I went to a seminar on Dante. I could just post — If you get a chance to listen to Dr. William Cook on Dante you probably should. - Or I could share a bit of what he said. Dr. Cook started by explaining that for Dante Comedy and Tragedy had very specific meanings. In [...]
Category: Dante
A little Dante for refreshment
I’m hoping to go to a seminar on Dante next Saturday so I floated around on the web looking for something entertaining, in Dante land. I landed in Canto 8 in Purgatorio in a different translation from those I’m most familiar with. Dante is still in the ante-Purgatory, discussing his journey and why he still [...]
People my father knew
By devious ways over the past week I came to find a paper entitled The 1920 Shapley-Curtis Discussion:Background, Issues, and Aftermath, Virginia Trimble. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Vol. 107, pages 1133-1144, December 1995 1995PASP..107.1133T This paper discusses something called The Great Debate of 1920 wherein two astronomers, Harlow Shapley and Heber [...]
Which Church father?
I have been chasing something I read about twenty-five years ago. I can’t remember it exactly but whoever it was wrote something like …people approached the temple, peered in to see its glory, then turned away rather than boldly entering and living there… . Me, paraphrasing ... The next few lines were commentary on this, [...]
Reading on many levels
When I was originally struggling with reading The Divine Comedy, I tried some of Dante’s other writings. Dante wrote up a whole system about how to read on more than one level and this, oddly, was a good entry point for me, because my mother had shared this system with a whole bunch of teenage [...]