Dante's Inferno...some of my Memory Theater

So I had some difficulties trying to put up my entire memory theater so instead I will put up my last four (the worst sinners according to Dante) and their picture


This is Judas. Known for his betrayal of Jesus. This has a bit of humor in it...as my girlfriend is a member of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority...I thought it would be funny to have it be Judas. She is not amused by this allusion.

This is Brutus. It is really a mural in dedication to our house mascot, a black lab. Brutus is the Roman senator who betrays Caesar (what Dante thought of as the second worst betrayal in history, second only to Judas' betrayal of Jesus). Brutus is the first to stab Caesar, but wasn't the last. According to Eutropius, witness to the crime, more than 60 men participated in his death goring open his body more than 23 times. Caesar utters his final words in Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar, "Et tu, Brute?"

The last of the traitors is Cassius, who is also one of the main conspirators against Julius Caesar and brother-in-law to Brutus.

"Cassius was one of the busiest conspirators against Caesar, winning over the chief assassins to the cause of tyrannicide. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, Cassius urged on his fellow assassins and struck Caesar in the face. He and his fellow conspirators referred to themselves as the "Liberators" (Liberatores). Though they succeeded in assassinating Caesar, the celebration was short-lived as Marcus Antonius seized power and turned the public against them" (Wikipedia). It is interesting that it is similar to the warning written over the gate leading into hell that Dante reads, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."



The last character of my memory theater is Satan, depicted here as a white wall covered in spray paint graffiti. Its lack of order and broad range of color made it easy for my to imagine it as a colorful lake of fire (or in Dante's case ice because they are so far from God), where Satan is contained somewhere inside.

Here is an artistic rendering of the Satan from Dante's inferno

And here is an diagram of Dante's Inferno...

a place where epithets are still common....THE WWE!!!

This is just fun, I haven't been a fan of "Professional Wrestling" since I was a kid and caught up in the trend. Regardless, I do think that it is funny how the oral culture of epithets is still widely used in the WWE.

Take for example Macho-Man Randy Savage...



"Savage was recognizable by wrestling fans for his distinctively deep, husky voice; colorful attire (often comprised of sunglasses and a bandanna, gaudy robes, and/or a cowboy hat); intensity exhibited in and out of the ring; and his signature catch phrase "Oooh, yeah!"" (Wikipedia). He is also well known for his slim jim commercials, where he bellows at the camera "Snap into a Slim Jim!"

This all came to me one day when we were trying to figure out an epithet for Worded Limbs (can't remember his first name) and all I could think of was WWE type names like "the body"...i decided that if I put that forward as a suggestion people might think I'm weird.

Just for fun again here's a link to an Onion article:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/make_a_wish_recipient_now_wishes

This has been a long time going that I have been meaning to put this blog up...I wrote it out in class one day and never put it up here. Well here it is!

I was thinking about what Sexson was saying with lists and their seemingly magical qualities. My mind was specifically intrigued by Nabokov's list of Dolores Haze's classmates, and his connection to the fact that language was first invented to keep lists (that is to allow accountants to keep track of bills). Sexson (and Humbert Humbert) argue that the role list is really poetry, and in that sense it has literary value. I was thinking about Foucault, and what he was saying about what exactly is a text in his essay What is an Author.

Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passagesand the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum (Foucault).

Foucault is arguing that since we do not consider everything written by an author to be a work (i.e. a "laundry list") then we must first consider the literary significance of a text before we can call something someone writes a work. It might seem that Sexson and Foucault are at odds in their respective ideologies, but they are actual after the same goals. Dolores Haze's role list to Humbert Humbert (and to Sexson and to many others) is poetic and therefore can be considered a work in Foucault's classification. But what does that mean for artistic intention if a random list of names can be considered art? How many people must consider something art for it to be art? Can anything, theoretically, be art? I don't believe any of these answers can be simple, but there seems to be answers to them...

My list of 50 things

Here is my list of 50 things...it is the first 50 people Dante meets on his way through Inferno. A lot of the people on this list are people that interacted with Dante rather than just people he sees.

1. Virgil
2. Charon
3. Homer
4. Horace
5. Ovid
6. Lucan
7. Elecktra
8. Hector
9. Aeneas
10. Caesar
11. Socrates
12. Plato
13. Orpheus
14. Cicero
15. Seneca
16. Euclid
17. Hippocrates
18. Minos
19. Semiramis
20. Dido
21. Cleopatra
22. Helen
23. Achilles
24. Paris
25. Tristan
26. Cerberus
27. Ciacco
28. Pluto
29. Phlegyas
30. Faromata
31. Minotaur
32. Nessus
33. Chiron
34. Pier delle Vigne
35. Capaneus
36. Bruneth
37. Geryon
38. Venedico Caccunico
39. Jason
40. Alessa Interminei of Lucca
41. Constantine
42. Tiresius
43. Malacoda
44. Friar Catalano
45. Vanna Fucci
46. Ulysses
47. Guido du Montefelto
48. Bertrand de Born
49. Griffolino of Arezzo
50. Myrrha
51. Sinon
52. Nimrod
53. Antaeus
54. Bocca
55. Count Ugolino
56. Friar Alberigo
57. Judas
58. Brutus
59. Cassius
60. Satan

I had come with this as my subject for memorization for class before I read this in Yates The Art of Memory:

"That Dante's Inferno could be regarded as a kind of memory system for memorising, Hell and its punishments with striking images on orders of places, will come as a great shock, and I must leave it as a shock. It would take a whole book to work out the implications of such an approach to Dante's poem (95).