Readings for August 7, 2022

Last year, I read Dante’s Divine Comedy on the occasion of its 400th anniversary. This was not a project I tackled alone, though I am certainly the kind of person who would read all of this on my own and hope I understood half of what the author was trying to get across. Luckily, Baylor Honors College, along with other universities, arranged the 100 Days of Dante read-along, with three cantos per week plus study questions and 10-minute YouTube lectures by scholars for each. Knowing thousands of other people were reading along with me, including a few friends who were roped in by my enthusiasm, kept me on track over several months, even after I started my master’s degree in the spring. We read all three books – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – ending in time to finish on Easter Day, when Dante the Pilgrim (as the character in the book is known) reaches the end of his journey. It was one of the most satisfying reading projects I’ve ever taken on.

I was going to write that I wasn’t going to try to convince you to read this whole work from the 14th century, but you know what? I am going to try to convince you. I am not a Catholic or even a believer myself, but as a work of literature, The Divine Comedy is seminal. Having a guide, like the 100 Days of Dante project, which is still available, helps a lot. An annotated edition of the text is important too; I used the Penguin edition translated by Dorothy Sayers, who also wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Sometimes you just need a map of hell, and this has it.

Anyway, what actually got me onto this subject was an essay in The Paris Review by Valerie Stivers, who has cooked her way through several classic texts. She also happens to be in the middle of converting to Catholicism, which adds an interesting dimension to her reading and her thoughts on gluttony as presented in the Comedy and in her life. And, of course, there are recipes. They are not easy. You have to make your own acorn flour. Still, a very good essay.

If you enjoyed my essay on “must of” on August 1, or anytime after that, then you might also love this history of the paragraph by Richard Hughes Gibson in Hedgehog Review. He means it when he says “history,” going as far back as the fourth century BCE in Greece, walking us up through the monks in early medieval Ireland and England, into the time of many arbitrary and only marginally helpful rules known as Victorian England, and through to a more flexible and realistic modern guide to using paragraphs in your own work.

I’m sharing this essay by Irina Dumitrescu in TLS on the one hand because it’s a nice meditation on returning to favorite texts and the new pleasures that can bring. I’m also sharing it because it’s by a medievalist and about an Old English work, and I’m gently preparing you for my semester of Old English literature, which you will surely hear about endlessly.

Oh, weird! Who could have seen this coming! Another essay about the British Isles, this time between the time that the Romans left and the scriptoriums started up. There’s still not much known about these few centuries, the “the Dark Ages,” but they’re not unknown, and they’re not unimaginable. Author Rebecca Stott discusses how she used the available research to fuel her latest novel for Literary Hub.

If you’re looking for a reason to keep writing and a project to keep you going, author Courtney Maum offers up wisdom in this LitHub interview with Mira Ptacin. It’s got the usual advice for writers that amounts to “Just keep swimming,” which is what I hear Dory the fish say in my head several times a week. But in this particular trash fire where we all now live, it’s nice to be reminded by Maum: “Well, the world sure as hell isn’t going to get better if I stop writing!” She also talks about the effect of doing one small thing for one creature in need, in this case a horse she rescued:

“As you know, it’s so easy to feel helpless right now. Like, I can recycle until the cows come home, donate and write letters and protest, and somehow, nothing seems to change. But something changed when I rescued Abuelita. I got hundreds of pounds back on her, she has food, friends, she’s happy, her life is no longer in danger, nor is her dignity. It is a small change in the grand scheme of things, but it feels big to me.”

Now Strap on Your Backpacks and Enjoy the Rest of Summer