Log24

Conversations in Hell

Part I: Locating Hell

"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
           che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
        c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."

— Dante, Inferno, Canto 3, 16-18

"We have come to where I warned you
       we would find
Those wretched souls who no longer have 
The intellectual benefits of the mind."

— Dante, Hell, Canto 3, 16-18

From a Harvard student's weblog:

Heard in Mather  I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal.  I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves. 

" … one more line / unravelling from the dark design / spun by God and Cotton Mather"

— Robert Lowell

Part II: The Call of Stories

From a website on college fund-raising: 

• “The people who come to us bring their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives.”—Robert Coles, Harvard professor, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination

• “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.”—Mary Pellauer, quoted in Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

From a website on "The West Wing":

THE LONG GOODBYE   
9pm 2003-01-15    

"ALL NEW!

In a special episode guest written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, C.J. (Allison Janney) reluctantly returns to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at her 20th high school class reunion…"

From a website illustrating language in Catholic religious stories:

"Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, the Sisters of the Precious Blood is a Catholic religious congregation…"

From a Catholic religious story by J. R. R. Tolkien:

"It shone now as if verily it was
 wrought of living fire.
'Precious, precious, precious!' Gollum cried.
'My Precious! O my Precious!'"

From a website on Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials: 

"'Stories are the most important thing in the world.  Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."

From the same website, a short story:

"Philip Pullman was born in Norwich on

19th October 1946."

Part III: My Story

For a different story, see my weblog of

19th October 2002:

Saturday, October 19, 2002   What is Truth?