An original 'Web Top' issue, Eugene Fox, also known as the Sly Fox, is in theatrical form on this humorous spoken drama, that details the life and after death escapades of a habitual 'sinner', gently mocking the Christian mythology of their Heaven and Hell. Historically descriptions of hell were always more popular than their counterpart: heaven, and while people would naturally chose the latter for retirement it was hell that held their interest. In the middle ages when artists like Albrecht Duerer would go to sell their prints outside the churches and cathedrals, they quickly realized that they needed ten times the amount of hell and damnation images, than views of heaven, and the more vivid the better. Even in recent times when published by Penguin Books, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, (also first published in the Middle Ages) which is divided into three parts, it was/is the first part, Hell, that is by far the most popular, outstripping both book two Purgatory, and book three Paradise, in both sales and comprehension. The story of Dante's Hell is both a religious and political allegory, and, according to Dorothy L. Sayers in the introduction to her excellent translation, ...."an allegory of a special kind"........."we shall find that it has an enormous relevance to both to us and the world situation today" ....."his (Dante's) vivid awareness of the deeps and heights within the soul comes home to us who have"..... "recently discovered the problem of power, and the ease with which our most God-like imaginings are 'betrayed by what is within'." 

The (first) book is a fantastic read from the first stanza of Canto1, where the 'lost' Dante says:
"Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
    I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
     Where the right road was wholly lost and gone."
up to Canto XXXIV, at the point where Dante and his companion emerge out of hell, through the body of Dis (Satan) and
"Come forth, to look once more upon the stars."
Sayers explains in her commentary that hell in the story is the place or condition of lost souls after death, in the allegory it is the image of the deepening possibilities of evil within the soul. Similarly, the people Dante meets in his journey to the depths of hell are, in the allegory, his (and our) disordered desires, seen and known to us as we plunge ever deeper into the hidden places of the self. Thus hell is not a place where people are arbitrarily sent for punishment but the condition to which the soul reduces itself through stubborn determination, and which it suffers the torment of its own perversions. {You better take heed.}
It was the story of hell and the Devil who comes to get you as reward for serving him, that was the sugar that folk were lapping up, even when they considered themselves to be innocent of any evil doings, mostly they thought that if they 'spoke' the platitudes from the bible, and professed their belief in God, they were all right, and of course in an expediential way they were; because the, then, all powerful, both moral and fiscal, church protected them. Not unlike 'believers' and voters in the political left today, with their holy city in Brussels, hiding behind the paranoid moral tyranny of hypocritical left wing ideology (now: Neo Liberalism). No, there's no way round it, you can't be 'good' and not believe in the dominant orthodoxy of good; Democracy, Democracy, Democracy.

RETURN TO MEN WITH RHYTHM & BLUES PAGE