When in Doubt, Think Dante

I think about Dante all the time.
All the time.
I especially think of Dante when in times of hardship.
Of course, it helps that since the age of nine I got in the habit of maniacally memorizing verse after verse and, oddly, have yet to forget a single stanza in the terza rima. Dante helps me organize my thoughts. His work helps me get centered and put things in perspective.

As a doctoral student in Germanics, I took a PhD course in Dante's Inferno. I was the only non-Italian PhD candidate in the course. The professor, one of the better known Dantisti in the States, asked me one day, "Brikena, come mai Dante?" i.e.: "Brikena, how come Dante?"

Stutteringly, I said: "Perche, eeee, insomma, perche mi parla...." i.e.: "Because uhm, well, because he talks to me."

Since early childhood, I've most likely spent thousands of hours reading Dante. Easily. Dante never feels like reading. It doesn't feel like work. It's like listening to music. It speaks to me. And unlike much else, it never disappoints. It always gives me something. It doesn't just take. It gives. Therein lies its unfading novelty and attraction. Novelty and attraction can only work well in the confines of giving. Deprive them of it and they'll vanish.

Dante understood that the human experience is marked by universality. He knew that while we might term certain emotions and feelings differently, our experience of the great basics, i.e., love, pain, anger, anxiety, difficulty are fundamentally the same whether one is professor Brunetto Latini who's condemned to inferno for eternity (see Canto XV) or Virgil, the guiding poet, who was unluckily born a few decades 'ahead of his time.'

Feeling good is 'dolce' and feeling badly is not. The dichotomy is clear to all. Dante refers to himself as two separate entities. On the one hand, there's the generally cerebral Dante, il poeta laureato, and on the other hand, there's Dante, l'uomo, the highly emotional man. The man, who faints at the sight of the great emotional pain of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V.

Dante embraces his emotional and cerebral sides fully. In my view, this is what makes me be as Dante-centric as I am. Dante fills a need. A need to self-soothe and inevitably self-ameliorate.

Why Dante, others, other than Prof. Di Tommaso have asked me. Why not Sophocles or Shakespeare? Or Goethe, even. For crying out loud, especially Goethe!

The answer is easy. I've long held that we don't get to choose art. Art chooses us. I believe this. As a matter of fact, I'll venture so much as to say that few things are solely choice-based. Very few. We think we choose but in most situations we are swayed to go one way over another.

Daily, I'm amazed at the multitude of applications that La Commedia lends itself to. And daily I'm tempted to apply it.

Dante spoke to me first on a cerebral level as someone with a doctorate of philosophy. He spoke to me equally strongly on a personal level. My whole life I've had difficulty with displays of emotions. I've always privileged my cerebral side. And unfairly so at times. But the older I get and the more I experience raw life, the more I allow myself to taste the opposite of ease, levity, and happiness, the more I'm drawn to Dante. It's hard, no, impossible, to ignore something that reaches you both on a cerebral and emotional level contemporaneously. Try it. You'll most likely fail.

What's been claiming most of my thoughts recently is the notion of the pursuit of happiness and it tenability. I've long wondered what it is that Dante must have experienced to write in Canto V that there's:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria (lines 121-123)
There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.

Cerebrally, I've always known this. I've lectured on it plenty. Emotionally, I'm convinced that the only way to get happiness, to truly capture it albeit fleetingly, is to see it in conjunction with pain and memory. Happiness cannot exist in the confines of complacency. It couldn't. It needs the oxygen of immediacy. It can't be without. Happiness can only be when ridden with the anxiety of potential loss.

Being, at times, happy is the hardest task to accomplish. Some are aided by their respective genetic makeup to have a somewhat easier/harder time with happiness. Generally, however, happiness takes much conscious work. If left to chance, the end result will undoubtedly be difficult. The gift of introspection, some call it. This ability that some have to look inward to find answers to the human condition. Introspection is not a gift. Introspection is work, a lot of arduous work. Introspection cannot be given one. It needs to be acquired. One individual at a time.

Satire a-la-Jon Stewart

And here's yet another example of satire as only Jon Stewart can do it. It features current news, comedy, literature, and, most entertainingly, Catullus and Latin poetry.

I give you Stew-Beef (hat tip to Tracy Morgan for the coinage).

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

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New Videocast: "Bored to Death" - A Review

In this new episode of Gendering the Media, I analyze HBO's new show Bored to Death. Bored to Death is a real treat especially to those who are in the business of literature and literature translated on the screen. In this analysis I mostly focus on the professional and personal relationship between the characters of George (Ted Danson) and Jonathan (Jason Schwartzman).


Note to self: Next time make sure to place the mic on the other side of the shirt. The episode will also be available on iTunes.

You may view the episode here.

Feedback welcome.

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The Transcript to 'Gendering the Text of the iPod' Audio Piece

You may here the audio piece here and you may follow along with the text attached below.


Gadgets have a way of making me happy. Switching to the iPod was the next natural step. The other gadgets were oh-so-20th century. That little gadget. My chosen box of possibilities. The iPod. Having in mind the theoretical approach of Judith Butler on gender I have long thought about how easily the iPod lends itself to being queered. Music precedes partners, relationships, most thoughts and sensations, even good writing. To me, at least.
“If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it ,” says Count Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. And I concur. Entirely. One can never overdose on music, after all. I’d venture so much as to say that I’m not capable of producing good work sans music.

Fluidity of existence is rendered possible via music. Judith Butler maintains a number of identities are occupied by the same person thanks to the many different roles that same individual can play in society . And these roles, I would add, can only be played if music were in the background. One is not just an athlete, a music lover, a mentor, a tutor, a child, a partner, a parent, and so forth. One is all of these things. And one does not just listen to Mozart, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Mina , Puccini, Wagner, The Stones and so forth but to a cornucopia of things. This need for diversity in music selections seems to match an inherent human need to diversify identity-wise.

Again, the fragment and the whole go hand in hand. One single role is as important as the sum of all the roles we play our entire lives. Mozart’s Requiem comes to me with as much exuberance as The Killers Indie Rock ‘n Roll. Even the most beautifully executed Rachmaninoff piece after being played non-stop all one‘s life can lose some of its grandeur, if not in the company of some other pieces, let’s say decadent rock and even some Schönberg and Stravinsky in the mix.
“Your music collection is just so queer.” See? It’s not the individual performers the friend was referring to. That elusive ‘queer’ did not just refer to Madonna, Muse , Mandalay , Belle & Sebastian , or The Magnetic Fields . He found the collective to be queer. So much variety in one little box! The white box oozes queerness.

In her Bodies That Matter , Judith Butler observes that crafting any positions or what she refers to as “reciting a given position in society always involves becoming haunted by what’s excluded and the more rigid the position the greater the ghost and the more threatening [it] is in some way. ” I experience such haunting by what was excluded on the 15th of June 2005. That day, my life as I knew it, changed radically.

I was riding my Honda Metro scooter listening to The Killers’ singing Indie Rock ‘n Roll and I remember noting that moment in time as a happy one. A thought I had at that point is how a little thing like a rock song could capture my attention so much that I’d be oblivious to anything else of importance.
Goethe once noted that great things should never be at the mercy of things that mattered least . In that moment, it was all about rock. Unfortunately, that moment, like so many moments in time, was painfully finite. When my iPod fell on the ground, I felt a disconnect. It was suddenly lying on the hot asphalt of 13th East in Salt Lake City. A tourist bus containing a plethora of people crushed it and my heart sank. My music was gone. It was taken from me. I felt wounded. I retrieve the iPod when it’s safe to do so and it’s defunct. No life in it. No music coming out of it. “This is just great!”

A few days go by. I get another iPod. It seems to strange to me. It’s a 60 GB! I look at it as if it were an original Monet or the wet lips of a good kisser. It’s so beautiful to me, it’s hurting my eyes. It’s so pristine, so white, so virginal. And it’s all mine. I like white things. They beg for attention, they appear so delicate, and yes, pretty. One little white thing, the all-present iPod. I have to spend more time on it. It’s like meeting someone new and sensing the pool of possibility they exude and then wondering if you’ll have enough time to get to really get to know them. I do. I take the time.

I create the iPod for me. The right partner that will accompany me daily as I go jogging, biking, hiking, shopping, flying to places, thinking. I have spent more time with the iPod than will close friends, partners, colleagues, and acquaintances. I choose five different protective skins for it.
When I’m feeling jovial, my iPod looks orange to purposefully mismatch the rest of my colorful ensemble of multicolored socks and shirts. Ah, the things one does in the name of postmodernity. The iPod adds to the queerness of the external presentation. The iPod is dressed in black when I don’t want it to clash with my more serious outfits. Then, there’s the blue cover for working out at the gym. The pink, to confuse my girlfriends, and of course, the white, my choice lack of color.

The white iPod is like a tabula rasa. It signified such a new beginning, such a sense of possibilities. I think about what it means to pull off white. That color almost compels the user to match the pristine nature of the box itself. Being known for losing things compulsively, I am amazed at the fragile behavior I espouse when I touch my white iPod. That color demands gentleness, care, love.
A number of blissful months ensue till that sinister Saturday morning. That very Saturday I could finally point to a moment in time when an abstract feeling of loss was rendered concrete. It was concretely lying on my hand. The dead, white box. “Come on, don’t be so puerile! It’s just one iPod. You’ll get another.”
What a strange way to console someone. See, to me, the iPod is anthropomorphized.

It’s the one thing I allow to accompany me everywhere. The iPod is my journal. I look at my writing and most of the time I can unequivocally remember what music I implemented. Emails to partners, mostly rock, emails to Dad, Verdi. Editing, punk, only punk. My writing process is apparently accompanied by a nod of the head that imitates the sounds of the music I’m listening to. Naturally, it must be a gene-determined mannerism. If my iPod were to be taken from me now, I would be inconsolable.

The first thing I do to cope with a crisis at hand, is turn on my iPod. Then I can breathe. It feels as comforting as a smoker’s first cigarette, or a starved person’s first bite of a delectable dish. The iPod caters to my very basic instincts, it feeds me. Then, there are the streets, those of London, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, and Salt Lake. They all seem to be full of white earphone carriers; a world of people who choose to focus on what is being poured into their brain by way of the iPod.

Some say we are becoming more and more marginalized and detached from the world. I would say the iPod is forcing many of us to look inside a bit more, perhaps at the risk of being hit by a bus, being distracted so much that a connection is missed at the airport in a foreign land. Be that as it may, the little box demands attention and pure love. It always delivers. At least until it’s attacked by a mean vehicle which suffocates its voice. The iPod. It represents a universe of possibilities. Where I seem to go, it goes there as well.

The absence of music is the presence of impotence. While a popular literary concept would stipulate that absence is as important as the presence of a subject, I would say that the absence of music would equal the absence of the written work. As some readers of Nietzsche would concur, music is the ultimate form of expression, hence it precedes all. But back to the iPod.
My whole music library in one little gadget. I remember thinking of the cumbersome nature of the red CD player. The little CD player only played a CD at a time. Making the transition to the iPod came as naturally to me as most of Europe switching from feudalism to capitalism. Perhaps comparing my switch from a CD player to the iPod to a major shift in the political and economic system is too much of a stretch but I do so on purpose.

Having a gadget like the iPod is a necessity in this time frame. Few other things manage to therapize me as effectively and very few things manage to keep my attention longer than a few hours.
So much information coming out of that white, pristine box. The consciousness of this twenty-first century being is fed by the best designed box of them all, the iPod. The fluid iPod can be a number of colors, it can shift identities as readily as a twenty-first century punk rock-loving, serious-looking, farming-interested academic. It is here and it is queer.
And after many deliberations with many a person, the best I can do to explain the term ‘queer’ is that it is ubiquitous. Yes, everywhere. It cannot help but be everywhere. It graces the streets of Salt Lake, Chicago, Rome, London, Toronto, the world.

There where we are, there it is also.

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Congrats to Herta Müller for Nobel in Literature

Romanian-born German author Herta Müller just received the Nobel prize for Literature. The last German author to receive a Nobel award was author Günter Grass.
Read more here.

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New Videocast: What's Up with Dante's Pettiness?

In this episode I talk about Dante's rarely discussed 'petty' character.

This was first inspired by a conversation I had with a close friend about Dante's choice of characters in his Inferno.


You may view this episode here.

Feedback welcome.

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Genius? No, I Do Not Agree with David Brooks

If you think the word 'genius' gets thrown around a lot in the vernacular, raise your hand. Well, metaphorically. Unless someone reads this to you out loud and you end up raising your [well, my, in this case] hand accompanied by a pronounced rolling of the eyes. Then you've entered another realm of bizarreness. But that's another story.

Let me explain why I am of the opinion that the word 'genius' is disrespectfully and superfluously exposed to the vernacular without much thought. The reason why I'm giving this some thought at this point is because of the recent NY Times piece on the topic by David Brooks.

Consider the following from said article. Brooks notes:

" What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

You can read the rest of his piece here.

Brooks' article was the focus of much of our Sunday conversation and I thought I would share some of the thoughts shared.
First, Brooks seems to reduce genius to much fundamentally concentrated practice. Granted, practice is indispensable to success but there is something unique that natural ability alone coupled with utter dedication can contribute. Brooks mentions Tiger Woods. The reason why Tiger Woods is the best golf player to ever practice the game is not because of his long practice sessions. There comes a point where sheer talent catapults one to a point beyond compare. What marks him so very uniquely is also what he does off-court and how game-centered he is. Extremely high results are not derived only from focused practice, a strong desire, and ultimate focus but rather a combination of all of these things plus a good measure of raw talent/natural skill.

Genius is about achieving machine-like results through analogue processes. It's a holistic process that approximates the slow, methodical tedium that David Brooks calls genius. By way of his own admission, Brooks is coming from a modern point of view which is why his discussion of genius is incomplete. What constitutes 'genius' is a modern view, which is exactly why modernity is so bereft of real genius. Now granted, we have many, many examples of competency in our day and age. There is certainly no shortage of pluggers away which, naturally, is a positive.

Brooks mentions Mozart and how uncomplicated his earlier works were. Well, what about his later work?

Only people with a superficial knowledge of a field recognize its greatest figures because of the things they did well through practice. Granted, Mozart practiced a lot and his early compositions are ordinary and imitated but the prodigy aspect of Mozart isn't what people in the know respect most about him. What inspires awe are works like Mass in C Minor, the Requiem, the mature operas and symphonies. The greatest works weren't arrived at by driveling away in the menial fashion the way David Brooks suggests in his awfully superficial treatment of this very important concept.

Now let me submit another example. Dante. Dante wrote his Divina Commedia in the 'terza rima.' A total of 100 cantos all written with unbelievable precision in the third rhyme. The Divine Comedy comes to us circa 1300. Dante was in exile, he had no access to Ivy League libraries, super computers and resources, or even an iPhone with incredible applications. Jest aside, what Dante had, other than much dedication and work ethic, was incredible literary talent. He had that which many other writers didn't. Naturally, a whole lot of menial years are required before great works are accomplished. But hard work alone is not sufficient. A lot of people work hard and a lot of them are great at certain tasks. However, they're not producing Comedies or Requiems a dime a dozen.

Tip of the hat to my dear LS for the food for thought and always delightful conversation.

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New Videocast: Moderation in the Middle Ages

In this sixth episode of De Amore: On Love with Brikena Ribaj, I discuss the concept of moderation and what it meant to the people in the Middle Ages based on what the literature of the German Middle Ages teaches us.

This is one of the concepts in which I have the greatest scholarly interests. I find moderation not only relevant from a literary perspective but also significant with regards to modernity.

You can view this new episode here.

Feedback welcome, of course.

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New Videocast: Anxiety and Wanderlust in the German Middle Ages

This is the most recent recording for my second podcast series De Amore: On Love with Brikena Ribaj.
This piece is about the character of Gahmuret in the German narrative from the Middle Ages, Parzival.

The question I tackle here is: "Why is it that the best of knights are always in a state of anxiety?" "Why do they have the urge to move from adventure to adventure?"

Familiarity with Wolfram von Eschebach's Parzival or the earlier French version, Perceval, the Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, can help but it's not a must.

All the episodes are now uploaded and running on iTunes as well as the blog.

You can view this episode here.

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New Videocast: The Gendered Identity of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied

In this podcast I talk about the character of Siegfried in the German narrative of the Middle Ages Das Nibelungenlied.

Some of the questions I tackle are:

-Just what is the price the exceptional Siegfried has to pay for his uniqueness?
-What does it mean to be homosocial in the Middle Ages?
-Why did Siegfried have a hard time attracting genuine friends when it was after all common for fellow brothers-in-arms to socialize and befriend people of similar skill and background?

An understanding of the Nibelungenlied as well as Literary and Gender Theory is helpful but not a necessity.

You can watch this videocast here.

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Mysteries of Pittsburgh: The Movie

Well, folks, one of my all-time favorite novels is adapted for the big screen. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the movie, is coming out soon.
Few authors 'get' gender the way my favorite American novelist, Michael Chabon, does.
If you have not read the novel yet, do so.

I do have to note that I have some measure of hesitation with regards to the film as the character of 'Arthur' seems to have been left out. And in my view, Arthur was the making of the novel. But, it's a Chabon-based story and it's definitely worth a look. Let's hope the filmic adaptation of the novel oozes some needed Chabon-ness so that it can succeed.

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What I'm Reading

Edward Skidelsky's Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture is definitely worthy of attention.
Ernst Cassirer, a German-Jewish philosopher (1874-1945), is one of the leading intellectuals of the Weimar period. His contributions to the liberal-idealist tradition are definitely worthy of more time and attention. I recommend.


Bethenny Frankel's Naturally Thin: Unleash Your SkinnyGirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting is an amusing and at times bizarre read. I have long maintained that dieting is rarely about the waist size and Frankel seems to support the same idea. In a roundabout way which is what makes her book, well, funny.
I find Frankel's book to be providing nothing new on the topic. What makes her book entertaining however, is how she explains that moderation is really where it's at.


William Cohan's House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street is an interesting 'reading' of the mess on Wall Street and how it it reached the point of break. This is an easy read and those who are not in the field of finance and economics should have no trouble following along. The book mostly delineates the far-reaching effects of unbridled greed. Definitely worthy a read.

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New Podcast: On Love

As I announced a few days ago, production has started on a new podcast series. The first podcast series, Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj will continue to have new pieces added to it every Friday. Most of these pieces will be on modern applications of literary theory.

This new series, De Amore: On Love, will, for the most part, be on the literature of the Middle Ages. The literature of the Middle Ages is what I am formally trained in and it is that which fuels the majority of my interests, professional and personal.
For there is nothing new under the sun, folks.
And, no, we don't know better in modernity.
Far from it.

The new series will be available on iTunes soon.

In the meantime, you may listen to it here.

This first podcast is a general introduction to the concept of love as "minne," the Middle High German word for courtly love, and "caritas/cupiditas/prima voglia" as Dante refers to it in his own work. The two authors I evoke in this first piece are Hartmann von Aue and Dante and their respective works to which I pay tribute are diu klage, Gregorius, Convivio, and the Divine Comedy.

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New Podcast Series

HetPer is proud to announce a second podcast series called De Amore: On Love. This series will focus on the concept of courtly love in the Middle Ages and how it is transmitted and received in later times.

These podcasts will be strictly literary in nature and the majority of the direct and indirect literary and historical references will come out of the European Middle Ages. The focus will mostly be on German, French, and Italian texts.

Stay tuned for the upcoming first episode which should become available in a few days.

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Susan Sontag: A Profile

I highly recommend this Times profile on the brilliant Susan Sontag.

"Then Sontag marries. The sequence of events is breathtakingly abrupt. She moves to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship in the fall of 1949. In November she writes, “A wonderful opportunity was offered me — to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff.” In the next entry, Dec. 2: “I am engaged to Philip Rieff.” A few pages later, after a trip to California to interview Thomas Mann, comes the entry of Jan. 3, 1950: “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.” And then she is on to “War and Peace” and Balzac and lists of works on theology. Her decision to marry Rieff is never explained or examined, and in fact she says nothing more about the matter, barring an ambiguous recounted dream, until she begins fulminating against the institution of marriage in 1956. The intervening years barely exist in the journals — five years dissolve in nine pages. The birth of her son in 1952 goes unrecorded; he makes his first appearance in an aside."

Find it here.

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New Podcast: Literary/Cinematic Analysis of Voyager, Part II

The new podcast is Part Two of a two-part literary/cinematic analysis. In this piece I compare and contrast the Swiss novel Homo Faber and its cinematic adaptation, Voyager. In this podcast I explore the relationships and relations between the key characters in these two narratives.
To listen to the new piece, click here.

The podcast is also available on iTunes under "Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj" along with the other weekly contributions.

Note: I picked this photograph from sartorialist as it oozes the kind of urban feel I get from Schloendorff's Voyager.

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Carrie Fisher's Book "Wishful Drinking"

I took some time to look at Carrie Fisher's new book Wishful Drinking the other day. Princess Leia's done a lot of interviews and promotion about the book so I thought I would give it a shot. Most of the reviews seem to refer to the book as 'funny.'
I didn't find it so.
There's a strong sadness and detachment that permeates this whole narrative. Fisher says often that she is, by virtue of her lineage and familial circumstances, different from most. Many of the jokes are made at the expense of her upbringing and, while I was expecting to be amused by the many anecdotes and vignettes, I found out that I wasn't.
On the other hand, the book reads very quickly and it provides a 'reading' of old-school Hollywood.
And to quote one of Fisher's own lines from the book: “If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” And perhaps therein lies the sadness.

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New Podcast: Literary/Cinematic Analysis, Part I

The new podcast is Part One of a two-part literary analysis. In this piece I compare and contrast the Swiss novel Homo Faber and its cinematic adaptation, Voyager. In this analysis I explore the relationships and relations between the key characters.
To listen to the new piece, click here.

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