tragos

—Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1929), trans. Ralph Manheim, New York Review of Books, 2007, pp. 158-159. Emphasis mine. (via msodradek)

I agree. To somehow believe you can ignore Dante’s “subject and doctrine” in favor of his form is like drinking a martini just for the gin: an impossible and pointless act.

Neither, though, would you want to read Dante as theology in verse, as doctrine set to music. The mission does not require spitting out the bitter bits, nor swallowing the drink whole.

The idea is to transform in your mind both the context and the content of the Comedy. First, you take Dante’s cosmology and ideas seriously, then you make them work for you in the here and now, avoiding both the prejudice of the present and the worship of the past.

It’s tricky business, but all part of the fun.

Adam Haslett in his Financial Times review of Stanley Fish’s new book, How to Write a Sentence.

Sitting here at my temporary desk, surrounded the remnants of last night’s beer and this morning’s coffee, bemused after a late afternoon nap, my shoulders hunched before the altar of my laptop’s screen, I am struck by the variety of ideas broached, critiqued and lamented in Haslett’s review, by the quick but not cursory glance at postwar hubris and Hemingway worship that contributed to our embrace of manly declarative sentences, by the potential nuance and descriptive power of subsidiary clauses, now anathematized in the post-Strunk-and-White age, by the suggestion that grammatical limitations might constitute cognitive failing, and by the telling quotations, the paragons of prose, peppered throughout, from Sebald to Pater to David Foster Wallace, all of which demonstrating how a sentence might make syntax commensurate with theme, and while the nature of a review allows for too little depth, and of course too little evidence required to corroborate the breadth of assertion, I strongly believe you should give these ideas, and maybe even subsidiary clauses themselves, a fighting chance.

Noam Chomsky (via julieanne)

Chomsky makes the mistake of seeing the Orwellian for the Huxleyian. By which I mean:

No, I don’t think your world’s most egregious dictators, Ben Ali included, would be impressed by the Obama administration’s dogged patience in the face of FOX News’ unthinking calumnies and reflexive opposition.

This is not to say that media consolidation, corporate money, and the other usual suspects are healthy influences on democracy and information transparency. It’s simply to say that the word “dictator,” used as Chomsky does here, is just unhelpful hyperbole. It’s a less severe form of the now knee-jerk use of “Nazi” to tar political opponents.

Ironically, I think rhetoric that indulges in cartoonish political aspersions damages sturdier opposition to excessive corporative influence on democratic political participation.

Evils can be very different, and to lump them together does a disservice to those fighting legitimate dictators (like those in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia now). Even worse, these false parallels undermine our ability to resist the anti-democratic forces of excessive corporate influence.