funny gender reversal -- Dante becomes Semele, mother of Dionysus, and Beatrice becomes Jove (whose sphere they've just left!). The canto ends with a reminder. After that talk about not-seeing and not-hearing with Peter Damian, al the saints in this sphere gather:
she began, "you'd become like Semele
reduced to ashes by the power of Jove (Par XXI.4-6)
Round him they came and stopped and gave a shout
so deep,no roar on earth I've ever heard
compares: the crack of thunder overcame me
And in the shock I did not hear a word.
So Dante gets his Jovial thunder anyway!
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:17 PM
December 14, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XX
Paradiso Canto XX
Early in Canto XX Dante offers us an odd combination of an image from nature and ideas from music to describe the Eagle's voice.
I thought I heard the rushing of a streamThat's one of the longest chunks I've ever transcribed here, and that's because the tercets are rushing on like the water and whooshing like the bagpipe notes. The Eagle tells Dante who the bright lights are in his eye - David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, some Sicilian king, and Ripheus the Trojan. Trajan and a Trojan? Dante is still interested in how the justice of God can be comported with the limit of the spread of the Christian message -- how can that man born on the Ganges bank be held accountable to Christ? The Eagle tells him:
splashing in open sky from stone to stone,
showing the plenty of its spilling spring.
And as the music will assume its tone
at the neck of the lute, and wind will play
as it sings whistling through the bagpipes' stops,
Setting aside all waiting and delay,
the whooshing climbed up through the Eagle's neck
as in a hollow, assumed a voice, And in the form of words rushed through the beak,
stilling the expectation of my heart
wherein I wrote them. It began to speak (Par XX.19-30
O predestination, how remoteIt's a mystery that won't be resolved until the very end, but Dante finds that news "soothing medicine" (XX.139).
your root is from those sights that cannot see
the fulness of the primal cause! And you
Mortals, withhold your judgement: even we
who see the face of God do not yet know
the number chosen from eternity
And it is sweet, such lack in what we know,
because in this good is our good made fine,
that what the Lord may will, we too will so. (Par XX.130-138)
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:56 AM
December 13, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIX
Paradiso Canto XIX
The image of the Eagle-made-of-Rulers which Dante first sees in Canto XVIII continues throughout Canto XIX, and leads to questions about the difference between the real and the symbolic. For instance, Dante notes that the Eagle speaks in the first person rather than the third, thought it is visibly made up of many spirits. My colleague thinks this has to do with the radical community nature of Paradise, especially as contrasted with the terrible individualism of the Inferno. I'm not so sure - I think it is surreal, and more about those who were supreme individuals, rulers, becoming part of something larger, a symbol of Rule.
What's more, I'm not sure why Dante should be asking an Eagle made up of rulers, however just, about the salvation of pagans. Maybe because they were just judges, and a standard accusation against God's justice is that it is unjust, since it judges people who never knew the rules. I'm not at all sure.
Certainly Dante asks the Eagle these questions because - surprise - there are two pagan rulers in the composite Eagle, Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan. But we won't meet them till the next Canto.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 AM
December 9, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVIII
Paradiso Canto XVIII
Dante describes Cacciaguida close to the first of Canto XVIII as il folgór santo, "the saintly thunderbolt" (XVIII.25). How apt! The Thunderbolt goes on to name the warriors of God in another dantean list - Joshua, Judaas Maccabaeus, Roland, Charlemagne -- on to a nice full list of seven or eight. And then they're off to the Sixth Sphere, Jupiter, where just rulers rest.
Dante sees souls spelling out words -- kind of like those old sign made up of individual bulbs, where each letter blings. The texts say DILIGITE IUSTITIAM and QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM, "love justice, you who judge the earth." The blinking souls reconfigure into the shape of an eagle in weird ways.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:47 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVII
Paradiso Canto XVII
Canto XVII, the mid-point of Paradiso, shows us the new Dante, refined by fire in Purgatory he is now not fearful. All along the way people have predicted his exile, but those were damned souls in Hell and souls with clouded vision in Purgatory. Now that he feels "solid as a tetragon" (Par XVII.24), Dante asks Cacciaguida, "Make me content,/tell me the fortune that awaits me now!" (Par XVII.25-26). Cacciaguida tells him that he will be exiled, but he puts it differently. Rather than being expelled, he will flee Florence (48). Cacciaguida also uses a suitably martial metaphor for the sphere of Mars:
You'll leave behind you everything you love
most dearly; this will be the arrow shot
first from the bow of exile. (Par XVII.55-57)
After Cacciaguida predicts some of the trials and comforts to come, Dante asks him a really interesting question about the poem -- should he use the names of the sinners -- repentant and unrepentant -- he's seen? Cacciaguida assures him that there's been a reason behind the meetings; hearing the stories of known folks will teach future readers more, and:
This is the reason why, within these spheres,
upon the mount and in the sorrowing pit,
you've been shown only souls whose names men know... (Par XVII.136-138)
Just think how much inky commentaries the world would have saved without that advice!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVI
Paradiso Canto XVI
Oh dear - I don't think that I reminded you in blogging about Canto XV that we are still in the Sphere of Mars - so Caccciaguida, crusader and Florentine, is an appropriate resident. I remembered the "ancient temple of Mars" legend, which will come up again here.
Canto XVI is a description - not entirely a complaint - of the rise and fall of Florentine families. Esolen mischaracterizes them as "noble." One of the characteristics of Italy in the middle middle ages (though I'm oversimplifying) is that nobility was rural, and the new towns were something else. They might have striven to become knights under imperial legates, but knighthood itself was not heritable. We tend to read Italy through the hyper-nobilized later Renaissance rather than for itself.
There are a few moments of language interest in this canto. At line 10 and 16 Dante comments on and then uses an unusual pronoun.
With the voi that was offered first at Rome
(usage in which they do not persevere),
my words to him resumed... (Par XVI.10-12)
And:
Io cominciai: "Voi siete il padre mio;
voi mi date a parlar tutta baldeza;
voi mi levate sì, ch'i' son più ch'io.
"You are my father," I began in reply.
"You fill my heart with confidence to speak,
you raise me so, that I am more than I! (Par XVI.16-18)
Esolen tells us that the disquisition on voi, the 2nd person plural pronoun used as a singular, is based on the idea that the Romans first used vos for Julius Caesar (and that it is a bad thing that they, and the Church, have stopped using it, Dante suggests). Pronouns are always fraught in Italy! The now-polite way to say "you" in Rome is Lei, one of those converted 3rd person pronouns, literally "she." The way to make your neighborhood merchants think you're not an American barbarian, just an American, is to return their "grazie" at the end of a transaction with "a Lei." Rather old fashioned, but polite, and seldom heard much north of Rome, I'm told.
Still, Dante is hammering it home -- Cacciaguida deserves a polite pronoun. But then he asks him who their ancestors were, their names, how long they lived (22-24). Cacciaguida doesn't particularly know. This is a sign of the great shift in heredity-mongering that had occurred between Cacciaguida's time and Dante's.
Again at 32-33, Dante refers to Cacciaguida speaking in a dialect of more sweetness, not like we talk today. Dante, of course, was very interested in the vernacular -- but it is interesting that Toscana, usually pretty unmodified by time (remember that Farinata degli Uberti recognized him by his speech) is getting inflected here.
When Cacciaguida talks about all the country folk moved to town of the new Florence he makes a nice usage of the State-as-body metaphor.
As when you bolt two different suppers down
you rouse diseases, so a town grows sick
from populations all confused in one (Par XVI.67-69)
The rest of the canto is, I fear, impenetrably localist. I've said before that I understand, but can't pretend to be interested in, Dante's love of Florence. Gimme an Orsini or a Colonna and I might pay attention, but the distant origin of the Guelph/Ghibelline feuds in a jilted bride (XVI.140) doesn't do much for me.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)
December 3, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XV
Paradiso Canto XV
As Canto XIV ended, Dante saw a massive cross of souls, gleaming like a gemmed cross (oh - go here to see a mosaic of a gemmed cross in Rome that Dante probably knew). Canto XV begins with the cross continuing to gleam, until one of the gems shoots across it, like a shooting star, and then comes to speak to them . . .
With such a loving piety for his son,
if we may trust our greater muse, Anchises
once hailed Aeneas in Elysium.
"O blood of mine, O overbrimming grace
poured out by God! for whom has Heaven's door
been opened twice, as it has been for you?"
So spoke that light . . . . (Par XV.25-31)
Here Dante invokes Virgil, "our greater muse," and contradicts himself. Remember Inferno II.32? I'll admit that I let Esolen give me the line number in the note, but I remembered Dante exclaiming to Virgil: "I'm not Aeneas! I'm not St Paul!" But he is - he has been to Hell, and here he is in Heaven, and he'll bring us reports of both.
But the ancestor of Dante goes on to speak, and Dante doesn't understand him -- "all was in a langauge too profound / Not that he chose to veil his thought from me" (Par XV.39-40). Almost everyone Dante has recognized or who has recognized Dante did it by speech, whether Dante called it italian, Tuscan, or Latin. This speech is too deep because the concepts are beyond mortal minds. Eventually the soul's speech slackens enough that Dante can understand him, and it turns out that this is his great-great grandfather, father of the Alighero who gives Dante his name. His own name, Cacciaguida, will be postponed until line 135, almost the end of the canto.
Meanwhile, Cacciaguida, who died around 1150, has described what Florence was like in his day, when it was all contained in its Roman walls. Cacciaguida praises the simplicity and modesty of 12th C Florence, when the birth of a daughter didn't fill a father in dread for her dowry and when men didn't leave their women to sleep alone while they went off to France for money. Cacciaguida claims to have been baptized in the ancient baptistery, but...oh, well. It certainly wasn't begun until after his death on the Second Crusade (if he's right and he was with Emperor Conrad, he never made it past Anatolia).
Art History commonplace (though I think it's in Villani, it's something that I learned in Art 102 and again in Renaissance Architecture) is that the Florentines believed their (actually 1150s Romanesque) octagonal Baptistery of St John was an ancient Roman temple to Mars converted by the early Christians (and hence a classical building that was admired on those grounds by some early Renaissance Tuscans), in fact it was perhaps built on the foundations of a tower on the city wall.
For Cacciaguida, and Dante, the important part is that Conrad raised him to a knighthood. That puts his family among the early Florentine elite. Though Florence didn't have a hereditary nobility, imperial knighthoods were coveted markers. Cacciaguida didn't live to enjoy his -- but he died a crusader-martyr, and "From martyrdom I came unto this peace" (XIII.148), which is a better trade.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 2, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIV
Paradiso Canto XIV
Canto XIV is a transition canto -- we hear the end of the conversation with Solomon and then Beatrice move on to the sphere of Mars.
Dante's last question for the wise is about the resurrected body -- won't it dim their lights? Solomon replies:
. . . When, blessed and glorified,
the flesh is robed about us once again,
we shall be lovelier for being whole (Par XIV.43-45)
The souls circling round respond:
So prompt and ready was the loud "Amen!"
both choirs responded, it was clear to me
how much they yearned to see their flesh again,
Maybe less for themselves than for their mamas,
their fathers, and the others they held dear
before they had become eternal flames. (Par XIV.61-66)
And thence they pass on to the sphere of Mars.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIII
Paradiso Canto XIII
If I thought the appearance of Juno's messenger at the start of Canto XII was odd, the mention of Minos early in Canto XIII is downright jarring! This time we're talking about Ariadne, who became a constellation (given how often that happens in world myth I'm amazed I don't know a happy greco-english word for it, like apotheosized). Still, minos surfaces again. But she is only a ghost of that true constellation, the Wise (Par XIII.20).
Thomas begins speaking again (this is his fourth cano - he's becoming the Statius of this canticle) and makes a lovely parallel between biblical types -- Adam and the New Adam.
You're thinking of the breast that gave its rib,
drawn forth to form the woman of fair cheek
whose palate made the whole world pay so dearly,
and of that breast pierced with a lance to make
full recompense forfuture sins and past,
causing the scales of human debt to break.
All this is in service of some mind reading -- Thomas had said in Canto X (line 109) that the fifth light (whoever that was) was the wisest ever. He's accusing Dante of thinking that surely Adam or Christ must have been wiser - but he goes on to identify the fifth light and explain how he was the wisest ever -- Solomon was best in class, rulers.
From what I've spoken you can see he was
a king, and asked for the capacity
to fulfill a king's duties - not to muse
About the angels and the quantity
of movers of the stars; or if a must
and might together make necessity; (Par XIII.94-99)
Solomon wanted to be the wisest king - not the best scholastic. I think this is also another jab at Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, who we saw denounced by his dead brother back in Canto VIII. Dante's theory of kingship is coming clearler - a separation of duties and of intelligences.
Canto XIII ends with Aquinas denouncing misdirected intelligence and inquiry - very Dominican!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM | Comments (0)
November 30, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XII
Paradiso Canto XII
So Thomas Aquinas praised Francis and his chivalric love of Lady Poverty and chastened his own order for wandering astray, a second garland or ring comes wit h Bonaventure. Interestingly, Dante gives the classical comparison first - "When the clouds are fine/and Juno sends her herald to earth" (Par XII.10-11) precedes "Rainbows that make us mortals early wise / by the pact God made Noah" (Par XII.16-17). I sometimes think our students wonder about Dante's devotion to the classics. Is he emulating? Rivaling? Showing off? I tend to think a little of all of those.
So Bonaventure joins them, and praises the mendicant founders together. And where Thomas's talk was full of chivalry, Bonaventure's is full of military and imperial terms - even to calling God "the high Emperor who rains forever" (Par XII.40). Bonaventure describes Dominic's (miraculous) birth and then the military zeal with which he fought heresy:
Then armed with zeal and doctrine and the charge
of apostolic duty, he fell quick
as torrents bursting from a mountain vein
And slammed the thickets of the heretic,
pummeling onward with his surging drive
where the resistance was most harsh and thick (Par XII.97-102).
Dominic must indeed have been some kind of force! And then Bonaventure turns to deprecating his Franciscans and how far they have turned from Francis's path.
Bonaventure's list of those lights who accompany him includes a few names that interest me. A second Hebrew appears - the prophet Nathan. Aelius Donatus the grammarian - I didn't know he was a Christian, but he's certainly late enough (mid 4th C). Rabanus Maurus, Carolingian abbot of Fulda! And finally and weirdest, Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot and apocalypticist. Odd company.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 PM | Comments (1)
November 29, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XI
Paradiso Canto XI
Canti XI and XII run in parallel. Here are Esolen's prose summaries:
XI: Thomas Aquinas recounts for Dante the life of Francis of Assisi, and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Dominicans of the present day.
XII: Out of a second garland of spirits another soul speaks: it is the soul of Bonaventure, who describes the life of Dominic and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Franciscans of the present day.
OK - to get the joke you have to have minimal Mendicant Friar Knowledge -- Aquinas is a Dominican, and praises the founder of the Franciscans. Bonaventure a Franciscan, etc., etc. Dante's Thomas fully adopts the chivalrous Francis -- troubador of Lady Poverty. Remember that nostalgia for the nobler days of the 12th century is pretty thick in the Commedia, and here it gets linked to the Franciscans.
It's important to remember, at least for people who believe that persistence in vocation and communal direction is probable (like all the nice conservatives who whine that the money of rich endowments is being misdirected by left-trending 3rd generation administrators) get a grip! Dante is setting his poem less than 100 years after the foundations (Dominic, 1206 at Prouille; Francis, 1210 at Rome) and things are already almost hopeless perverted from their original purity. So there. Pessimism about human organizations will go a long way towards making you happier.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM
November 27, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto X
Paradiso Canto X
Canto X takes us to the fourth sphere, that of the sun. We're mainly going to talk to theologians here -- and it lasts a long time -- all the way to Canto XIV. Dante begins with an exposition on why an ecliptic -- why that seeming imbalance in the otherwise perfect cosmos? After all, this is a model that depends on spheres because, well, they're SPHERICAL and we all know that spheres are perfect. As are circular orbits. As our physicist friend pointed out to our class, the ancients (and medievals) had enormous amounts of very good observational data, but they occasionally tripped over a dogma like that.
Dante's explanation? We need a skew system to keep each hemisphere habitable. Well, I like seasons, too (which is good, because I woke up to more-than-a-dusting of snow this morning).
Dante tells the reader to sit as he sets the table with a feast of poetry (Par X.25). But this is the level of the Theologians, and what satisfies their appetite is knowledge:
So the fourth family of the Father shone,
who fills their hunger ever, revealing how
He breathes His Spirit and begets His Son.
That is, there are no Mysteries anymore - the Trinity will be revealed. The description of the souls here is one of my favorite passages in the whole Commedia. Dante see them from a little distance:
Those ardent suns that had not ceased to sing,
as stars revolving round the pole nearby,
as stars revolved about us three times in a ring,
Then stopped: as ladies pausing in their glee
hold the reel's places and resume the dance
when they catch the returning melody. (X.76-81)
The first time I ever read that I was reminded of the dance scene in the Franco Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. I'll see if I can scare that up on youtube for my class.
Their interlocutor, the dancer who speaks to them, turns out to be Thomas Aquinas. He names a lot of the others -- Albert the Great, Gratian, Dionysius the Areopagite, Boethius, and (the only Englishman in the Comedy, according to my colleague), Bede.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto IX
Paradiso Canto IX
Dante has mentioned living family members before -- especially in Purgatory, where the souls frequently named them and asked that they be begged for prayers. But Canto IX begins with direct address more like Dante's use of "Reader" than his usual 3rd person method. Dante speaks directly to Charles Martel's daughter (or wife).
I believe we also have our first saved Old Testament figure in this sphere.
Know that within it Rahab finds her peace
The highest of our saints, she seals her light
on every rank of spirits in our choir. (Par.115-117)
Rahab is the prostitute who helped Joshua and later married him. Esolen reminds us that the Fathers saw her as a type of the Church, since Joshua is, of course, the same name as Jesus. So this is a spectacularly reformed Bride of Christ -- but Dante would agree that the Bride needs constant reforming. In fact, he ends this canto with a denunciation of the devotion of the Church of his own day to canon law, not to Christ.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VIII
Paradiso Canto VIII
They have moved in Canto VIII to the Sphere of Venus. Dante compares the souls to the notes of polyphony and the movements of a dance:
And as you'l find the flickerings in a flame
or song in song when one voice holds the note
while the other comes and goes in melody,
I saw a host of lamp glows in that light
more or less swiftly moveing all a-dance
according totheir grace of inner sight. (Par VIII.16-21)
These are souls who were too attached to earthly love. Most of the canto is given up to Charles Martel - not the hero of Poitiers, but a 13th C Angevin prince, titular king of Hungary, and probable acquaintance of Dante (he spent some time in Florence in the 1290s). Charles is an example of one of Dante's crushed hopes -- a political leader who failed or went wrong or died young (in this case, died young), leaving Italy torn and the Empire unrestored.
Dante always likes the ones who die young, and damns the ones that lives. Well, he doesn't damn Robert of Naples, Charles's younger brother, but he has Charles dismiss him in the last lines of the canto -- and everyone else in Italy disagreed.
Charles was the eldest son, Louis the second, and Robert the third, of Charles the Lame, the Angevin king of Hungary. During the Sicilian Vespers uprising in Palermo, the three boys were given as hostages. Eventually freed, Charles went to to die young. Louis renounced all his titles, became a Franciscan, was appointed bishop of Toulouse, and died young. Robert ruled for 30 years and ended up being called Robert the Wise -- and long after Dante's death was praised by Petrarch and Boccaccio as a patron of the arts. Here's what Dante has Charles say:
If all the world down there would set their minds
to follow the foundation nature brings,
the'd have a populace that's good and strong.
But you wrench someone to religious things
who has been born to strap the sheath and sword,
and of the sermon givers you make kings.
And that is why your strides go off the road. (Par VIII.142-148)
Remember, Dante is not dogma. He's often wrong about history. Robert of Anjou may not have been the savior of Italy that Dante was looking for, but he was a good king. And Louis of Toulouse was a saint. And Charles Martel died so young that Dante can project whatever he wants on him. His point about misunderstood vocations is well-taken, but not necessarily correctly applied to this family.
The picture is a Simone Martini altarpiece showing St Louis crowning his brother Robert of Anjou -- it's one of my favorite pieces of dynastic religious art -- talk about claiming your legitimacy from heaven! Robert kneels at his already-sainted brother's throne to receive his crown. It's at the Museo Capodimonte in Naples.
Fun facts to know and tell -- Louis, as in San Luis Obispo, which therefore must've been a Franciscan Mission. I didn't know that until I started to link the Wikipedia entry.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VII
Paradiso Canto VII
Dante's persistent failing in this canto is not fear, but a reverence for Beatrice that gets in the way of communication. Admittedly, she's like a stern or pitying mother, but she does want him to talk - and she keeps encouraging him with smiles.
"Speak, speak to your Lady," I began to exclaim
within myself, but wavering, "Speak to her!
she slakes your thirst with hr sweet drops of truth."
But reverence played the mistress over me
and like an old man nodding off I bowed
when in my mind I heard the name of "Bee."
Beatrice for a little while allowed
my speechlessness, then flashed me such a smile
as would bring gladness to a man in fire. (Par VII.10-18)
Let's hope he improves. As is, he hears another lecture - this time on the Atonement. The only thing particularly novel (man sinned, he can't pay God back, God must become man to pay God back) about her explanation i her insistence that no one understands this doctrine who does not understand it mystically.
More secret than a tomb is this decree,
brother, from anyone whose native wit
hasn't been fostered in the fire of love. (Par VII.58-60).
I admit that the doctrine can seem very legalistic, so perhaps Beatrice is right - we need the inwardness of fire to really get it. Dante, of course, was purified in the refining fire of Purgatorio XXVII, so perhaps he's ready, too.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:51 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VI
Paradiso Canto VI
Beatrice may go on and on, but Canto VI is delivered in one voice. Justinian, representing those who paid too much attention to worldly duty, describes the career of the Roman eagle from Troy to Dante's present for 142 lines. By putting this speech in the mouth of Justinian, Dante reinforces the importance of the civil law and the primacy of Rome.
Dante uses the speech, of course, to beat up on the Ghibbelines and Guelphs and to execrate the French. Charlemagne comes in for praise, though, for protecting the papacy from the Lombards (not that Dante has shown himself to have any use for modern Lombards, either).
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:50 PM
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto V
Paradiso Canto V
Beatrice is -- umm -- a lecturer. Or a soloist. Where Dante and Virgil conversed, Beatrice sings on:
So then did Beatrice begin this song,
continuing her holy reasoning thus
as one does who does not break his speech in two. (Par V.16-18).
Not break it in two? She doesn't break off for 66 lines -- she sings from 19 to 85. Not that there's not great stuff in there! For instance, she discourses on the creation of humankind in liberty and to be intelligent, and how the high value of vows depends on these two characteristics, which are needed to form consent.
The medieval Church was great on consent; one of the revolutions of medieval Christianity is the reshaping of marriage as something entered into only by mutual consent; families could make arrangements, but those arrangements could be dissolved if there was no consent. Not that that didn't lead to problems, but it was still a considerable step forward for the rights of women (and minor boys).
After that speech Beatrice and Dante once again zip off to the next sphere by looking,
. . . as an arrowhead will hit
the mark before the cord has ceased to hum,
so did we speed into the second realm. (Par 91-93)
The second realm is the sphere of Mercury, where those who cared too much for worldly glory are shadowed, just as Mercury is frequently obscured by the Sun's light. In Canto VI they will hear from Emperor Justinian.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto IV
Canto IV
Dante starts Canto IV with a problem known to us by the name of a slightly later philosopher -- Buridan's paradox.
Between two morsels for the appetite,
just an appealing, just as far away,
before a free man ever took one bite
He'd ide of hunger (Par IV.1-4)
This Canto is being trapped between two goods. - like poor Piccarda. How can we blame her if she had a good intention of keeping her vow and was confronted with violence (19-20)?
We have another Dante coinage in this canto, too - india, "endeitied," to describe the Seraphim, Moses, Samuel, the Johns, and even Mary. [The word is not "india," the place, but "in-dia."] That may be Dante's version of what the Orthodox call theosis, becoming like God, but I'm not enough of a theologian to say.
This is also our introduction to the fact that the lower place in the spheres is not entirely - hmm - the real way to look at it. We won't really understand that until we get to the Empyrean, to the Celestial Rose, where everyone we meet as we pass through the spheres shows up again - or really is. How to understand that mystery?
That is why Holy Scripture condescends
to your minds and attributes to the Lord
a hand or foot, intending something more (Par IV.43-45).
Things are complicated in Heaven - even while they're perfectly simple.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:44 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto III
Canto III
Canto III starts off with a tercet about a sun -- Beatrice -- but then turns to a series of reflections -- a mirror, sunlit water, a reminiscence of Narcissus and the pool. After all, Dante and Beatrice have risen to the sphere of the Moon, where the souls of those who failed to fulfill their vows rest. The Moon in its phases represents inconstancy -- in some models the last sphere of mutability, in others the border between change and changelessness. The souls appear as shadows or appear to be shadowy. The lack of clarity is helpful.
Their interlocutor is Piccarda, sister of Forese Donati, who we met in Purgatory (XXIII, XXIV). That makes her a relative of Dante's by marriage, and the first example we meet of families broken into parts. Some families have representatives in all three canticles -- I don't remember if the Donati had anyone in Hell. If they don't, it might be because Forese and Piccarda's brother wasn't dead yet -- he forced her to leave a convent of the Poor Clares and marry a political ally. So her sin is giving up the vow she made to be a Bride of Christ.
Dante asks if those who dwell in this slowest sphere (II.51 - being closest to the earth it is rotating most slowly) if they want to be further up, to know more, and be more loved by God (II.65-66). Piccarda replies with the keynote of Paradiso:
E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace;
ell'è quel mare al qual tutto si move
ciò ch'ella cria o che natura face.
In His will is our peace:
that is the sea whereto all creatures fare,
fashioned by Nature or the hand of God (Par II.85-87)
I think the departure of Piccarda is incredibly beautiful and expresses the calm of the Moon:
Così parlommi, e poi cominciò Ave
Maria cantando, e cantando vanio
come per acqua cupa cosa grave.
So did she speak, then she began to sing,
"Hail, Mary," and so singing she was gone,
like a smooth heavy object vanishing
Into a shadowy pool.
come per acqua cupa cosa grave. Gorgeous.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:59 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto II
Canto II
Once again we see Dante using the image of a boat -- though this time he addresses sailors, warning them to stay back: I venture waters never sailed by man! (Par II.7) He is about to sail the stars, and he does it with love and vision.
Beatrice gazed upward, and I gazed at her
and in the instant of an arrow's flight--
sunk in the target, whistling off the nock--
I saw I'd reached a place that turned my sight
toward something to behold in awe... (Par II.22-26).
It's not all that common for Dante to enjamb a sentence across two tercets, but that's in the Italian, too. Thus they go zooming to the sphere of the moon, and Dante asks what causes the dark spots. What we see as the Old Man in the Moon, Italians call Cain. Dante see the marks as marring the lunar body (II.49). There begins a disputatio -- a scholastic debate.
Dante see the spots as caused by thin or denser matter (II.60). Beatrice denies this, and compares it to the variable brightness of the fixed stars (II.64). She says:
If that were caused by various densities,
a single starry power would dwell in all,
portioned in some place, some more, some less. (II.67-69).
She examines his argument and finds it false. Instead, she points out, but their diverse virtues -- not "dense" and "rare," but variety. Ah - so it's a theological explanation, though she has claimed it is all Realism. This is what our physicist friend meant who talked to the students last week. He pointed out how excellent the observed data of ancient and medieval astronomy was, how careful the reasoning and the mathematics, and how crippling the dogma.
He meant dogma in this sense -- why are the spheres spheres? That is, why did it take until Kepler for someone to try elliptical orbits? Well, because the Greeks believed the fixed stars were changeless and perfect, and surely spheres were more appropriate.
Similarly, Beatrice can't believe that the moon is marred -- it must be something else. Despite that, she says:
Experience, if you let it be your guide,
the fount for every stream of human art,
can set you free from this objection too. (Par II.94-96)
If that's not an Aristotelian talking I don't know what it is. But Aristotelians go wrong where their observation gives way to a preconception -- like spheres.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:29 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto I
Paradiso Canto I
I climb to Paradiso - and none too soon!
Dante begins by invoking God not by name but by pronoun -- colui che tutto muove, "the One who moves everything" (Par I.1), and returns to his theme of the inadequacy of language and mind, but embedded in a claim of his right to speak:
I have been in that heaven He makes most bright,
and seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue
utter, when one descends from such great height (Par I.4-6)
Dante's going to try, though. This time, rather than invoke the aid of the Muses or of Imagination, he calls on Apollo, but in a weird way. He asks for Apollo to inspire him, to "breathe your song, as when you drew the vain/Marsyas from the sheath of his own limbs" (Par I.20-21). That's a gory memory - Apollo flayed Marsyas for challenging him. Dante's relationship to the Classical world is fraught -- and never entirely positive.
Beatrice and Dante stare at the Sun with vision like eagles (who in medieval bestiaries could look directly at the Sun without flinching) they talk about Order, and how flame flies upward. They will soon be on their way from the Terrestrial Paradise to the sphere of the Moon, just as fire rises.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)
November 9, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXIII - the last canto
Canto XXXIII
The seven ladies walk on ahead of Beatrice, Matelda, Statius and Dante. Beatrice addresses Dante again, this time calling him "brother" (23), and asking why he doesn't ask questions. Dante admits that he is tongue tied in the presence of his superior.
She said to me, "I wish that you would now
loose yourself from your fear, be free of shame,
and speak no longer as a dreamer does." (Purg XXXIII.31-33)
Still fear! Even bathing in Lethe didn't cure Dante of that.
Beatrice explains the pageant -- the Church and Empire will be restored, but she gives Dante one explicit instruction for his poem:
And when you write them you must keep in mind
never to hide how you have seen the tree
robbed for the second time in Eden here. (Purg XXXIII.55-57)
In other words, Dante is not to conceal the state of the Church and Empire, not to pretty things up. Goodness knows he accepted that charge! Popes in Hell and a vision of a Whore in the Terrestrial Paradise!
Matelda had already brought Dante through Lethe, which washed away his memory of his sins. Now the party comes to Eunoë, which givees good memories -- memories of Dante's acts of charity. Dante and Statius drink and are made ready to move on. The canticle ends with a wonderful evocation of poetry -- for once Dante's language doesn't fail him, but his space does!
My Reader, if I had a longer space
I would keep singing but the merest part
of that sweet drink I never could drink full--
But because now the pages set upon
this second canticle's loom are all complete,
the rein of art prevents my writing on. From its most holy waters I returned
as remade as a new young plant appears
renewed in every newly springing frond,
Pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars. (Purg XXXIII.136-145)
There - again, a the last canto of a canticle ends with stars; at the end of the Inferno, Dante was seeing them. Now he will go among them!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXII
Canto XXXII
The Griffin's procession passes along, with Dante, Matelda, and Statius following at the wheel, passing through the deep but empty wood / (the fault of her who trusted in the snake) (Purg XXXII.31-32). Interesting to remind us - this wood would be full of people if the Terrestrial Paradise hadn't been removed from us. The Italian of the parenthetical statement is heavy on C-sounds: colpa di quella ch'al serpente crese.
Beatrice descends from the chariot and the whole party circles the dead tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Griffin, who is or symbolizes Christ, addresses the Tree and it re-flowers. Language and knowledge fail Dante:
I've never heard it, nor do we here sing
the hymn those people sang; nor did I last
to hear the ending of their melody. (Purg XXXII.61-63)
Dante sleeps, and when he wakes the Griffin is gone and Beatrice is sitting under the newly green tree. Another sacred drama takes place. This time we see the Chariot, which represents the church, perverted. This time the drama is clearly for Dante - Beatrice warns him to write it all down when he gets home. Dante sees an eagle attack the chariot (imperial persecutions?), a fox jump into the box (heresies), then the Eagle takes it over. A dragon comes, then the chariot sprouts horns like those of the Beast in the Apocalypse, then a whore mounts the chariot, and a giant joins her. When the whore gives Dante the eye, the giant lashes her and drives her away into the dimness of the forest.
Esolen reminds us, apocalypse means "uncovering." This uncovering is a revealing of the constant threat to the Church of power - both its own and political powers. But how strangely conveyed! Surreal!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXI
Canto XXXI
My colleague is going to have to explain why Dante should love Beatrice in the Terrestrial Paradise. I'm really finding the lady's scolding quite insufferable. What was Dante supposed to do after she died? (a) enter a monastery? (b) pine away? It's not clear, but she succeeds in making him weep in repentance and faint. Matelda washes him in the waters of Lethe, and he's ready to proceed.
Oh well, we have to take it on faith that Beatrice was so beautiful and so good. It's probably the weather that makes it harder for me to accept Dante's testimony about that than about so much else in the Purgatorio. In the long run I'm finding the eros that's supposed to have drawn Dante to the threshold of Heaven an unconvincing motivation.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 1, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXX
The thunder clap at the end of XXIX? It was to announce the person riding in the chariot - Beatrice!
Dante is caught up in love poetry -- he describes the flowers, the season, the sun in luscious terms - and then "stricken in the sight" (40) he runs to Virgil "as a little child will do / wide-eyed and running over to his mama / when he's afraid" (43-45). But Virgil's gone.
But Virgil has deprived us of his light,
Virgil the sweetest father, Virgil, he
in whom I trusted that I might be healed (Purg XXX.49-51)
In the space of three tercets Virgil is mother and father. This has got to be the most intense example of the Anxiety of Influenceever -- and a relationship open to torturous explanation. Virgil is Dante's teacher, guide, master, mama, father, nurse -- all of these get applied to him or his poem at various moments. Dante acknowledges him, and wants to exceed him -- even though when he actually lists classical poets he thinks he exceeds, Virgil is not among them.
The next word after Dante's tears? Dante, spoken by Beatrice in line 55, the only occurrence of the name in the Commedia.
Illustration: Sandro Botticelli, Terrestrial Paradise, c 1500.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:12 PM
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIX
Purgatory Canto XXIX
There is something about Purgatory that makes Dante think of sacred drama. In Canto VIII we watched two angels drive away a menacing serpent -- but there can be no real menace in Purgatory, so it was all for show. I still wonder for whom, since it happens every day. Maybe for the princes?
Here a full-scale pageant lays out the history of divine revelation - but for whom? I don't see any suggestion of regularity, so perhaps it for Dante alone. Certainly Matelda tells him to watch and listen. Dante strains to report what he saw, calling on the Muses again for help with the surreal scene:
Most holy virgins, if I have endured
hunger or cold, or watched the night for you,
good reason spurs me now to claim reward.
Still all the springs of Helicon for me!
Urania, help me with your choir, to set
hardly conceivable things in poetry. (Purg XXIX.37-42)
He exchanges a silent look with Virgil, and begins. What he describes sounds like a didactic allegorical procession -- something the late middle ages loved, complete with a float.
First come 24 Elders, two by two. They are obviously the 24 Elders of the Apocalypse, and more obscurely (though the numbering goes back to St Jerome, at least), the books of the Old Testament.* Then come the Four LIving Things (or the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse), representing the four Gospels, of course. Behind them comes a two-wheeled chairot pulled by a Griffin, half bird and half beast, representing Christ's two natures, fully human and fully divine. The chariot is accompanied by ladies, representing the virtues, theological and classical. Behind them are Luke and Paul (though Luke is mystically also a beast!). Paul, like the Gospel authors, is presented with a traditional iconographical attribute - the sword. Then four men "whose looks were meek and low" (142), representing the minor epistles, and finally "there came a man, alone / an old man, sleeping, with a knitted brow" (143-4), John the Evangelist as visionary of the Apocalypse. I'm not at all sure how he's processing and sleeping, but there you have it. I looked back - they're not ON the chariot, I think.
The procession ends with thunder. Unlike that thunder that struck Dante into a faint in the Inferno, this thunder booms and everyone stops, banners waving -- and we wait in anticipation with them.
*Esolen spells it out:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (the 5 books of Moses), Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings (as one),
Chronicles (same), Ezra (inlcudes Nehemiah), Job, Judith, Esther, Tobit, Maccabees (as one), Psalms, the 5 books of Solomon (as one), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah (including Lamentations and Baruch), and the Minor Prophets as one.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVIII
Purgatory Canto XXVIII
The Inferno began in a dark forest, the selva oscura of Inferno I.2. Purgatory is ending in another dark forest, but one without fear and threats. Dante is wandering into the Earthly Paradise, la selva antica, the ancient forest (Purg XXVIII.23), when he finds a stream.
Dimly and darkly here it rushes by
under the everlasting shade that never
allows a ray of sun or moon within. (Purg XXVIII.31-33)
On the other side of the stream Dante sees a lady whose name will not be revealed until Beatrice names her in Canto XXXIII. She is Matelda, and Esolen assures us that no one has been able to pin her to any historic person. She takes over as guide here. Virgil has fallen silent.
Matelda tells Dante about this place, which is Paradise, lifted up after the expulsion of Adam and Eve. The two streams, though, rather than the Biblical four rivers, are Lethe, the classical river of forgetfulness, and Eunoe, "good memories" (Purg XXVIII.131). That's another burst of inventiveness from Dante - and a pseudo-Greek word at that!
The canto ends with a typical linking of Dante's cosmos with the classical world - Matelda says that insofar as the classical poets sang about Parnassus and a golden age they were talking about this place,
For here the human race was innocent;
forever spring, and fruit upon the vine.
This is the nectar which the poets meant. (Purg XXVIII.142-144)
In a moment of remarkable intimacy, Dante looks back at Statius and Virgil and names them miei poeti, "my poets" (146). The relationship has changed from Virgil as guide, protector, and father and Statius as interlocutor and companion to something different. "My poets."
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVII
Purgatory Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII begins with Dante's greatest personal pain in the Commedia. The angel guardian of the next door says to the pilgrims, "Holy souls, you pass no farther on / unless you're bitten by the fire" (Purg XXVII.10-11). He names Dante a "holy soul!" Talk about progress and healing! But Dante is still afraid, scared to death.
So did he say to us when we drew near,
and I was like a corpse put in the grave,
the words I heard so touched my heart with fear.
I joined my hands and stretched them to the flames,
gazing, seeing too sharply in my mind
bodies I'd seen die burning at the stake. (Purg XXVII.13-18).
At the stake is a little strong for the Italian, which is only "which I had seen burned," già veduti accessi. But maybe that "burned" is to be understood as more actively done to the bodies than people who happen to have been caught in fires. Certainly Dante could have seen people burned.
Virgil reminds Dante of all the troubles they've been through to no effect, until he brings up Beatrice. Then Dante is willing to test the flame. Virgil goes first, Statius brings up the rear.
The blazes there inside did so surpass
all measure, that to feel the cool again
I'd haveflung myself into boiling glass.
But my sweet father spoke of Beatrice
with every step he took, to comfort me:
"I think I can already see her eyes." (Purg XXVII.49-54)
I've played with boiling glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. That's vivid.
The pilgrims pass out of the fre and start up the last flight of stairs just as the sun sets - so they each take a step and go to sleep. Dante has a detailed dream of Leah, who talks about her sister Rebecca -- and Leah is to Rebecca as Martha is to Mary, active and contemplative.
When they wake they finish that final staircase. Standing at the top, Virgil speaks his last words to Dante (though he will accompany Dante and Statius silently for a few more canti). Virgil tells Dante that he has led him by strength of mind (reason) and art (poetry?), but can go no further. He pushes Dante to accept his freedom as priest, prophet, and king -- the baptismal promises.
No longer wait for what I do or say.
Your judgment now is free and whole and true;
to fail to follow its will would be to stray.
Lord of yourself I crown and miter you. (Purg XVII.139-142).
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:10 AM
October 25, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVI
Purgatory Canto XXVI
So the pilgrims (including Statius) are walking gingerly in single file along the rim, air to the right and a wall of flame to the left. The sun casts his shadow onto the flame, and that stirs the interest of souls again. They put it two ways -- talking among themselves they say "It loks as if his body is not false" (Purg XXVI.12). That fittizio, "fictitious, false," is interesting so soonafter the disquisition in XXV on the airy bodies the souls assemble.
More beautiful comes a little later, when they address Dante directly. "Tell how you're a wall / against the sun" (Purg XXVI.22-3). Wall against the sun! I like that.
Dante notes that the souls come to the edge of the flame to approach him, but never leave it. That's a strong statement of their acceptance of their correction. The canto will end by calling the flame foco che li afina, "refining fire." This fire hurts - but it hurts in a way they accept.
The souls here are being purged of lust. Interesting, though; Dante seems to have disposed of them in the Inferno in separate places. The Circle of the Lustful was the second circle of Hell, Canto V. Only heterosexual lust was mentioned, and Paolo and Francesca were the interlocutors. The sodomites were much further down -- in the Circle of the Violent, Canti XV and XVI, where the interlocutor in one was Brunetto Latini and the other was the gang of fire-slick Florentines.
The souls here are both persuasions, being corrected together -- and their correction has gone so far they can greet each other with a kiss that is the kiss of peace rather than of lust (Purg XXVI.31), and their striving is friendly There is shouting, but it's jocular, claiming their shame (is this the only shouting in Purgatory?).
Dante makes another one of those odd jabs at Caesar here -- Caesar, who Dante puts in Limbo and whose assassins he saw chomped by Satan. Still, Dante remembers Suetonius's report that when Caesar entered Rome as a triumphator, his soldiers hailed him as Queen of Bithynia, because he had supposedly spent his hitch as a legatus in Bithynia having an affair with the king. Dante's attitude toward emperors is no simpler than his attitude toward popes. He loves the idea of empire and would like a more ideal papacy, but he spots human weakness.
Dante's interlocutors here, like Brunetto Latini among the sodomites, are poets and beloved teachers - Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel. We last recalled Dante's debt to Guinizelli in canto XXIV, when he talked with Bonogiunta of Lucca. Bonogiunta, who had dismissed the fancy love poetry of Guinizelli and Dante in life is the one now calls it dolce stil novo (Purg XXIV.57). Arnaut Daniel delivers the longest bit in a language other than Tuscan in the poem -- 8 lines of Provençal.
Clearly these are two love poets who lived out their poetry. Perhaps Dante is suggesting that if Beatrice had been alive he would have tried? Certainly he will have to pass through the flame in the next canto.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXV
Purgatory Canto XXV
Dante finally asks a question in Canto XXV that may have been bothering some of us -- how can the souls of the Gluttonous get so skinny when they don't need nourishment in Purgatory? Virgil says very briefly that it's all about the link between you and your reflection in a mirror. Statius will explain at great length and with the medieval technical understanding of embryology, complete with refutation of Averroes and an acceptance of Thomist models. Funny, the process Statius describes reminds me of those old ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny diagrams. The generation by blood on blood is a little off, but then we become a plant - or have the vegetative soul. Then we are "like a sea sponge," then we become an animal, and then a child (Purg XXV 52-61).
I still don't quite see why, even given all this, the disembodied soul after death has to create a facsimile body while it waits for the resurrection, but there you go -- I'm kind of theologically impaired.
More interesting is that at the end of the canto as they walk round a corner they see a blast of flame that almost reaches the rim. They are about to enter the place where "the last wound of all," lust, is healed.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:28 PM
October 21, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIV
Purgatory Canto XXIV
Forese continues as Dante's interlocutor (I guess Virgil and Statius are off speaking in Latin with each other?) in Canto XXIV. As Forese names souls among the gluttons, we find out that many of them are clergy -- the kind of hierarchs who always eat well. There is at least one poet beside Forese -- Bonagiunta di Lucca who had dismissed Dante and his circle in life. Here he praises Dante, and names Dante's technique the dolce stil novo, "the sweet new style" (Purg XXIV.57). Esolen admits in the notes that Dante may be cheating here -- it's one thing to put your enemies in Hell, but having your dead rival praise your work over his poetry?
When Bonagiunta first approaches he asks if Dante is the one who wrote the poem 'donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore,' 'Ladies who have intelligence of love.' Dante answers
Said I to him, "I'm the one who takes the pen
when Love breathes wisdom into me, and go
finding the signs for what he speaks within." (Purg XXIV.52-54
That last is an interesting explanation of the poet's working method. Love (or the Muse, or inspiration) speaks within, and the poet has to find a sign to express it.
Another of Dante's Ps is wiped away as they leave this ring and climb away.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:56 PM
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIII
Purgatory Canto XXIII
Canto XXII ended with the sight of an apple tree - it will be awhile before we discover that it sprung from a seed of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Canto XXIII begins with Dante looking up at the tree so fixedly that Virgil has to speak to him to get him to move on. And just as Virgil was protective and mothering in the Inferno (why can't I remember which canto?), here he is più che padre, "more than a father" (Purg XXIII.4).
As they go on into the ring of the Gluttons -- who turn out to have been more gourmands than piggish gluttons -- Dante meets his old friend and poetical comrade Forese Donati (who was also some sort of relative of Dante's wife). Forese and Dante were the kind of friends who exchanged poems of humorous abuse. Esolen includes them in an appendix, where we read Dante alleging that Forese neglected his sickly wife, Nella; however, she gets mentioned here in Purgatorio because she's prayed him up the hill so quickly -- Forese had only been dead five years. Compare that to poor Statius, who had no one to pray for him!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:32 PM
October 20, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXII
Purgatory Canto XXII
Virgil and Statius chit chat about the sin being purged here -- Statius was a spendthrift, and they are with the avaricious in Purgatory just as they slam rocks against them in Inferno VII -- and then Virgil asks the question that must really interest him: how did you get saved?
"...What candle, then, what sun
scattered the darkness that you might turn sail,
following the Fisherman?"... (Purg XXII.61-63)
The answer is "You."
Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano
A poet you made me, and a Christian too. (Purg XXII.73)
Statius says that Virgil first made him a poet, leading him on to write his own epics, and then in Eclogue IV he set Statius up for the Gospel message.
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
The great line of the centuries is born again,
now the Virgin returns, now the reign of Saturn
now a newborn babe is sent down from high heaven. (Virgil, Eclogue IV.5-7)
You can see why Christians have often thought that something other than a pagan Muse touched Virgil there? Statius says that God touched him through Virgil, at least, and then he began listening to the itinerant preachers of Christianity. During the persecutions of Domitian he was baptized, but concealed his faith. Therefore he spent centuries in the fourth ring with the late repenters. Virgil passes on news about various classical folk in Limbo and Hell, and they continue to climb.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XXI
Purgatory Canto XXI
The earthquake at the end of Canto XX bewildered the pilgrims -- and silenced the singing of the souls, briefly. In Canto XXI they meet an even older saved soul than Hugh Capet and learn the reason.
What's the line from It's a Wonderful Life - "every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings?" Every time the mountain shakes, a soul is ready for freedom, and passes out of Purgatory (58).
Their interlocutor is the early imperial poet Statius, who lived in the Vespasianic era (69-96). His conversion story will come in the next canto. Here we read his tribute to Virgil, his model. He says this about his influences:
Of the Aeneid I mean: for all I am
of poet, it was my mama and my nurse.
Without it, all my work weighs not a dram. (Purg XXI.97-99)
Talk about a willingness to acknowledge influence!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:50 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Purgatory XX
Purgatory Canto XX
Dante is such a snob! The poor Capetians are STILL a new family to him, from Hugh down, and what Hugh is atoning for is avarice. Hmm - Hugh is certainly the longest-serving patient we've met so far in Purgatory; he died just before the year 1000 (Cato doesn't count - he's not going any further up the mountain). Hugh's diatribe is really a stick to beat the French monarchy with, that institution whose interferences in Italy took things from bad to worse.
Hughe Capet was my name, and every last
Philip and Louis who has governed France
from my day until now has sprung from me. (Purg XX.49-51).
I like that echo of Tom, Dick, and Harry Esolen gets in there - the Italian just has definite articles, "the Philips and the Louises."
Hugh is so disgusted with his family that Dante lets him say something positive about Boniface VIII - who was harried to death by the agents of the King (the slap of Anagni).
The canto ends with another set of those weird voices through the mist - disembodied voices giving historical examples of avarice. I find the auditory events disturbing, for some reason. I'll have to think about that.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:11 AM
October 6, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio XIX
Purgatory Canto XIX
Canto XIX begins with a dream -- remember, Dante fainted occasionally in the Inferno, but in the Purgatorio he rests. Dante's dream is of the Siren, an allegory for the attachments purified in these upper rings, avarice, gluttony and lust (58-60). Virgil explains, and then rousts Dante out of his revery, like a falcon.
An idle falcon, gazing at his feet,
turns at thefalconer's cry in hot desire
to feed, and launches forth upon the wing (Purg XIX.64-66)
And so they scramble on up to see the avaricious, who lie in the dust with their faces to the ground. Dante's interlocutor is Pope Adrian V, pope for a month in 1276. Adrian expresses the frustration of success, his realization that the position he wanted so much:
Was a cheat, for it could not still the heart,
nor from its highest reachdes could one climb.
So for this life I felt the flame of love. (Purg XIX.109-111)
The obvious contrast is to Pope Nicholas III, the simonist of Inferno XIX. Nicholas is unrepentant, and in fact eagerly awaits the arrival of Boniface VIII. The simonists were planted upside down in little holes, only the soles of their feet showing. Esolen speculated that this represented the inversion of the hierarchical positions they sought. Here in Purgatory, the position is brought low to the dust -- but Adrian accepts his correction.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:21 AM
October 5, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XVIII
Canto XVIII
In Canto XVIII Dante gives Virgil a new title: l'alto dottore, "the Teacher of deep matters," Esolen offers. Or "high," alto being one of those annoying words. Virgil certainly lives up to the name in this canto, with a long disquisition on love. Love is the source "of all good actinos and their opposites" (Purg XVIII.15).
L'animo, ch'è creato ad amar presto
ad ogne cosa è mobile che piace,
tosto che dal piacere in atto è desto.
The soul, which is created quick to love,
once readiness is wakened into act
will move toward anything that pleases it. (Purg XVIII.19-21)
I love that create ad amar presto! That explains a lot, doesn't it? Our souls are, by nature, ready to love, and easily distracted into loving things that aren't good for them. And it's beauty that does it!
For they may see the goodness of the matter,
but they neglect the form. Not every seal
is good, although the wax it stamps may be (Purg XVIII.37-39).
Virgil also presents two other things that are inborn, like the desire for beauty: reason and liberty. Both of those are called innate, "inborn." The Purgatorio is the story of the unclouding of clouded reason and the achieving of true liberty. That really is the big pattern, in much the same way that the great pattern of the Inferno is the correspondence of suffering to the particular rejection of God.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:35 PM
October 1, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XVII
Purgatory Canto XVII
Canto XVII is the middle canto of the Purgatorio. Dante begins with both a direct address to the reader and an epic apostrophe. But rather than invoking the Muses here, Dante calls on Imagination, imaginativa, to tell him how she works.
Line 70, the middle line of this middle canto describes sunset, which always brings progress up the mountain to a halt. That gives Dante a chance to ask Virgil about the layout of Purgatory. Below they have seen Pride, Envy, and Wrath corrected - disordered loves. Further up they will see Gluttony, Avarice and Lust realigned from their excessive bents. And:
Here they restore a love of good that fell
short of its duty; here they ply the oar
which once they rowed to slowly -- to their loss (Purg XVII.85-88)
Halfway through the middle canticle!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM
September 30, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XVI
Purgatory Canto XVI
The Wrathful in Canto XVI, already on their way to correction, sing the sweetest liturgical chant, the Agnus Dei. One of my New Testament study sheets for art history students is all about lambs and shepherds -- and students explore the transformation of the Lamb of God into the Lamb on the Throne in the Apocalypse. It's a good lesson for the angry as they untie what Dante describes as the "knot of anger" (Purg XVI.23).
Vision fails on this ledge, because a thick smoke fills the air. People can still here Dante speaking Tuscan, though, and Dante falls in with a Lombard. The Lombard explains how men confuse astrology with fixed fate, as though the stars destroy free will. Instead,
The heavens give your movements their first nudge--
not alll your movements, but let's grant that too--
still, light is given that you may freely judge
And choose the good or evil , and should free will
grow weary in the first battles with the stars,
foster it well and it will win the day.
You men lie subject to that One who made
you free .... (Purg XVI.73-80)
It's the nature/nurture argument, with Dante saying that fate nudges us, but we don't have to do what fate says, nor do genes always win. The souls in Purgatory are learning to be really free.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM
Evening in Purgatory, Midnight in Florence -- this is how Dante kept his horizons straight.
A colleague shared that with me - and I'll be sharing it with the Dante class.
I recommend that you click and watch it at YouTube - my blog template is cropping the right margin and you're going to lose some.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:27 AM
September 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio XV
Purgatory Canto XV
The long arc from the dawning of the day
to the third hour's last movements, in that sphere
whose turning's ever like a lad at play,
Would measure out how much of its career
lay for the sun before the evening's close;
evening upon that mountain, midnight here. (Purg XV.1-6)
In the Inferno we saw Dante and Virgil paying close attention to the structure of Hell. Dante was constantly referring to the diagram pinned to his wall to remind the reader how far he'd come.
On that mountain, Dante's concern is time of day, constantly expressed in astronomical terms -- so as the Sun turns it is now evening in Purgatory, midnight in Italy. But the angels, when they appear, are even more dazzling than the Sun, because they reflect the brightness of God.
In some previous canti Dante has seen relief carvings depicting either sins or virtues -- here he has, as is probably appropriate after all the dazzle, a vision. He sees three related scenes of Meekness, the correction of pride, one of them quite odd. No reader can be surprised at the Virgin Mary as an exmplar of meekness, or even of Stephen the First Martyr forgiving his persecutors. But Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens?
Dante knew Pisistratus through Valerius Maximus's Memorabilia (Esolen nods - he gives the date for Pisistratus as late 5th C BCE, when he was 6th). Someone stole a kiss from Pisistratus's daughter, and his wife demanded the man be punished.
And he responded, with his countenance calm:
"What shall we do with those who wish us ill
when even those who love us we condemn?" (Purg XV.103-105).
An excellent example of forgiveness!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM
September 23, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XIV
Purgatory Canto XIV
Canto XIV is not full of interest for those who are not up on their late Medieval Italian genealogy -- the canto is dominated by lists of courtly families extinguished by failure to produce sons or degenerate in behavior. There's also a very depressing description of the course of the Arno from the mountains to the sea - and everywhere it flows the dirty ditch gets worse; Dante can describe teh natural world charmingingly, but not here. Dante was in a mood
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:18 AM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XIII
Purgatory Canto XIII
Canto XIII has 3 very nice moments. First, Virgil uses the verb temo, "I fear." He admits openly in prayer that Purgatory is new to him and he needs help. We are so used to Dante fearing in Hell that this admission comes as a surprise -- even though we've seen Virgil's confusion and occasional discomfiture already in this canticle.
The souls being corrected here are the Envious, whose eyes are sewn shut. Esolen associates the color of their cloaks with liver (livid, liver), based on medieval medical theory of envy originating in that organ. But the outlet for envy, which was a milder form of the Evil Eye, was the eyes. That's probably why they're stitched up. Dante asks if anyone was a Latin (which Esolen renders as Italian, l 92). In reply a woman (and a Sienese!) wisely replies:
"My brother, each man is a citizen
of one true city .What you meanto say
is, 'who once lived a pilgrim in that land.'" (Purg XIII.94-96)
That's one of the great themes, as Esolen reminds us, of lots of medieval authors, from Augustine (who named the one true city) to Chaucer.
Best of all, though, may be Dante's brief examination of conscience. When the woman notes that he still breathes and asks what he's up to he admits that he will spend little time on this ledge, but can already feel the burden of the rocks the Proud haul around (Purg XIII.133-138). Dante knows himself. He's no longer afraid, and he is confronting his real sins.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:18 AM
September 21, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XII
Purgatory Canto XII
Dante's empathy has never been so evident as in the simile opening of canto XII.
Now neck to neck like oxen at the plow
I walked along beside that burdened soul
all while the sweet instructor would allow,
But when he said, "Come on and leave the man,
for here it's well that each soul speed his boat
with wings and oars as quickly as he can,"
I drew upright, as men are wont to go --
my body drew upright, though my thoughts still
remained all hunched and bowed and humbly low.
But isn't the second comparison an odd juxtaposition! Dante and Oderisi the Illuminator are like oxen, burdened, low, but Virgil sees Oderisi (and all the souls) as boats speeding on! Interesting passage.
This is another place Doré ignores the text. Notice how he shows heroes carved on the wall of the ledge of the proud; Dante is hunching along with Oderisi. But the poem says that the carvings in this area are carved "upon the road from hill's base to the brink" (Purg XII.24), and compares them to floor tombs in a church.
This is a canto with an overwhelming patterned ekphrasis. As Dante describes the subjects of these carvings each tercet begins with a pre-determined word - 4 with Vedea (Mark! or Look!), 4 with O, 4 with Mostrava (Look! or See!), and then one last Vedeva. Lots of other patterning going on inside the description, proud pagans and patriarchs brought low, but no Christians.
Dante refers to Satan in line 25 as "the one," colui; I wonder if that avoidance of naming him in Purgatory is like Dante's avoidance of naming Christ in the Inferno, where he was the One. I'll have to keep my eye out.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XI
Purgatory Canto XI
Canto XI continues the correction of the proud, and continues to show Dante's interest in the visual arts. But instead of describing works of art carved for the edification of the saved souls, Dante meets repentant painters and describes other painters -- not that painting is a sin, but like all things humans can do excellently painting can lead to pride.
The canto begins with a long (22 line) paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, sung by the souls, paraphrased to bring out the themes of reliance on God. Their chant ends with
Dear Lord, we do not make this final prayer
for ourselves here, for here there is no need,
but for the ones behind us yet to come. (Purg XI.22-24
These souls are saved - they need no prayers for that, though the prayers of the living can shorten their time there. But they, graciously, are praying for us, too.
I'm a specialist in early Medieval architecture and such, and had never considered the etymology of a remarkably common word in later Medieval art, "illumination" and its variants. Dante made me wonder about why we call manuscripts illuminated with a throwaway line.
"Oh!" diss'io lui, "non se' tu Oderisi,
l'onor d'Agobbio e 'lonor di quell'arte
ch'alluminar chiamata è in Parisi?"
"Say!" I began, aren't you Oderisi,
glory of Gubbio and glory of that art
which they in Paris call illumining?"
Dante thinks of alluminar as a French loan word? Interesting! So I checked up on the word in the OED and found that ILLUMINATE in meaning 8, "To decorate (an initial letter, word, or text, in a manuscript) with gold, silver, and brilliant colours, or with elaborate tracery and miniature designs, executed in colours; to adorn (a manuscript, inscription, text, etc.) with such decorative letters and miniatures," comes with a parenthetical note: "(In this sense it has taken the place of ENLUMINE." Noting that the earliest occurrences of "Illuminate" are 16th Century, I follow the trail to EN'LUMINE (accent on the first syllable, interesting), from Old French enluminer, which shows up as early as 1366 in Chaucer, A.B.C. (what's that text?), "Kalendeeres enlumyned...." The great dictionary throws in a CF to a medieval Latin term I'd never heard, "lumina (lit. 'lights') the paintings in a MS."
Fun morning digressions aside, Oderisi's pride is so tamed that he responds by naming the successor who has outshone him - he is well on his way to being corrected, and expresses his correction in a monetary metaphor - "Here for such pride we pay the fee" (Purg XI.88). He goes on to name Giotto as another successor who has outshone his predecessor - in Giotto's case, Cimabue - and then to relate the pattern to poets and politicians, all of whom could use correction for their pride.
The poem ends with another prediction of Dante's exile, but again the tone is different when those come here in Purgatory. In Hell there was always some gloating on the part of the damned soul who had the news. Here it is more gentle, more corrective.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
September 9, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto X
Purgatory Canto X
Dante and Virgil begin the ring where Pride is corrected - and I noticed for the first time (though once I thought about it I realized it's been going on for a little while) Virgil seems less assured. In X.19 they are both uncertain of their way. Towards the end of the canto, Virgil says
. . . these eys of mine,"
said he, "first had to tussle with my thought." (Purg X.116-117)
We are reaching places where Virgil's human senses (even those of a Limbo-dwelling virtuous pagan) are failing.
This confusion of senses also runs through Dante's first use of the visual arts in the Commedia (I think!). There was an inscription on the gate of Hell, but there were no pictures -- just as there was no singing. But now the pilgrims see relief sculpture carved into the rock face of the ledge of Pride.
It was all gleaming marble and adorned
with figures so well carved that not alone
would the great Polycletus* there feel scorned
But Nature too. (Purg X.31-34)
The confusion of the distinction between Art and Nature, or Perception and other senses, continues through the canto. First they see an Annunciation, and Dante confuses the pose with the spoken word:
. . . he did not seem
A silent form. You'd swear you heard him say "Hail!"---for the one who opened Heaven's high love
was there in image, she who turned the key,
And in her pose was stamped the spoken word,
exactly as a seal in molten wax:
"Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord." (Purg X.39-45)
Of course in the slightly later Renaissance it was not at all uncommon to paint the dialog between the Angel and Mary as issuing from their mouths (I'm not certain about c. 1300 - I don't remember any just off hand), but Dante is not visualizing an inscription. The next panels, showing scenes of the Ark of the Covenant and of King David dancing before it confuse both hearing and smelling! Talk about synaesthesia!
[images of people] who made one sense
of mine say, "No," the other, "Yes, they're singing,"
And so too with the smoke of frankincense--
the image set at strife the eyes and nose
with yes and no. (Purg X.59-63)
And here we see, too, the valorization of "it looks just like reality." As an art historian I find that kind of depressing. I spend way too much of my time convincing students that art, even art they think is Realistic (their word) is at best an abstraction from nature.
*Esolen nods. Policleto in Italian looks like Polycletus in English, but we really call him "Polyclitus" or "Polykleitos" in Art History. You know, the sculptor of the Doryphorus.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto IX
Purgatory Canto IX
Is this the first time Dante sleeps, as opposed to the fainting fits of the Inferno? At IX.12 he lies down to rest and falls asleep. I remember the pilgrims sitting in Hell, and Dante falls unconscious over and over, but does he sleep? Hmm.
The canto is also an orgy of classical allustion. We have a swallow singing - and a reference to the story of why she sings a sad song (IX.15), Ganymeded (IX.23), Achilles (IX.34), his mother (IX.37), Chiron (IX.38), and the Trojan War. It seems a dense occurrence.
In the middle of the canto - tercet 24 out of 48 - Dante speaks directly to us:
Lettor, tu vedi ben com'io innalzo
la mia matera, e però con più arte
non ti maravigliar s'io la rincalzo.
Reader, you may well see how I exalt
the matter of my song, so never wonder
ifnow I prop it up with greater art.
This is like the invocation of the Muses in Purg. I, but without the pagan help. Dante is relying on his greater art. I wonder if he will rely less now on classical commonplaces?
Dante finally reaches the Gate of Purgatory. He went through a number of gates in Hell. The first was the open, broad gate of the inscription ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE in Canto III. The second was the locked gate to the City of Dis, defended by the Gorgons (IX.88-90); an angel opened that one, too. That one opened with the touch of a wand. This needs two keys, one of silver and one of gold. The door groans, but opens, and the angel inscribes the letter P (for peccato, "sin") on Dante's forehead. He is ready to proceed, and hears yet another liturgical hymn, the Te Deum, as he walks on.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:21 AM
September 5, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio VIII
Purgatory Canto VIII
One pattern of Hell reversed in Purgatory is sound. Where Hell was full of horrible noises people keep singing in Purgatory. We began with Dante's invocation of the Muses in Canto I, where he promises to sing. In Canto II the pilgrims heard the souls singing the psalm In exitu Israel. Cato scolded Casella for singing one of Dante's love songs in Canto III, but the souls were enjoying the sound! The Miserere occurs in Canto V, Salve Regina in VII, and the evening hymn Te lucis ante terminum here in VIII. We have a combination of the canonical hours (this last is a hymn for Compline) and free song -- but it is all registered as pleasant. The only exclamations from the souls are excited noises when they see that Dante is alive (remember that Ooooo?) and sighs. But the sighs here are not sighs of despair, but hope. Everyone in Purgatory has already made it into Heaven -- they just need to be rectified and made acceptable for entrance.
One of the stranger episodes in the entire Comedia plays out in this canto. Dante and Virgil see two angels appear - come from Mary's bosom in Heaven. Sordello tells the pilgrims the angels have come to guard the valley / against that serpent whose approach is near. (Purg VIII.38-29)
Eventually (c. line 100) the serpent slithers in, maybe the same who gave the bitter food / To Eve (Purg VIII.99). The angels, "celestial falcons," stoop on the serpent, which flees at the sound of their wings beating the air.
But what was it about? It is like a sacred drama acted out for an audience -- but is the audience the neglectful princes? Or Dante? Why would God in His grace allow a serpent to approach Purgatory at all? Very mysterious! Definitely an allegorical drama to unpack.
The canto begins with sailors and pilgrims -- voluntary travelers -- and ends with exile.
That hour had fallen when the sailor bends
his yearning and his softened heart toward home,
the day he's bid farewell to his sweet friends;
The hour that wrings the pilgrim just away
should he hear home's beloved bells afar,
that seem to mourn the dying of the day -- (Purg VIII.1-6)
At the end of the canto Dante is talking to Currado Malaspina and praises his families liberality and gallantry. Malaspina tells the Dante of 1300 that 7 years won't pass:
Before upon the front of your own head
you'll find this courteous opinion nailed
with surer nails that what the rest have said --
If judgment has not stopped its course and failed. (Purg VIII.136-139)
That is, Dante will find out for himself how liberal and gallant the Malaspina are when, in 1306, they take him in as an exile from Florence. Any number of souls in Hell foretold his exile, but Malaspina is the first to offer comfort (though hard comfort, an opinion nailed to his forehead!). So, we've moved from those gentle sailors and pilgrims headed home to Dante in Exile - a good way to balance a canto.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:30 PM
September 2, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto VII
Purgatory Canto VII
My lack of real interest in Canto VII is certainly my own fault - the holding room for late medieval princes who neglected their souls to rule their domains involves a cast of characters I find as uninteresting as, say, all those Florentines in Hell.
The obvious parallel to the kings who sit around doing not much of anything is the Limbo of Virtuous Pagans in Inferno IV, where a lot of listing goes on. I am more interested in the culture heroes of the Classical world than I am in late 13th Century politics, so there you have it.
Unlike the pagans in Limbo, who everyone in 14th Century Italy would have agreed were interesting and probably virtuous, the list of rulers was probably considerably more controversial in its own time, relying as it does on Dante's judgment.
But there you have it - too topical for my taste, which runs more to Charlemagne. He'll turn up in Paradiso XVIII -- I guess he'd been dead long enough to move on!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 AM
August 31, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio VI
Purgatory Canto VI
In the University of California Lectura Dantis, Purgatorio ( a canto-by-canto commentary, and one I should read more thorougly), Maria Picchio Simonelli points out that the 6th canton in all three cantiche is political. Canto VI in the Inferno, the circle of the Gluttons, was mainly about partisan politics, Guelphs and Ghibbelines. This canto is the introduction to the negligent princes, with Sordello as guide.
Before we get in Canto VII to the princes who neglected their souls to be about their business we read here some of Dante's most famous denunciations of Italy - and he even calls her Italia (VI.76), rather than the land of the Latins (see Inferno XIX) or some such.
Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello
nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,
non donna di provincie, ma bordello!
Ah Italy, you slave, you inn of grief,
you ship without a pilot in the storm,
no lady of the shire, you house for whores! (VI.76-78
Dante plays again and again the contrast between localism and nationalism - the love for non-existant Italy and the love of City. Here in Purgatorio VI, Sordello, a man who lived in France, wrote poetry in Provencal, and retired to the Abruzzi, goes all gushy over his fellow Mantuan, Virgil. Dante is not portraying that as an entirely positive reaction.
Now here's something about which I'm sure I could find more discussion. Dante and Virgil consider (VI.25-VI.48) the inefficacy of prayer to the Olympian deities (based on a quotation from the Aeneid about the uselessness of praying for Palinurus). Esolen talks about that as a misalignment of ends -- the prayer is directed to the wrong deities, but when it seemed to be answered it was because it happened to correspond to God's will. Virgil evades the question (a little) by saying that Beatrice will clear all this up, and Dante rises to the bait of Beatrice.
Then 100 lines later, in what is at least an ironic usage and at best a weird classicism, Dante prays:
And if you will allow me, highest Jove,
you who on earth were crucified for us,
have your just eyes turned elsewhere? Or is this
The preface to some benefit you've planned
in the abyss of providence, cut off
from our capacity to understand? (VI.118-123)
Because if those 2 tercets aren't about the mystery of unanswered prayer and the inscrutability of theodicy I'm not sure what they're about -- and they're addressed to Giove. Neither Esolen nor Simonelli help at all. Oh - the mystery Dante's talking about is still why Italy is such a bordello.
So much to learn!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:19 PM
August 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto V
Purgatory Canto V
Some people have a better excuse for being late-repenters -- and so they're further up the slope: the people who repented at the last moment because they died by violence. They're engaged in the 2nd example of psalm-singing, the Miserere (Psalm 51, Vulgate 50), "Have mercy on me, O God, according to they mercy; according to the multitude of thy kindnesses blot out my iniquity," but the chant changes when they see that Dante casts a shadow.
mutar lor canto in un "oh!" lungo e roco;
they changed their song to one long speechless "Oh!" (V.27)
Listen to all the Os in the Italian! They may have delayed their earlier repentence, but they rush over to the pilgrims with three similes!
. . . No shooting stars
have I seen slash the calm and starlit eve,
nor shafts of sunset split the August clouds,
As quickly as I saw those spirits run
and with the others turn their eyes our way--
like horsemen charging on without the rein. (V.37-42)
Their re-formation is well underway.
One of the three who speak is the son of someone in Hell - Bonconte da Montefeltro, son of Guido da Montefeltro (Inferno XXVII). Where Guido made an outward conversion, even becoming a Franciscan, Bonconte died on the field of battle, and fighting against Florence. Once again, Dante rises above his own loyalties.
Here's an even stronger example of speaking to the 14th Century audience than I wondered about in Canto III -- and took some nerve on Dante's part. Bonconte says that his wife and other relatives aren't bothering to pray for him (V.89). Bonconte is about Dante's age -- Esolen suggests that Dante was present at the battle when Bonconte died -- we might suppose that the widow was still alive when Dante was writing. Did he know something about her life? Had she happily remarried? Had she failed to have masses said - and was this public knowledge? It's really a pretty stiff charge!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:19 PM
August 27, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatorio Canto IV
Purgatory Canto IV
I guess Canto IV is the kind of passage that makes people say "Purgatorio is dull."
Dante and Virgil have a couple of long conversations about the location of Purgatory (directly opposite Jerusalem) and astronomy (the sun rises to the moves from NORTHeast to northwest in the Southern Hemisphere) Dante is demonstrating his mastery of medieval science - and doing it all in poetry.
Dante doesn't notice the latter until the pilgrims sit down for a rest, having scaled the steep slope from the beach towards (but not to, yet) the Gate. While they're sitting down and speculating about the sun rising over the left shoulder they notice some souls resting in the shade - the laggards, those who put off their repentance until the end. Again, like the excommunicate, Dante has them wait as many years as they delayed; these two are good examples of what scholars see as the rising habit of numeration in the Middle Ages.
I can't say the canto gripped me, either!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM
August 26, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto III
Purgatory Canto III
The first tercet of Canto III ends with an excellent 4-word statement of the method of Purgatory: it is the place ove ragion ne fruga, "where reason winnows us" (III.3). If Hell is a place where the souls have rejected and still reject Divine Reason, Purgatory is the place where the souls learn to increasingly conform themselves to that pattern. Dante has just compared the scattering souls at the end of Canto II to pigeons scattered from a wheat field, so the verb frugare, "winnow," is especially pointed.
The souls the pilgrims first met in Hell were the indecisive, who were condemned to perpetually chasing a flag as fast as they could fly. The first established group of souls Dante meets here are moving slowly, deliberately. They are "a happy flock" (III.86), the excommunicate.
Dante meets Manfred, King of Sicily. His father Frederick was in the circle of the heretics and his aunt Constance will show up in Paradise -- our first example of this sort of family division. Manfred explains the technical effect of excommunication. Excommunication doesn't damn a soul to Hell -- popes can't do that, souls damn themselves or not -- but for every year he lived excommunicate he has to wait here on this beach before starting to climb the mountain.
However, that time can be shortened by the prayers of the living -- and we see here for the first time a shift in Dante's relation to the dead souls. While in the Inferno he or Virgil offered fame in exchange for conversation or help (e.g., Antaeus), here the souls will ask or Dante will offer to carry word to their survivors. Manfred asks:
See now if you can bring me happiness,
revealing to my daughter the good Constance
the law that binds me here. For we can gain
Much profit from what prayers on earth obtain.
I wonder about the 14th Century! How many early readers of Dante came across the name of a relative or friend in Purgatory and offered up a prayer? Surely some!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:35 AM
August 25, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatory Canto II
Purgatory Canto II
Canto II begins with much astronomy, situating Mount Purgatory for the informed medieval reader -- all of whom believed, of course, in a spherical world hanging at the center of the cosmos. Jerusalem was at the center of the inhabitable land mass and directly antipodeal to Mount Purgatory. The Pillars of Hercules were 90 degrees west of Jerusalem and the mouth of the Ganges 90 degrees east (neat, if inaccurate). No one who survives this course will ever believe in the Flat Earth Theory, concocted in the 19th century.
Across the waters of Ocean Dante sees the angelic opposite of Charon bringing souls to Mount Purgatory. Esolen has a graceful little note: The details of this scene echo and, as it were, correct those of the crossing of Acheron Inf 3.82-120)--boat, waters, pilot, speed, instruments, attitude of passengers." I like that "correct" - a good word for Purgatory.
Most importantly for readers and interpreters of Dante, the souls are singing the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, "When from the land of Egypt Israel came." This is the very verse Dante explicated for Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona, in the letter dedicating the Paradiso to him. Dante lays out four levels of polysemous meaning for the Big Dog: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
So in the first 50 lines of the Canto we're going to get to discuss medieval cosmology and medieval hermeneutics. Does it get better than that?
Here's the letter, in Latin and English.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
August 24, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatory Canto I
Purgatory Canto I
I rush on with the pilgrims to the mountain of Purgatory.
My little ship of ingenuity
now hoists her sails to speed through better waters,
leaving behind so pitiless a sea
The commonplace is that everyone finds Hell more interesting than the other two realms. We'll see how Romantic our students are.
Dante begins the canticle with an invocation of the Muses, but the strangest, most backhanded invocation of classical precedent I can think of -- he calls on Calliope to sing this canticle of pardon while reminding her that she is merciless.
Here rise to life again, dead poetry!
Let it, O holy Muses, for I am yours,
and here, Calliope, strike a higher key,
Accompanying my song with that sweet air
which made the wretched Magpies feel a blow
that turned all hope of pardon to despair.
(Purg 1.7-12)
Esolen's note reminds us that Virgil addressed Calliope and that Ovid told us the story (Metamorphoses 6.294-340, 662-78). Some foolish humans engaged in a singing match with the muse. She won, of course, and to remind them of their presumption turned them into magpies. No one ever came out ahead in those challenges to the Olympian gods - Arachne, Marsyas, these girls - and no mercy was shown, no chance of forgiveness. Dante is subtle here, reminding us that however much he loved those old poets, he did not love their gods.
The first soul they meet, the guardian of the beach of Mt Purgatory, is a puzzler - Marcus Porcius Cato - pagan, anti-Caesarian, and suicide. At best you'd think we was with the virtuous pagans in Limbo, at worst getting chewed by Satan, and most logically in the wood of the suicides. But here he is!
Esolen's note helps a lot.
The explanation lies in Cato's motive and in the meaning of Purgatory. Dante insisted (De monarchia 2.5) that Cato's death was an act of devotion to freedom, a self-sacrifiing witness to its pricelessness. It was an act, althought Cato himself was not aware of it at the time, in imitation of Chrsti, who died that all men might be free. Dante could claim impressive precedent from the poet Lucan, whose Cato, after decrying the injustice of the Roman gods in leading the nation into civil war, seems to wish to do what those gods would not exclaiming: "Would it were possible for me to lay my head down, condemned by the gods of Heaven and Hell, and take upon myself all punishments!" (Pharsalia 2.306-7). "Let my blood redeem the nations" (2.312), he cries, longing not to enjoy freedom himself but to restore freedom to others. And freedom--the liberation of will from sin--is the aim of Purgatory. ( (Purgatory, 412)
There were some astronomical moments in the Inferno, but they become more frequent in Purgatory -- here we see the the Southern Cross in the sky. I've got to look up how much of that was fancy and how much based on reports from sailors.
In Hell Dante and Virgil sometimes bargained with the damned - they wanted information and they offered fame through Dante's poetry in return. In Purgatory they will offer or the souls will request that news be taken to their loved ones so that prayers can be said for them. The first attempt to carry news falls flat, though -- Virgil offers to carry news to Martia, Cato's wife, who is in the Limbo of Virtuous Pagans. Cato refuses the favor. He remembers their love, but tells the pilgrims that now they are divided by the river Acheron, "più muover non mi può," "she can no longer move me, now nor ever" (Purg 1.90).
Hard divisions.
One of the first moments where I will be telling students to flip back to the Inferno to compare and contrast is the reed-pulling scene. Cato tells Virgil to wash Dante's face and belt him with a reed from the shore. They do so, and just at the end of canto 1 Dante sees:
Oh wonder to behold! Where he had torn
the lowly reed he'd chosen, suddenly
A reed exactly like it was reborn
Contrast that with the gruesome twig-plucking in the forest of the Suicides in Inferno XIII. When Dante breaks off a twig it begins to gush blood and talk. There's lots of violence and no rebirth in that canto. Things will be different in Purgatory.
I'm going to note again I think it was an odd editorial decision (not one I think Esolen made) to call the first canticle Interno, but to call the next two Purgatory and Paradise. Perhaps market research proves that "Dante's Inferno" is a recognizeable English phrase? I would prefer all three in English or all three in Italian, but that's me.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:33 AM
August 23, 2010
Danteblogging - Inferno Canto XXXIV
Inferno Canto XXXIV - the last canto
The pilgrimage takes 100 cantos -- and thus the Inferno is one canto longer than the other two canticles. The structure doesn't fall as neatly as 1 introductory canto and 33 in Hell - Dante and Virgil get to the gates of Hell at the start of Canto III.
Here in XXXIV we have the end of the descent into Hell and the beginning of the climb to Paradise - the pilgrims pass the center of the cosmos. But first they must past Satan's faces. What Dante sees from a distance are the turning arms of a giant windmill - the sails that are eventually revealed to be the fruitlessly beating wings of Satan, imprisoned in the ice. Again, language fails Dante when he neither dies nor lives as he see "The emperor of the reign of misery" (34.28). But he goes on - and language ceases to fail. Begins to work? And he describes the ludicrous parody of the Trinity that Satan has become - a three-headed monster chewing three of the worst sinners, traitors against their benefactors.
Once again I'm left a little puzzled -- Judas, sure. Brutus, sure, given the way Dante feels about Caesar and the Roman Empire. Cassius, fine, ditto.
But couldn't Dante have thought of a third traitor that belongs in the mouth of Satan? Imagination is failing me at the moment, but perhaps it is part of the relentlessly Mediterranean world-view that Dante can't think of anyone better than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar.
After all this long journey the end comes remarkably quickly. Virgil says
But night is rising, and it's time to leave,
for Hell has nothing more for us to see. (34.68-9)
Then Dante climbs on Virgil's back and Virgil begins to mountaineer down Satan's hairy flanks into a crevasse. At a certain point they reverse and begin to climb up the legs. It was the center of the spherical cosmos -- Satan had fallen from heaven and stuck like a dart in the center of the world, "...the point/toward which all weight from every side is drawn" (34.110-1). The heart of the material universe, of matter, is Satan's selfishness.
The Inferno began with a middle aged man lost in a dark forest; it ends on another note.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And we came out to see, once more, the stars. (34.139)
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:34 PM
Danteblogging - Inferno Canto XXXIII
Inferno Canto XXXIII
I first tried to read the Divine Comedy all the way through when I was in 11th grade - I think in the John Ciardi translation, which my high school library had just bought in hardback. I can't say I did a very good job, but at least I'd already read big chunks of the Aeneid in Latin, so I was better prepared than some people. I still remember the creeps Canto XXXIII gave me - the story of the cannibalistic Count Ugolino.
Ugolino betrayed his city, Pisa, but was in turn betrayed by his bishop. They're locked together in the ice of Antenora, Ugolino chewing on the bishop's brain in a very Dawn of the Dead image. Except that Ugolino raises his gorey chops and tells Dante why he's chewing the bishop's skull - he and his offspring were nailed into a tower in Pisa (I've seen what purports to be the tower!). The boys died one by one of hunger. Dante leaves the conclusion a little ambiguous, but I assumed at 17 that Ugolino ate them - as he is now eating the bishop. Ugh! Dantesque, and in the bad way.
Ugolino perceives that Dante is a Florentine by the sound of speech, and by the failure of speech in the tower he is turned into a monster, a stone. Dante damns the Pisans with a linguistic touch, too:
Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti
del bel paese là dove 'l sì suona,
Ah Pisa, vile disgrace of all the folk
in the sweet land where sì is uttered (33, 79-80)
The land of Sì - not a polity, but a shared vernacular.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:04 PM
August 13, 2010
Dante blogging Canto XXXII
Canto XXXII
Antaeus lowered Dante and Virgil to the frozen river of Cocytus and the region of the traitors. They move in tis canto through Caina, where those who betrayed family are punished (Cain, first fratricide), to Antenora, where traitors to their country suffer (Antenor, a bad Trojan prince).
The damned souls are mainly topical Tuscans and not of much interest to me -- but the poetry and the poet's increasing recognition of his power are.
The canto starts and ends with sound effects that remind us that this is not only a poem on the page -- oral performance is very important. I'm doing this on the iPad so my formatting may not be as nice as usual, but I'll try.
S'io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,
Come si converrebe al tristo buco
Sovra 'l qual
Oh I'll go back and put in the Italian in a bit...word completion is driving me nuts!
Dante starts by talking about his inability as a poet to make the "bitter and crack-throated rhymes" he would need for this lowest part of Hell--not with the tongue that says mama and daddy in Tuscan! The canto ends with his promise to Ugolino to tell his story: "I will/ make you a good trade in the world above,/unless my tongue should wither to the root."
That's a canto about tongues -- inadequacy of language, mother dialect, and the poet's art as currency! Things are getting thick here at the end of Hell. In between we have lots of vile activity, with Ugolino the vilest. But I will pass over that for now because his story is really told in XXXIII.
The idea that Dante has something to offer the Damned has come up before, but it shows up repeatedly in this canto. Here at the end of the canticle Dante is feeling his power as a poet, even if he's denying his ability to write that kind of rhyme. He will make the same off in Purgatory, but there he thinks his poem will stimulate prayers for the souls. The Damned have no such motive, only reknown -- that very pagan form if the afterlife. Even that doesn't interest one if his interlocutors, Bocca (c. Lines 76-115). If. Dante revealed that he's in Hell everyone will finally be sure that he WAS guilty of the betrayal of the Guelphs for which he was exiled from Florence. Dante doesn't oblige and we all still know.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:37 PM
August 9, 2010
Danteblogging - Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI is a transition canto between the last of the Malebolge and the bottom of Hell, where the traitors are punished. The mechanism here is again the cooperation of a monster. In Canto XVII the pilgrims rode flying Geryon. Here Virgil talks Antaeus, giant opponent of Hercules, into lifting them down the cliffs between the last of the Malebolge and frozen Cocytus. He does it with an interesting offer - Dante, who is living, can offer Antaeus a morsel more of recognition:
Don't make us seek Typhon or Tityus.
This man can give you what you long for here,
so bend and do not turn your face askew,
For in the world he can still bring you fame.
The sin of the giants is to have tried to replace the gods - or to have rivaled God, in the case of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, builder of the Tower of Babel. Antaeus complies, silently.
Dante compares the giants to city towers - most specifically to the Garisenda tower in Bologna (one of Bologna's twin towers) and to the watch towers circling a fortress at Montereggioni (near Siena). The 16th C illustration I uploaded certainly picks up on the latter.
Image from Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary - I think I found it at Wikimedia, though I've downloaded a number of versions this summer to turn into presentations in the fall.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:16 AM
July 31, 2010
2Blowhards is now officially frozen in amber.
One of the best cultureblogs shuts down after 8 years - but leaves the archives up. I think I've had a link to them on my blogroll from the beginning!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:23 PM
July 28, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXX
Canto XXX
The thirtieth canto begins with 20 lines of epic simile - Dante showing off his myth - wrapping up with:
But none so fury-ridden in Thebes or Troy
had ever lunged with such ferocity
to bite at beasts or even rip men's limbs
As I saw two souls, naked, pale as death,
tearing away and snapping as they ran,
like the tusked swine who's set loose from the sty.
You see, those classical examples of despair were at least still human - these souls are like swine - and one of them WAS at the Trojan War - Sinon, who lied to the Trojans about the Greeks having left.
I'm not sure why Esolen thinks Master Adam the counterfeiter was English (note, 480), but I'm going to have to check. My colleague is under the impression that the only English person in the Commedia is Bede, who shows up in Paradiso (of course!). I'll have to check the commentary tradition, because the text gives no help.
This canto gives one of those regular hints that Dante sat at his desk with a diagram of cosmos pinned to the wall - one of the damned souls reports the dimensions of the 10th Malebolge: "...it's eleven miles around the ditch / and not less than half a mile across" (30.86-87). The tradition of making plans of Hell goes back to the maker, in other words. One of the reasons I chose the Esolen translation is that he doesn't include maps. The students will have to make their own!
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)
Back to medieval blogging
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXIX
Canto XXIX
Before the Pilgrims move on to the Tenth Whatever of the Malebolge (Pocket? Pouch? Ditch? Translations differ.) there is a brief glimpse of Italian family life inside the city - Dante has spotted one of his relatives among the schismatics and feels a pang of regret. As Esolen puts it in his note: "The spirit here is Geri del Bello, Dante's cousin, about whose discord-sowing and death we know little except that he provided occasion for decades of strife between the Alighieri family and the Sacchetti" (478). Dante is not immune to the code of violence.
We then pass to the Ditch of the Fraudulent - every kind of con man, including alchemists.
I spotted an oddity of the translation here - when Vergil addresses the souls looking for someone to talk to, he asks
dinne s'aclun Latine è tra costoro
che son quinc' entro...
And Esolen gives us
Tell us if an Italian in this ditch
is to be found ... (29, 88-89)
I flipped back into Canto XXVIII and found the same thing at line 71. I hadn't noticed that before. Hmm. Talk about making Italy into a locution rather than a location - even Dante uses something else.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:19 AM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXVIII
Canto XXVIII
Dante has a broad vision of schism - the schismatics have divided religion, cities, and families - but all are punished by being divided, split into parts. As they pass around their track they heal, only to be split again.
The pilgrims' first interlocutor is Muhammad. Some medieval versions of the history of Islam counted Muhammad as a disappointed bishop or cardinal who went off and started his own religion - and, in fact, historians of early Islam still argue to what extent Muhammad did know Christians and Jews first hand in Mecca. It's clear he had some contact, but accounts differ. Dante has him split almost in half, gruesomely.
There was a long tradition of depicting Muhammad in Hell - there is a particularly fine version in San Petronio in Bolgna which was threatened by al-Qaida in 2002. Here's a link to an archive of images of Muhammad - you have to scroll a long way down to find it, but it's worthwhile.
Some scholars like to see the Night Journey of Muhammad, in which he saw the torments of the damned and the pleasures of heaven, as a source for Dante's journey. That's possible, but unnecessary - there is a tradition that goes back to patristic times of narratives of just such journeys, including Purgatory. I'll have to figure this out though before Fall, because the colleague with whom I will be team-teaching loves any sort of Islamic source. That comes from having lived in Spain too long, I think. I wonder if the Miraj, the legend of the Night Journey, had been translated, and if not how Dante is supposed to have known about it.
There's a connection in this Canto to The Name of the Rose - Muhammad sends a message to Fra Dolcino that he should get in supplies. The fallout from the Dolcinists, a radical poverty movement that turned into a civil war at the turn of the 14th century in Italy, is a motivating factor behind a lot of the plot and a number of the characters in Eco's novel.
Then after a number of relatively obscure civil-dividers the last interlocutor is the man who provided Doré with the subject for the illustration here - Bertran de Born, Provencal poet and encourager to civil war.
Clearly I saw, and the sight still comes back,
a trunk without a head come walking on
just like the others of that sullen pack,
That held the chopped-off head by the long hanks,
hanging like a lantern from his hand,
and the head gaped at us and said, Ah, me!"
He made himself a lamp unto himself
and they were two in one and one in two.
How that can be, He nows Who steers the helm.
Dante, who has mentioned lots of poets' work, never mentions that Bertran de Born is a poet - even though Dante was very interested in the methods of the Provencal poets. Odd, that.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:05 PM
July 23, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXVII
Yes, it's been awhile. But I''m back to it!
Canto XXVII
The last canto began with an apostrophe to Florence - XXVII lists the cities of the Romagna, which "is not and has never been / free of war within her tyrants' hearts..." (37-38). True to his naming the Romagna a region of tyrants, Dante gives a long list of heraldic symbols.
The sinner Dante talks with in this canto is Guido da Montefeltro, a famous leader of the Ghibbelines who, in his old age, became a Franciscan and an occasional advisor to Pope Boniface VIII. Dante sees the last as a sign of a false renunciation of the world - anyone who was a friend of Caetani could not have been a true friar.
Boniface would reign as pope until 1303, so in the cosmos of the Commedia he is still alive. Dante can damn him only through the words of others, like Guido - who wishes him in Hell. Guido says that Boniface asked him for advice on how to destroy the Colonna family - and that when he hesitated offered him absolution in advance for the sin.
When Guido came to die - and he managed to do that in Assisi itself - St Francis came for him, but was beaten out by a logic-chopping devil. The devil says:
One who does not repent can't be absolved,
nor can a man repent and will at once
the law of contradiction rules it out.'
Ah sorrow! when I woke to my position
and heard him say as he grabbed hold, "Perhaps
you hadn't thought that I was a logician.'
Of course Hell observes the Law of Noncontradiction.
This death-bed scene is a great medieval topos - I've written about it before here, and provided a link to Bosch's Death and the Miser.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:07 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2010
Getting to hear Erin O'Connor
One of my favorite bloggers (I link to her less often than I used to - hmmm - wonder what that's about?) is the topic of Norman Geras's Friday interview - Erin O'Connor.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:37 PM
July 16, 2010
So why did I buy an iPad?
I dunno - see here.
Then there's the fact that I can almost not imagine watching a movie now without the IMDB app open.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:13 PM | Comments (2)
scorecardresearch?? What have they done to my blog??
Whenever I try to open the Cranky Professor in Firefox I get a flash of the blog, then a blank page. The progress bar at the bottom reads:
Sometimes it progresses to my blog, sometimes it doesn't.
I've checked - they're some kind of market research firm with site options in English, Spanish, French, and Polish.
I sent them a contact email asking what they've done - do any of my belovèd readers have any idea? I just looked at my main template and can't see anything - I did delete one script for a service I don't use any more.
further:
Turns out I'm late to notice them: Read this. And an update the author posted YESTERDAY. Looks like the technorati tracker might be the culprit. If so, out it goes.
further yet:
I removed all the html related to Technorati - and the problem is solved. Pity - I think I got some hits from those technorati tag links, especially people looking at my category "Islam," which is mainly about art and architecture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:40 AM
July 7, 2010
I hate it when a familiar website does a redesign...
...at least when it reduces utility. I really don't like the new Google News. I preferred a double column - it made skimming for something interesting in my self-defined sections a faster process. Oh, well.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
June 30, 2010
About the iPad as a Blogging Tool
The iPad is a great blog-reading tool.
So far, for me, using MovableType (see the qualifiers), it is not much use for blogging. Cut and paste is trickier than it looks between multiple browser windows. Highlighting text to apply a button (formatting or making a link) is HARD. The scrolling category list - yikes. In fact, on Mobile Safari any scrolling box filled with radio buttons is tricky; I can make those lists scroll about a third of the time (so far).
Maybe I'll get better or maybe MovableType will come out as an app - but I just did the previous entry on Mother's desktop after failing miserably three or four times to paste the quotation from Jules Crittenden.
further:
Since I'm complaining about the iPad - one problem is Mobile Safari's unchangeable (so far as I can tell) preference for new windows - you open a new window and the cursor appears in the search field, not the url field. When I open a new window I more frequently want to go to a new site, not look something up. Ugh!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:14 AM | Comments (2)
June 22, 2010
Leaving on a jet plane...
At least I hope it's not a prop plane but out of Rochester you never know.
So all I'm taking with me for a week of travel (Chattanooga; Atoka, TN; back to Chattanooga for a few days and then back to Geneva) is the iPad! I'll let you know how it does as a travel platform.
I'm already getting used to the keyboard, which is about as tight but much more sensitive than the net book I used last summer in Germany. It's certainly fine for e-mail . . . . Finding good wifi signal in the Rochester airport is a little hit and miss this visit.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:38 PM
Carnivalesque 63
Carnivalesque 63 - an Ancient and Medieval Version!
Do cities that are just NOT THERE any more matter? You bet they do! But how do we show people what was there if there's no there there any more? Go look at what can be done with Antioch on the Orontes.
How do you get extant but really fragile manuscripts out of the library where more than one scholar at a time can use them? Here are some really interesting digitalization examples.
And how do you get the DNA out of a manuscript folio to figure out things about - well, about everything, starting with the sheep herd the page was made from. Well, first you have to convince a librarian that a set of 40-micron diameter holes in the edge of a manuscript is acceptable. Then you have to use Michael Drout's new machine - prototype now available!
Bit players in the grand play of the Fall of the Roman Empire and the eventual emergence of the modern western European nations? Not so fast, buddy! Go read about the Burgundian Civil War and think harder about what makes people(s) central to the story.
Not a bit player at all - the power behind the throne - a new life of the Empress Theodora.
Periodization is always a question. In question? Questionable? But much like bit players and great powers, definition is important, if impossible. Magistra et Mater asks "How late should the late antique go?"
So you didn't make it to Kalamazoo this year? Jonathan Jarrett covered a BUNCH of sessions incredibly thoroughly - here, here, here, and here He's not quite Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake, but hey - most of us aren't.
The most important Kalamazoo news? The Chaucer Blogger steps forward!
And finally, what I think must be the most-forwarded ancient or medieval story of the year -- the lurid cemetary of the Gladiators at York. Men bitten by Tigers! Differential development of right arms! At least three of my students in Greek Art & Architecture this semester forwarded this to me - and it was on every list serve I'm on, too. And then ADM sent it as a suggestion, too - so clearly Gladiators are In the News!
Happy reading!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:03 AM
June 21, 2010
*TAP*TAP*
Is this thing on??
My internet hosting provider moved all my stuff to a new server. I'm sure they had a great reason, but it confused the hell out of my Movabletype configuration.
O.K. - I may not get the Carnivalesque post up until tomorrow - give me a bit! Last minute submissions gratefully received.
I apologize that my own technical confusion (really it wasn't so hard), exacerbated by a garden party yesterday afternoon when I could have been straightening this out got in the way.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:09 PM
June 15, 2010
Again with the Carnival Bleg
If you have read any interesting ancient/medieval bloggery lately, forward me a link! I'll be putting up the next Carnivalesque soon.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)
June 8, 2010
Department Chairing getting in the way of blogging
Sorry about the gap - I'm a busy catherd lately.
I did something fun last weekend for Reunion, though, and it went well enough that I'm considering how it will work in Rome in the Spring.
I volunteered to teach an Alum College class (I do it about every other year). This time I took them on a walking tour of a different set of Gothic Revival buildings on campus - Blackwell House and McCormick House, two of the William Smith Dorms. Blackwell was designed by Richard Upjohn for William Douglas, who then hired him for St John's Chapel a few years later. McCormick is an interesting, kind of wacky bit of carpenter gothic - a post-1851 building on 1806 foundations (despite the plaque that says 1830 - I worry sometimes about those giving people wrong impressions).
The fun part was that I was able to show the participants drawings (plans and style elements) and comparative views from other buildings on an iPad! I got a loaner from the Information Technology folks at the Library. I uploaded some pictures (and gosh, everyone's right, the "just like an iPhone" file handling is clunky! Apple had better straighten THAT out) and showed them round.
You see, one of the problems about teaching on the hoof is that we art historians can't reach for a comparison - we're stuck with what students can see with their own two eyes. Sometimes you're lucky and there's a poster near the door with a building plan. However, most of the time the best we can do is xeroxes and the worst we can do is gesture - because many of our students can't deduce a plan from what they see (that's a mix of some spatial ability and a experience - most art historians have at least some of the former and a lot of the latter, but can count on neither in a random class).
The iPad let me show plans pretty effectively to a small group (6?). I'm not sure how it will be with a group of 20. Also, color photographs, though they are lovely on the screen, were not contrasty enough for the folks to see as clearly. Black and white photos (I had an aerial view of the Hill from the 1940s) and drawings worked fine, though.
Here's to Rome 2011 - I'll be experimenting! Um - I'll be experimenting with MY iPad, after mid-June.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:54 AM | Comments (1)
June 1, 2010
Carnivalesque Bleg
I'm hosting Carnivalesque here in June (which means soon!). I've been so off stride that I'm not blogging much myself - let alone reading. So please send suggestions! Ancient and Medieval.
update: link above changed to be more illuminating
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:34 AM
May 24, 2010
Suit up!
This is a weird take on this, which the British government put out in the early days of WWII. Talk about the stiff upper lip!
via Kyle
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:32 PM
May 3, 2010
Hmmmm . . . Apple thoughts
My mother has an inadequate laptop - it's my 8 year old one (I think it's 8). She also has a 2 year old Mini on a desktop, but she likes to play solitaire and check her email on the front porch. She can play solitaire, but can't use wifi lately.
I had a perfectly good laptop last summer with a cracked screen, so I retired it to a desk and plugged in an external monitor - and everything is lovely in the home office. But I bought a new MacBook Pro, too. Except that I have a computer at school.
So I'm thinking of paying off the remaining paycheck deduction loan on the MacBook, using it to get my mother's home network up into the 21st century, and getting myself an iPad for sitting in the living room and playing around online - and reserving the office computer and the home computer set up for 'work.'
Anyone have an opinion? I haven't done more than play with an iPad in a store so far - I need to find one on campus and ask some questions, I guess.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:38 PM
April 29, 2010
How had I missed this blog?
The Digitised Manuscripts Blog - the digitalization project of the British Library. Here's the "about" statement:
The Digitised Manuscripts Blog covers not only the progress of current digitisation projects at the British Library, such as the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, but also more generally all topics associated with generating digital images of manuscripts, making them available to researchers, and pursuing old and new ways of researching digital surrogates of ancient manuscripts.
Their initial project is 250 Greek manuscripts, but there is some interesting discussion in the comments about what manuscripts people would like to see scannedl
A colleague sent me a link to a current entry on the Vatican's decision to go ahead with digitalizing 80,000 manuscripts (40,000,000 manuscript pages, on estimate). Neat blog!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:10 PM
April 5, 2010
Two housekeeping issues - blogroll and coffee
I did some blogroll pruning, revision, and addition (hey, Anna in Brooklyn!!). Movabletype ate part of my template (or I did, I'm not sure), but there you go. I need to upgrade anyway some weekend.
Second - I'm trying to think of what concept I'm looking for....specific gravity? I have different coffees and for some of them when I pour in the half'n'half it swirls around and distributes itself and for others I have to use a spoon because it sinks to the bottom and stays. Specific gravity of liquids?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:23 AM
April 1, 2010
I'm no early adopter...
...after all, I managed to hold out for a year on an iPhone - but this Walt Mossberg review makes the iPad sound great!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 AM
March 25, 2010
Technology. Megan Mullally. Not a bad combination.
The things that YouTube has caused - 2.5 minute music videos dedicated to butter substitutes....but I love it!
I still prefer butter. But if Megan Mullally danced through the Geneva Wegmans dairy zone I'd watch.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:27 PM
March 8, 2010
Internet access as a human right?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2010
Oooh - Apple Rumors
Why would Apple build a big ol' server farm in North Carolina? To deliver content? Hmmmm....iPadism.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:37 PM
February 20, 2010
What we get from blogging...
I started blogging a good while ago -- I'm too lazy to go through Google cache versions of my Blogspot version to find out quite when it was, but I was leaving a lot of comments on the early blogs of Amy Welborn and Megan McArdle. Both of them, in the nicest way possible, suggested that I should get one of my own. I took their advice.
I didn't set out to meet any other bloggers when I started doing this, but it happens fairly regularly. I've never met Amy, just by the way things have worked. But Megan, who is still Miss McArdle for now, is in Upstate New York this weekend and managed to find time to stop by Geneva for dinner at the Red Dove. I enjoyed showing her my favorite room in downtown Geneva -- and was reminded that it's always good to meet the people we read. Voices spring to life; typing habits turn into verbal tics; tone that sounds happy proves to be a real smile.
I enjoy blogging. If you read several a day you might give it a try.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:12 PM
February 19, 2010
Is it the greatest passive aggressive note of all time??
I think so! Of course, it was written by a Briton - and they are the greatest.
Whoops! I had attached the wrong link! Sorry!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:48 PM
February 8, 2010
There's Visual Literacy and there's Legal Literacy. And you'd think a building full of lawyers would be legally literate.
In producing faux openness (look, we're all social media and we post photos!) the White House forgot that "no copyright for pictures produced by federal employees in the line of work" clause, didn't they? And they didn't HAVE to publish on Flickr!
Now they're scrambling - and it probably won't work.
I really should blog about the great Visual Literacy seminar our Library and NITLE put on right before classes started - I've been bogged down! Copyright and such were certainly topics. In fact, I set up a private Tumblr blog just this morning for my Islamic Art & Architecture students. Not only do I want this to be a comfortable class environment (cough cough) but I want it to be unsearchable when we start talking about images of the Prophet Muhammad.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:33 AM
February 6, 2010
A new fave - Unhappy Hipsters
Life in high design - Unhappy Hipsters.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:30 PM
December 25, 2009
Why we blog...
Because blogging brings us into contact (indeed, even meeting for an early morning cup of tea or coffee, if we're lucky), with people who post things like this:
Some poets - Hopkins... Emily Dickinson comes to mind - have an insane concision and obliqueness, a madly packed brevity. Many of their poems have the compression of black hole events. The reader stands at the tongue of the event, leaning over gingerly, having a bit of a look, afraid of the pull.
Go read Professor Soltan on a Hopkins poem. Wish, like me, that you were signed up for one of her classes in the spring. Ah, well, I'll teach Greek vase painting. That's some consolation.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 PM
November 13, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI begins with an apostrophe to decadent Florence and ends with the punishment of evil counsellors - so Florence's woes are place between the thieves and those who give bad advice, which seems fitting. The first tercet is splendidly horrible, with a reversal in the last line from fame to infamy:
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Florence, rejoice! You fame's so great to tell you beat your wings over the land and seas
and spread your name throughout the deeps of Hell! (26.1-3)
Poor Florence! Poor Dante! For me, who am no Florentiaphile,* the Tuscan politics gets tiresome sometimes. Who cares what stereotype Dante had (or assigns) to Pistoia, and whether it was fair or not? But the man's love of his place, his city, is clear - and I can respect a particularist even if I find his particular love annoying.
The pilgrims move on to the 8th pouch, where evil counselors are tormented in flame. Dante sees them first from the hill above, and compares the moment to a peasant seeing fireflies filling a valley below in summertime.
When they draw closer Dante communicates with only one soul - Ulysses. Virgil speaks for him - telling Dante that Ulysses might scorn his (Tuscan) tongue, because he is a Greek (yet another annoying particularity). Virgil asks Ulysses where he died - and why he is here.
Ulysses tells a tale of searching for knowledge and experience unbounded by God's will. After returning home to Ithaca, he took a boat-load of men and sailed out of the Mediterranean and south in search of the Antipodes, where finally his ship wrecked and all were lost.
The sin? Trying to reach Mount Purgatory without dying - this, from a man who went to the Underworld and back in the Odyssey and narrated by a man who will visit Heaven itself. The difference is that Dante is doing his journeying at God's will, and Ulysses wanted to find out for himself.
What is really amazing, though, is that this story is Dante's - it does not depend on the body of mythology. Dante made it up. That is poetic boldness, the poet's mastery of his subject, when he can rival Homer and make up a new end for Odysseus!
*One of the many things that makes me happy about these Colleges is that our Italian program is based in Rome rather than Florence. Here's this year's program.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM
November 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXV
Canto XXV
In Canto XXV Dante stretches his powers of surreal description to rival Lucan and Ovid - and he challenges the two classical poets quite specifically. We are still in the Malebolgia of the Thieves, where snakes torment sinners. Dante sees three souls transformed, transmuted, metamorphosized from their human - if naked and degraded - appearance - into something other.
Be silent, Lucan, where you touch upon
wretched Sabellus and Nasidius,
and listen to the arrow I shoot now.
Be silent, Ovid, with your Arethusa
and Cadmus, where your poem turns
this to a serpent, that one to a spring;
I hold no grudge, for never front to front
did you transmute two natures so their forms
were ready to change matter with each other. (25.94-102)
Dante's damned souls are bitten, and through the bite merge and transform into something other in a terrifying way. Esolen speculates that this transmutation is appropriate "for sinners who never respected what is proper to (what is the property of) the indivdiual or family. Now their own boundaries blur in a hideous defacing of the body: a false union, an "improperty," so to speak" (468).
The direct challenge to the auctoritates Lucan and Ovid strikes me as Dante here, three-quarters of his way through Hell, feeling his mastery over his tools. He can deploy language, description, and allusion with the best of them now. Well, with the best save Virgil. Is the anxiety of influence is full-blown, though, when he names them? I'm not certain about that.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
October 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV
Again, this canto starts with contrast - the last pocket was full of the deadly tired hypocrites, laboring under their lead cloaks. Dante himself is tired, and Virgil tells him:
..."You must
shake off your sluggisness," the Teacher said,
"for no one comes to fame who sits in soft
pillows of down, or lies easily in bed,
And when his life is wasted utterly
he leaves such traces of himself behind
as smoke in air or foam upon the sea. (24.46-51)
Virgil is preparing Dante not only to get through the Malebolge, but also "to climb a longer stair" (24.56), the mountain of Purgatory.
Dante gets busy and they climb out of the region of the hypocrites into the region of the thieves - a giant clutch of snakes. Ugh. Snakes. It really does sound like a moment in an Indiana Jones movie - snakes knotted around sinners in horrific detail. Certainly one of the punishments I'd rather not picture.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII
After all the noise of squabbling devils in Canti XXI and XXII, XXIII begins with silence.
Taciti, soli, sanza compagnia
n'andavam l'un dinanzi e l'altro dopo
come frati minor vanno per via.
Silent, alone, no escort at our side,
we set out, one before and one behind
as Friars Minor walk in single file. (23.1-3)
The silence doesn't last long, and the pilgrims end up fleeing devils coming back for more. Virgil grabs Dante and runs with him - and they tumble into the 6th ditch. There they find the hypocrites, walking slowly, wearing beautiful golden cloaks whose inside is all lead.
Dante runs into two Bolognese friars who recognize his Tuscan dialect. Tedious Guelphage and Ghibellinage passes. Esolen seems more tolerant - "Note how severely Dante condemns those who meddled in political affairs, even when the meddling benefited Dante's own party" (464). Maybe it's because my coffee hasn't set in yet, but I figure Dante's faction inside the Guelphs didn't come out so well in the 1266 settlement of the 36 Good Men. Nevertheless, as Esolen points out in another note, all the named occupants of the Ditch of the Hypocrites are clergy in one way or another.
Just as Dante is about to abuse the friars he catches sight of a man crucified to the path where all the lead-weighed souls pass over him - and one of the two friars reveal that his father-in-law and the whole council of which they were a part suffer the same punishment.
"That soul you wonder at, who lies transfixed,
advised the Pharisees that it was fit
to martyr one man for the people's sake. (23.115-117)
This is Caiphas, who Esolen points out did not call directly for the death of Jesus, since that is not how hypocrites operate. "Yet thought hypocrites usually intend more than they will say, in this case Caiphas spoke more than he intended, and was the victim of his own irony. For Jesus was slain for the people, but not as the priest supposed..." (464).
Dante, as a medieval Christian, has no doubt about Jewish blood guilt for the crucifixion. He identifies that guilt as sown by these men - but he does not pardon it. One of the sad truths of the world is that great art does not heal. It can help, but Dante, the poet of individual responsibility, who finds people in Hell who no one else thought might be there and will find folks in Purgatory who repented great wickedness still believes in inherited group guilt for the Jews.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXII
Canto XXII
Dante continues his devil-farce in Canto XXII. I'll certainly have to come back to this and compare it to some of the devil-play in French farces, which I've spent some time thinking about in public. Certainly, Dante is closer in these two canti, with their sinners bobbing in boiling pitch, poked by demons, to modern popular conceptions of Hell.
The humor here is pretty broad - but the conclusion is actually funny - the devils begin fighting among themselves and fall in - and get stuck together with the tar. We could take this as a serious lesson about how there is no honor among thieves or mutual respect among devils, and that's true, but it misses the point, I think.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
(oh - sorry for the gap - it's midterm and I've been grading)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM
October 14, 2009
Ah - midterms.
I am giving a midterm.
Yes, even as I type my European Studies 101 (Antiquity to the Renaissance) students are writing busily for 55 minutes.
I have the laptop with me and am watching them think.
This is a typical identify-the-quotation-and-comment test. What makes it mine, different from when folks from other departments teach it, is that there are 3 or 4 images on the test to consider either in their cultural context or in comparison to a specific text. For instance, we do a day (a day and a half, this year) on the Parthenon to go along with Pericles and the Melian Dialogue. It's useful to see what those Athenians spent the treasure of the Delian League building - and to figure out how much MARBLE it would have taken.
Likewise, when we look at the Code of Hammurabi we look at the Stele of Hammurabi. Right up there at the top is Hammurabi receiving his authority (though not written tablets of the law) from Marduk. That's a useful image to discuss.
Wish them luck!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)
October 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXI
Canto XXI
Dante begins this Canto with a lovely set of sound effects - read it out loud and see!
Così di ponte in ponte, altro parlando
che la mia comedìa cantar non cura,
venimmo; e tenavamo 'l colmo, quando
restammo per veder laltra fessura
di Malebolge e li altri pianti vani; e vidila mirabilimente oscura
And so from one bridge to the next we came,
talking of things I do not care to sing
within my Comedy, and reached the top,
And rested there to see the other crack of Evil Pouches, and their useless cries; and what we looked upon was wondrous black. (21.1-6)
Those first four lines with their P, C, and O are really something - and he's using them to describe things he will not sing to us.
The Canto ends with the opposite - a vulgar sound all done with T, C, and D.
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno;
ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno;
ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta. (21.136-139)
Then the platoon turned sharp left on the bank,
but first they'd stuck their tongues between their teeth
and blown it at their sergeant for a sign,
and he had made a bugle of his arse.
As Esolen points out, "one musical note in Hell, as it were" (461). The sergeant generating the note is a devil - one of Dante's first band of dedicated demon tormenters. This ditch is full of boiling pitch and bribe-takers; the demons circle the bubbling goo poking any grafter who sticks a body part above the surface. Their names are, as Esolen points out, very Screwtapey: Calcabrina works out to Tramplefrost, Cagnazzo becomes Larddog, Rubicante becomes Redfroth (460). I'd never thought, though, that these crazy compounds should remind us of the brigands and politicians of Dante's time. Remember that one of his great patrons (though perhaps not this early?) was Bigdog of the della Scala family, Cangrande.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
October 5, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XX
Canto XX
The next pocket of the Malebolge contains those who predicted the future. Their punishment fits their crime very visibly - as Vergil says about one of them:
See how he's made a breast out of his back.
because he wished to see too far ahead,
now he looks back and walks a backward path.
(20.37-39)
That is, their heads are screwed around to face their backs, and they back through hell at a slow walk, weeping down their backs.
Vergil seems a little more hostile to these than even to the average damned souls. Esolen suggests that his extremely hostile narration of the founding of his own city of Mantua by Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, may be an implicit self-defense against charges of magic (458). In the Middle Ages the Aeneid, like the Bible, was used for fortune telling - in the sortes Virgilianae one picked up a copy of Vergil's poem, flipped to a random page, stabbed a line with your finger, and found your fortune. The sortes Biblicae was the same thing, but with a Bible.
The only memorable medieval person in this circle is Michael Scot, court alchemist and astrologer to Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Astrology is one of those pagan practices the Church was never able to stamp out. Yes, pagan - though there may be Christian's who have a very high mark for predestination, we have to leave room for the free will. If stars control things, there's no free will. And there astrology columns still are in newspapers.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:46 AM
October 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIX
Canto XIX
Dante begins with an epic apostrophe - but not of the muses:
O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci
che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
deon essere spose, e voi rapaci
per oro e per argento avolterate
or convien che per voi suoni la tromba,
però che ne la terza bolgia* state.
Simon Magus, O you wretched crew
of his disciples! The things of God should be
espoused to righteiousness and love, and you
Rapacious wolves, you pander them for gold,
foul them for silver! Sound the trumpet now
for you -- for this third pocket is your place.
The simonists, those who like Simon Magus want to reduce sacred authority to a cash transaction, are planted upside down in holes, with fire burning the souls of their feet. The red-hottests pair of feet turn out to be those of a recent pope, Nicholas V. Esolen cleverly points out that Nicholas had inverted the purpose of the hierarchy of which he was head, so this makes an example of Hell fitting the sin.
Nicholas mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII - he wonders if the prediction was off by a few years and Boniface is already dead and waiting to be plunge Nicholas deeper into the hot hole. Dante then leaps forward to Boniface's even worse successor, Clement V.
It is clear from all this that Dante is generally troubled by the temporal power of the Church - he takes it all the way back to the Donation of Constatine. Dante's problem is that the sources of temporal authority he wanted to like were the Empire and the Kingdom of France - neither of them very likeable, either.
Still a problem today, and no more liable to a solution other than the individual holiness of clerics and just uprightness of rulers. It could happen.
*When I was proofreading I noticed this little moment of structural orientation I had slid past before. Handy!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM
October 1, 2009
Frustrate Comments
Oh well - I'll give up trying to post a comment over there and post it here. Maybe my old log in has died, since I haven't commented at Cliopatria in a long time.
I mentioned a few days ago that the group blog at Cliopatria had only noted some published reviews of the Taylor Branch/Bill Clinton book rather than blogging directly about the situation.
Ralph Luker responded on Cliopatria, and provides a glimpse of what he sees as the real scandal. Luker says:
The scandal isn't even, as Tinkler seems to think, that the interviews were conducted privately or that other historians are denied access to them. Frustrating as it may be, that is very commonly the case in contemporary history. The scandal of Branch's new book is that even he had no access to the tapes that he and Bill Clinton had created. All Branch had were his notes and recorded memories of the interviews that he created after leaving the interviews with Clinton.
That's interesting! And it answers my real query; I wondered what someone over there thought about it - simple links to published reviews wasn't doing it for me. Luker is a historian of the 20th Century who uses a lot of direct material - interviews and papers - so his opinion about the kind of archival and access issues involved in taped discussions is useful to know.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:44 PM
September 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII
Here we are right in the middle of Hell - or at least in the middle of the Inferno - the jump from XVII to XVIII is the mid-point of the 34 canti - and Dante kicks off with structure again. The first word in the canto is Luogo, "place." We can't quite capture that in English - for Luogo è in inferno we can't say "Place there is in Hell," but that's our problem. Dante is reminding us to check the chart, mental or posted on the wall. Once again, I'm a little amazed that the Esolen's translation in the Modern Library doesn't have one!
Here's a nice one, in case you're getting lost.
Dante explains the region they're starting to cross, the Malebolge, "Pouches of Evil," Esolen gives us as ringing the deep pit in the center of Hell (18.2). They will cross the trenches on little stone bridges that run like spokes.
Here we get an image of Hell right out of the popular imagination - horned devils with whips driving naked sinners. Dante compares the streams - some going in one direction, some the other - to pilgrims during the Jubilee crossing the Ponte San Angelo in Rome, half headed to St Peter's on the south bank of the Tiber and half leaving.
Dante, of course, disapproved of the great Jubilee of 1300 because he hated the pope who called it, Boniface VIII. If you want to get a really good idea of what Boniface was up to without half the sarcasm of Dante, you ought to read Kessler and Zacharias'
Dante loathed Boniface, and is going to prepare a place for him in the next Pouch.
This Pouch, though, is for pimps, seducers, and flatterers - with a whore as the archetypical flatterer. I'm amused that his example of a serial seducer is Jason, as in the Argonauts. No offense to any Jasons out there, but I always wonder what parents are thinking who name their child after such an unpleasant classical figure as that one.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM
September 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVII
Canto XVII
Virgil threw Dante's belt over the edge in Canto XVI to summon a beast to ride down the cliffs. When Geryon arrives he is horrifying - a "likeness of deceit" (17.7). He is, after all, their ride from the circles of the violent to the circles of the fraudulent.
The mythological Geryon that Hercules killed had 3 bodies. Dante's version is a composite - kindly old man's face on a serpent's body with a lion's legs and a scorpion's sting - and he smells. But that's who they are going to ride.
Virgil sends Dante to look at the last of the 3 categories of the Violent against God, the Usurers, while he explains to Geryon that one of the passengers will have human weight. Dante wanders over to where the usurers squat, brushing fire-flakes off their skin. Dante can make nothing of their features, but they each wear a money bag around their necks with their coats of arms (Esolen points out they were not driven to usury by poverty, but by greed).
Though Dante recognizes two Florentine coats of arms, the damned soul that speaks is a Scrovegni of Padua. Esolen doesn't tell us, but every art historian can, that this is Reginaldo degli Scrovegni, whose son Enrico commissioned Giotto to paint the Arena or Scrovegni Chapel, partly in expiation for his father's sins and partly for his own.
The picture here is the Last Judgement from the chapel's west wall. Giotto may have heralded the Renaissance, but there's nothing not right out of Medieval Last Judgements here - Christ is enthroned above, surrounded by a rainbow. He is flanked by the 12 Apostles and choirs of angels. Below to His right are the saved, queuing up in orderly fashion to approach the Throne. Fire pours out of the left side of Christ's mandorla and streams down to Hell, where sinners are tormented.
At the foot of the cross a kneeling man presents a model of the chapel, carried by a kneeling Dominican friar, to a group of saints who will convey it to Christ. That's Enrico Scrovegni.
Dante could perhaps have seen the chapel, even - it was completed around 1305 in Padua, a city he seems to have visited. Think I'll be showing it in class? You bet!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:08 AM
September 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVI
Canto XVI
Dante shows the same reticence in Canto XVI about the sin and the same courteous interest in the sinners - three Florentines run up and find a different way to evade the 'no stopping' rule - they form a circle around the 2 pilgrims and keep moving - "as naked champions, muscles slicked with oil" (16.22). Again, I think we should remember the crowd at this level and wonder about the simile.
The four Florentines leave Virgil out of the conversation as they discuss the decline of their city. Ser Brunetto had blamed it on rustics moving in from Fiesole. Here, Dante blames the new-rich.
There is some odd by-play with Dante's belt - Virgil takes it and throws it over the edge of a cliff to summon the monster Geryon, on whom they will ride down to the 8th Circle. Esolen reminds us that though the belt is ambiguous, Dante won't have another one until Virgil makes him a new belt from a rush at the foot of Mount Purgatory. Belts obviously have something to do with restraint or constraint, but it's not clear quite what.
Most noticeable in the canto is Dante's naming the work! We're almost halfway through the 34 canti of Hell, and here Dante addresses the reader:
ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note
di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro,
s'elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte
. . . but I cannot
keep silent here, and, Reader, by the notes
of this my Comedy, I swear - and may
They keep in favor long(16.127-130)
So - a comedy. Remember, comedy is what ends happily and is probably low and vulgar (or so Aristotle). Dante is certainly going to end happily, and he's writing in the volgare. That's enough for the name. The attribute divina shows up quite soon after his death - and the favor has lasted more than 700 years.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (1)
Tobit
My Bible reading this season seems to be flipping around to a book I haven't read lately. The gone, but not forgotten Old Oligarch (can it really be 4 years ago he gave up blogging?) would understand my delight in Leviticus, but this week I'm reading Tobit for the first time in years.
I can really see why the Reformers were eager to toss this one out! In the benighted 16th Century they couldn't imagine that fragments of Hebrew and Aramaic versions would one day turn up at Qumran, and their petty argument that it only survived in the Greek would go 'boom.' Famous last words in historical disciplines: "There is no evidence that . . ."
Always say "There is no evidence currently available." Archaeology may well prove you silly otherwise.
So, Tobit. Angels who care - and tell white lies! Demons who flee to Egypt at the stink of fish, are run down, and bound hand and foot! Almsgiving and burying the dead (ooooh - Corporal Works of Mercy!). You can see how that would make Luther nuts. I enjoyed it - the description that it's a religious novel with good historical detail works for me. And why shouldn't we have a few of those in the Canon to read, too?
Further:
Even worse, from the Reformed point of view, must've been Tobit 12:10 (in either recension):
So now when you and Sarra prayed, I brought the memorial of your prayer before the glory of the Lord and did likewise when you would bury the dead.
There's your Guardian Angel right there, laying your prayers as offerings before the Lord. Can't have that!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:39 AM
September 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XV
Canto XV
Canto XV begins on the same structural note with which XIV ended - Dante observes the diking system of Hell - ingeniously made, like those which the Flemings make. It interests me that he uses such a foreign example first, then mentions the Paduans. He certainly would have been to Padua sometime - it would have been easy to get to Ravenna that way - but he never traveled in the North. I suppose Dutch dikes were already a byword. Lots of Florentines would have been to Bruges, of course.
The dike system provides a setting - Dante and Virgil are walking along the top at a higher level than the sinners racing below (remember, the blasphemers lie supine, the usurers squat, and the sodomites run).
When following the dike we met a band
of spirits coming toward us, and each one
stared at us hard as one is wont to stare
As someone in the dark of the new moon,
knitting their brows to keep us keen in sight
as an old tailor threads the needle's eye. (15.16-21)
Esolen notes this simile a little oddly: "The images in this tercet derive from common experience in town life and thus prepare us to meet one of Dante's townsmen and to hear from him a harsh appraisal of that town" (445). I certainly get the everyday life aspect, but why would that make us think of Florence rather than everyday life?
Oh well - more pertinently, I think these two tercets are doing something else - and stand in contrast to Dante's action just below, when "even the charred features could not keep / My intellect from recognizing them" (27-8). Dante's use of vision corresponds to something we've seen over and over again - the reference to Aristotelian science and the Thomist appreciation of what goes wrong in sin - that sinners have failed in their intellect as well as in their flesh.
Contrariwise, the hard stare of the sinners is not the intellect-laden gaze, but cruising. Remember, the sinners in Dante's Hell have never given up their sin - that's why they're there. People who gave up their sins are elsewhere - Purgatory and Heaven. Sinners who chose lust first and then chose God show up in Purgatory XXVI - sodomites explicitly among them.*
So it should be no surprise that a band of souls suffering for having spent time cruising under the new moon are still at it.
Dante greets the soul whose charred features he sees through with the polite pronoun and a title - only the second time in Hell Dante uses voi. Dante makes clear his respect for ser Brunetto as a mentor, "la cara e buona imagine paterna" (15.83).
The actual sin doesn't get discussed in this canto - and Brunetto doesn't even want to name many of his fellow sinners, and only describes the sin as "the same fall."
Know, in a word, that they were scholars all,
great men of letters, clerks of wide renown,
made filthy in the world by the same fall.
In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci
e litterati grandi e di gran fama
d'n peccato medesmo al mondo lerci.
Listen to those sharp, bright clicks in the Italian! -pi, -ti, -ci, -di
So, without ever going into detail, ser Brunetto runs away - and Dante favors him with a last simile. He runs like someone in a race, "and of those he seemed / The one who wins, and not the one who loses" (15.123-4).
*Yes, yes, I know that some modern commentators on Scripture suggest, for good reasons involving things like references to Sodom in other parts of the Old Testament, other sins for the condemnation of Sodom, like violating host/guest relations or uncharitableness - but Dante had no question what counted as sodomy, and its his poem.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIV
Canto XIV
Canto XIV brings us to the 3rd round of the 7th circle, the worst of the violent, the Violent against God. Dante divides them into three groups. This Canto concentrates on blasphemers, while the other two groups, sodomites and usurers, take up the next 3 canti.
Nevertheless, the schema for punishment across all 4 canti occurs here:
Some lay flat on their backs upon the ground,
and some were sitting huddled at the knees,
and others roved about continually
The greatest number were of those who ran;
the least, who took their tortures lying down--
but their tongues were the freest in their cries.
Esolen points out that the ones who are the worst are treated first - the blasphemers against God (and the gods?). Their punishment is to lie flat on their backs, where all they can do is writhe under the falling fire. The usurers squat, able at least to brush off new-fallen embers. The sodomites are able to run around, dodging the fire - which falls in an especially lovely metaphor.
Sovra tutto 'l sabbion, d'un cader lento,
piovean di foco dilatate falde,
come di neve in alpe sanza vento.
Over the desert, in a gentle fall,
there rained broad flakes of fire, as in the Alps
the snow comes falling on a windless day.
(14.28-30)
Gorgeous - but painful - and the damned spend all their time brushing the "fresh flakes from their skin" (14.42).
Dante meets here one of the few classical souls tormented for sin instead of serving as a trusty under the demonic administration. (Rather few demons, per se, seem to show up in Hell.) The interlocutor in Canto XIV is Capaneus, one of the Seven Against Thebes, struck dead by Zeus with a thunderbolt forged by Vulcan, Dante parading what he's learned from Statius, not Aeschylus (thanks, Prof. Esolen! I wondered briefly if it was Ovid and then looked in the back). Statius has got to be one of the lesser-read classics; I have an undergraduate degree in the field and never picked him up. He's going to come up again later - he's a lot more important to Dante (both the poet and the narrator) than anyone but Beatrice and Virgil.
Capaneus is a good example of the impenitent - the roaring sinner who doesn't even pretend he doesn't deserve his hellfire. He is still damning Zeus - though it is God's Justice doing the punishing. His blasphemy seems to be declaring his own manhood to be his god as much of his specific denunciation of the Olympian, though.
The Canto ends with one of those odd structural moments where I wonder what Dante is up to - and realize that I have more reading to do. Dante is wondering about the source for the four rivers of Hell (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus - analogues of the four rivers of Eden). Virgil's explanation goes off to the tears of the Old Man of Ida, a giant statue on the island of Crete who seems analogous to the giant idol in the Book of Daniel - in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. I see the parallel but I don't know that I understand why it shows up here - and I wonder where it comes from. Did Dante make this up? Esolen doesn't help with the last question.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 4, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIII
I just noticed something odd about the Esolen Inferno from the Modern Library - no map! I don't think I've ever had a translation of Dante that didn't have a diagram of each place in each volume (the rings of Hell for the Inferno, the Mountain for Purgatorio, etc).
This sprang to mind because of this bit:
"Before you enter farther, you should know
that you are now within the second round,"
said my good Teacher..."
E 'l buon maestro "Prima che più entre,
sappi che se' nel secondo girone",
mi cominciò a dire...
I find it impossible to believe that Dante himself didn't have a sheet of something pinned to the wall with a diagram on it. What wouldn't we give for that! I'll have to look into the tradition of mapping Hell and figure out who did the earliest known version after Dante.
There's also a fine touch in the first two lines quoted that doesn't really come through in the translation -- the word Esolen renders as "Before," which is going to go with an "until" further down, is prima. In the next line comes secondo. Even though one of these is a time marker and the other is an ordinal, they're still "first" and "second," "before" and "after."
So in answer to a question my father asked last weekend, I'm trying to get through this once well in English, but I am looking at the Italian when something catches my eye.
Canto XIII is about the most self-absorbed of all the damned, the Suicides. Let's not indulge them by talking about them any more.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM
September 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XII
Canto XII
A few quick notes about thoughts Canto XII threw up -
Dante and Virgil have to climb down a rock-slide to get to the next ring. I wonder where Dante got the idea that the Harrowing of Hell - Christ's Descent into Hell Virgil described in Limbo was so violently ruinous to the physical structure of Hell? Is it an ancient topos, or something new to Dante? I really should ask my acquaintance Georgia Frank over at Colgate, who has studied early descent into Hell and purgatory. Maybe we can get her to come do a guest turn in the spring of '11 when we teach this!
Remember that fraud is something that beasts can't do? The Minotaur, of course, is the offspring of a fraudulent cow - Daedalus made a cow for Pasiphaë to crawl into so she could be impregnated by Poseidon's bull (oh, those Greeks!). The Minotaur, though, is guarding the violent, along with the centaurs. Hmm.
About the Centaurs, who are racing around the river of fire, shooting arrows at any violent man (mainly famous rulers) who rises too far out of the stream, again, half-beasts to guard the bestially violent - specifically those who were violent against others. Also on my coffee table is Machiavelli's The Prince, which will come up in November in European Studies 101, and Machiavelli makes a rather different use of centaurs in his chapter 18 - "In What Mode Faith Should be Kept by Princes."
Thus, you must know that there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. This role was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting. (The Prince, Mansfield translation, p 69)
Machiavelli and Dante both link the centaurs with rulers, one for training and one for punishment. Hm. Since one of the ways I amuse myself when I read Machiavelli is thinking of him as writing a manual for getting Lorenzo de Medici to Hell even faster than the average member of that family, noticing this helps.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:47 AM
September 1, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XI
Canto XI
Is it worth talking about Dante as a fair judge?
Dante is even-handed only in the sense that he damns a certain number of Guelphs - otherwise he's not to be trusted. I was thinking about this because I had a talk this weekend with a friend of a scene in Purgatory where someone Dante thinks was pretty bad in life scraped in because of a moment-of-death conversion (I can't find it now - it'll wait). Some of the folks in Hell don't seem to have been given a chance for repentance, even when they had the leisure for it - like Pope Celestine in Canto III - who, after all, lived for 10 months in imprisonment after making what Dante calls "il gran rifiuto." Think he might have repented?
Similarly, Dante sometimes works with poor historical information, like here in Canto XI, when he damns Pope Anastasius as a Monophysite (one of the last of the Christological heresies of early Christianity). But then Dante was no historian - there's a reason most of his characters are, more or less, current events. By the way, I'm not at all offended by the idea of a pope in hell (I like John Chrysostom's quip, that hell is paved with priest's skulls), but given the rules Dante sets up it seems unlikely - they have too many chances for sacramental confession. I have no particular doubt that Teddy Kennedy made a good end, for instance. He had a lot to confess, but so do I.
Dante's got a job, though - he has to populate the rings of Hell.
Oh - a quick aside - I wonder why the Modern Library and Anthony Esolen titled the three books Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He may well have explained that in some front matter I missed, but it seems a little odd to stick to the Italian in one but not the other two. Maybe a pure marketing decision - name recognition for the first may really be that high?
OK - back to the rings of Hell. Now is a time to draw on the board again - Hell has order inside which chaos is confined. Look at the bottom right (Christ's left) of the mosaic from the west wall of the cathedral at Torcello (one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon). Those boxes each contain a variety of the damned - I'd click to enlarge. Similarly, Virgil offers in Canto XI a quick explanation of the layout of the rings of Hell.
All the remaining sins have some element of force or fraud - we're past the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and into something more offensive to God. The violent are neatly divided into those who have committed violence against their neighbors, against themselves, or against God. The lowest rings, though, are crimes of fraud. Or,
Since fraud's a sin peculiar to mankind
God hates it more; and so the fraudulent
sink farther down, assailed by greater pain.
(11.25-27)
The Torcello mosaic and Dante go a long way to reminding us that the Middle Ages exulted in order. Whether they achieved it or not is another question - but any explanation of the history of ideas or the history of culture that presents some kind of change from disorder and darkness to balance and brightness because of some self-styled Renaissance is up against it - what can be more neurotically balanced than Aquinas? What vision of the Cosmos is more orderly than Ptolemy's as elaborated by Muslims and medieval Christians? The philosophical movement that goes along with imitation natural landscapes is the Enlightenment, not the Scholastics - who preferred their horti to be conclusi.
Oh well - professors are always fighting yesterday's battles. In fact, most of my students don't seem to have a lot of cultural baggage about the Middle Ages. They haven't really ingested any periodization at all. I should probably shut up and move on.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2009
I'm only concerned about receiving spam from this scam...
I'm only concerned about receiving spam from this scam if the malefactors crack the database of those flagged as subversives.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:09 PM | Comments (0)
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto X
Canto X
Canto IX was a Canto of waiting - Canto X gives Dante more to think about than he likes. He see great figures from both sides of the Florentine political schism damned in the tomb of the Epicureans - and this leads him to some thinking about poets. Dante is, perhaps, always about poets and poetry.
Remember the photo of les Alyscamps from my contact Nick? Look at this Gustave Doré version (the resolution is too poor to bother taking it from Wikipedia and reloading it here). Dore has a great picture, but he has the historical phenomenon wrong. Oh, well - what can you do with the Romantics? Still, the Modern Library Esolen translation is printing them, so they're going to come up.
As Dante says, "The lids have all been raised" (10.8), but you can see that in Nick's picture as well. Indeed, Roman sarcophagi seldom have their original lids; they were usually taken and recycled into later buildings or art works. In fact, lots of the Alyscamps might have ended up in the facade of St. Gilles du Gard and the cathedral of St Trophime in Arles - Romanesque carvers were never ones to overlook a good supply of pre-quarried marble. And Arles had nothing particularly good local. We call that Green Architecture nowadays.
Of course, the Epicureans in the red-hot tomb wouldn't have objected in life, because then they believed that death meant the extinction of the soul. Now that they have found out otherwise they might appreciate more permanent monuments on Earth.
Dante first talks with Farinata degli Uberti, an unpleasant Ghibelline; he thinks Dante a bounder, which he probably was. Then Dante talks to another resident of the tomb, Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, a Guelph and father of one of Dante's poet friends. Cavalcante is worried about his son, who died only months after the action is set. Indeed, the foresight of the dead is confusing - though Dante tries to clear it up. How did Ciacco prophesy? How is it that Cavalcante doesn't know about his son?
Farinata rather graciously explains that the closer the event the less clear it is.
"As a man with bad vision," he replied
"we dimly see things far away. So much
splendor the sovereign Lord still shines on us.
When things draw near, or happen, emptiness
is all we see. If no one brings us news,
we can know nothing of your human state. (10.100-105)
I'll have to think about the optics of that. What are the implications for vision if the splendor (splende) is descending from God?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IX
Canto IX
Canto IX is a Canto of anticipation - Virgil and Dante wait outside the gate of the City of Dis for someone to open the door. I noticed three things - two of them go together and the third bewildered me for a bit - Esolen's note helped a lot, though I'm going to have to see what the Lectura Dantis commentary* makes of it, too.
First the bewildering bit:
O voi ch'avete li'ntelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto 'l velame de li versi strani. (9.61-63)
O you whose intellects see clear and whole,
gaze on the doctrine that is hidden here
beneath the unfamiliar verses' veil
The literal sense is easy enough - Dante is addressing (ideal) living readers, asking them to interpret - to read verses for doctrine hidden behind the veil. But what? This occurs as Virgil turns Dante away from Medusa and covers his eyes to save him from petrification. Is it to tell us to look when Dante can't? But then what are we to see?
Actually I think that's pretty close - we, readers who Dante kindly addresses as persons whose intellects see clear and whole, are to look at Medusa. He can't.
Esolen helps here. "Dante, we must understand, is in real danger. When Virgil covers his charge's faace with his hands lest he see the Gorgon and be turned to stone, we must not think it idle....Whatever the danger is (despair?), we are to remember that its approach to Dante might well cause the loss of his eternal soul" (428). Esolen also refers to Dante's explanation of the 4 ways of interpreting (from the Letter to Can Grande). Since we can read this literally as turning to stone or (the moral sense) the loss of his soul by staying stuck in Hell we are reading beyond the veil. How does that sound? It satisfied me over coffee, at least.
The picture on the right, from the photo stream of my Flickr friend Nick in Exsilio, brings us to the 2 related points. There are two great moments of classical recall and reuse in Canto IX - one of which Dante may have gotten in the folkloric sense.
First, Dante asks Virgil for some reassurance - Dante is once again on the verge of the despair Esolen mentions. Dante asks "has anyone from Limbo ever been this far in Hell?" (tercet 6). Virgil replies that he himself has been all the way to the circle of Judas, when sent by the witch Erichtho to drag a soul up to the land of the living to speak a prophesy. That's a reference to Lucan's Pharasalia, book 6, where just like in Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, we read about the Underworld. We last saw Lucan in the Castle of Limbo in the company of Homer, Horace, and Ovid. Ah, intertextuality!
So, yes, Virgil has walked this path before - yet another reason for Dante to stop whining.
But once the angel from Heaven opens the gates of Dis and our pilgrims walk through, they see a vast field of jumbled tombs, which Dante compares to the Alyscamps at Arles (thanks, Nick!) and a sarcophagus field at Pola - across the Adriatic from Ravenna. You may also remember the Alyscamps from some very orange and yellow van Gogh paintings, which show a rather prettified park version. In Dante's day it was more of a mess, probably - an area outside the city walls filled with tombs. Alyscamps is the Occitan for what northern French calls "Champs Elysees." In medieval legend, which may have some relevance for Dante, these were the tombs of the army of Roland, slain by Saracens. Vivid visual image for a field of tombs, though.
*So far only the first two volumes are out. Each Canto gets a good essay in commentary, but each essay's author is free to focus very narrowly. So far it's always been interesting but never immediately useful. I'm sure the 2nd time through I will mine lots more to talk about with students.
---
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VIII
Canto VIII
It occurred to me that I ought to dig up some creative commons licensed art occasionally - so here is Delacroix's "The Bark of Dante" - Dante in red and grey; Virgil in brown; and Phlegyas, a damned son of Mars, nude and wrapped in blue. Delacrois really does capture the energy of Phlegyas, who rows the fasting moving transport in Hell. The city of Dis glows red-hot in the background. Esolen compares it to the New Jerusalem (428), but it's also a counterpart to the quiet castle of the virtuous pagans in Limbo.
Dante recognizes the soul gnawing on the boat - one of his rivals in Florence, a man who profited from Dante's exile. Dante lets go of his anger, and wishes to see him suffer.
"Teacher, I've got a hankering," said I,
to see them dunk that spirit in this swill
before we leave the lake and disembark."
And he replied, "You will enjoy your fill
before the farther beach comes into sight.
Such a desire is good to satisfy." (8.52-57)
None of this namby pamby nil nisi bonum de mortuis here, which is, after all, a sentiment based more on a pagan fear of the restless dead than on theology. Dante's anger is just - and Justice is the key to Hell. Mercy is the key to Purgatory, but we're not there yet. Somewhere Thomas Aquinas teaches that contemplating the smoke rising from Hell will be one of the just delights of Heaven (I don't know, I'm half remembering it and have no chance of finding the citation while sitting at the kitchen table - anyone have an idea?). We'll see. Certainly the damned soul of Filippo Argenti does nothing to ask for mercy from Dante's. The damned do not apologize. That's why they're damned.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
August 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VII
Canto VII
After the punishment of the gluttonous we next see the shared punishment of the avaricious and the spendthrift - mirror images of each others' sins. Dante sets them up as the extremes from the Aristotelian golden mean of possession - and then asks Virgil to explain Fortune. This will be another good opportunity to talk about cosmology, because Virgil explains Fortune as the angel of our earthly sphere, who shares out power and wealth between peoples, taking from one and giving to another.
Fortune's Wheel is one of the major images of the later Middle Ages - and until this reading I'd never noticed how Dante shifts the familiar Wheel to a Sphere - Fortune rotates our sphere, not a wheel for him (7.95). Interesting! I wonder if that ever made it into the illustrations?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VI
Canto VI
The damned of the third circle are the gluttons, wallowing in a mire and beaten by a hard winter rain:
...de la piova
etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve;
regola e qualità mai no l'è nova. 6.7-9
...where the rain falls
eernally, accursed, ponderous, cold --
changeless in rhythm, changeless in quality.
Even with little or no Italian you ought to be able to read that out loud and hear the sound effect Dante wants. Brrr.
Canto VI also brings us our first Florentine (Paolo and Francesca were from the Adriatic coast - Ravenna and Rimini), and provides us with a good example of Dante's topicality. The soul identifies himself only by his nickname, Hog, and we don't know any more about him. Dante asks him what will happen in Florence in the next few years (there's no speculation in this canto on how the damned know the future - we'll get that later) and the Hog predicts.
Esolen valiantly notes:
Naturally, few readers now will care deeply about the fortunes of Blacks or Whites, Guelphs or Ghibellines. We should remember, however, that Dante's visition -- the incarnational vision of Christianity -- was never, and could never be, a vision that ignored the goodness of this very world that Christ entered to save. Florence is part of that world; then even Florence plays a part in the divine plan.
I think that sounds like a man bored by years of having to explain the Blacks and Whites, Guelphs and Ghibellines (Dante was a White Guelph, by the way, which was why he was exiled in 1302). Esolen is right, but Florence in 1300 still isn't very interesting.
I think we can use the tedious topical references to remind ourselves what a great poem this is - the Comedia overcomes its topicality. Otherwise we would have stopped reading it long ago.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM | Comments (1)
August 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto V
Canto V
Canto IV ended with the pair of pilgrims heading "out of the quiet, into the trembling air--/Into a place where nothing ever shines" (4.150-151). In Canto V we are assaulted by the shouting and grunting of Minos -- who is very rude for a king and judge. I suppose that Minos also presents the first horrible body of Hell, as he whips his tail around his torso, with the number of loops representing the circle of Hell to which the soul is sent. I've never quite understood the monstrous conflation of Minos and the Minotaur - I wonder where Dante would have learned Greek myths other than Ovid? He certainly knew the Metamorphoses, but would he have known the Heroides? I'm not at all sure. It's been so long since i've read the Ariadne and Theseus section of the Heroides that I don't remember how much topical detail about Minos it carries. I've always wondered if Dante was running together Minos and Midas - specifically the Midas-judging-Apollo-and-Pan story.
Canto V begins with a quick explanation of the structural principle of Hell, narrowing from the top as one descends:
So I descended from the outer ring down to the next, which belts less space about but stings the souls to greater agony. (5.1-3)
and Minos's body provides a weird echo:
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him: belts himself with his tail as many times as there are grades the sinner must descend. (5.10-12)
The hardest Canto for big-R and little-r Romantics to deal with is probably Canto V, where Courtly Love comes in for some hard knocks. I'm not in the mood to blog about Paolo and Francesca except to say that luckily I will be team teaching with a friend who regularly teaches troubador material and has no illusions about chaste ladies and ideal knights, even if she does want to believe that Arthur existed.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:58 AM
August 20, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IV
Canto IV
Canto III ends with Dante falling into unconsciousness, and IV begins with a boom that shakes him awake. Not every pair of Cantos carries action across the break so smoothly (or jarringly, as in this case), but the transitions are always worth checking. Dante was a thorough craftsman. There is certainly lots of debate about the making of the poem - he started it in exile, probably in 1304, he seems to have published Inferno in 1314. That gives a lot of time for polishing.
I think the urge to see Dante as a poet who begins uncertainly is an example of the (Romantic?) failure to separate maker from creation - to assume that Dante (in this example) is speaking authentically as Dante, that he is afraid, that he does not know where he is, that he is learning from Virgil as he goes along. I'm calling the Pilgrim "Dante" out of laziness and convention more than anything. I don't believe this is Dante Alighieri speaking to us from the heart - this is a finely constructed object of art. It certainly has stress fractures and may even have some bad lines (I'm not enough of a judge of the Italian to say - though this effort will surely help that), but the Commedia makes much more sense as a unity. If there's ever a poem that repays formalist analysis it's this one.
In Canto IV we enter Limbo - and Dante asks Virgil one of those hard questions - did no one leave here before the Resurrection? What about those unbaptized infants?Is this fair??
Well, if 'fair' means playing by the rules, this is fair. It's also hard lines on the virtuous pagans. Dante suggests, though he lists only big name Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, that virtuous Jews from before the Incarnation were saved at the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended. What happens to later Jews we will consider later.
Dante is more interested at this point in showing us that there is a hierarchy in Limbo, a hierarchy not of happiness or contentment but honor. There is honor in limbo for the greatest souls.
I've always thought that the appearance of the first epic list of names here is hardly an accident. Dante is not only giving us a long list of virtuous unbelievers - among whom he includes 2 or 3 Muslims - because he's in a castle full of them but also because, in Virgil's company, he has just met Homer, Ovid, and Lucan. I think because he is accepted into their circle as a poet, he demonstrates his mastery of the genre. If we don't believe that we have to take refuge in believing the narrative and think that a person, Dante, is walking all around the only castle in Hell with decent lighting looking at nametags.
The Canto ends with the pair leaving this Castle with clear light, headed into darkness. Dante does it with a LOT of words ending in -a.
La sesta compagnia in due si scema:
per altra via mi mena il savio duca
fuor de la queta, ne l'aura che trema.
E vegno in parte ove non è che luca.
Esolen gives us:
The company of six is cut by two,
and my wise guide leads me another way,
out of the quiet, into the trembling air --
Into a place where nothing ever shines
"Trembling air" sounds lovely, but when we turn the page we will find out what makes it tremble.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM
August 19, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto III
Canto III
The inscription over the Gate of Hell:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE,
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
I AM THE WAY TO GO AMONG THE LOST.JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.BEFORE ME THERE WERE NO CREATED THINGS
BUT THOSE THAT LAST FOREVER -- AS DO I.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
The hard thing is not to show students that Hell is hopeless, but that Love created it. Virgil gives us a help in the 6th tercet:
We have come to the place I spoke about,
where you would see the souls who dwell in pain,
for they have lost the good of intellect. (16-19)
Esolen's Appendix C will also be a help - a big dose of Aquinas. The people in Hell have gotten what they sought - separation from God, the Trinity described as Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. If Love is to give someone, finally, what he wants then Love has to create a place like Hell. Hard lines, but it makes an intellectual sense. It won't satisfy them - I know I was one of two people out of about 18 who got it the first time when I took Dante as an undergraduate - but there we go. Maybe one of the course outcomes should be "Students will realize the way they want the world to be has consequences."
I, too, prefer the idea that Hell is not eternal - that it's really just a harder version of Purgatory, but so far as I've heard the only major 20th Century Catholic theologian to think about that possibility seriously was Hans Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?), but I'm not really interested in reading theology much. I'll wager with Aquinas and try to scrape in to Heaven.*
By the way, the line immediately before "We have come to the place I spoke about" reminds us of Canto II. Virgil tells Dante, "here you must put all cowardice to death" (15). Dante is going to have trouble doing that. Like us his feelings are going to get in the way of understanding again and again.
Indeed, the first time he hears the wails of damned souls he weeps - and these are the souls who, like Dante in Canto II, unwilled what they willed, changed every plan with every thought. Angels who were neither rebels nor faithful, people who never lived well or badly. Dante, and Justice, respect more those who sin boldly. This is also the first example of a punishment to fit the crime: these souls are damned to follow a banner moving fast - to finally follow, not hang back and consider what they might or might not do.
In this Canto, too, we get the first example of Dante putting people in Hell because he doesn't like their politics. Most of those are tedious factional problems of Florence, but one soul Dante recognizes "che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto," "the craven one, who made the great denial" (61). He almost certainly means Pope Celestine V, who abdicated the papacy in 1294 and left the way open for Dante's least favorite pope, Boniface VIII. Dante's hatred of Celestine is based on hearsay, and much of his hatred of Boniface is based on narrow Florentine patriotism (though Benedetto Caetani was hardly a pleasant man). Remember, Dante is not dogma!
*That is, I will be leaving money for Masses for my miserable soul in Purgatory.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM
August 18, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto II
Canto II
Dante is one self-absorbed poet who has to learn to be a little less so. Canto II - and the whole of The Inferno - is about* fear, one of Dante's besetting faults, and getting past fear. Dante starts the Canto well, invoking the Muses, genius, and memory - and I'm wondering to what extent ingegno has connotations of "skill" as well as "genius" or "ingenuity" here. He addresses Virgil at great length about previous trips to Hell and Heaven, but by the end of his address he is afraid he is not up to it. "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Saint Paul!" Dante sums up his own problem in 6 lines:
And as a man who unwills what he wills,
changing his plan for every little thought,
till he withdraws from any kind of start,
So did I turn my mind on that dark verge,
for thinking ate away the enterprise
so prompt in the beginning to set forth. (2.37-42)
Ah - cowardice. Virgil names the vice and explains how he himself came here, his call by Beatrice. Virgil himself had wondered that Beatrice came to him from Heaven with no fear or worry; Beatrice gave him the answer, which he offers as one reason for Dante not to fear:
The only things that justly cause us fear
are those that have the power to do us harm; (2.88-89)
That's going to come up again.
More important though is this - Virgil puts it for Dante in the terms of courtly love and the Court of Heaven - why are you afraid:
Seeing that three such ladies blessed in Heave
care for your healing from their court above,
and what I tell you holds forth so much good? (2.124-126)
Esolen says about another moment in the Canto "He is saved not because he loves but because he is loved" (413).
Dante's response is a lovely piece of courtly contrast - his courage is like little flowers, fioretti and virtude -
As little flowers shut small and bowed beneath
the frost of night, when the sun brightens them,
rise open-petaled on their stems upright,
So did my weary courage surge again (2.127-130)
Talk about plenty to discuss - and that's even without delving into the placement of the invocation of the Muses (yes, we started in medias res as well as nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) or one of my own little hobbyhorses, Dante's avoidance of names. In Canto II we get a good example of his refusal in the Inferno to name the Virgin Mary, and the first time Aeneas is called something other than the father of Silvius is in a negation - "I'm not Aeneas!" Typical - and worth talking about.
*disclaimer - when I say something "Is about" or "is all about" I am engaging in the exaggeration of the spoken voice or the written blog post - everything in the Middle Ages is about lots of things. Univocality may be a sign that something is not medieval.
Further: It occurred to me when rereading - while I was getting the HTML to format the tercet indentations correctly - that I hadn't said that virtude has its root in Latin vir, "man." Then I realized that this is not a commentary on the Commedia but only a first pass at teaching notes. When I do this sort of thing for books I'm preparing to teach I just circle word parts that are going to go up on the blackboard - I know what vir means, what virtù means in Renaissance Italian, and I'm going to go on about it in class.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto I
Dante Blogging
My dear friend and colleague Laurence Erussard and I are planning to teach Dante together as one of our Medieval Art and Literature courses. She was up for next fall - Fall 2010 - but I insisted that starting Dante in August and ending in December was wrongheaded, especially in the Frozen North. So we will teach Dante in Spring '11 - starting in Hell in January and ending in Paradise in May - which is closer to right. June would be better.
To prepare for this, since I've only ever taught Dante in a casual, half-credit style, I decided to read my way through again. My resolution is to blog a Canto a day. The new(ish) Anthony Esolen translation comes highly recommended by Prof. Bob Benson at Sewanee, who has taught Dante every year for a long time. I bought a set. I got through 3 canti before I realized that I ought to be blogging my progress. Here we go.
Canto I
Dante's hard for us. Long poetry is hard for everyone. The Medieval World View makes life more difficult.
We're going to have to do a good job setting the students up in how to read allegory - not to slave at it, but to let themselves dance with the polysemy. Is the Wolf Greed? Malice? The World? A wolf? Why not all four? You might think, in this age of irony, that ambiguity would be something students get instinctively; my experience is that my students want certainty -- they'd like an answer. Unsettling that desire will be one of Dante's contributions to their education.
The first astronomical moment shows up in line 17. raggi del pianeta/che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle, which Esolen translates: "the rays of that wandering light of Heaven/that leads all men aright on every road." That's handy - we get to start with the idea the Sun is a Planet in the Ptolemaic Cosmos, and that planets are wanderers. What a good start!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:48 AM | Comments (2)
August 10, 2009
Yikes! Spammery!
I just deleted 471 spam comments. There was no way I was going to troll through that many looking to see if something real had gotten misfiled by MoveableType, so if you commented and your comment has never shown up, sorry.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:57 PM | Comments (3)
July 28, 2009
Warning to film festivals - get more sophisticated web sites!
And lawyers.
Chinese hacker(s?) attack an Australian film festival because of a Uyghur film.
Oh - by the way - I was sure that I have been reading Uighur rather than Uyghur. Some prescriptivist at Wikipedia assures us that there is such a thing as an only correct spelling:
The English transcription of the Uyghur ethnonym: [ʔʊɪˈʁʊː] is Uyghur. Typically, Uyghur is pronounced as /ˈwiː.ɡər/ by English speakers; however, /ujˈɡur/ is closer to native pronunciation. Moreoever, several alternate spellings appear in literature: Uighur, Uygur and Uigur, but the only correct spelling is Uyghur.
The whole point of transliterated words is that there are not correct spellings, only conventional ones, and conventions change. I'm certain that the convention at National Geographic was Uighur as of the last time I read it in the print edition. I'm amused to find by searching that the prescriptivist with the "only correct spelling" has failed as of 7:14 AM EDT this morning to clean up the entire Wikipedia article on Uyghur people. Sometimes Uighur slips in, still.
Further: Even the CNN article linked above has both versions - Uy in the story and Ui in the caption!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:06 AM
July 2, 2009
On the impermanence of the Internet
Jack Lail on disappearing newspapers. I got a friendly email the other day about a broken link on a page I have up for my students - it happens allthe time.
via Prof. Reynolds.
blogged from my iPhone. Somebody please tell me there's a mobile version of MT!!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 AM | Comments (1)
June 24, 2009
La la la - on the road
Airport blogging by Rochester Free WiFi.... You know, I should have told everyone sorry in May and extended my stay, but for remarkably little more than that would have cost me I'm on my way back to Germany for a visit. Spur of the moment, but it will be fun!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:19 PM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2009
Using Google Earth for archaeology
This is neat - looking for crop circles with Google Earth. I knew that people were doing this, but follow the link to see pictures!
via (well, after following some links) Brian Tiemann
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:57 AM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2009
Airport Blogging - Ataturk Airport
Free wireless! More than one can say for many airports!
The food prices are extreme, though - trying ot drain the last Turkish Lira out of us. It's working - I totaled up my last few bills and all the change and managed to afford a döner kebab and then small cappuccino at Gloria Jeans (yes, them - they're all over the place in Istanbul).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:59 PM
April 21, 2009
Blogger Luncheon
Sorry the photo is of the wrong time of day - but the church on the horizon is Ss. Domenico e Sisto, the chapel of the Angelicum, the Dominican University. Catho-Bloggers may be able to guess who I'm talking about - yes, I got to take Fr. Philip Neri Powell to lunch! I really did live just the next hill over, but we were both busy. I'm thinking about a book, he's almost finished with one. Here - go preorder Treasures Old and New: Traditional Prayers for Today's Catholics, Fr. Philip's reflections on novenas.
I even got to tell him about a novena practice he hadn't come across - the Flying Novena. Many years ago and not so far away I was visiting Saintes Marie de la Mer, the great fortified Romanesque church on the French Mediterranean coast with Tom Lyman and an Emory group. It was some kind of holy day (perhaps St. Mary the Egyptian? Wikipedia claims for Saint Sarah, but I'd prefer something better sourced) for the Gypsies. Lots of ladies were coming in one door, heading for an altar, saying a prayer and lighting one candle, heading out a different door, coming back in the first door, and repeating.
I asked "What on earth are they doing?" Tom told me they were doing Flying Novenas. Since they wouldn't be able to come to the church for 9 consecutive days, the usual way one handles these things, they were packing it all in.
Father Philip Neri was sceptical about the licitness of this devotional practice, but then he's a Dominican and that's what they do.
We had a lovely lunch - pasta and laughter. It doesn't get much better.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 PM
April 6, 2009
ONE of these days...
I might actually have internet access in the apartment - but I'll settle for a bar directly across the street with excellent coffee and free WiFi.
This is especially important because it's registration week at home and I'm getting urgent emails from Juniors who want to register for one of my 100-level classes next fall - European Studies 101 is required for the major and one of 2 options for the minor, so there are always a certain number of desperate seniors.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:44 AM | Comments (1)
March 4, 2009
Amy Welborn moves
Amy Welborn blogs for money! New blog, new name - Via Media.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:30 PM
February 4, 2009
Oh my!
Michael Dubruiel collapsed yesterday and couldn't be revived. Please pray for his soul and for Amy and the family.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:36 AM
January 26, 2009
Carnivalesque 46
An Early Modern blog carnival!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:08 AM
Annals of creative mis-reading
When I opened my Google News this morning the headline right at the bottom of the page caught my eye, but I misread it something awful. Pfizer to buy Wyeth for $68 billion. I thought to myself "that's a lot of money to pay for a Wyeth, even if his IS dead now. That thought didn't last long - I swear. Hey - I had only had one cup of coffee!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
January 23, 2009
Best spam this calendar year
I just removed a bit of spam so good I almost approved it. Some auto insurance provider put in a spam comment. The url was transparent, the username was obviously spam, but the text - oh the text!
Man, don't start talking 2010 elections just yet. I am so burned out from this last round.
See what I mean? I was tempted to break the url and leave the comment, spam though it was.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:39 AM
December 26, 2008
Little girl with a big future
One of my current daily reads is PassiveAgressiveNotes.com. Their December 24th entry shows that nanny-statism starts young!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM
December 17, 2008
Sometimes a Medievalist has to take consolation where he finds it
I am grateful that up to now none of the quadrennial articles about the Electoral College refer to the institution designed by the wise Founders to protect us from the vagaries of the People as medieval. Here's an example of archaic. I wouldn't be surprised to see a byzantine.
How do I know? Well, my google news search for medieval hasn't turned any up yet.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM
November 23, 2008
Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings
Welcome to Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings!
Lots of people are talking conferences - it's a way of not thinking about grading, of course. J. J. Cohen at In the Middle gets some organizational information about what sort of audience to expect for his paper at the Leeds Congress and breaks out into a rash:
Yeah, nooo pressure at all. I'll just wear a nice suit and juggle oranges on a unicycle while reading from my translation of Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself into medieval Latin. Slowly.
Dr. Virago complains at Quod She about her future office, but then she shows pictures of the Modern Panopticon! She's right - those are a lot of windows to clap to.
What brings people to the blogs they read? Jonthan Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe (IN a Corner of Tenth-Century Europe? I'm not sure) looks at his referrer logs and decides to do something for the searchers.
If I leave aside the porn searches and count only strings that look academic, the two things that bring people to this blog from search engines more than anything else are, firstly, my piece on the First Crusade, which is good as that's what it's there for, and secondly, the piece I wrote about Charles the Simple, because it includes a reference to and a map of the Treaty of Verdun. It's searches for "treaty of Verdun" that bring people to that, and they can't really be getting what they want out of it. I'm not going to try and fill that gap here, because there are already better sites out there explaining what the Treaty was, but I will do two things. Firstly, I will make an important point about the Treaty's effect, and then I will do what I do best, or at least most, and tell you a story from a charter that helps to illustrate the sort of thing that was going on.
Dr. Weevil is also checking meta-blog information. He blogged a bit from 14th century essayist Yoshida Kenko that reminded him of the essence of blogging:
If I fail to say what lies on my mind it gives me a feeling of flatulence; I shall therefore give my brush free rein. Mine is a foolish diversion, but these pages are meant to be torn up, and no one is likely to see them. (Kenko, Essays in Idleness 19, tr. Donald Keene)
Belatedly wondering if anyone else had quoted Kenko's proto-blogger manifesto, I did a Google search on "Kenko + blogger + Idleness + flatulence". The first result of "about 93" was my own 11:57pm post, dated (timed?) "9 minutes ago", which means that Google had it in their database approximately 25 minutes after I posted it. I would be less impressed if I had even 0.1% (e.g.) InstaPundit's traffic.
Speaking of meta-blogging, how many of us started out as anonymous bloggers only to be outed? Or noticed? It just happened to Another Damned Medievalist.
Disiecta membra! Got to love them! Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval shows us a marginal guy ripping himself apart! And monkeys!
We don't always have to reinterpret the same ol' same ol' - we can dig up new stuff! But then we find ourselves in an arms race with, you know, the public. Who sometimes dig things up without consulting the experts. Alun Salt at Archeoastronomy considers all sorts of issues along these lines - starting with Great Britain's current finding regime, the Portable Antiquity Scheme. The broader consideration is of how we might encourage a world in which a conserved heritage is more valuable than a marketed heritage. Lots of links for people interested in ethics and morals of archaeology. Here's the Portable Antiquity Scheme in case you don't already have it bookmarked.
Talking about the ethics and morality of archaeology, Dr. Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology offers a guest entry by Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex - who manages to go to a lecture and restrain himself from standing up and shouting by taking diligent notes:
A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus was rather full: I believe there were 650 to 700 people there. It was a strange feeling, being in the same room as all those people and knowing that most of them would probably believe what Däniken was going to tell them.
Speaking of aliens, Michael Drout, in his only political blog posting, asked Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?
Gesta at On Boundaries posted on a Chris Wickham lecture, 'The problem of the dialogues between medieval history and medieval archaeology.' Gesta links comments on the same lecture by Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra et Mater, and notes:
What is interesting from my point of view is that clearly I had my teaching head on rather than my research head in this lecture. While Magistra and Jonathan were mulling over the implications for the way they write history, I was pondering how we start to address the problems at undergrad level. I fear I am becoming institutionalised.
Do you know what Zenobia really looked like? Judith Weingarten has some ideas. Coin pictures at Zenobia, Empress of the East!
And since we're turning to the classical world, let's talk Classics as a major - and one of those awkward conversations we sometimes have this time of year during registration for Spring classes. Are your students declaring majors? Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has Ed Turner's letter to young Ted Turner (yeah, that Ted Turner) on the subject. Ed wrote:
"I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on my way home today."
How would you help Ted answer Ed?*
Edward Cook at Ralph the Sacred River tells us why the Jesus Bowl is just another crock. Everyone loves Magic Bowls, but this one's nothing special.
And a different sort of bowl - and back to the idea of the morality of digging up or owning things, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber talks about buying a Song dynasty bowl. Read the comments.
Just remember, don't go buying things as if the sales catalog is accurate! David Nishimura at Cronaca pointed out a couple of stories about a Fatimid ewer selling at Christie's for 3.2 million pounds. The same piece had been cataloged in January of 2008 as a 19th century claret jug and valued at 100-300 pounds. Jug, ewer - is it the price point that inflects the nomenclature? Whatever - caveat emptor!
The December 2008 
(early modern) will be hosted at Investigations of a Dog. Go make suggestions!
*Fun fact to know and tell - Ted Turner started Latin under the same man I did, W.O.E.A. Humphreys at the McCallie School. Note that I am not listed as one of the notable alumni.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 PM
November 21, 2008
Anyone have sugestions for Carnivalesque?
Remember, I'm hosting the ancient/medieval - send in suggested posts, either directly to me or by following the Carnivalesque button.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:29 AM
November 18, 2008
I'm hosting Carnivalesque and I haven't sent out any invitations!
Well, I keep saying I'm having a Christmas party and I haven't even chosen a date, either.
Hey - if you have an Ancient or Medieval bit of bloggery to suggest or show off in the November , which I hope to go live with on Monday, you can either email me at thecrankyprofessor AT gmail DOT com, send a message to the carnival email address (carnivalesque AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk), or use the nomination form.
Here's the previous Carnivalesque I hosted, way back in 2005.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
November 5, 2008
Travel
I'm away from home for a week, so I may or may not blog as much. There will be pictures, I'm sure. Sad to say the Rochester airport no longer has free wirefi.
Further: There IS free wireless - I was just in a bad pocket to find the signal! Thank goodness.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM
November 3, 2008
Vote for Obama or Andrew Sullivan will just DIE.
From a comment on a post at Althouse:
I wouldn't say that it's the very best reason to elect McCain, but it surely has to be fairly high on the list of motivations that if McCain wins, Andrew Sullivan's head will explode. (It will "open in a fundamental way,"* perhaps.)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:14 AM
October 26, 2008
Radio silence
Sorry - I had a busy weekend packing stuff and lifting things. Not particularly stressful for me (since it's not my life being moved and I'm not concerned about various closings), but I did go off and leave the blog on its own. I also managed to leave my cell phone charger at home, which caused some parental worry when they couldn't get me on the phone yesterday. Alas.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:03 PM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2008
I should stop blogging over my coffee
It's cutting into my crankiness.
In a new experiment, people who held steaming cups of coffee for a few seconds judged another person as more generous, caring, and happy than people who held a cup of iced coffee did.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:57 PM
October 18, 2008
Screen resolution annoyance. Movable Type annoyance.
So yesterday I plugged the laptop into a bigger display to do some proofreading - everything worked fine. This morning I unplugged the laptop and the screen resolution is all wacky. I've tried every setting and nothing seems quite right, quite the way its always been. Maybe it's like getting a new prescription for your glasses - things never look QUITE right at first?
And then there's Movable Type 4.21. I upgraded a couple of weeks ago. In general it's slower and it has at least one thing that annoys me a LOT - about a third of the time when I try to create an entry and most of the time when I try to edit an entry I get to the editing screen and the BODY field won't accept a cursor. I can click into the TITLE field and start one or edit that, but the BODY field is dead space. I have to quit MT and come back. If I wait at least 5 minutes it seems to solve itself.
Odd!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:38 AM
September 13, 2008
A new spam stream
I'm getting some new spam emails at work - every one comes from a deeply unconvincing name (iabg mac?), but the subject lines are these great 3-part names: abdenace jill tien-fu, pratt beau cadwallader, erik graham constantine [capitalization sic].
I actually had to open Erik Graham Constantine to be sure. Pratt Beau Cadwallader sound too much like a fellow alumnus of the McCallie School to be true, though.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:23 PM
September 1, 2008
Weird Anti-Republican Reactions to Palin
This is hilarious. Andrew Sullivan wants medical staff to confirm that Palin's baby is hers. Talk about the presumption of guilt for the accused!
You can't make up this kind of hostility. It seems like desperation to me.
-----
Update: He's still doing it:
Now they've cleared the air on this - and good for them - what harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue medical records. So let's have them. And then we can move on.I like the use of the phrase, rather loaded in contemporary political life, "move on" to describe what he's willing to do if he gets his way. Remember the sex-scandal that MoveOn.org was founded to counter?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:26 PM
August 30, 2008
Obama pick up lines
Hey, baby, you're the change I've been waiting for!
I just hope these guys are married, because otherwise there's no hope for 'em.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:29 PM
August 20, 2008
Why We Blog
My home away from my home away from home
Originally uploaded by Michael Tinkler.
Why we post pictures
Originally uploaded by Michael Tinkler.
The other day I posted a picture on my flickr stream of my new home away from my home away from home. One of my regular readers happens to be the just-now-formerly-acting-head-librarian (I'm not sure how else to describe Sara other than, say, Library Goddess, but those two will have to do).
She noticed a particularly horrible chair with green padding in the first photo. She brought me a new one - much more comfortable for sitting with my feet up and reading purposes.
I'm an even happier camper now!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM | Comments (1)
August 14, 2008
New Pocketable Camera Joy!
A PowerShot SD870 IS (don't all those elements connote sophistication?). This will fit more slimly in my pockets - the tradeoff of the A530's use of over-the-counter batteries was the big bulge; of course, it also made it easy to handle. We'll see.
Once again I read around, but came back to Ken Rockwell's recommended list and ordered there - might as well support someone who is so very, very informative! Go there and do likewise.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:59 PM | Comments (2)
The Old Pocketable Camera
My PowerShot A530 is still working fine - but the slide to switch from shoot to replay broke off - luckily in the shoot position! Time for a new camera!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:57 PM
August 8, 2008
What a week of Blogger-meeting!
My trip was great - we all had a wonderful time helping to celebrate my sister's promotion and I had a good time meeting some of the bloggers I most admire!
Eve Tushnet met me for lunch on the same day I visited the Afghan Gold exhibition. Eve turns out to be much the same mix of philosophy, religion, Dominican-admiration, book-chat, and probing questions (I do hope she takes that lunch off her income taxes - I was being interviewed about the state of contemporary college students!) as she is on her blog, confirming my belief that bloggers I like to read are all typing in their real voices. See below. And further, later.
Megan McArdle gave me the gentle push I needed to start blogging - I commented so regularly at her gone-but-not-forgotten Asymmetrical Information that she gently encouraged me to get my own. I noticed that another of her frequent commenters has done the same lately - Freddie at L'Hôte. Megan and I met a couple of years ago for drinks and dinner in NYC; this was my first chance to find out up close and personal about her reactions to Washington. She's having a lovely time and cybertracking her friends with her iPhone apps. What else would you expect? A city whose dominant ethnic food is Ethiopian and which is full of wonks with good tech skills is the perfect environment for her - and she's getting paid to blog!
Margaret Soltan, two hours, and a Venti dark roast goes a long way towards restoring a cranky man's view of the professoriate. O.K., she drank apple juice from a box, but I already knew she was not a coffee-drinker. The voice was spot on and we had fun ranging about, from the sadness that is the University in Europe to best bets for retirement living. I'm headed South, that's all I'm sure of, and she's headed to the Sun.
One of the old differences between literary and art historical temperaments came out, too - I'm spending my sabbatical running around looking at stuff; Margaret's headed for a beach. Or two, if she can swing it, but she's going to sit and read and think and write. That's one of the reasons I'm happy at being what I am (though, yes, I am cranky about quite a number of things!) - I discovered in time that I am temperamentally suited to running and looking. Arthur Kingsley Porter with his camera and his touring car is the more or less explicit model still for all medievalist art historians.
Do I need to say that I came away from the 3 meetings with enough book recommendations and resolutions to last me till October? That I had a good time? Probably not. But I can repeat a bit of advice: it's always worth looking up a someone who delights you on screen; if someone has a strong voice over many, many posts that lunch, dinner, or cup of coffee will pass too quickly. Forever afterward, too, you'll hear the real voice when you read the typing! And what could be more pleasant than that?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:57 AM
August 7, 2008
More typography
The Ampersand, a weblog.
via Daring Fireball
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2008
Rochester Airport blogging
Off to NoVa and DC for a week - the big reason is to attend (and help with!) my sister's wetting down party - she's now (or soon will be?) a Captain, USN.
Geneva being the small town it is (and Rochester being one of our only 2 airport choices) I saw a couple of colleagues coming in from vacation in LA - they got here just in time for drenching rain.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:35 PM
July 29, 2008
TLM Communities and Google Maps
So I don't want to start any new non-fiction big medievalist books before I leave town tomorrow. And I was a little bored last night. And I'd been wanting to play with Google's personal mapping functions. And I've spent WAY too much time reading What Does The Prayer Really Say and The New Liturgical Movement and such lately.
So here you go -
1. residences and rectories of
2. groups, orders, etc., who are
3. in union with the Pope of Rome and
4. say Mass primarily with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII
So far I've got the:
FSSP in blue
ICKSP (link not safe for work if you dwell in chant-averse lands) in purpleish pink - I wanted purple for obvious reasons but Google doesn't get that far up the color scale
CRSJC in yellow
2 disclaimers -
1. Not mass locations, residences. I'm more interested in community dispersion or concentration than I am in individual masses. I'm an historian, not a devoté here. I'm depending on the public information on their websites and sometimes there are ambiguities. For instance, the Institute of Christ the King has at least 2 oratories in the Bay Area, but there really only seems to be one priest (going by the bulletins online). Not that you can tell without compulsively reading that kind of thing.
2. I am not, myself, all that interested in the Extraordinary Form. I'm happy with a well-ordered and reverent Missal of Paul VI mass - the Reform of the Reform is just fine with me. I was very happy with the Oratory in Rome this spring. But I live in the Diocese of Rochester, so I'm hoping for a new springtime and the revivification going on in this movement seems like the best thing for the Church lately.
- - -
further - I've already accepted a name-change for the parish in Vancouver, BC. Suggestions welcome!
- - -
further still - added a 2nd location in St. Louis, MO
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:16 PM
July 28, 2008
Back up your blog!
Folks - I had a scare this morning. I could not get into my Movabletype control panel consistently or see the blog front page for a good hour there. When did I back up the data base last? Let's just say I was a younger man, then.
Everything is tidy and backed up now.
I resolve to be a better blog-maintainer in the future. Right when I turn over that aspidistra-full of new leaves I've already thought of, sadly . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:17 PM
July 21, 2008
Getting ready for those incoming students?
That little lecture to your first year advisees on why they shouldn't post compromising pictures online?
Read this. Two years in prison.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2008
Technology on the March - Looking at Art Online
Over at Cronaca I read about an exhibition at the Morgan Library of a new acquisition of theirs, an early 16th century French prayer book (the Prayer Book of Claude de France). The manuscript is too late to be of much real interest to me (we all have our preferences, and a strong one of mine is for earlier art), but the online viewer he linked to is amazing! Just shows what money and thought can do - this is the best online viewer for books that I've used lately!
Go look!
By the way - total coolness! The donor's bookplate is still in the book; after all, it's a Picasso! The Morgan wouldn't go peeling that out, even for conservation purposes. Just look at the juxtaposition of interiors and exteriors - Picasso's sketchy little window looking onto a landscape (with the owner's initials worked into something that recalls a wrought iron balustrade) and the Claude Master's tricky little framed view of John on Patmos toying with space and illusionism. Fun!
Now having looked at that, go look at some of their other online exhibitions.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 AM
May 4, 2008
Not dead - just grumpy
Sorry for the hiatus. I re-hurt my knee* and gosh is it making me grumpy. Somehow I just can't bring myself to write a cheery blog entry about the show in Venice or about the duty-lunch-gone-well that last weekend in Rome. GRRRRR.
*My own damn fault - I helped my parents' yard lad get the rototiller down from and back up into his truck. Too heavy, I guess, because a few hours later the knee started to swell up again.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:20 AM
March 27, 2008
Fritzy morning
I'm having a very fritzy morning with my internet connection, so I'm not going to try to upload the pictures and write the two entries I have in mind right now - but soon to come, Walter Benjamin and the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius followed by yet another example of why I'm leery of the idea of sending important ancient art back to Italy just because they say it's theirs.
Oh - meanwhile - this morning we're meeting at Sta Maria in Trastevere and I give out the schedule for final exam presentations. I expect some wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:05 AM
March 13, 2008
Historic Photos on Flickr
Notre Dame's Architecture Library has (or maybe 'is in the process of'?) uploading scans of its lantern slides - and they're all under a Creative Commons license!
This one shows the Pons Fabricius, the foot bridge to Tiber Island, with an INCREDIBLE load of silt - perhaps in the aftermath of the 1870 flood? I'm not sure. Here's my photo from this spring of the same bridge - taken from a slightly different point of view.
Amazing photos! Over 600 for Italy alone! Lantern slides were amazingly high quality black and white medium format glass slides, and nothing is much better for showing architecture. Given the collection there are few scenes of everyday life except those in the foreground of buildings and there's an obvious western European bias, but this is a real resource - 2,714 reasonably high quality photos in the public domain of the world before World War I. Thank you, Notre Dame!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM
March 6, 2008
Meet the blogger...
I also met a blogger today - something that I, who usually live in scenic Geneva, NY, seldom do.
Zadok the Roman invited me to meet him outside the Cancelleria, where he had a class this afternoon. We got caffé, then he showed me the Sala Riario (named after the cardinal who built the palazzo) and the Sala dei Cento Giorni, painted by Giorgio Vasari.
I had never been further than the Bramante courtyard. Here's the best picture I can find on the web of the Sala dei Cento Giorni, which is as good an answer in paint to the question "What is Mannerism?" as the Villa Giulia is for architecture. The name of the room comes from the funniest anecdote in Renaissance art history (a field of striking solemnity and self-importance, I usually find). Vasari, now better known as a biographer than a painter, showed the room to his old master MIchelangelo and bragged that he had completed the work in 100 days. Michelangelo said, "It shows." I rather liked it, but then I have decadent tendencies. Paul III surveying New St Peter's dressed as the Jewish High Priest really made me happy! There was a scene of the distribution of cardinals hats to semi-nude men in advanced states of ascetical skinniness that made no sense at all - that's Mannerism for you!
I enjoyed meeting Zadok. He had to stay for a lecture in the glorious Sala Riario on the Internal Forum from James, Cardinal Stafford. Sad to say, even princes of the Church use PowerPoint. I skedaddled.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM
February 5, 2008
O me of little faith!
I am blogging from wifi in my apartment!
Yay!
(when I spontaneously said that over the cell phone to my basically non-English speaking landlord he laughed)
Yes, the technico came this afternoon when promised and wandered all around the building looking at where the wires went in. He got a ladder, fiddled with stuff, and the box he'd hooked to the line made a horrific noise until he came back in and pronounced the line functional.
So, yay!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:59 PM
January 12, 2008
Just one of those mornings - but you know, I'm in Rome.
Rome can be rainy in the winter - and today is a frustrating, on and off again rain. But that's not the only reason I'm back at the internet cafe.
1. The DSL hasn't been hooked up at my apartment. Pray for me. I've called the landlord - he hasn't called back. I want a shower curtain, too. I might buy a spring for an expansion rod myself on that one.
2. I need to retrieve a password for my cell phone account. Long story. That could wait.
3. When I came down here earlier I brought a usb flash memory thingy with the pictures for uploading (since Flickr uploader on my laptop is still hating me and perhaps GustoLab in general). I walked off without it. There's nothing important on there, but I wanted that gb of memory back! Luckily, it was still in the usb slot. Maybe choosing a screen with a really inconvenient cpu (I had to reach way under the desk to put the usb flash memory thingy in and to retrieve it) wasn't such a bad idea after all?
But, here I am. I came out both times with my more serious camera, the one that takes pictures that are usable for teaching on the big screen. About every 15 minutes it stops raining and I think I'll take some pictures. Then it starts again - hard, usually. It's not a day to go do anything much outdoors, and I'm just not in the mood to preview the Vatican Museum on a weekend. Hit me, beat me, make me go sit in the Pantheon for an hour. Then maybe the Palazzo Altemps and the Ludovisi Sarcophagus.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 PM
December 10, 2007
Gothic Revival in the Finger Lakes
This is what my students in the Gothic course have been working on for their final project - Gothic Revival in the Finger Lakes. Take a look! They're not finished (grrrr!), but the project is closer than it looked on Saturday, when I wanted to kill myself.
I'd like to turn this into an ongoing project, adding to it from course to course. I'll try to get the IT folk to move it to a more permanent URL, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
December 7, 2007
Ave atque vale.
Fr. Jim Tucker gives up blogging.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:08 PM
December 4, 2007
Why I read Cronaca
Modern over-the-counter cough remedies may not be as dramatic an example as, say, bleeding, but our continuing embrace of them is no less irrational.Do you need more to make you read it all?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 PM
November 29, 2007
Visitor tracking and pit of your stomach emotional weirdness
I read something last week that reminded me of the power of visitor tracking - I forget what - and I mentioned it to my collegial non-blogging but regular reader and occasional commenter next door office neighbor. Then I showed her what I get from Sitemeter for free. You can skim down in the right hand column and click on my Sitemeter badge and see some stuff too, I suppose. I hadn't really looked at the hit tracker much lately, but sitting here at home with my foot elevated (grrrr, sez the Gouty Professor) I happened to look again.
Someone googled me - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Michael Tinkler. I click on the little link and discover that said googling was done from these scenic Colleges' own server - by a Windows user. This visitor spent a couple of minutes on my site and then clicked out via one of the dog pictures from last week.
So why am I feeling - um - observed? Because I figure that many people on campus who do read me have me bookmarked or can remember "Crankyprofessor.com." Those who are coming to look for the first time may well be - gulp - people reading my Tenure Box, a process I assume is going on right now. I made no mention of the blog in my tenure case, but one of the outside reviewers did, which might tip the committee off.
I don't think googling candidates for jobs or promotions is an invasion of privacy. I never tried to be particularly anonymous here; perhaps I was naive, but when I started blogging in 2002 (thanks to Amy Welborn and Megan McArdle, the latter of whom actually said something like "why don't you get a blog of your own?") I didn't consider possible professional implications. However, I've always assumed that I'm writing in public, and have consequently done my best to avoid annoying my friends and loved ones any more than I do in person.
Of course, maybe it's just the professor for whom I dog sat, looking at the cute picture of his dog in the snow.
Yeah.
I'll think about it that way.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:40 PM
November 28, 2007
The Cranky Professor considers changing his name . . .
James Gillray, "The Gout"
Just back from the doctor and the pharmacy, I am considering changing my nom de blog to The Gouty Professor. Remember when I wrote that I was trying to listen more attentively when colleagues tell me to go to the doctor? Lo and behold, there turns out to be a reason I'm still limping for the fifth day in a row. Though the Nurse Practitioner is confirming my uric acid levels with a blood test I'm taking the medication as though the diagnosis is correct. What's more, my diet and genetic predisposition probably pale before iatrogenic reasons - hydrochlorothiazide for blood pressure is probably the main culprit,
Perhaps I shouldn't grade any papers tonight . . . I have far too much fellow-feeling right now with Henry VIII for the grading distribution to be very high.
Holbein, Henry VIII
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:39 PM
November 17, 2007
Roman drinking vessels
Two of my favorite sites have related recent stories - the 24 Hour Museum tells us about a museum in Wiltshire acquiring a local hoard of Roman vessels found by a metal detectorist and the Portable Antiquity Scheme Blog points to the 24 Hour Museum AND to the PAS database entry for the hoard. Fun with blogging!
The vessels themselves are interesting - one is stamped with a maker's inscription otherwise known from Pompeii!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:46 AM
November 5, 2007
Dendrochronology - it's not just tree rings any more!
Serendipity! I explained dendrochronology and even mentioned the lab at Cornell to the students in Medieval Art and Literature: the Vikings on Friday - we were talking about how to date and determine the source of building materials for longboats. Today, via my friend at Mirabilis.ca, I read this helpful article about Cornell's enterprise, the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology. I think I'll email them each a copy.
Here's a taste:
Trees of the same species from the same geographical area have fairly similar ring patterns, Manning said, because they are exposed to similar climatic conditions. By starting with living trees and then finding samples from slightly older trees used in buildings and still older trees from more ancient sites, archaeologists have been able to overlap tree-ring data to create chronologies that date back thousands of years.Radiocarbon dating, statistical analysis, researchers' trained eyes and prior knowledge of events in the area are then used to match new samples with tree-ring chronologies from the same area. Manning and his staff in the lab have used such techniques to verify, for example, the likely origins of a Circle of Rembrandt painting (referring to an elite group of students that worked directly with the artist). He showed that the oak board of the painting came from the same tree as the board of another painting, whose origins are known and which hangs in a museum in Krakow, Poland.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:30 AM
October 10, 2007
Best Spam comment recently - Spam for the Children
Having deleted a real comment amidst the spam by being too quick to empty the junk folder, I am now skimming more carefully before deleting all - so I noticed this:
Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children Uganda!
There follow a number of urls for - um - enhancement products. You know what I mean. Nice Ugandan orphans wouldn't want to be supported by dirty money from products like that! DELETE!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:00 AM
October 3, 2007
Hmmm. I shouldn't have hit 'delete junk comments' so fast
Steve...I think I deleted a real, non-junk comment from you. I was skimming too quickly and emptied that junk mail box. Feel free to comment again! I'm not sure why it got filed in the junk folder, but that sort of thing does happen.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:57 PM
September 9, 2007
All my lady friends are moving . . .
What is this? New blog season?
This is really kind of odd - the first two were the main impetuses behind me getting a blog in the first place (you know, you comment so often they email you to say "you should really look into a blog of your own") lo, these many years ago. #3 is a long-time daily read of mine, too - and I think she occasionally notices mine. Click and see her new location - Five Feet of Fury (actually, it's more fun to go to the old location and see her Youtube Siouxsie Sioux farewell metamorphosis. Or maybe it's a generational thing that I like it so much).
Nah - I'm happy with my current identity - even if two people have recently told me that they don't see me as being particularly cranky. I put it down to being so happy to be back to the classroom and moved on. Crankiness will follow as more homework comes in!
Speaking of which, the only good thing about spending all day in airports and airplanes? My backlog of Bible homeworks are all graded and ready to hand back.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:39 PM | Comments (2)
August 28, 2007
Movies I won't see but that make me think
Megan McArdle has a fascinating post on status hierarchies - but it's still not enough to make me see a movie about Donkey Kong. We're all part of networks of hierarchies - good or bad at all sorts of things that no one else really cares about.
An odd point - I picked up the post through Net News Wire (where I have my daily reads saved). I usually just click and open blogs in a new window, but for some reason I skimmed through this one in NNW, the newest version of which seems to display a few revisions and additions - some sentences will be picked out in green, for instance, and there will be a few strike-throughs in red. I'm not sure if NNW is showing me just the last couple of versions of the post or what. I learned that Megan has trouble with Sweden, too - she struck it out and retyped it without altering it. That Nordic nation is one of my spelling problems, too. Imagine the semester I'm going to have with this course, BiDis 291: Medieval Art & Literature - the Vikings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 AM
August 27, 2007
Have I mentioned how much I like the Portable Antiquities Scheme?
I'm playing with the PAS database artefact cloud. Click and see. It's a big list of words that reflect the finds - the bigger the words, the more of that kind of object people have found. Coin is biggest (71063 entries), but I clicked on badge, of course. 251 entries. That takes you to the database - click on a header to resort - for instance, click on COUNTY to see finds localized, or TYPE to sort between badge and pilgrim badge. Then click on the individual entries to see pictures and information! Oh my!
I love modern living!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM
August 25, 2007
The Internet - flickr groups
I came across the League of the Empty Chair and their amazing discussion of what constitutes an acceptable image.
Either some people have too much time on their hands or the internet is the most wonderful invention of human history - or maybe both.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:37 PM
August 23, 2007
My kinda charts
via Tony Woodlief
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:30 PM
August 15, 2007
Ah, the crankiness . . . kindred spirits all over
Critical analyses of critically bad church signs
The "Blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM
August 13, 2007
Dresden Old Master Gallery appears in Second Life
The Dresden Old Master Gallery has created a virtual version of itself for an online environment. Cologne Cathedral is following suit.
I think I feel an assignment for my Gothic Art and Architecture course coming on!
(Oh, yes, it really is called that - it's the Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. I don't know (it's not my part of the field), but this may be one of the places our English phrase for those old painters comes from. I always thought it was really funny, though, that they really WERE the Alte Meister.)
This is the story in Wired.
Here's their regular website.
Here's the Second Life version.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM
August 8, 2007
I can only imagine what my RSS feed looks like...
Sorry about that - for some reason the San Francisco post just didn't want to do what I wanted.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
August 6, 2007
Eeeek!
Hit counters all over St. Blogs are gonna feel this.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:35 PM
July 25, 2007
Archive Bloggery and resizing photos
Something that I do not do particularly well is resize photos to fit on web pages. For some reason I have to resort to pencil and paper and hard thought about proportions every time - I guess I should do it more often.
This morning I was busy posting (and thinking of how to resize) a couple of photographs on the Abner Jackson Journal blog, a blog the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Archivist Linda Benedict and I are working on. I've mentioned it here before, but it's on my mind at the moment (and MUCH more amusing than Chicago-style referencing, which I could also be doing - but hey! This was Faculty Research Grant-funded Scholarship and it counts, too!).
Jackson was president of Hobart College from 1858 to 1867 and kept a daily journal. Some students and I transcribed it (that's where the funding came in) and Linda and I are now uploading it. We're also putting up pictures, though until the blog comes onto the campus server we're not making a lot of internal links from entries to the photos; we know about broken links.
This is what I put up today - a pair of pictures of Linden Hall. Through the second half of the 19th century (from at least 1858 until 1892) Linden Hall was an entertainment space in downtown Geneva which the College and college groups (such as the sophomore class on at least one occasion that springs to mind) rented for events. The Washington's Birthday celebrations were usually there, for instance, and at least part of the graduation celebrations (either the exercises or the dinner) were held there.
We didn't have any photos of Linden Hall in our own archives, but my neighbor and friend Karen Osburn, archivist at the Geneva Historical Society, found and scanned these two for me. Thanks, Karen!
One of the interesting things about treating the journal as a blog is the utility of categories (one of the things I do is categorize entries - Linda's uploaded most of them so far). Unlike a book index, categories are live links - so if you go to the blog and click on Discipline or Clubs, Societies, and Fraternities, or Campus Planning or Fundraising you may see how little life for a college administrator has changed in 150 years. I think that folks who are interested in 19th Century America might find this interesting. As a Southerner living here now I find the relative lack of trouble caused by or interest in the Civil War fascinating - though we ARE missing 1865 from the journals.
Here's Linda's own blog, Alone in the Archives, in case you've never clicked on it from the blogroll, where you'll find it filed under the HWS blogs.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:59 AM
July 17, 2007
Why we blog - and badges!
I apologize for the slow posting lately - I'm in a frenzy of deadlineness. I'm trying to get several things finished before the tenure box goes in - and then there's actually writing the tenure case. I have a teaching philosophy, but I'd rather enact it than write about it (and isn't that just the kind of sentence I need to use?).
And I've had a house guest this week who comes up periodically from Atlanta to read things at the Cornell Library (mainly in the rare book room) that he can't get elsewhere. He stays with me and drives down to Ithaca every morning. Having a human being (sorry Argyle) to talk with reduces some of the blog-urge. Oh - he blogs occasionally at Reformation Professor. Ah - grad school friends. You forget sometimes how much you miss them.
And then there's the Hand List of Words for Talking about Medieval Badges.
I did most of the reading in dictionaries for this year before last and left the text file sitting on my hard drive. I was looking up some words again and realized that I had those already and might as well post them somewhere I can get at them. Take a look. I'm up to cockle-shelled, an adjectival derivative of a cockleshell shaped badge. The example the OED gave was of a St. Michael badge (Mont St Michel also used the cockleshell, being sea-girt and all).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM
July 2, 2007
Carnivalia
History Carnival at Historianess.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:51 PM
June 27, 2007
A little lunchtime blog maintainance
I've just added a new flickr badge - it's way down there in the right column - pulling random pictures from the Gothic Revival flickr group. If you have fun Gothic Revival pictures come join us and contribute!
I meant to do a little more archival research on my own Gothic Revival article today but got diverted - so until tomorrow I'll stick to thinks in print. I'm rereading something on style in architecture by J. Mordaunt Crook. Isn't that the greatest name in scholarship? The book is pretty wonderful, too. That helps.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:54 PM
June 26, 2007
The Carnival of Bad History
Jonathan Dresner brings you this week's Carnival of Bad History!
I've added a link in the right column to the History Carnival Aggregator, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM
June 14, 2007
Silence
I apologize for my recent blogging neglect - though the weather in Geneva has been heavenly, I'm not having the greatest of summers. Work. Managing dog-decline. My lungs. I'm in a cranky mood.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:13 PM
May 28, 2007
Lifespan issues
Bloggers come and bloggers go - but important bloggers live forever in our hearts. Prof. Anne Brannen is closing down Creating Text(iles). She was kind to introduce herself to me at Kalamazoo in 2006! She had read between the lines of my blog most carefully and offered sympathy I needed at the time.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:20 PM
May 19, 2007
Airport Blogging, again
Ah, free wireless at the Rochester airport, how I love you!
Off again - this time for a family thing. My parents have been genealogizing in Richmond, VA, and are now at my sister's in NoVa. I'm running down for a few days to overlap with the parents and see the others. Should be fun!
My friend the Artemisia Gentileschi specialist tells me there're Aretmesias at the National Museum of Women in the Arts show of Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque. I might even go, since Dumbarton Oaks is still (grrr!) closed and they have an American Western Art show up at the Philips. Maybe the big Modernism show at the Corcoran? It got great reviews.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:07 PM
May 6, 2007
Procrastination is a Beautiful, Beautiful Thing
Alright. So I should've been writing the final exam for Islamic Art & Architecture (yes, a Sunday exam), but instead I set up a new Flickr group for Gothic Revival. Come join and contribute if you have the right stuff.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:51 PM
May 1, 2007
Bloggables
I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm regularly blogging things I find at Bloomberg.com: Muse lately. That's more or less Bloomberg's arts (and dining in NYC, mainly - though today there's a review of a restaurant in Dubai) page. They have some sharp folks writing arts coverage for them. Take a look. I find the black background annoyingly retro, but there you go. At least it doesn't look like the woeful NYTimes.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM
April 24, 2007
The things google news will offer you . . .
Google news turned this up for me - Geek archaeology - how to throw out tech junk from Wired. I'm doing a lot of that this week - chargers to lost appliances? Begone!
Moving has its points.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:57 AM
April 16, 2007
Art Law
I noticed a link from the Art Law Blog - interesting reading over there about deaccessioning (including the Fisk case, which I haven't followed closely enough to blog about - even though an old friend sent me a link to a story in the Tennesseean long enough ago that I really should have). Go read!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM
April 14, 2007
Prof. Dr. von Korncrake at the Zoo
Between trips across the hall to see if the carpet has been laid in my new apartment (I've told the students who I'm offering to pay to carry my belongings that it will be more like rearranging the furniture than it is like moving) I'm fiddling with the beginnings of my paper for Kalamazoo.
Then I click over to Herr Professor Doktor von Korncrake and read his story.
Simultaneity.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 PM
April 11, 2007
Charlemagne's Palace Chapel at Aachen
This on the right is pretty much the view of the intended audience - what Charlemagne would have seen from the vantage point of his throne if he looked up at the dome.
The throne sits on the 2nd floor gallery on the west side of the central octagonal core (to the left on the section - click for a pop-up). Charlemagne could walk west from his throne to a window overlooking an large courtyard or could sit on his throne and look up and across the central core at the chapel at the mosaic of Christ enthroned (the parallelism was not lost), around him in the gallery level at his court, or down and across the core to the altar.
The big inscription that I was talking about the other day ran around the cornice (more or less) between the gallery level and the lower level. I'm still looking for a good free photograph of that.
Drawing from Georg Dehio/Gustav von Bezold: Kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Stuttgart: Verlag der Cotta'schen Buchhandlung 1887-1901, Plate No. 40. I found it at the Wikimedia Commons
Longtime readers may be wondering about this burst of images lately - I've been realizing that I can use Creative Commons licensed photos off of flickr but it hadn't occurred to me until this morning that you could search that way! Damn you Alun Salt! That little blogpost of mine on the administrative senior managers overuling marks in the archaeology department at Bournemouth got picked up for Four Stone Hearth XII - a Carnival of Archaeology. I go over there to read the other entries and come across Alun Salt's note on alternatives to stock photography. Alun has a couple of suggestions, one of which is a flickr creative commons search. He uses Delphi. I change the search terms to aachen chapel and come up with 5 great shots, one of which you see above.
So I guess you'll be seeing more pictures. That's not a bad thing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:31 AM
April 9, 2007
The Consolation of Blogging
Have you visited Korncrake - the website of Herr Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake? I recommend his work.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:23 PM
April 7, 2007
Adding a New Category
I was inspired this morning while doing some cleaning around the house and the blog to add a new category over in the left column - Historic preservation. Then I went back and made sure that the older entries on topic were so categorized. Click and see.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:25 AM
March 30, 2007
The Rotunda and the Lawn
When I was blogging about UVa the other day I remembered that not everyone has a good visual memory ('visual learners' my foot). Google images didn't turn up what I wanted, but a flickr search did. This is from Steve Cholewiak, who kindly agreed to let me upload it to the blog. Click and see his other photos, especially his amazing high definition range photos of a clock tower at Purdue! Ain't the internet great?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:22 PM
March 16, 2007
"Because really, bitchery doesn't seem so petty when it's poetry."
You all read Big Arm Woman, don't you? Go read aboutHaiku Friday.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM
March 13, 2007
The Joys of Google News
One of the thrills of google news and world-wide news aggregation is that when one skims the headlines presented for one's delectation one has no idea of context. Big Banks may be Chum. You see, that could come from some English-language daily in India and tell us about the friendly relations between big banks and small banks! One almost has to read the summary to see - and sure enough, it's Forbes, and the article begins: "As the sharks circled beleaguered subprime lender . . . . " O.k., that kind of chum.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 AM
February 16, 2007
Why some people are on my blogroll . . .
Well, one person. In re: North Korea, Miss McArdle asks:
So what do we get out of the negotiations, other than a way for earnest people who believe in diplomacy to get the same emotionally loaded, adrenalin-soaked thrill that the rest of us got out of being on the Prom Committee?Click. Read.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:07 PM
February 12, 2007
Oh my!
I'm so sorry! I just deleted a PILE of comments (including all those from the sweet Airedale Terrier folks!). I have about 24,000 comments in my junk folder and was trying to clear them out. There are so many that MT can't empty the folder in a single step! I mistakenly chose the wrong set and lost at least 75 and maybe a hundred real comments. I apologize. That's what I get for housekeeping without paying attention.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:36 PM
Ugh - Spam
I'm being deluged with spam - and peculiarly pointless spam! It comes with a non-functioning url (I have html disabled in comments anyway) and a web link for the commenter to google. Surely google isn't doing this!
I thought that MT 3.33 had a built in comment throttle! If so, I need to reset mine. Any ideas?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:16 PM
I apologize for silence...
I have not been in a blogging mood.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:35 AM
January 16, 2007
Spam names
You know, I wish I received real mail from someone named Nub G. Esthete. The spam he sends really isn't cutting it, though. DELETE!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:46 PM
December 7, 2006
How do you like to be interviewed? "In as fawning a way as possible."
Derek Lowe is on the job market and has a number of interesting posts on interviewing and being interviewed - go read!
The whole category - How to get a pharma job.
Best of luck, in the Advent season, to Derek! His blogs have been one of my daily reads - I've learned a little about the way scientists think.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:15 AM
December 4, 2006
Advent as a Penitential Season
I have no problem keeping Advent as a season of penance - I'd better get credit off of time in Purgatory for grading. December has started badly for me - bronchitis on top of a pile of papers. At least the exhibition project for the first year seminar seems to be in good shape. Some of them were up until 3 last night posting, but the overall exhibition looks good. Now we have to prod them to revise things. It's a pity my colleague and I feel cautious about copyright issues, or we could show you the results - but we're still in the problematic days of a new technology.
My colleague told me on Thursday (I think it was) that the Victoria & Albert in London is no longer charging for academic and non-profit printing of its images - at least its digital ones. Read the report at Cronaca.
Onward through the pile of 101 papers!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:38 AM
November 30, 2006
Class blogging rewards the fiddlers
I have two classes going at Movable Type to create online exhibitions right now (which I will not advertise for copyright reasons - if we keep it private maybe we're covered by fair use). This year I've added an oral instruction in both classes which seems to have paid off a little: web work rewards fiddlers.
I encouraged groups to choose a single person to be the enterer-of-information and to try to choose that person on the basis of a willingness to tinker. I think I see that happening in one group (of 8) in the First Year Seminar and 2 groups (of 7) in Art 101. This year in Art 101 when I asked how many people have ever had a LiveJournal or MySpace page account about a third raised their hands - I told them that if they've done that they can do this. We'll see!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:09 AM
November 24, 2006
Aca-blogging
Oso Raro has written a magnificent reflection on academic blogging - with pictures. Not of academic bloggers, you'll be happy to know. Other blogging is implicated. Click and read.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2006
Not ready for prime time, but take a look at some local history
I'm a medievalist. I live in Upstate New York. There's no medieval architecture. However, there's lots of Gothic Revival - and revival styles interest me.
I've been working on our chapel off and on for the last couple of years. One part of that project is the journal kept by Abner Jackson, president of Hobart College from 1858-1867. I'm very interested to see how much I can say about the intentions behind the building than I can ever say securely about Medieval buildings.
I had a little grant last year to have students transcribe the whole thing (we're missing 1865, damn it, but we got the rest of it) and now the archivist and I are mounting it as a blog.
We're posting photos and realia from the archives to enrich the document - and it's already starting to be fun. I'd like to publish it, eventually, but an online version may satisfy that. The illustrations would certainly be richer this way!
Oh - when I say "not ready for prime time" I mean that we've got it on the Wordpress free server right now, but there will eventually be a stable, campus URL for the site. Feel free to look and link, but the link will be broken sooner rather than later.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:25 PM
November 3, 2006
The new Economist Blog
The Economist Blogs - eponymously, as always. WE know Miss McArdle is behind it . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:06 PM
October 30, 2006
Best Spam Comment in AGES!
So I'm looking at the one or two junk comments MT 3.33 let through today and read this lovely text:
Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)I find the use of 'cognitive' to mean 'meaninglessly good' about par for the course. Cognitive is right up there with evolutionary and slightly less meaninful than nano in my book.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:58 PM
October 29, 2006
All is new...
OK - I think I've succeeded in upgrading to MT 3.3 - and comments are back on.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:10 PM
October 28, 2006
The nicest thing...!
I think this is a very nice thing to say about your wife! If the choice of who to play her in film is Angelina Jolie . . . oh, click and see.
You know, the alternative always impressed me as someone from somewhere perfectly reasonable - and there you go - IMDB tells me she was born in Gaffney, SC. No wonder she sounds real!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:55 AM
October 26, 2006
sorry, folks
I'm having some mild technical difficulties - among other things I need to upgrade my MovableType installation. I've backed up my SQL database, downloaded MT3.3, and then found myself a tad busy. It's really not the kind of thing to do after 9 p.m., so I've turned off comments (the script is disabled - my hosting service informed me that something was up in the cgi script - someone had left a gremlin there).
SO...commenting will resume soon.
In the meantime I just finished pulling together Pompeii for Art 101 today (with the digital presentation software and access to the Visual Resources Center we can do this from home - yay!). For reasons I don't quite remember I decided to concentrate on the House of the Vettii this year, so I made sure that all of that was scanned and ready to project digitally. When you have more than 150,000 slides the scanning process is NOT instantaneous.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:51 AM
October 24, 2006
Sorry for the hiatus
I apologize to anyone who missed me, but I ran off to a conference and then had to play catch up.
The conference theme was drama in the Middle Ages, and I fell back on "those who don't do, teach" - I gave a pedagogical paper. It went over well, though - I have a good module for handling the high Middle Ages in European Studies 101.
1. Read Rutebeuf's Miracle of Theophilus
2. Study the north transept portal at Notre Dame de Paris, which tells a slightly different version of the Theophilus legend.*
3. Discuss ecclesiastical administration and organization, homage, written contract, Jews in the 13th century, magic, Hell, intercession and patronage, the role of the Virgin Mary, the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos -- the list, as one says, goes on.
It was well-received in the conference sense and, I believe, in the "ooh - I'm going to try that!" sense.
And I'd like to acknowledge Another Damned Medievalist for her two read throughs.
*sorry for the link to someone's flickr site, but I'm queasy about posting copyrighted pictures and am having trouble doing better.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:43 AM
September 27, 2006
MY Favorite Humphrey Bogart Movie
Prophets unhonored in their own countries -- David Larrabee in Sabrina suggesting plastic champagne glasses, 'just in case' after his sitting-on-the-glasses-in-his-hip-pocket incident. Me, I prefer glass, but the plastic champagne flute has been a wonderful, wonderful thing for the world -- I'm all for the democritization of champagne flutes!
Bonus excitement! What blogger's real name is implicated in the Larrabee office staff?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:59 PM
September 20, 2006
Virtual friends
One of the beautiful things about finally meeting those one has become acquainted with - yea, fond of - online is that one can forever after hear them.
As I wrote him, a dictatorship is a real thing, not a super-synonym for "governments that do things I don't like".So not only do I agree with JG/MM, but I can hear how she's saying it. That's even better.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:27 PM
August 14, 2006
Travel sadness
I'm a little hurt that I don't appear in the Sartorialist's instances of effortless on the street dress, given that I was putting some thought into how to look as I trod the sidewalks of New York.
Saddest of all, he'd probably like my weekday dress 9-5 (Sept-May).
Me, lately, coordinating my goatee with my polo shirt.
Me, not so lately, dressed for grading.
Me, not dressed for class, given that I live in the sad land of Memorial Day to Labor Day. Me, I tend to observe my ancestral Easter-to-Columbus-Day rule anyway.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 AM
August 13, 2006
Spam subject lines
I got a great serving of spam today - here are the subject lines:
Tabatha Murphy + Science has a way to improve your vitality
Elvira Carmichael + Recall the bubbling energy you had in youth
Mickey + Feel Pleasure wih Finally there is something that is real
Trinidad Newton + Say goodbye to extra pounds
Anne Dominguez + big news break on up and coming company
Nickolas Henley + Science has a way to improve your vitality
Lorna Head + Hey man, stop throwing away your money
Ain't the internet great?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:37 PM
August 12, 2006
Socializing
Of all my socializing in New York City the most thrilling was certainly meeting my blog-parent Miss McArdle. We had splending drinks and a splendid Chinese meal - and lots of splendid conversation.
Yes, several years ago after I'd been commenting at her blog she said something along the lines of "shouldn't you have one of these?" And I do. Still.
Thanks, Megan!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:21 AM
August 3, 2006
Breathing Exercises
I notice that Megan McArdle (in her guestblogging role at Instapundit, not at Asymmetrical Information) is having trouble breathing in New York - she slept on the sofa. Me, I have an Ikea Poang chair and footstool for those bronchitic nights and have never been happier to sleep sitting up. Not that it's fun to sleep sitting up, but it beats smothering in your own bed. Mine pieces of ikeadom are two different colors of red, the chair havinga head start of several years at fading gracefully, but they're still comfortable.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:02 AM
July 24, 2006
OK - a REASON for YouTube
I'm watching this over and over again and chortling. YouTube is a wonderful thing. The intersection between reality and celebrity - and the power of posting online! The 21st Century summed up in 31 seconds!
And yes - I've seen the Charro version - it isn't as much fun. YouTube found me that one, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:35 PM
July 21, 2006
Why I read B.A.W.
Big Arm Woman does it again - "Durham is a tense town on a good day."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:35 AM
July 19, 2006
Digital Libraries...
Here's another digitalization project - this time a Digital Abbey Library of St. Gall (Codices Electronici Sangallenses). Best of all, they're allowing non-commercial reproduction on the web, so long as there is an explicit bibilographical reference and a link back to the digital library!
Here's a good description of the project - they have about 100 out of about 2,100 manuscripts digitized now.
You, readers, might have wondered why I, an art historian, use so few images on my blog. Copyright. That's why. I'm moderately sensitive to the horrific issues of copyright, and it's easier not to tread those paths.
This kind of collection will help!
Here's one - a cross-carpet page from an 8th century Gospel book.
Cod. Sang. 51, page 6, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen / Codices Electronici Sangallenses).
Sorry, the descriptions (and even some of the labelling) is in German even after one chooses the English options. Oh, well - everyone should learn German, anyway!
One of the neat things about this kind of online resource is that all too often we art historians only show students the pretty pages - the ones with good pictures. I was in graduate school before I realized how few pages in medieval manuscripts had any decoration at all! But you see, slide collections are that way, too - we tend only to own slides of the pretty pages. So what I can do with this sort of online resource that provides facsimile photographs of complete books is choose a book I know has some decorated pages and move through it on the big screen page by page -- and the students will see what a small proportion of book pages are decorated!
What fun!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:11 AM
July 16, 2006
Read and Learn.
When H. P. Lovecraft wrote,There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination - for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.he could well have been describing a screening of Dances With Wolves (1990).
Passages like that make me read Udolpho.com religiously. Well, have him on Net News Wire. Which he would mock because I'm a Mac user. And people tell me with strange regularity that I remind them of Stephen Speilberg. But I don't mind. He's worth it.
Here's the direct link to the post from which the excerpt came.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:06 PM
June 19, 2006
Sorry for slow posting - summer strikes!
It's been hot and sticky and not much fun here in Upstate New York. Another thing that cuts into my blogging, productivity tends to make me grumpy. I'm being productive. Yay. Kalamazoo sort of accepted the session proposal (they accepted one of the two sessions on humor we proposed, and I had to cut down the descriptions and titles from a pair of sessions into a single session. Good news, bad news). I've had a paper accepted for the Binghamton medieval conference and really might want to think of writing it now, given how early the conference is and my schedule in the fall.
The only interesting news has been the blessed event. Welcome, Mary Elizabeth! None of the plants died while I was gone, the airedale is fine, and Geneva is still here.
I do have something to say (with pictures) about the new Renzo Piano wing at the High Museum in Atlanta, but I'm still thinking.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:24 AM
June 5, 2006
Free Airport Wireless!
Yay! The Rochester Airport has free wireless!
I'm on my way home to Tennessee for a week with the parents and a cousinly wedding - and it's important to stay connected. Even if you have no reason to be connected, I guess.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:06 AM
June 4, 2006
Bloggers one would like to meet...
I have met very few fellow bloggers. I mean, I knew Another Damned Medievalist, Jodi Dean and Bibliochef before they started blogging (and they, me).
I want to meet Professor Soltan. You can't autograph a blog, but I want to shake her hand. She's the most interesting acablogger of them all.
But honor's another one of those words. When a marine sings "keep our honor clean" -- an awkward bit of language in itself, I admit -- I actually know what's meant. There's a history and a literature there. When an unimaginative dean, brimming with the accumulated irritations with everyone -- professors, students, parents, other administrators -- that deans are obviously going to have, portrays himself as an honorable man in a sea of dishonorables, a man who can renew a college's honor, I need a good deal more substance and clarity about all that than this book is willing or able to give me.Here's her review of the latest Harvard book.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:55 PM
May 28, 2006
Blogging and Food!
Go read a bit at Bibliochef's Cooking With Ideas! The author is a near-neighbor and good colleague of mine. If I know this colleague, there will be mystery-talk, too.
I've added Cooking With Ideas to the blogroll, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:03 PM
May 22, 2006
Things I've bought lately
I'm still incapable of typing clever thoughts for you, but here's a list:
John Hiatt, Master of Disaster. I was motivated by looking for a deeply politically incorrect song of my youth and heard the recentest stuff.
a woodcut from the student art show - maybe I'll photograph it for you later.
and a Christmas present I'd better not link to - the intended recipient reads the blog and need not know that I'm gonna read it myself, first.
Let me hasten to assure you that while linking constitutes endorsement (everyone should follow my lead and the world would be a happier, more harmonious place) it does not constitute a commercial endorsement - no amount of clickage puts anything in my pocket other than the vague satisfaction that by providing a lead I may be making the world a better place.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:50 PM
May 16, 2006
Oh my!
Sorry to have left my garden uncultivated! I've been busy beyond even my usual busyness for early May - 4 days at Kalamazoo isn't exactly a mistake, but it does make it difficult to finish strongly!
Oh, well, I'm back on track. This was the first weekday of summer and I did work! Yay!
Graduation was dry! Yay! Not beautiful, but not what was predicted.
I'm headed upstairs to the balcony grill a little steak and local asparagus (it's turned out to be too nice an evening to stay inside) and read William Diebold's Word and Image again. I'm going to try to use it in my Art 270 next spring (early medieval, more or less) and I really ought to reread it. Pricey for such a slim volume, but it is good. He deals clearly with lots of the issues that I wish most for students to learn. He strudctures the book around Gregory the Great's defense of images and its partial success in the West - and its failures. He ends with a really well-done exploration of a single object - the reliquary-statue of Ste. Foy of Conques. Here's the later church dedicated to her.
You know, the pretorn, prewashed salad may be one of the great innovations of recent years. I am eating much more salad because of it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:17 PM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2006
I apologize
I apologize for the gappy service, but life has been hard lately - and not only in the usual academic April way.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM
February 21, 2006
Creepy!
O.K., so I'm cleaning out the spam this morning -- there was only one, but it took me to comment #666. Honest (remember, I restarted the blog in January 05 after losing everything to a database meltdown). So I tell mt.blacklist to purge it and it comes back and reports that the URL behind the comment is shaved-goat.com.
Satan? Running online pharmacies?
That's where all this spam has been coming from!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM
February 19, 2006
Subject lines that disappoint
Eliminate all weakness and become the king!
Unworthy though I am, I was willing to become the king for the good of the rest of you . . . but no. It's another ad for 'performance enhancers.'
So you're left imagining the glory of my benificent rule!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM
February 1, 2006
"Meme."
GOSH I hate that word. Worse is "memed." Worst still is discovering that you've been memed but haven't even noticed it because you've been busy and not blogging. Oh, well. Alright, Jgo.
FOUR JOBS YOU’VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE (and part time had better count):
Clerk in a college admissions office
Clerk in a graduate school of business admissions office
High school Latin teacher
College art history professor
FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER:
Could we do books? O.K., O.K.,
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Gallipoli
Blade Runner
Zoolander
There was a time when 2 or 3 of those would have been John Hughes movies, but that time is past.
FOUR PLACES YOU’VE LIVED:
Chattanooga, TN
Houston, TX
Atlanta, GA
Geneva, NY
FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH:
Law and Order
Law and Order, Special Victims Unit
Law and Order, Criminal Intent
Local on the 8s
FOUR PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON HOLIDAY:
holidays? I'm an art historian! Travel is for business!
really - I'm blanking here.
New Orleans. the last trip there was pure vacation.
FOUR NONPORN (and let me add, nonblog) WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY:
The New York Times
our Colleges' Daily Update
our Visual resources center, but it's only accessible from within the firewall, so I won't tease you.
Amazon
FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS:
Mama's fried chicken
Mama's fried okra
fried artichokes (carciofi alla giudea) (are we detecing a pattern?)
bacon
FOUR PLACES YOU’D RATHER BE:
Rome
the sunny South
Paris
New York (in good weather)
No one need feel obliged to make lists on MY account! I take all that kind of mild sadism -- making people write things they wouldn't have written without being under compulsion -- out on people who pay me for the privilege.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:09 PM
January 30, 2006
Atlatl Season
Pennsylvania has approved an atlatl-season for deer. Don't remember what an atlatl is? Go read.
I stress read because, like so many stories on the internet, it has no pictures. Now the National Geographic has to have internal access to more stock photos of atlatls than anyone else in America! Are you telling me that the magazine art department is so jealous of its copyright that it doesn't make old "artist's conceptions" of prehistoric hunting available to the other departments? They're bound to have one of the larger supplies in the world of photos and drawings out of copyright of this kind of thing -- why don't they scan them? It doesn't surprise me, but it's STUPID.
I was complaining about this pattern over at Mirabilis.ca just the other day (on an entry about stackable cars) -- why do so many news outlets not post pictures on their web versions of stories? I especially dislike that about CNN, given that most of their news is video driven anyway!
The National Geographic News Service does provide a link to a lovely atlatl site, atlatl.com. Can you tell I've always enjoyed the word atlatl? I do. And I love saying it. Ever since I was 9 or 10 and went to Russell Cave with my class and threw a stick using an atlatl I've enjoyed the word. "Flint knapping" does nothing for me, by the way -- the words, not the practice.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
January 5, 2006
Back and blogging up a STORM
Mirabilis.ca, that is. Brain science, black death, Befana - go read!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:07 AM
January 4, 2006
Wonder of wonders!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:01 PM
January 1, 2006
Blogging your local paper
One of the more interesting uses of blogs is the [fill in the blank]-Watch function, and one of the best is Patterico on the LA Times. Here's his year-end roundup. As he points out somewhere in there (it's huuuuge!), when newspaper editors think 'blogger' they should be thinking 'reader' -- bloggers are readers.
Every paper should be so lucky as the LA Times.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:44 AM
December 18, 2005
Upstate Greek Revival, Or, Blogging Pedagogy and Me
My Art 208, Greek Art & Architecture class, participated in a blogging assignment between Thanksgiving and the end of the semester. Here's the blog. There are lots of good pictures and interesting comments -- interesting enough that I gave credit for them, at least. Go look!
I had several objectives in this. I wanted to get my students off campus to look at some of the interesting 19th and earlier 20th century architecture all around them. I wanted them to draw specifric comparisons between what we had studied and a revival style. I wanted them to practice in a new medium -- taking and uploading pictures, writing short entires, commenting. I wanted to see if blogging would work with a class as a mixed group and individual assignment (they were to take pictures and post in groups and write comments as individuals).
I'm particularly happy with the categories - the few readers who know Geneva (four or five of you, I think) will know where the streets are. If not, don't worry. In a better incarnation these would all have clickable map graphics.
All in all I'm quite happy - look for a medieval revival version next semester!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:58 PM
December 14, 2005
Class blogging, 2
The class blog is going well - with a day or two left to run I have 55 entries (almost all of them separate buildings) and 134 comments. That's pretty good for 32 students.
I am spending a lot of time editing and recategorizing -- the next iteration will definitely have student EDITORS.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:09 PM
December 12, 2005
Class blogging
Sorry to have been blogging lightly lately, but I've been cracking the whip over a reasonably successful class blog. I had students in my Greek Art and Architecture class take pictures of local buildings that were either Greek Revival or used classical architecture vocabulary, post them with a brief text entry, and then comment on each others' postings.
The blog looks great, but I told them that I wouldn't show it to anyone outside the department (some of them were concerned). It's no great loss to the larger world, but it has been interesting. Maybe when the semester is well and truly over I'll close comments and make it more public. It's also one of the pilot blogs for Movabletype on our campus server, so the IT people (who told me last year that this blog is in the top twenty or so referrers to the Colleges' website) asked that we keep it private for this go-round.
One way I helped them find buildings (you have to realize that the young are kind of obtuse and needed guidance) was setting up as categories categories the useful streets of Geneva. Now those categories are clickable links in the side column and generate nice photo sets. Fun!
I've learned a few things that I will do the next time I try this.
1. Use the more experienced to help the less experienced. Sit down with the 30% or so of the class who have already kept a blog (Livejournal and Myspace were both popular venues) or were regular uploaders to photo sites and run them through a tutorial. Then use them as 'consultants' for the 70% who haven't. Unfamililarity with the medium made this HARD for some people.
2. Write clearer directions. Again, the 30% who'd done something similar found them crystalline. Then some more folks had no problem because they like fiddling with new things. I'd say 30% of the class didn't like it at all because they don't particularly enjoy fiddling with new things.
3. Comment more myself. I think that every time I offered a comment I got 2 or 3 direct responses. The grade for this project is pure participation -- so anything that stimulates participation is good.
4. Try a different time-scale. This time I kept it very concentrated -- only the last 3 weeks of the semester. That period was partly dictated by getting MT up and running, but mainly I was thinking that if I ran it as a true COURSE blog lasting all term they wouldn't pay attention. I'm still of that opinion, but I may start the project at midterm next time. My students had a definite pattern of getting to work, taking some pictures (in their little groups), posting them, commenting on everyone else's posts, then never reappearing. It's too task oriented! How could one overcome that tendency?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM
December 7, 2005
What I'm Listening to Lately
I haven't confessed to my musical indulgences lately -- so here's this afternoon's grading melancholia playlist:
Been There, Done That (What's Next mix) -- Jon Astley -- The Compleat Angler, 1988
Ne me quitte pas -- Nina Simone
Avalon -- M People -- Fresco, 1997
Sinking In An Ocean Of Tears -- Stephen Bishop -- Careless, 1976
Another Nail In My Heart -- Squeeze -- Singles 45's And Under, 1982
Love Will Tear Us Apart -- Joy Division -- Substance 1977-1980
Party Girl -- Elvis Costello & the Attractions -- Armed Forces, 1979
Only You -- Yaz -- Upstairs at Eric's, 1982
Pills and Soap -- Elvis Costello & the Attractions -- Punch the Clock, 1983
Heaven -- Talking Heads -- Popular Favorites 1976-1983
Whispering your name -- Alison Moyet -- Essex, 1994
When The Hangover Strikes -- Squeeze -- Classics Volume 25
All Cried Out -- Alison Moyet -- "Alf", 1985
Under Pressure -- David Bowie & Queen
Broken Hearted Melody -- Sarah Vaughan
Black Coffee In Bed -- Squeeze -- Singles 45's And Under, 1982
A Fine Romance -- Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald -- Ella And Louis Again, 1957, disk 2
The End of the Party -- The English Beat -- Special Beat Service, 1982
It Might As Well Be Spring -- Rosemary Clooney -- 16 Most Requested Songs
Skateaway -- Dire Straits -- Making Movies, 1980
Last Night 10,000 -- M People -- Fresco, 1997
The Menu -- Jon Astley -- The Compleat Angler, 1988
Alison -- Elvis Costello -- My Aim is True, 1977
Say It's Not Too Late -- Matt Bianco -- Indigo, 1988
Is you is or is you ain't my baby? -- Dinah Washington (Rae & Christian Remix) -- some Verve remixed thang
I Get A Kick Out Of You -- Dinah Washington -- The Essential Dinah Washington
No me llores más -- Omara Portuondo -- Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo
Romeo And Juliet -- Dire Straits -- Making Movies, 1980
Thought It Would Be Easier -- Shelby Lynne -- I Am Shelby Lynne, 1999
Sunbeam -- Submarine -- Skin Diving
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 PM
November 30, 2005
Hosting Haikus
My hosting service, Dreamhost.com isn't perfect, I guess - they have had an outage or two (though in one of those all of downtown LA was out). However, they never cease to amuse me. This month's newsletter is entirely written in Haiku:
Why can't I connect?https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=support.msg
Everything used to be fine.
Is my server down?
I recommend 'em - the service is entirely adequate for my purposes, the Help response is swift and helpful (for my purposes), and you get newsletters!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:17 PM
November 29, 2005
Blogger books
Our School : The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds came yesterday - run order a copy yourself! Then go read Joanne Jacobs blog. As I pointed out earlier, this has thrown off Amazon's suggestions for me -- I really don't want to give a book by Michelle Malkin for Christmas.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 AM
November 14, 2005
If I deleted your comment . . .
I apologize. I just got hit with about 250 spam comments with likely human names. I'm only halfway through deleting them, so I may have knocked out a real person. Sorry!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:00 PM
September 27, 2005
We all have our heroes . . . .
The Manolo, he gives an interview!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:23 PM
September 7, 2005
MovableType Plugin for Scripture References!
Did you know that there is a plugin available that takes scripture references and creates automatic links to text at Bible Gateway? Yow! Scripturizer 1.1 I may have to install this! One can imagine similar plugins for all kinds of literary sources online. Shakespearizer? Gutenbergificator? My mind is boggling.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:50 PM | Comments (1)
August 24, 2005
How to blog
I'm showing someone how blogging works.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:17 PM
August 14, 2005
Snippy Spam Message!
One seldom reads the spam messages, but I had one left under a normal first name that I didn't delete on first pass. It had the nerve to say:
can you please tell useful info this website is dissapointing [grammar, spelling, punctuation sic]The nerve!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:06 AM
August 10, 2005
Further Blogfinds, Antiquity
More, MORE interesting blogs! I dunno - having done the Carnivalesque thing I'm following up links and finding other blogs I should bookmark -- here's one:
Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean blog, subtitled "Posts on religious life among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman empire and on the social history of Christianity." This post talks about his main squeeze - which probably isn't what you're thinking. Go read!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 AM
August 8, 2005
Neat Late Antiquity Blog!
I forgot this one in the Carnivalesque listings -- I came across Troels Myrup Kristensen's Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm sometime last month and had misfiled the bookmark. Kristensen is a graduate student at the University of Aarhus and the blog tracks the course of the M.A. thesis on early Christian iconoclasm of non-Christian (pagan, that is) art.
The Case Studies category is especially interesting -- and the pictures are even more so.
One of the interesting issues will be sorting out the dating accurately enough to be certain that what shows up is Christian iconoclasm rather than Islamic iconoclasm (something that certainly went on as well). It's also tricky to separate accidental damage from intentional destruction -- marble statues are inherently fragile (the qualities which makes marble easy to carve makes it easy to break). For instance, were statues damaged in earthquakes or shipping and then simply disposed of?
When we see faces that have been chipped away with bodies that have been allowed to let stand it's clear we're seeing something intentional -- but it's difficult to date except by careful attention to archaeological context.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:27 AM
August 4, 2005
Carnivalesque
What have people interested in things Ancient and Medieval been up to lately? Here are a few offerings -- some submitted by their authors, some by readers, and some dug up by your host - Michael Tinkler. all links open in new windows
To begin on a properly carnivalesque note, Anne Brannen at Creating Text(iles) tells us about Lewd Maygames and Riotous Piping in Barns
Item bicause the Saboth day is so fondly abused in going vnto Fayers and visiting of frendes, and acquaintances, and in feasting and making of good chere, in wanton dawnsing, in lewd maygames sometyme continuing riotously with Piping all whole nightes in barnes and such odde places, both younge men and women out of their fathers and masters howses, I charge all my parishes, within my Dioces, and charge the Churchwardens, Sidemen, and ministers to see that no such disorders be kept vpon the Sabaoth day, commonly called the sundayes, as they will aunswere vppon their othe.This entry is an entry from a series describing a summer research trip. We know that academic summers sometimes look like beer and skittles, but some of us travel around the world to go to ill-ventilated libraries and read documents in crabbed hands. I myself had a few posts using the word Carnivalesque earlier this summer, but I didn't get to go anywhere. No one even brought me a tshirt.
Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon took a less professionally focused trip -- she was cycling through Kent -- but when those inclined to think about the past go pedalling around high and late medieval buildings, they can't help but think. Those who blog can't help but type about architectural cycling.. She found that the villages and towns of later medieval Kent weren't quite what she expected.
Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval offers Astonishing Tales of French Bureaucracy -- his first trip to the Bibliotheque Nationale as a reader. Woe! Footnotes!
Michael Hendry at Curculio offers a way to pass the dog days of summer for those of us who aren't travelling -- Latin Scrabble! Go comment and play at home!
It seems that many people who aren't reporting research trips are still thinking more lightly than usual. Jim Davila at Paleojudaica offers a list of lost books he'd like to see.
It's heartening to know that what once was lost can be found. the eponymous Glaukôpis of Glaukôpidos commented on the rediscovered Sappho poem and offered some alternative translations.
Two of my daily reads for keeping up with things found are Mirabilis.ca and David Nishimura's Cronaca. Both are constant sources for urls forwarded to my students with the subject line "look! someone just dug up another one of those things we were just talking about!" I recommend them both to your rss feed reader. When they go on vacation I miss them!
David Nishimura took a plunge into publishing original scholarship in late July, though -- he's been posting regularly on the Macclesfield Psalter situation. Because an article he and his wife have written is in festschrift limbo, he's posted it (with permission but without images). Ah, those double-medievalist marriages!
Michael Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak has an Update on the Crazy Sheep DNA Project (his use of the term "crazy"). For your less crazy medieval manuscript needs there's always Pecia -- nominated by a reader and also recommended on Cronaca last week. You have to be able to read French, but we can do that, can't we? And for archeology news, mainly in German but occasionally launching into other tongues, Archaeo-News-Blog.
Since I just used the word part archaeo-, I turn to archaeoastronomy - the term and Alun Salt's site. He speculated recently about which comes first -- addition or multiplication? The answer might surprise you, but for those who think I'm setting a math reading, there are pictures. I especially liked the aside "A lot of thought on numbers requires assumptions which we don’t even acknowledge existing."
Word parts and words - I know that's what hooked a lot of us on a past. Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti had a nice post on augurium and auspicium.
Another Damn Medievalist at Blogenspiel speculates about why she loves the early stuff -- I concur. But to remind us all that a specialty in things old doesn't improve one's character, Dennis at Campus Mawrtius posts about an Italian human interest story I'd missed retired classics teacher as con man. Can't trust a man just because he has Latin and Greek. What is the world come to?
The past isn't always long ago and far away. Tony Badran at Across the Bay posts on Ethnohistory, Ideology, and Modern Politics -- what's an Amorite? a Canaanite? a Phoenician? Think it doesn't matter in modern Lebanon? Then you don't read Tony often enough.
Did you know there's a Beowulf movie? It's going to be about as horrible as you might imagine -- Grendel has a father, for instance -- but the costumes look like fun. The world premiere is going to be at the Toronto film festival in September. I'm sure we'll all buy it on DVD, no matter how horrible it is, just like I'm about to buy the director's cut of Alexander.
The next will focus on the Early Modern, but I haven't seen a host announced yet.
Further: you can also go read this -- about a blog I intended to include.
Further: The Über Carnival page at Truth Laid Bear
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:31 PM
August 3, 2005
Medieval and Ancient Blogs on Parade
My friend that other damned medievalist persuaded me to run a blog roundup of Ancient and Medieval blogs -- if you care to submit something send it to professor AT crankyprofessor-dot-com. Things will go up Friday the 5th.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:00 AM
Sorry for the silence . . .
I've been peevish even for me -- I was sick, then I had to travel while relapsing, then I was at my parents, now I'm home, the weather is sticky and hot, the summer is ending swiftly, I have a lot to do. Oh, well. I'm back. I hope you've been using the archives or the category function . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:58 AM
July 10, 2005
Anti-Panda Blogging
The Old Oligarch is at it again.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:09 AM
July 3, 2005
Flickr fun
I've added a link in the right column to my Flickr stream, but I'm not at all sure that I like it. We'll see. Does it do horrible things to people's loading time if they're on dialup? Does anyone read me on a handheld internet object? Hmmm.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:43 AM
June 29, 2005
Poor guy!
Brian Tiemann's blog was the 22nd google hit for "Bob Lewis Volkswagen." If you add "service" to the search he's #16.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM
June 24, 2005
Make yourself useful! Go fill it out!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:53 AM
June 14, 2005
spam spam spam spam
After months of mt-blacklist working like a charm I'm getting 150 poker spams a day. Argh!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:34 AM
June 4, 2005
Things that lead people to my blog.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=yes professor stop calling me professor yes professor&spell=1.
Google searcher, feel free to call me "Professor."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:10 AM
June 3, 2005
New Domain for "Code-abiding" Pr0n
Well, it'll be easy to write the spam-filters and library web-site blockers (if the librarians would stand for such fascistic tactics as shackling information!! Yeah!! Librarians want everything to be free!!) for anything coming from websites with this domain. Sorry not to spell it out, but you know, wouldn't want to artificially encourage Google.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:06 AM
May 25, 2005
Want to be a K-8 Principal of a Catholic School in Seattle?
Go west, young person! Well, certified person who is a strong Catholic leader with teaching experience. I think a speaking knowledge of Spanish would help, too. Details at Open Book.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:26 PM
Blogroll Revisions
I had cause to change a url or two lately (and then to switch one back!) and took the opportunity to prune and revise. For instance:
..........Anthony Swenson is once again active at A Coyote at the Dog Show
..........Shelton Clark is back at 1050 lb. -- same name, now blogspot.
..........I cut a couple of the Rice bloggers who seem to have disappeared -- Owen Courrèges is writing, but it's more journalism than bloggery.
..........And I've added a link to a new Hobart blogger, Theological Static.
Prof. Juan Cole emailed me to say that he is indeed working on the Americana in Arabic project, but hasn't yet gotten tax-free status; I removed the mild disclaimer from the fundraising link -- send him money! It's a good cause. There were other mild revisions and restatements on the blogroll, but those spring to mind.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:26 PM
May 22, 2005
More Chortling
Another frabjous day! Mr. Shelton Clark, a complete hack, returns to blogging.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:21 PM
May 21, 2005
Callooh! Callay!
Oh frabjous day!
Doctor Weevil resolves his domain-name problems!
I'm chortling in my joy.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 PM
May 18, 2005
Book Tag
Oh, dear. This is difficult. Fr. Tucker passed one of those horrible "tell us a little about yourself" things on to me. I usually refuse to play, but my inner clericalist makes me say "Yes, Father."
Total Number of Books I've Owned: I really can't help you here. I must own a thousand or so; my office is full-to-overflowing and the back bedroom is getting to be frightening. I haven't unpacked all my boxes, even.
Last Book I Bought: Not counting my last Amazon shipment (which hasn't shipped, so I haven't been charged, so it doesn't count) I bought a stack of used books in Rochester last weekend - a book on the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters sounds most impressive, but I gave it away. I've already finished (see below) Starrett, Vincent, ed. Fourteen Great Detective Stories. NY: Modern Library, 1928. (I link to a current paperback edition!) I'm most of the way through Ivins, William M., Art & Geometry, a Study in Space Intuitions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1946 (I link to the unillustrated Dover edition). I also picked up Collected Stories of Reynolds Price. I've never read any of his short fiction. Oh, and Crusader figural sculpture in the Holy Land;: Twelfth century examples from Acre, Nazareth and Belvoir Castle -- the things you find in good used book stores! I was at Gutenberg Books in Rochester.
Last Book I Read: Yesterday I finished both the Starrett (see above) and Crone, Patricia and Martin Hinds, God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1983.
Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me: This too is unfair. It's like asking "what's your favorite artwork?" I always respond "from what century?" What about things I've read over and over again, whether I need to teach them or not? Shall I include or exclude fiction? I've got at least 5 novels I read over about every 2 years! Here are 5 that mean a lot.
.....1. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited..
.....2. Virgil, The Aeneid. sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentam mortalia tangunt
.....3. Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture - this book (which I first read in the first edition hardback in the Reserve Room because it wasn't available in paperback. OH the things you used to be able to force college students to do!!) is a big part of why I am a professional historian of art and architecture AND a medievalist.
.....4. Peter Brown The Cult of the Saints : Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity - this book changed the way I thought about the world by exploding the high/popular distinction in religion. Great stuff.
.....5. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. I guess. I could put The Last Gentlemen and be reasonably happy about that choice, too.
I think I'll pass this on, with the offer to refuse to be tagged, to my friend at Mirabilis.ca ; Prof. H.D. Miller; my friend at Blogenspiel, whose name is in flux but who has actually MET Prof. Miller; Dr. Julius Weevil, and Prof. Kimberly Swygert, Psychometrician.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:21 PM
May 13, 2005
The Citizen-Journalist Kit
Not to imply that journalists aren't sometimes citizens, but . . . Prof. Reynolds is making spec lists for citizen-journalist kits.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:59 AM
May 11, 2005
Oh, the Stories we COULD Tell!
This story about the SMU adjunct-blogger explains in part why I never write about the good stuff. Bad stuff? Whichever. I'm not really anonymous, after all (though I don't throw my name around a lot), so I don't tell the stories I sometimes want to tell. I realized once I was about 3 months into blogging that I wasn't nearly anonymous enough to say anything about my colleagues, much though you might be amused by our antics. Nor do I go into negative detail about specific students; all of my whining is fairly generalized. You might have figured out that I link to horrific stories from other schools to get the urge out of my system.Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:25 PM
May 5, 2005
Mild Paranoia -- Fit, Fitter, Fittest?
Remember my entry on word searches the other day -- things we have to do because we can because of computers? Well, I was looking at my referrer log (I know, I know - obsessive. That's me. So far it's been a socially useful problem, causing me to overprepare classes and always show up early for parties -- which allows me to help chop the crudités) and noticed that someone came to visit based on a google search on "michael + tinkler". Hmmm. What makes it slightly creepy is that it was at 4:01 a.m. And from a verizon.net domain name, which is utterly useless. I, of course, was especially curious to see if it were a colleague, but now only know that it was an insomniac.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:45 AM
April 27, 2005
Play List, 4/27/05
The AirportExpress is helping me play this tonight:
West End Girls -- Pet Shop Boys -- Discography
Wap Bam Boogie -- Matt Bianco -- Indigo, 1988
This Is the Right Time -- Lisa Stansfield -- Affection, 1990
Situation -- Yaz -- Upstairs at Eric's, 1982
Say It's Not Too Late -- Matt Bianco -- Indigo, 1988
R & B -- Matt Bianco -- Indigo, 1988
Ode to Boy -- Yaz -- You and me both, 1983
Indigo -- Matt Bianco -- Indigo, 1988
How To Be A Millionaire -- ABC -- Absolutely, 1990
Everyone Everywhere -- New Order -- Republic
Don't Stand So Close to Me -- The Police -- Zenyatta Mondatta, 1980
Cloud 8 -- Frazier Chorus -- Ray, 1991
Chains Of Love -- Erasure -- The Innocents, 1988
But Is It Commercial? -- Jon Astley -- The Compleat Angler, 1988
All Around the World -- Lisa Stansfield -- Affection, 1990
Accidents Will Happen -- Elvis Costello & the Attractions -- Armed Forces, 1979
(We Don't Need) Fascist Groove Thang* -- Heaven 17 -- Best Of Heaven 17, orig. 1982
It's a Brit Pop Post Supper Extravaganza!
*This song helped me realize that great art and great dance music can be made by idiots and still be worth looking at or dancing to. What can I say -- I'm no South Park Republican; I'm an 80s Dance Music Republican. For instance, Miss Tushnet uses "The Politics of Dancing" as the title of an ongoing essay series for reflection on the pop. Me, I just groove to Re-Flex and flash back to when it was a new song. It's a Dionysian moment for me, though 80s dance music did help me avoid taking either Englishmen or people who use the word "Fascist" seriously in grad school. That was a lesson worth learning in 1982.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:01 PM
April 13, 2005
Death from Above!
Avian flu got you worried? Go to avianflu.typepad.com -- Prof. Tyler Cowen is pulling together a group blog to watch this particular sign of the Apocalypse for us.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:49 AM
April 9, 2005
Saturday Morning Cartoons
Saturday fun - Spamusement.com. This somewhat twisty genius takes the subject lines from spam email and uses them as the titles for cartoons (usually - there are occasional photos, too). Chortle.
via Brian Tiemann
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:32 AM
March 25, 2005
Oh, my! Blogger Profiling, neo-neocon
The normblog profile today is of a blogger I recently bookmarked - neo-neocon. I've enjoyed reading her a good bit, especially her extended essay on changed minds. (part 1, part 2, and part 3, so far).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:25 AM
February 26, 2005
History Carnival
I'm not sure these things are really of much use -- "history" is not a very helpful category*, in some ways -- but here's a link to this month's History Carnival. The host of next month's will be my long-time friend and one-time co-student, Another Damned Medievalist.
*want to see why I don't think "history" is a helpful category? Read the comments.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:08 PM
Terri Schiavo
The coverage gets worse - it is amazing to read the headlines. A 3-week stay against removing the feeding is being presented as authorization TO remove the feeding tube in many of the headlines (I have google.news as my homepage lately - CNN has beenn loading too slowly for my taste). ABC headline, for instance, "Man Cleared to Remove Wife's Feeding Tube." The abuse of language is depressing.
For continuing coverage, see the roundup at Blogs for Terri. Commentary on the headline writing here
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:47 AM
February 24, 2005
Spam Stats - 10% real comments?
Here are some spam statistics based on my site. I have the advantage of being a moderately experienced blogger who had to restart from scratch (see this tale of woe - start at the bottom). Since I've restarted there have been 90 legitimate comments and 913 spam comments either blocked or forced through moderation by MT-Blacklist. I don't have trackbacks enabled; given what I've read I never will.
I think there's a very good case here for not having comments.
updateSince I posted this statistical tidbit this morning my comment list went from 90 to 173. Wanna guess how many of those are spam? I haven't looked yet, but since it is almost a 100% increase in the nubmer of total comments in under 12 hours I have a feeling that few of my regular readers are there. Further reason to drop comments entirely.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:45 AM
February 20, 2005
Registered Typekey Comments
So far three (3)* people who come here and comment have bothered to register a Typekey identity and thus count as "registered commenters." That suggests to me that most people feel about that as I do about re-registering as a blogger user in order to leave comments on blogspot sites -- unimpressed.
Let me point out the two advantages of being a registered commenter -- one for you, one for me. YOU get instant gratification when your comment shows up immediately. I get delayed gratification when I eventually check the Movabletype comment control panel and find out that I don't have to check and see if I want your comment to show up.
Feel free to register, regulars (I'm looking at YOU, Mrs. Smith and Frau Doktor ADM), but don't put yourself out. I only did in order to comment at Joanne Jacobs's site.
oooh - update - six (6)!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:33 PM
February 13, 2005
Doctor Weevil!
Doctor Weevil is almost back to blogging! A happy day for the classically-inclined, the cranky, and the well-read. Neither his domain change nor his template is resolved yet, but click and click and see.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:17 AM
January 31, 2005
Ummm, I'm Getting This Thing Working
The Typekey registration seems to be working -- at least one comment has now appeared with an "approve user" rather than "approve comment." That means that if you're a regular commenter you could save me some effort by registering for a Typekey account. That way your comments will show up immediately, too! Not that I'm really all that busy, but I sure am all that lazy.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:23 PM
January 24, 2005
Now THAT'S an Improvement!
Oh, my. MT-Blacklist 2.0 and MT 3.14 integrate very nicely! In my first hours of having it installed, even with the comment throttling on MT 3.1 (a feature that MT 2.6 didn't have) MT-Blacklist caught and rejected 6 comment spams. Both of them could use more people like me to test their installation instructions, though. Why WILL people assume that anyone knows what a CGI-BIN is. There's nothing labelled a CGI-BIN in my file hierarchy. I had to google it. Tell me, computer person, do you know what a pleonasm is without looking it up? Why do the people who write instructions for this kind of thing not provide a better (or, even, any) glossary? I truly could not have installed MT without the help of kind (unpaid) folks on the Movabletype support message board.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:47 AM
January 21, 2005
Blogroll
Hmmm - the way MT 3.14 works is probably far more satisfying for the computer-comfortable out there, but for those of us who cut'n'paste our way to HTML success it's tricky to figure out. I created two new templates, one for my contact info and one for my blogroll (and haven't taken time to edit the blogroll, much -- it needs some care).
Speaking of which, does anyone know if Prof. Cole is going to do anything about his proposed Americana in Arabic library? I occasionally toy with the idea of joining the yahoo group (except that 'groups' horrify me -- MORE email! ugh!) and then I notice that he's posted 3 messages since last July. It doesn't look like he's making much progress. Soooo . . . is anyone already doing (as opposed to proposing) any translation INTO Arabic or funding distribution of Arabic versions already translated?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:34 PM
January 20, 2005
First Spam
The reconstructed blog has been working for about 20 hours and I've already deleted my first piece of comment spam -- I haven't had time to get the new MT-blacklist installed, so I had to delete it myself.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:49 PM
And to top it all off...
My blogging disaster happened AFTER a flare up of repetitive stress nastiness in my right wrist -- I've been wearing a wrist brace and popping anti-inflammatories all week. It never snows but it blizzards.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM
January 19, 2005
Alright
This seems to be working now - sorry for the interruption in services. Movabletype and I are having a hard time. Do you start a blog using MT 1.0? You probably still have the kind of database I had. It's gone now, with all my old entries and comments. I may or may not be able to get them back.
Do yourself a favor - go read about converting your database to MySQL before this happens to you!
Thanks to the folks at the Movable Type Support Forum for their help.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 PM
And...
Yet another attempt....
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 PM
Well...
Well, this isn't working...
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:21 AM
Recovery.
Something horrible happened to my (Berkeley) database. I'm in the process of recovering my old blog entries; we'll see if I can get the process to work. I'm not sanguine.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:01 AM