Read-Think-b4-u-Write

  Over at Lapham's Quarterly there is a story entitled "Flesh and Page" . I knew a bit about the making of parchment and the switch to paper because it seemed like a good story. But this article is a full-blown history of how parchment was made--animal by animal. The author of the article, Bruce Holsinger, asserts instructions for making parchment were not well written, often incomplete, or even insensible. But since parchment was an expensive commodity, medieval creators more likely were loath to reveal their recipes. When making a local product with local animals and local organic base and acidic compounds, recipes were bound to vary and vary widely. Regardless, there are dozens of recipes left from medieval times. Parchment had a reverential place in most societies. So much so, that it caused religious uproars regarding the manner in which animal skins were prepared especially among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But another argument seems to rival religious authority....

If you've ever read Roman, Old English, Medieval, or Renaissance lit, you may have noticed how devoid of feeling it is? Many of the ancient sagas from Homer to Iceland are filled with action, especially violent war-type action. But didn't any of these societies have any feelings? Of course, they must've by why don't they ever write about it? Is it because we expect everyone to reveal their every feeling on the page? Is this desire something that makes us modern? I mean pick up a novel, open it to any page and read. Feelings are spread before us in almost every paragraph with gallons of ink. There are so many feelings that it sometimes takes the characters forever to DO anything. "Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters’ inner experiences may sharpen readers’ general abilities to...

Canto XXI – Circle Nine (Cocytus) – Treachery Danté takes the rebuke at the end of Canto XXX just as “we turned our backs on the dismal valley.” They hear a “horn-blast that would have made the loudest thunderclap seem faint” and turn to look at “a range of lofty towers . . . Master, tell me, what city is this?” Virgil tells him “your eyesight is deceived by distance . . . these are not towers, but giants and, from the navel down, each stands behind the bank that rings the pit.” They approach one who just talks nonsense. Virgil says, “This is Nimrod, because of whose vile plan the world no longer speaks a single tongue” to remind readers of his association with the Tower of Babel and the resulting confusion of language. Virgil brushes off Nimrod and they proceed. They see the chained giant Epihialtes who “joined the great assault when giants put gods in fear” during classical times. In other words, he tried to rebel against the gods—not a good move. Antaeus, another classic...

Canto XXVIII - Circle Eight, Bolgia Nine - The Scandal Makers Danté begins canto XXVIII with a catalog of the horrors of war, who "could tell the blood and wounds that I saw now?" where men were "cleft from the chin right down to where men fart." From Aeneas's Trojans (1150 BCE)--a Roman victory--to the Roman defeat by the Carthaginians (216 BCE), the Norman defeat of the Saracens (1070 CE) and the defeat of Manfred by Charles of Anjou (1266 and 1268 CE). In other words, from ancient times to Danté's time. Danté even runs into Mohammad in this bolgia who "looked at me and, with his hands, ripped apart his chest." Danté believed that Islam was a rival Christian sect, thus Mohammad is divided in belief. Danté also describes the Sunni/Shiite split that occurred in 656 and still divides Muslims. All the inhabitants of this bolgia "sowed scandal and schism while they lived and that is why they here are hacked asunder. Their punishment fits th...

Canto XVI - Circle Seven, Ring Three - Blasphemers, Usurers, and Sodomites (?) Danté is accosted by three shades from his hometown, Florence, a "degenerate" city. These men are covered with sores and joined together like a wheel "their feet moved forward while their necks were straining back." These sinners are punished by continual movement, reflecting their agitated lives. Two of the men are Guido Guerra and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Guelph powerhouses and usurers. The speaker is Iacopo Rusticucci, another Guelph and possible homosexual. We again run into a problem when looking at sodomy. Rusticucci says, "It was my bestial wife, more than all else, who brought me to this pass." Some say this line means his wife drove him to homosexuality while others believe that his wife enjoyed anal sex (a sin at the time). The reader never actually meet homosexuals in Hell, so this can be interpreted in many ways. Something to consider is that homosexuality is punish...

Canto XIII - Circle Seven, Ring Two - Suicides and Spendthrifts Danté and Virgil enter a wood where the "filthy Harpies nest." Talk about metafiction. We have Danté writing about creatures from the Aeneid written by Virgil, his guide through Hell, in a poem about Christianity . . . but I digress. The wood (the only vegetation in Hell besides the meadows of limbo) is populated by brambles that, when broken, can speak. Dante breaks off a branch. "Are you completely without pity?" the branch laments as it "blisters and hisses." The bramble was once Pier delle Vigne, a minister to Emperor Frederick II. Remember, the Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman Emperor, while the Guelphs (Dante's party) supported the pope. Delle Vigne rose to power quickly and held sway at court for about 20 years until he was accused of stealing from the treasury. He was blinded and thrown into prison where he committed suicide "to escape from scorn." "R...

Canto X - Circle Six: Heresy Heresy can be a bit prickly among modern day folk because they are far too intelligent to believe in god or a higher power. That is exactly what Dant é was writing about in the early fourteenth century: pride leads to heresy. What's even weirder today is the proliferation of ghost "reality" shows and people that believe in zombies and vampires. Oh, but you don't believe in zombies or vampires, do you? You're way too smart for that. There is heresy in every age and it involves what we, as a society, are forbidden to criticize. Can't think of anything? What is the worst epithet you can be labeled? How about racist or homophobic? Like George Orwell once said, "The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. " Canto X takes us to Circle Six where we meet the shade of Farinata delgi Uberti, a Ghebelline (Dant...

Canto VII - Circle Four: Greed (Avarice and prodigal) to Circle Five: Anger Danté and Virgil meet up with Plutus (Greek god of wealth) who guards the entrance to circle four where they see shades rolling money bags back and forth endlessly. As Virgil says "All the gold that lies beneath the moon, or ever did, could never give a moment's rest to any of these wearied souls." Seriously, do you know people like this? And I'm not just talking about money. How many shoes do you need? How many buttons, Pokemon cards, books, action figures, stamps, Pez dispensers, cars, guns, records, DVDs, CDs, MP3s, etc., etc., etc. does one person need? These are the hoarders. Then there are the prodigal that squander goods. Can't find your lipstick - just go out and buy a new one, or two, or three. Got a scuff on your new Nike's? Oh well, go buy another pair on your credit card. Got too rough with your new iPhone - it's all covered, no problem. In this circle, Dant...

Canto IV - Circle One: Limbo In the last post Danté had reached the shore of Acheron just past Hell's gate and then promptly fell asleep. He wakes up on the other side of the river, refreshed and ready to continue his journey. Virgil is by his side and guides Danté through Limbo, the first circle of Hell. It is Virgil's home and the home of the unbaptized, although some occupants have ascended to Paradise, one-time occupants like Moses, Abraham, and David. On the surface, Limbo is not a bad place. It is made up green meadows and a castle with seven gates representing the seven virtues that these virtuous pagans practiced in their daily lives. What are the seven virtues, you ask? Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity. Virgil meets up with his compatriots Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, all famous writers of the classic world, and they hold a short conclave and then adopt Danté as one of their own. Wow, pretty gutsy for a guy who hasn't eve...

Introduction Danté's  Inferno is a self-help guide book that can aid you as you navigate your way through Hell (with a capital H). In 2015, most students may find this work challenging, but if you think of how Danté is relevant today that can help make The Inferno one of your best reads yet. Some things to keep in mind, Danté wrote YOU into The Divine Comedy, an epic poem of 14,233 lines. That may sound like a lot of reading, but they are short 3-line verses (tercets) divided into 100 cantos (verses) and we are only going to look at Hell (34 cantos). So keep an eye out for friends, family, and yourself as we make our descent. The Inferno  is very descriptive and we'll look at many illustrations to help see what Danté was trying to show us, like the picture above. Danté's Hell is based on varying circles, or levels, with the worst sinners at the bottom. Everyone in Hell gets the punishment they deserve, and the farther down one is located in Hell, the worse the p...

If you listen to some people, they complain about how young people today can't string five words together into a coherent sentence, BUT today more people then ever before can read and write. Why is that? It's called T-E-X-T-I-N-G! In this digital age if you can't keyboard, you're sunk. Every job everywhere involves some form of written communication. Hard to believe that 757 million adults cannot read or write. Maybe it's just third world countries. But no! In America this may seem foreign to us, but guess again there are 32 million adults that cannot read or write. Think about that. How do they go to the store? How do they pay their bills? How do they take public transportation? How do they read medication labels? What does it mean to be illiterate? It means you, your children, and your family will live in poverty. There's even a Literacy Day (Sept. 8) to help raise awareness of this problem. Do you know someone that struggles with reading ...

"Now lend me your ears! This is how to write a good short story." This is how Kurt Vonnegut begins his tips for writing short stories that readers will actually finish. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the classic science fiction stories Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5 (click on the links to listen to each) and was never afraid of speaking his mind. He once called semicolons “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Vonnegut's eight tips for a good story are: 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as close to the end as possible. 6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in ...

I love maps!  And the older the better. I like looking at how the world has changed, or being reminded of places I've visited. In my office I have a 1930's map showing the "Voyages of Discovery" with dashed lines and little galleon icons indicating the trips of Columbus, Vaso de Gama, and Magellan, a visual text sparking images of pirates, sea monsters, and exotic ports of call. In my kitchen I have a very art deco map of "Europe in 1932" with pink and teal countries whose borders are very different than the world today. Whenever company comes and congregates in the kitchen it always sparks a conversation about places we'd love to visit.  Rome, Paris, Athens, Florence, London, Alexandria, Constantinople all great cities a world away. Now some of these antiques are available to everyone thanks to the New York Public Library . The library has been scanning maps for about 15 years and now has "1,100 maps of the Mid-Atlantic United States and ...

Reading Twilight , Harry Potter (take that Harold Bloom), Hunger Games , and Watchmen , for that matter, will improve your brain. Don't believe me? Let's ask the experts. ABC News is reporting that scientists are using some of their most sophisticated tools to peer inside the human brain to see what happens when we engage in the process of reading, and they are finding a number of surprises: -- Reading is a very complex task that requires several different regions of the brain to work together. -- But surprisingly, we don't use the same neural circuits to read as we grow from infants to adults. So our brains are constantly changing throughout our lives. -- It appears possible that reading can improve the "connectivity" between the various brain circuits that are essential to understanding the written word. -- And there is recent evidence that simply reading a good novel can keep that enhanced "conne...

Mark Twain the author of such literary greats as Puddn'head Wilson and Huckleberry Finn was also a humorist and essayist.  His avid reading took him across disciplines as was common in 19th century America and some of his annotations have been featured in an article on "Twain's Viciously Funny Marginalia" . Heaven help John Dryden, the translator of Plutarch's Lives , which, is "Translated from the Greek" into, as Twain annotates, "rotten English . . . the whole carefully revised and corrected by an ass."  As you can see, Twain had some strong feelings about the English language and did not hesitate to talk back to his texts. On the title page of Saratoga in 1901, Twain renames the volume Saratoga in 1891, or The Droolings of an Idiot. What do you look for when annotating a text?  Are you summarizing paragraphs in the margin? Are you talking back to the text the way Twain does? When you talk back to a text you are engaging in criti...

The New York Times' editors chose the best books for 2012 naming Chris Ware's Building Stories , a kind of graphic novel, as the year's number two book. Building Stories puts a boxful of anecdotes at your fingertips, stories you have to tease out from pamphlet's and puzzles, game boards and leaflets. This "erector set" of ideas was specifically designed to foil any attempt at reading on an iPad or computer. The reader has to unsnarl the memories of a few different protagonists to deduce their story as presented by a few collected bits and pieces. Do you have a scrap book or memory box at home? If you went through the memories you've collected--old newspaper clippings, tickets to sporting events or movies, dried flowers from the prom--what story do you think the stuff of your memories would tell? Better yet, since the Holidays are just around the corner, what kind of memory box could you create for your parents, children, or significant other...

Have you read Lord of the Rings ? How about The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye ? If you have then you are reading banned books. In honor of Banned Books Week (Sept. 30) here are the top twenty banned "classic" books according to the American Library Association (ALA) . 1. The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald 2. The Catcher in the Rye , by J.D. Salinger 3. The Grapes of Wrath , by John Steinbeck 4. To Kill a Mockingbird , by Harper Lee 5. The Color Purple , by Alice Walker 6. Ulysses , by James Joyce 7. Beloved , by Toni Morrison 8. The Lord of the Flies , by William Golding 9. 1984 , by George Orwell 11. Lolita , by Vladmir Nabokov 12. Of Mice and Men , by John Steinbeck 15. Catch-22 , by Joseph Heller 16. Brave New World , by Aldous Huxley 17. Animal Farm , by George Orwell 18. The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway 19. As I Lay Dying , by William Faulkner 20. A Farewell to Arms , by Ernest Hemingway Why are books b...

Did you read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in high school or college? Did you have a hard time keeping track of who is who? SomethingSoSam.com created a slick art deco Gatsby Character Map to help you keep track. But SomethingSoSam didn't stop there, there are also some graphics of memorable Gatsby quotes , like this one: To finish off this trilogy of visual fun, here is a video with a little bit more about the Gatsby characters . . . A Look Into the Characters of The Great Gatsby from SomethingSoSam on Vimeo . It's obvious this graphic artist is passionate about The Great Gatsby . Warner Brothers would be well served to hire SomethingSoSam to create the posters for their movie slated for release December 2012. It is billed as an "American 3D romantic drama film", and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan and Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson....