A brief update as we go onward

(If you were here for the first round, you remember this note - but for the newcomers, I wanted to send it again.)

Hello, everyone, and congratulations on making it through a hell of a weekend! (So far as I’ve seen, my Substack has the highest ratio of “time to completion of [part of a] reading” to “time passed in the actual reading”.)

Of course, we’ll still be going through Purgatorio and Paradiso, and our next installment will be sent out on Thursday. When that happens, though, you may notice some small changes to the organization and the post-reading notes.

The source I was using for notes for the Inferno was here, and it looked like this:

They were great. I could copy paste them and formatting was seamless. And, as I noticed, some people were using the links included within. I owe a lot of thanks to the editor(s) of these. The notes for Purgatorio on the Wikisource website, on the other hand, are here, and look like:

Ah, well, Inferno is the most popular of the three, and we can’t win them all. The good news is that I have found another relatively formattable source of Longfellow’s commentary - many thanks to the readers who shared resources with me, and to the Dartmouth Dante Lab http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader . The bad news, aside from minor formatting changes, is that we lose the links in the notes. If someone gets inspired to edit the Purgatorio and Paradiso note pages on Wikisource (and/or, for that matter, add line numbers in the Purgatorio and Paradiso there), I would be deeply grateful, but, of course, I recognize the time and effort of unpaid work in the times we are in. (I’d do it myself, and maybe can chip in one day, when things are a bit freer for me.)

In any case, thanks for coming along for the first third of the journey, and I do hope you come along for the rest. If even one person has gained something from this, it will have always been worthwhile. Onward!