The Strawberry Blog

In one week I have been socially thwarted by a Puerto Rican banker, inadverdently dissed by Quincy Jones, and chatted to, by, and with former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.

Pinsky and collaborator pal Michael Mazur were speaking as part of the University of Southern California’s “Visions and Voices” series (Quincy Jones will be there next month). As my professor friend and I tardily approached the lecture hall Thursday evening, we were stopped by a woman outside.
“The lecture has already started,” she said in a stage whisper and horrible skirt, “so please be quiet when entering the hall.”
Please be quiet? We took our seats and, as Pinsky and Mazur discussed collaboration on Dante’s Inferno, I stewed. Quiet? As in refrain from alerting the press, cueing the trumpets, and striking up the fanfare? Did she mean that kind of quiet? As the discussion carried on colorfully on stage I continued to ruminate on the meaning of this poorly outfitted, presumptuous nitwit, wondering why I didn’t fire back with something like “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an ill bred undergrad?” or “Gee thanks, I know I look like Lindsay Lohan but I promise I’ll behave myself in the auditorium.”
After these fantasized fair to middling retorts, I promptly got down to the business of listening. Listening and scribbling, which is what I do when I’m in lecture halls with brilliant minds and the palpable energy of enlightened people.
People who are in The Dante Club, as Mazur calls it, the unspoken guild to which one is automatically assigned when working on a translation or illustration of Inferno—a collaboration with every other artist in history who has ever worked on Dante.
It’s been a long time since I sat down with Dante’s Inferno and curiously, I had forgotten how, in Canto V, “Carnal Desire,” those fixated on sexual thought walk in a perpetual hurricane. And it gave me pause: what, then, might be the punishment for Gross Negligence in Engineering?

What would Dante do?

Might the punishment entail a perpetual state of coitus interruptus? Or prostatic congestion? Or would it involve drinking enough toxic concoction to make one sick—but not mortally injure? He might condemn the Army Corps of Engineers to be ignored in perpetuity. Or, confine them to a state of hopeless struggle, forever building a levee that is never strong enough—one never good enough for the people who commission it. That seems fair enough in hell, don’t it?
Dante ends the Inferno with this:
“Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
The other Pinsky, Dr. Drew, the M.D. better known for his radio show Love Line, in his recently published study cited that stars—or, more precisely, celebrities—are more narcissistic than the rest of us. No shit, Dante! The star of our evening, Robert Pinsky, very un-egotistically inscribed my book thus: “Best Wishes.”

So, maybe—just maybe—there are stars at the end of hell. If they’re Dr. Drew types and not the celestial ones, you’ll find me sipping a cocktail in Dante’s Fifth Ward—waiting for the lust filled to come in out of the hurricane