Albert Camus on the Responsibility of the Artist: To “Create Dangerously” (1957)

Lit­er­ary state­ments about the nature and pur­pose of art con­sti­tute a genre unto them­selves, the ars poet­i­ca, an antique form going back at least as far as Roman poet Horace. The 19th cen­tu­ry poles of the debate are some­times rep­re­sent­ed by the duel­ing notions of Per­cy Shel­ley — who claimed that poets are the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world” — and Oscar Wilde, who famous­ly pro­claimed, “all art is quite use­less.” These two state­ments con­ve­nient­ly describe a con­flict between art that involves itself in the strug­gles of the world, and art that is involved only with itself.

In the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, Albert Camus put the ques­tion some­what dif­fer­ent­ly in a 1957 speech enti­tled “Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly.”

Of what could art speak, indeed? If it adapts itself to what the major­i­ty of our soci­ety wants, art will be a mean­ing­less recre­ation. If it blind­ly rejects that soci­ety, if the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express noth­ing but a nega­tion.

And yet, grandiose ideas about the artist’s role seemed absurd in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when the ques­tion becomes whether artists should exist at all. “Such amaz­ing opti­mism seems dead today,” writes Camus. “In most cas­es the artist is ashamed of him­self and his priv­i­leges, if he has any. He must first of all answer the ques­tion he has put to him­self: is art a decep­tive lux­u­ry?”

Women artists have also had to con­sid­er the ques­tion, of course. Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va quotes Audre Lorde’s call for artists to “uphold their respon­si­bil­i­ty toward ‘the trans­for­ma­tion of silence into lan­guage and action.” Ursu­la Le Guin believed that art expand­ed the imag­i­na­tion, and thus the pos­si­bil­i­ties for human free­dom. Both of these writ­ers were polit­i­cal­ly engaged artists, and so it’s lit­tle won­der that we find sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments in Camus’ speech from decades ear­li­er.

To make art, Camus writes, is to make choic­es. Artists are already involved, as Shel­ley declared, in shap­ing the world around them, whether they acknowl­edge it or not:

Real­i­ty can­not be repro­duced with­out exer­cis­ing a selec­tion… The only thing need­ed, then, is to find a prin­ci­ple of choice that will give shape to the world. And such a prin­ci­ple is found, not in the real­i­ty we know, but in the real­i­ty that will be — in short, the future. In order to repro­duce prop­er­ly what is, one must depict also what will be.

The most elo­quent, endur­ing expres­sions of future think­ing are that which we call art. Even art that seeks to depict the fleet­ing­ness of nature freezes itself for pos­ter­i­ty.

Art, in a sense, is a revolt against every­thing fleet­ing and unfin­ished in the world. Con­se­quent­ly, its only aim is to give anoth­er form to a real­i­ty that it is nev­er­the­less forced to pre­serve as the source of its emo­tion. In this regard, we are all real­is­tic and no one is. Art is nei­ther com­plete rejec­tion nor com­plete accep­tance of what is. It is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rejec­tion and accep­tance, and this is why it must be a per­pet­u­al­ly renewed wrench­ing apart. 

To under­stand art as pur­pose­less­ly divorced from the world is to mis­un­der­stand it, Camus argues. This is the mis­un­der­stand­ing of “a fash­ion­able soci­ety in which all trou­bles [are] mon­ey trou­bles and all wor­ries [are] sen­ti­men­tal wor­ries” — the self-sat­is­fied bour­geois soci­ety “about which Oscar Wilde, think­ing of him­self before he knew prison, said that the great­est of all vices was super­fi­cial­i­ty.”

Art for art’s sake is the doc­trine of a “soci­ety of mer­chants… the arti­fi­cial art of a fac­ti­tious and self-absorbed soci­ety,” Camus declared. “The log­i­cal result of such a the­o­ry is the art of lit­tle cliques.” Or, to a degree Camus could not have imag­ined, we have the enter­tain­ment indus­tri­al com­plex of art for com­merce’s sake, which in the 21st cen­tu­ry can make it near­ly impos­si­ble for art to thrive. (As actor Stel­lan Skars­gård recent­ly said in pub­lic com­ments, the prob­lem with the film indus­try is “that we have for decades believed that the mar­ket should rule every­thing.”)

There­fore, the ques­tion before Camus, and no less before artists today, is how to “cre­ate dan­ger­ous­ly” in a soci­ety “that for­gives noth­ing.” The ques­tion of whether or not art serves a pur­pose is a false one, he sug­gests, since “every pub­li­ca­tion is a delib­er­ate act,” and there­fore pur­pose­ful. The real ques­tion, for Camus the philoso­pher, “is sim­ply to know — giv­en the strict con­trols of count­less ide­olo­gies (so many cults, such soli­tude!) — how the enig­mat­ic free­dom of cre­ation remains pos­si­ble.” If only arriv­ing at such knowl­edge were so sim­ple. Camus’ lec­ture has recent­ly been trans­lat­ed by San­dra Smith and pub­lished in the short vol­ume, Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly: The Pow­er and Respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Artist. You can read a sec­tion of the lec­ture at Lithub.

Camus’ speech was pre­sent­ed on Decem­ber 14, 1957 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Upp­sala in Swe­den, short­ly after he won the Nobel Prize.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

See Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty — 1997 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its the Philosopher’s Life & Work

Albert Camus Explains Why Hap­pi­ness Is Like Com­mit­ting a Crime—”You Should Nev­er Admit to it” (1959)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A Rare, Early Version of the King Arthur Legend Found & Translated


The sto­ries of King Arthur and his court took shape over a peri­od of a few hun­dred years; like most ancient leg­ends, they evolved through many iter­a­tions — not a lit­tle like the sto­ries in mod­ern-day com­ic books. “The medieval Arthuri­an leg­ends were a bit like the Mar­vel Uni­verse,” explains Lau­ra Camp­bell, a medieval lan­guage schol­ar at Durham Uni­ver­si­ty. “They con­sti­tut­ed a coher­ent fic­tion­al world that had cer­tain rules and a set of well-known char­ac­ters who appeared and inter­act­ed with each oth­er in mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent sto­ries.”

The first account of Arthur comes from a text in Latin called the His­to­ria Brit­ton­um, a com­pi­la­tion of sources assem­bled some­time in 829 or 830. Here, Arthur is men­tioned as a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, “var­i­ous­ly described,” notes the British Library, “as a war lord (dux bel­lo­rum), as a Chris­t­ian sol­dier who car­ries either an image of the vir­gin or Christ’s cross, and as a leg­endary fig­ure asso­ci­at­ed with mirac­u­lous events.”

Mer­lin the magi­cian — the fig­ure we most asso­ciate with mirac­u­lous events in the Arthuri­an leg­ends — doesn’t show up for anoth­er two hun­dred years or so, in Geof­frey of Monmouth’s His­to­ry of the Kings of Britain. “After Geof­frey,” writes Kathryn Wal­ton at Medievalists.net, “Mer­lin becomes a fix­ture of the Arthuri­an leg­end and appears in all kinds of dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the sto­ry across the Mid­dle Ages.” One Mer­lin sto­ry that appears in many ver­sions involves a fig­ure called Nimue, Viviane, and oth­er names in French, Eng­lish, and Welsh. (She is some­times iden­ti­fied with the Lady of the Lake).

The Mer­lin and Vivien sto­ries have “sur­vived through­out the ages in a way that not many oth­er sto­ries have,” the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester’s Robyn Pol­lack writes, “because writ­ers have found remark­able ways to trans­form the char­ac­ters and the nar­ra­tive over the cen­turies.” Now, schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol have announced, two years after its dis­cov­ery, the authen­ti­ca­tion of a frag­ment con­tain­ing yet anoth­er ver­sion of the sto­ry.

Found glued into the bind­ing of a late 15th cen­tu­ry book at the Bris­tol pub­lic library (one of the world’s old­est libraries), the sev­en frag­ments in Old French, dat­ed between 1250 and 1275, con­tain the “most chaste ver­sion” of the Mer­lin and Viviane leg­end, says Leah Teth­er, co-author of the new Eng­lish trans­la­tion and com­men­tary, The Bris­tol Mer­lin: Reveal­ing the Secrets of a Medieval Frag­ment. “The most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence to be found in this par­tic­u­lar set of frag­ments is where Viviane, the enchantress, casts a spell.”

In oth­er ver­sions, her mag­ic inscribes three names on her groin, a spell that keeps Mer­lin away from the same area. In the re-dis­cov­ered frag­ment, which shows evi­dence of two scrib­al hands, Viviane engraves the three names on a ring, there­by pre­vent­ing Mer­lin from speak­ing to her. “With medieval texts there was no such thing as copy­right,” says Camp­bell, one of the pro­jec­t’s trans­la­tors and authors. “So, if you were a scribe copy­ing a man­u­script, there was noth­ing to stop you from just chang­ing things a bit.”

Part of a col­lec­tion of Arthuri­an sto­ries known as the Vul­gate Cycle, the frag­ment pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence of the Mer­lin char­ac­ter’s evo­lu­tion, and con­sid­er­able soft­en­ing, over time. At his first intro­duc­tion, Mer­lin was the lit­er­al son of Satan, a kind of antichrist sent to earth to wreak hav­oc. Over the cen­turies, he became much less sin­is­ter, trans­form­ing into the wise advi­sor of the ide­al Eng­lish king, Arthur, a char­ac­ter who did a fair bit of trans­form­ing him­self as his leg­end grew and changed.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

King Arthur in Film: Our Most Endur­ing Pop­u­lar Enter­tain­ment Fran­chise? Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #104

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

Medieval Scribes Dis­cour­aged Theft of Man­u­scripts by Adding Curs­es Threat­en­ing Death & Damna­tion to Their Pages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961)

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsur­pris­ing recep­tion giv­en that noth­ing like them had been writ­ten for adult read­ers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish poem The Faerie Queene, per­haps. At least, this was the con­tention of review­er Richard Hugh­es, who went on to write that “for width of imag­i­na­tion,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beg­gars par­al­lel.”

Scot­tish writer Nao­mi Mitchi­son did find a com­par­i­son: to Sir Thomas Mal­o­ry, author of the 15th cen­tu­ry Le Morte d’Arthur — hard­ly mis­placed, giv­en Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, but not the sort of thing that passed for con­tem­po­rary writ­ing in the 1950s, notwith­stand­ing the seri­ous appre­ci­a­tion of writ­ers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s tril­o­gy. “No pre­vi­ous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowl­edge, cre­at­ed an imag­i­nary world and a feigned his­to­ry in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poet­ry, a fact upon which crit­ic Edmund Wil­son seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is appar­ent­ly quite insen­si­tive — through lack of inter­est in the oth­er depart­ment,” wrote Wil­son, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same lev­el of pro­fes­so­r­i­al ama­teur­ish­ness.” Five years lat­er, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judge­ment when they exclud­ed Tolkien’s books from con­sid­er­a­tion. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury mem­ber Anders Öster­ling, “has not in any way mea­sured up to sto­ry­telling of the high­est qual­i­ty.”

The note was dis­cov­ered recent­ly by Swedish jour­nal­ist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names includ­ing Lawrence Dur­rell, Robert Frost, Gra­ham Green, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their even­tu­al win­ner, Yugosla­vian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Ali­son Flood reports at The Guardian. (The Nobel archives are sealed until 50 years after the year the award is giv­en.) Ekström has been read­ing through the archives “for the past five years or so,” he says, “and this was the first time I have seen Tolkien’s name among the sug­gest­ed can­di­dates.” His name appeared on the list chiefly through the machi­na­tions of his clos­est friend and chief sup­port­er, C.S. Lewis.

Lewis, “also of Oxford,” Wil­son sneered, “is able to top them all” in praise of Tolkien’s books. From the first appear­ance of his Mid­dle Earth fan­ta­sy in The Hob­bit, Lewis promised to “do all in my pow­er to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recog­ni­tion it deserves,” as he wrote in a 1953 let­ter to British pub­lish­er Stan­ley Unwin. In what might be con­sid­ered an uneth­i­cal pro­mo­tion of his friend’s work today, Lewis respond­ed tire­less­ly to crit­ics of the tril­o­gy, going so far, after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Two Tow­ers, to pen an essay on the sub­ject titled “The Dethrone­ment of Pow­er.” Here, Lewis explains the pro­lix qual­i­ty of Tolkien’s prose — that which crit­ics called “tedious” — as a nar­ra­tive neces­si­ty: “I do not think he could have done it any oth­er way.”

Tolkien’s biggest fan also urged read­ers to spend more time with the books and promised that the rewards would be great. In defense of the sec­ond work of the tril­o­gy, he con­clud­ed, “the book is too orig­i­nal and too opu­lent for any final judg­ment on a first read­ing. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration our­selves in our reread­ings, I have lit­tle doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indis­pens­ables.” And so has all of Tolkien’s work, becom­ing the lit­er­ary stan­dard by which high fan­ta­sy is mea­sured, with or with­out a Nobel prize.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhib­it in Gen­er­a­tions Is Com­ing to the U.S.: Orig­i­nal Draw­ings, Man­u­scripts, Maps & More

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lit­tle-Known and Hand-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Mr. Bliss

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: The Real Perceptual Disorder That May Have Shaped Lewis Carroll’s Creative World

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land isn’t just a beloved chil­dren’s sto­ry: it’s also a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal  syn­drome. Or rather the words “Alice in Won­der­land,” as Lewis Car­rol­l’s book is com­mon­ly known, have also become attached to a con­di­tion that, though not harm­ful in itself, caus­es dis­tor­tions in the suf­fer­er’s per­cep­tion of real­i­ty. Oth­er names include dys­metrop­sia or Tod­d’s syn­drome, the lat­ter of which pays trib­ute to the con­sul­tant psy­chi­a­trist John Todd, who defined the dis­or­der in 1955. He described his patients as see­ing some objects as much larg­er than they real­ly were and oth­er objects as much small­er, result­ing in chal­lenges not entire­ly unlike those faced by Alice when put by Car­roll through her grow­ing-and-shrink­ing paces.

Todd also sug­gest­ed that Car­roll had writ­ten from expe­ri­ence, draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from the hal­lu­ci­na­tions he expe­ri­enced when afflict­ed with what he called “bil­ious headache.”  The trans­for­ma­tions Alice feels her­self under­go­ing after she drinks from the “DRINK ME” bot­tle and eats the “EAT ME” cake are now known, in the neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, as macrop­sia and microp­sia.

“I was in the kitchen talk­ing to my wife,” writes nov­el­ist Craig Rus­sell of one of his own bouts of the lat­ter. “I was huge­ly ani­mat­ed and full of ener­gy, hav­ing just put three days’ worth of writ­ing on the page in one morn­ing and was burst­ing with ideas for new books. Then, quite calm­ly, I explained to my wife that half her face had dis­ap­peared. As I looked around me, bits of the world were miss­ing too.”

Though “many have spec­u­lat­ed that Lewis Car­roll took some kind of mind-alter­ing drug and based the Alice books on his hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ences,” writes Rus­sell, “the truth is that he too suf­fered from the con­di­tion, but in a more severe and pro­tract­ed way,” com­bined with ocu­lar migraine. Rus­sell also notes that the sci-fi vision­ary Philip K. Dick, though “nev­er diag­nosed as suf­fer­ing from migrain­ous aura or tem­po­ral lobe epilep­sy,” left behind a body of work that has has giv­en rise to “a grow­ing belief that the expe­ri­ences he described were attrib­ut­able to the lat­ter, par­tic­u­lar­ly.” Suit­ably, clas­sic Alice in Won­der­land syn­drome “tends to be much more com­mon in child­hood” and dis­ap­pear in matu­ri­ty. One suf­fer­er doc­u­ment­ed in the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture is just six years old, younger even than Car­rol­l’s eter­nal lit­tle girl — pre­sum­ably, an eter­nal seer of real­i­ty in her own way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Beau­ti­ful 1870 Visu­al­iza­tion of the Hal­lu­ci­na­tions That Come Before a Migraine

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Ralph Steadman’s Warped Illus­tra­tions of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on the Story’s 150th Anniver­sary

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen

In his book on the Tarot, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky describes the Her­mit card as rep­re­sent­ing mid-life, a “pos­i­tive cri­sis,” a mid­dle point in time; “between life and death, in a con­tin­u­al cri­sis, I hold up my lit lamp — my con­scious­ness,” says the Her­mit, while con­fronting the unknown. The fig­ure recalls the image of Dante in the open­ing lines of the Divine Com­e­dy. In Mandelbaum’s trans­la­tion at Columbi­a’s Dig­i­tal Dante, we see evi­dent sim­i­lar­i­ties:

When I had jour­neyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself with­in a shad­owed for­est,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that sav­age for­est, dense and dif­fi­cult,
which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter—death is hard­ly more severe!

This is not to say the lit­er­ary Dante and occult Her­meti­cism are his­tor­i­cal­ly relat­ed; only they emerged from the same matrix, a medieval Catholic Europe steeped in mys­te­ri­ous sym­bols. The Her­mit is a por­tent, mes­sen­ger, and guide, an aspect rep­re­sent­ed by the poet Vir­gil, whom William Blake — in 102 water­col­or illus­tra­tions made between 1824 and 1827 — dressed in blue to rep­re­sent spir­it, while Dante wears his usu­al red — the col­or, in Blake’s sys­tem, of expe­ri­ence.

Blake did not read the Divine Com­e­dy as a medieval Catholic believ­er but as a vision­ary 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish artist and poet who invent­ed his own reli­gion. He “taught him­self Ital­ian in order to be able to read the orig­i­nal” and had a “ com­plex rela­tion­ship” with the text, writes Dante schol­ar Sil­via De San­tis.

His inter­pre­ta­tion drew from a “wide­spread ‘selec­tive use’” of the poet,” dat­ing from 16th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish Protes­tant read­ings which saw Dante’s satir­i­cal skew­er­ing of cor­rupt indi­vid­u­als as indict­ments of the insti­tu­tions they rep­re­sent — the church and state for which Blake had no love.

Approach­ing the project at the end of his life, not the mid­dle, Blake drew pri­mar­i­ly on themes that Dante schol­ar Robin Kil­patrick describes as a “search­ing analy­sis of all of the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic fac­tors that had destroyed Flo­rence .… Hell is a diag­no­sis of what, in so many ways, can prove to be divi­sive in human nature. Sin, for Dante, is not trans­gres­sion of an ordi­nary kind … against some law… it’s a trans­gres­sion against love.”

Blake died before he could fin­ish the series, com­mis­sioned by his friend John Lin­nell in 1824. He had intend­ed to engrave all 102 illus­tra­tions, con­ceived, he wrote, “dur­ing a fort­night’s ill­ness in bed.” You can see all of his stun­ning water­col­ors online here and find them lov­ing­ly repro­duced in a new book pub­lished by Taschen with essays by Blake and Dante experts, help­ing con­tex­tu­al­ize two poets who found a com­mon lan­guage across a span of 500 years. The book, orig­i­nal­ly priced at $150, now sells for $40. A beau­ti­ful XL edi­tion sells at a high­er price.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rarely-Seen Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Are Now Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Uffizi Gallery

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Explore Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a New Dig­i­tal Data­base That Col­lects Sev­en Cen­turies of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

100 Days of Dante: Join the Largest Divine Comedy Reading Group in the World (Starts September 8)

This year marks the 700th anniver­sary of Dante Alighier­i’s death — which means it also marks the 701st anniver­sary of his great work the Div­ina Com­me­dia, known in Eng­lish as the Divine Com­e­dy. We’ve all got to go some time, and it’s some­how suit­able that Dante went not long after telling the tale of his own jour­ney through the after­life, com­plete with stops in Hell, Pur­ga­to­ry, and Par­adise. It remains a jour­ney we can all take and re-take — and inter­pre­tive­ly grap­ple with — still these sev­en cen­turies lat­er. Start­ing this month, you can take it as a group tour, so to speak, by join­ing 100 Days of Dante, the largest Dante read­ing group in the world.

A project of Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty’s Hon­ors Col­lege (with sup­port from sev­er­al oth­er Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions), 100 Days of Dante has launched a web site “through which mod­ern seek­ers and pil­grims can fol­low the great epic poem with free video pre­sen­ta­tions three times a week.”

So writes Aleteia’s John Burg­er, who explains that “the three books of the Divine Com­e­dy, known in Ital­ian as Infer­noPur­ga­to­rio, and Par­adiso, are divid­ed into 33 chap­ters known as can­tos. [Infer­no actu­al­ly had 34.] Each video will present one can­to, with com­men­tary on it from lead­ing experts in Dante stud­ies.” You can also read the entire work on 100 Days of Dan­te’s web site, in Eng­lish or Ital­ian — a lan­guage Dan­te’s own poet­ry did much to shape.

Nobody inter­est­ed in the lan­guage of Italy, let alone the coun­try’s his­to­ry and cul­ture, can do with­out expe­ri­enc­ing the Divine Com­e­dy. One of 100 Days of Dante’s aims is a re-empha­sis of its nature as a thor­ough­ly reli­gious work, one that ren­ders in vivid, some­times har­row­ing detail the world­view held by Chris­tians of Dan­te’s place and time. But believ­er or oth­er­wise, you can join in the read­ing from when it begins on Sep­tem­ber 8, to when it con­cludes on East­er 2022. You may well find, as the long Italy-res­i­dent Eng­lish writer and trans­la­tor Tim Parks observes, that Dante has a way of slip­ping through con­ve­nient inter­pre­ta­tive frame­works cul­tur­al, his­tor­i­cal, and even reli­gious. “Long after the fires of Hell have burned them­selves out,” he writes, “the debate about the Div­ina Com­me­dia rages on.” Find more edu­ca­tion­al resources on Dante and The Divine Com­e­dy below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

An Illus­trat­ed and Inter­ac­tive Dante’s Infer­no: Explore a New Dig­i­tal Com­pan­ion to the Great 14th-Cen­tu­ry Epic Poem

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Explore Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a New Dig­i­tal Data­base That Col­lects Sev­en Cen­turies of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A 94-Year-Old English Teacher and Her Former Students Reunite in Their Old Classroom & Debate the Merits of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

In fic­tion the inspi­ra­tional high-school Eng­lish teacher is a cliché, despite (or indeed due to) the fact that so many of us have had at least one of them in real life. For gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents who passed through San Fran­cis­co’s pres­ti­gious Low­ell High School, that teacher was Flossie Lewis. Long after her retire­ment, she went sur­pris­ing­ly viral in a 2016 PBS inter­view clip about her thoughts on aging. It seemed she retained her pow­er to inspire, not just for her more than sev­en mil­lion online view­ers, but also for the PBS pro­duc­ers who lat­er reunit­ed her with her for­mer stu­dents in the very same class­room where she once taught them.

You can see this reunion take place in the video above, which also includes Flossie telling her own sto­ry of hav­ing fled Brook­lyn spin­ster­hood on a Grey­hound bus head­ed west. “I could com­mand the atten­tion of a class,” she says of the source of her pow­er as a teacher. “I had a voice. I had that kind of per­son­al­i­ty that did not seem teacher­ly, but was provoca­tive.”

One­time stu­dent Daniel Han­dler, bet­ter known as the nov­el­ist Lemo­ny Snick­et, cred­its Flossie with an “abil­i­ty to star­tle.” Anoth­er, now an archi­tect, remem­bers “grav­i­tas” — and his hav­ing been “intim­i­dat­ed by her name. Flossie is a very unusu­al name.” Or at least it is today, its pop­u­lar­i­ty (dri­ven, it seems, by the Bobb­sey Twins books) hav­ing peaked in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

Flossie is also rep­re­sen­ta­tive of her gen­er­a­tion in anoth­er way: not par­tic­u­lar­ly car­ing for the music of Bob Dylan. Though she can’t have been thrilled with that gui­tar-play­ing (rel­a­tive) young­ster’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture, she’s will­ing to hear her stu­dents out on the sub­ject. “The triv­ial task before us is to decide whether Bob­by Dylan is worth the lau­re­ate,” she declares to the group of Low­ell alum­ni gath­ered in her old class­room. Now all mid­dle-aged, her for­mer stu­dents include Dylan defend­ers and Dylan deniers alike, but what unites them are their undimmed mem­o­ries of their teacher’s mix­ture of rig­or, com­pas­sion, and sheer eccen­tric­i­ty. As one of them recalls, “You read us a son­net from Shake­speare and said, ‘It’s no good.’ ” What­ev­er his gen­er­a­tional rel­e­vance, the poet from Hib­bing may nev­er have stood a chance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly-Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

“Tan­gled Up in Blue”: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Albert Camus’ Touch­ing Thank You Let­ter to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher

Come­di­an Ricky Ger­vais Tells a Seri­ous Sto­ry About How He Learned to Write Cre­ative­ly

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Two Haruki Murakami Stories Adapted into Short Films: Watch Attack on a Bakery (1982) and A Girl, She Is 100% (1983)

At this year’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, the Award for Best Screen­play went to Ryusuke Ham­aguchi’s Dri­ve My Car, an adap­ta­tion of a sto­ry by Haru­ki Muraka­mi. So did FIPRESCI Prize, the Prize of the Ecu­meni­cal Jury, and no small amount of crit­i­cal acclaim, sug­gest­ing that the code for trans­lat­ing Muraka­mi onto the screen might final­ly have been cracked. Every now and again over the past forty years, a bold film­mak­er has tak­en on the chal­lenge of turn­ing a work of that most world-famous Japan­ese nov­el­ist into a fea­ture. But until recent­ly, the results have for the most part not been received as espe­cial­ly con­se­quen­tial in and of them­selves.

In gen­er­al, short fic­tion tends to pro­duce more sat­is­fy­ing adap­ta­tions than full-fledged nov­els, and Murakami’s work seems not to be an excep­tion (as under­scored a few years ago by Kore­an auteur Lee Chang-dong’s Burn­ing). Ham­aguchi’s film spins some 40 pages into a run­ning time of near­ly three hours, doing the oppo­site of what oth­er Japan­ese film­mak­ers have done with Murakami’s short sto­ries. In 1982, Nao­to Yamakawa made one of them into Attack on a Bak­ery, a short film run­ning less than twen­ty min­utes; the fol­low­ing year, he made anoth­er into the even short­er A Girl, She is 100%, run­ning less than fif­teen. Today Muraka­mi fans every­where can watch them both on Youtube, com­plete with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles.

The mate­r­i­al will feel famil­iar to Eng­lish-lan­guage Muraka­mi read­ers. A main char­ac­ter of the sto­ry “The Sec­ond Bak­ery Attack” rem­i­nisces about a rob­bery he attempt­ed as a hun­gry young man that went com­i­cal­ly off the rails, in a man­ner sim­i­lar to the one in Yamakawa’s first short. (In 2010 “The Sec­ond Bak­ery Attack,” where­in the now-mar­ried nar­ra­tor robs a fast-food joint with his new bride, itself became a short film direct­ed by Car­los Cuarón, broth­er of Alfon­so.) Though “The Bak­ery Attack” has nev­er been offi­cial­ly pub­lished in Eng­lish, “On See­ing the 100% Per­fect Girl One Beau­ti­ful April Morn­ing” has, and it now stands as one of Murakami’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive short works in that lan­guage; it also, in the orig­i­nal, pro­vides the basis for A Girl, She Is 100%.

“She doesn’t stand out in any way,” Murakami’s nar­ra­tor says of the tit­u­lar fig­ure. “Her clothes are noth­ing spe­cial. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either — must be near thir­ty, not even close to a ‘girl,’ prop­er­ly speak­ing. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% per­fect girl for me.” Yamakawa dra­ma­tizes a sim­i­lar fleet­ing encounter and the roman­tic spec­u­la­tions that res­onate in the man’s mind. Like the half-baked philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­vic­tions of the would-be rob­bers, these inspire the direc­tor to the kind of visu­al and for­mal inven­tive­ness one would expect giv­en his back­ground in Godard and Scors­ese schol­ar­ship. But the only film­mak­er name-checked is Woody Allen, which fans will rec­og­nize as a char­ac­ter­is­tic Muraka­mi ref­er­ence. So as are the inclu­sions of Wag­n­er, D.H. Lawrence, jazz music — and of course, an unex­pect­ed cat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 12 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online

Dis­cov­er Haru­ki Murakami’s Adver­to­r­i­al Short Sto­ries: Rare Short-Short Fic­tion from the 1980s

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

Mem­o­ran­da: Haru­ki Murakami’s World Recre­at­ed as a Clas­sic Adven­ture Video Game

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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