beautiful mess

Dante’s Inferno is the best piece of classical poetry because it’s the most petty thing you will ever read. Half of Hell is mythological or historical figures and the other half is Dante’s enemies. So the whole thing is like “I am Medea, who slew her own child to spite her husband.” “And I am Francisco di Vincezzino Fabriccia, who gets very talented and handsome poets kicked out of Florence, but I’m very sorry for it now because I’m burning in Hell and I suck.”

I feel I should add that because it was the Middle Ages and literacy was next to non-existent, poets made their money by reciting their poems in public. And The Divine Comedy is written in the first person. So the way this was originally presented was Dante himself standing on a stage and saying “so then me and my best friend Virgil went to the circle of whiny bitches and we saw Giovanni Petucci getting eaten by a giant dog, because he’s a bitch, and he was all “ah help me Dante I’m so sorry I thought the Holy Roman Emperor was better than the Pope, you were right about everything”, and then Virgil –again whom I’m extremely close with– said it was too late for him.”

one of the biggest cultural gaslights happened when people started to treat dracula by bram stoker as a dark romance story instead of the victorian og scooby doo shenanigans

Everyone thinks of Austen as victorian and Stalin as russian but they were actually both georgian... one of many shared traits