My First book ever selected and published by an independent press. I knew that one day I would have my own book published. It is not arrogance disguised as confidence. Writing has always been part of who I am.
The Glass and the Flame is a fugue of the heart, woven from multiple strands of longing and sorrow into a polyphony of eros and psyche. I have learned that you can write the felt without being met.
The axiom that “you are who you are” is not necessarily true in my writing. Rather, I am what I write.
In terms of Orwell’s reasons for writing, I write from aesthetic enthusiasm and sheer egoism. Neither political purpose nor historical impulse belongs to my work.
If you dare, walk with me in the garden where Eros freely roams with Psyche.
My author’s copies of The Glass and the Flame have finally arrived. As you can see, Toro, my LA Praetorian Guard, is inspecting the copies to make sure we received them all.
Now I know how Sappho must have felt when she wrote to leave her legacy as proof of her existence for posterity. Who knows? A thousand years from now—as long as humanity continues—perhaps a future Stephanie will happen upon my book and do the same.
Ars longa, vita brevis. (Art is long, life is short.)
Branwell drew this cat when he was just 11!, courtesy of Annebronte,org
Pets are like your children or friends, depending upon how you see them in your own surroundings. I am a sister to my two cats: Toro the Tabby and Camille the Black. Not a Cat Lady or Cat Mom—both burlesque images of a woman living alone with her cats. And I don’t see myself as either—or, for greater atmospheric enchantment, perhaps I am a witch who writes beneath a lustral moon at night. Enough of the self-defense. And Toro and Camille are my lucky stars in my otherwise not-so-lucky life. You got that?
Camille the Black knows when I cast a spell
So, reading Holland’s article about the Brontë sisters’ love of their pets at home was a simple pleasure of one Saturday afternoon. Before reading it, I already knew that Emily Brontë had a pet merlin named Nero, whom she fed in the kitchen when Charlotte wasn’t around, since Charlotte wasn’t fond of seeing him there. But I didn’t know they had cats at Haworth Parsonage until I saw their only brother Branwell’s adorable drawing of a cat loafing like bread, much like my Toro. In fact, the Brontës were very fine artists, as seen in their pictures of Nero, Flossy (Anne’s spaniel), and Grasper (Emily’s mastiff).
The dogs seem more like the sisters’ familiars than the cats do, given the sensibilities and personalities concealed beneath the narrative veneer of their novels. Still, Haworth Parsonage was filled with the pets’ amiability and the family’s moments of contentment. No wonder the sisters frowned upon and judged anyone who displayed indifference or irritation toward pets or other animals beyond the parsonage.
My Practorian Guard Toro at Ease
Back in my tiny apartment in LA, I am writing this note with Toro under my legs. He looks at me with large emerald eyes full of liquid tenderness and affection. He knows I am writing, and if he likes what I am writing through our special astral connection, he stays still as a gesture of approval. I know Edgar Allan Poe’s cat Catterina used to do something similar, but Toro is more like my Roman Praetorian Guard, standing watch over my writing. As for Camille, he is sleeping in his secret hideaway in my bedroom, but soon he will come out and look at me with his amber eyes, saying “Meow,” which means, “I am hungry.”
I don’t care if I am a real witch pretending to be a sister.
Before the Greeks came, there were the Minoans, with their Linear A, saffron gatherers, bull-leaping boys and girls, and dolphins jumping out of the Aegean Sea. The Minotaur in the Labyrinth was a creature of the island, and the islanders were vibrantly colorful in clothing and facial expression, as seen in the frescoes. The Snake Goddess danced before the klepsydra of civilization’s history, as if her sinewy body uncoiled to birth her children, first in her beloved Crete.
A History of Crete unfolds the mystery of its people like Ariadne guiding Theseus through the Labyrinth with a ball of thread, allowing us to see the face of the mystical Minotaur: half man and half bull. Rather than producing a stuffy, academically inclined history of Crete, the author organizes each chapter and section chronologically, with Herodotus-like backstories about who the Cretans were, what they did, and how they did it. Crete was Zeus’s home—literally, at least in myth. It was where he was born and where he fathered children in its royal line. Perhaps this home-ground advantage affected Cretan society, whether the god intended it or not.
One of the most remarkable claims I encountered in the book is that, compared with Sparta, slaves in Crete were not treated as harshly as their counterparts in Sparta. Moreover, the Hermaea festival at Cydonia was a Cretan equivalent of a carnival, in which masters served their slaves and endured their ridicule in a role-reversing psychological drama. Such a custom might have helped the slaves release their emotions and thus prevented them from plotting to subvert the status quo.
Although I enjoyed reading this book, it was somewhat different from what I had expected; I wanted to know more about the people, such as what they wore, what they ate, how they spoke, and what they did at home or at work. My growing interest somehow stalled as the centuries passed because I wanted to remain in ancient Crete. Call me biased, but I would have been more delighted to read anything about the ancient Minoans than about Crete under its successive conquerors. But then, that is the author’s call, not mine.
This book is a commanding introduction to more detailed studies of Crete’s mysterious peoples and their lives on the island. And I know that this is what the author wanted it to be. He serves as something of a cicerone, helping readers discover what they did not know. It is also a good coffee-table read to pick up when Netflix has nothing interesting to offer, or simply to dispel boredom.
No matter where you read this book, you will not close it without a piece of ancient treasure from Crete.
When Odysseus returned home after twenty years of war and wandering, the first to recognize him was not his virtuous wife Penelope. It was Argos, his faithful hound, who greeted him and breathed his last after seeing his master once more. In Homer’s time, too, dogs must have been man’s best friend: loyal, devoted, and artless. So, it’s not new that dogs deserved recognition in art over time. Paolo Veronese, a Renaissance painter, joined this tradition by making dogs mirrors of human emotions and behaviors through their unspoken gaze.
Thomas W. Laqueur’s “Veronese’s Dogs” tells us what dogs represent in Paolo Veronese’s paintings, most of which depict colossal religious and moral scenes. Because the essay is excerpted and adapted from Laqueur’s own book, The Dog’s Gaze, this reading is like hearing the author’s mind directly, without another critic’s interpretation. Among the paintings he discusses, I am drawn to Veronese’s dogs as silent witnesses to the manifold human characteristics revealed when people are placed in moral quandaries. One that lingers in my mind is The Feast in the House of Levi. The scene shows Jesus at the center of a ballyhoo of raw human expression. Around him, the figures appear exaggeratedly excited and excessively vociferous: dubious-looking clerics and a copious assembly of porcelain-skinned characters displaying their wealth. Only Jesus and the dogs retain a serene, dignified composure, as if they were looking upon all human acts without interfering. Christ and the beasts. But who, then, appears impulsively theatrical, gesturing grandly, while the dogs look almost divine?
But not everyone was pleased with Veronese’s artistic freedom, especially in The Feast in the House of Levi, so the Inquisition called him to replace the dogs with figures such as Maria Magdalena. But why on earth would she be in the Feast, even if she wasn’t there? But Veronese was braver than Galileo. Instead of removing his beloved canines, he added the inscription “Levi made the Lord a Great Feast” (Luke 5:29), and the painting became The Feast in the House of Levi. His wit saved the painting from a flaming stake.
Animals do not speak human language. My cats do not speak, but they understand Korean and English. How I know is no mystery: they look happy when I come in from outside, bunting their little heads against my legs and looking up at me with their beautiful emerald and amber eyes. And that’s not all. When I tell them, “I love you,” they snuggle their soft, furry bodies into my arms, and I know they know. Veronese knew.
Book III of The Aeneid tells of Aeneas and his Trojans sailing through life’s vicissitudes to reach the destined place, Italy. The voyage is perilous and circuitous; it is almost ridiculous that, even when they reach Sicily, Aeneas must detour yet again because obstacles keep preventing him from reaching Italy smoothly. But he knows that it is his fatum—his destiny, written by Fate and scripted by the Olympians. Thus, his voyage is never aimless, nor does he abandon himself to the force of fatalism or an existential vacuum.
In the case of the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in Safe Spaces by Tice Cin, the emptiness of an uprooted life in working-class London is existential: through her eyes, it becomes a void in the meaning of life. Told in the first person, her ballad moves through shifting perspectives, as though she were an alien songbird observing from a separate space. She moves through doorways, “walking past each one,” because she seems to feel that no one cares whether she is an artist from Cyprus whose first language is Turkish. She feels her presence as a songwriter and music producer in the streets of London is insignificant, or worse, invisible. One’s creative value, wrapped in attitudinal value, dims beneath an outward identity defined by culture and gender.
In contrast to her comparison of memory to a messy laundry cupboard, memory, to me, is a messy pile of CDs and cassettes stored on the closet shelves: the first music I came to know, the favorites I could listen to a hundred times over, and the ones I can hardly believe I ever bought. But I don’t want to discard or sell them. And still, I haven’t decided what to do with them while I am listening to “Hunter” by Dido on my iPhone.
The choice of personal pronouns can elegantly convey the author’s shift in perspective, diluting subjectivity with objectivity, and vice versa. I write to create, she writes to speak, and you write to express. We know that the different pronouns work in different ways.
I haven’t read the book yet, and honestly, I don’t think it will be on my book list. From the review, the book seems written for peers of the author’s generation, and its narrator works in the music industry. (Yes, art has money too.) As a young immigrant girl, my concern was getting a job while going to school so that I could help support my family. The narrator does face financial precarity, but she doesn’t seem to carry the same familial pietas—the obligation to help support a family—that shaped my youth. I feel more akin to Aeneas navigating the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis than to the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in London.
Aeneas is lost. He knows that he has a fate, but he doesn’t know what it is. He tries to find it in his own way, but circumstances do not allow him to do so. Everyone reminds him of his pietas: there are things far more important than life’s simple pleasures. He suffers, complains, misreads. Still, he sails.
In Book III, we see Aeneas as a leader of his people, a refugee looking for a place where he is fated to land. At first, Aeneas and his father are unsure where their ancestors came from. Then, through the divine intervention that repeatedly directs Aeneas, they come to understand that Italy is the land of their ancestors. Therefore, Aeneas is returning to his ancestral land, which gives him a purpose for the voyage—his fatum, a reason to move away from his personal longings. In terms of logotherapy, such a purposeful voyage becomes a source of meaning in life, requiring him to sail through life’s vicissitudes between Scylla and Charybdis. So, ironically, such a purpose gives him the will to live and to confront the fate that has placed upon him the extraordinary burden of fulfilling pietas. Yet his voyage is never smooth, because fate makes it difficult for him to achieve his divine destiny; the suspense of the voyage makes his sacrifice, born from personal loss, all the more divine and glorious.
My sense of Aeneas’s agony—that the gods do not favor him, given the hardships he must endure for the greater good—has not changed. In fact, the more I read about him, the more I begin to feel like him. Aeneas holds firm, trying to make his voyage as meaningful as possible. Fata viam invenient. The Fates will find a way. He is a reluctant warrior. He is the embodiment of humanity—imperfect, vulnerable, and beautiful.
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