Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Category: book review

  • Saturday, September 26, 2026 – Saturday Reading of “Veronese’s Dogs” by Thomas W. Laqueur, published in The Public Domain Review on September 16, 2026

    The Feast in the House of Levi (1573) from Wikepedia

    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.

  • Between Fatum and the Void: A Reading Note on Sana Goyal’s Review of Tice Cin’s Safe Spaces

    September 19, 2026

    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.

  • Thursday, September 17, 2026 – Reading Book III of the Aeneid by Virgil

    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.

  • Reading Book II of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Thursday, September 10, 2026

    I often wonder why God allows the ills of society to persist and their victims to suffer violence for no reason. What are the sins of children who suffer such violence? Why can’t he care more about changing the fates of these children? The same question arises through Aeneas in Book II when he sees his beloved Troy burning and, with a yearning heart, seems to demand an answer. If fate requires suffering, what is fate? Is God truly omnipotent and omniscient?

    Book II is Aeneas’s ballad of burning Troy—the story of his fate, which does not allow him to enjoy the ordinary life of a married man. His life doesn’t seem to be protected by the gods, even by his divine mother, who appears to her son as Venus, not as a mother. They force him to fulfill sacred pietas by carrying Troy’s future to foreign soil, where his descendants will build Rome. He tries to resist their gambit on the chessboard, where he is their number-one knight, moved around at their pleasure. Even his mother Venus is part of the divine ilk and hurries him out of Troy like a mom sending her son to school before it’s too late. In Aeneas’s mortal eyes, the idea of becoming the forefather of Rome appeals to him less than being a husband, a father, and a son at home. Can even his divine mother protect him from this fate?

    Gods are cruel just as God is cruel. They make his life easy only when he acts according to their will. Without the gods’ command, Aeneas would not have thought of fleeing the burning city with his elderly father Anchises on his back, his little son Ascanius at his right hand, and his wife Creusa following behind. But then Creusa must stay away from her husband, who has a duty far greater than his personal life. Her ghost appears and tells Aeneas that he must leave; as she vanishes into the folds of mist, all his chances of escaping his fate and its burdens vanish with her. He has no reason to stay but must move forward against his will.

    The Trojan Horse, Laocoön and his two sons engulfed by the sea serpents, and the cries of Priam and his wife Hecuba all signify the great labor of birth in the process of dying, all within the fate of a man who must act out his assigned role in the divine chess game.

  • Saturday Reading Notes on Bitter Water Opera

    September 12, 2026

    My reading today of Sophie Golub’s review of Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera is a literary matryoshka: a reflection on a review of a book I have not yet read. Yet Golub’s elegant summary of the story reveals the book’s undertone: a woman’s admiration for a particular artist. It is a story embedded within a story, conveyed through a reviewer’s reading of a writer’s book.

    The story revolves around a woman named Gia. She is the narrator, who sends unaddressed letters to Marta Becket, an artist whose art and inner life draw Gia into her solar system, which Gia tries to adopt as her own, because Marta is Gia’s kind of artist and person. She is at a point in her life where she needs direction. She needs a clear purpose in life, so she turns to Marta, who has already become a ghost hovering at Gia’s front door. Gia tries to find a reason to live in others’ lives rather than contemplating her own. She needs to see her own reflection in someone or something outside herself. Marta becomes that reflection, though Gia doesn’t realize she may have been chasing her own shadow.

    But I also get Gia’s point about why she favors artists who are dead and out of reach. I read this distance as Gia’s protective shield against the corruption of artists in the real world. In her mind, the familiar image of successful writers is shaped by publicity funded by their publishers and amplified by the media, all too obviously for profit. Likewise, I tend to be drawn to writers who have become ghosts because they are frozen in time; their human faults and imperfections cannot easily interfere with my admiration for their work. Both Gia and I internalize our own artistic principles and judge other artists against those internalized principles.

    I may not have read the review in the way it was intended. But basically, the review centers on Gia’s “existential ennui,” a state in which Gia loses her sense of meaning and desperately needs a model with whom she can identify. I can see something of myself in Gia because we are both interested in people with unique stories. Yet Golub does not allow Marta to remain a flawless model: Marta and her theater also need saving, and Gia’s final transformation is stated more clearly than it is felt.

  • Reading on A Review of the Aeneid, Translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, by Deborah Warren

    First, let me confess that I have not yet read the translation of The Aeneid by McGill and Wright. Maybe I will after I finish reading Robert Fagles’s translation. So, while it would be unfair for me to judge which translation better serves readers of the twenty-first century, I can say that Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s epic narrative of Aeneas reads like a prose poem to me, simply because its language and arrangement suit my taste.

    This essay is not for general readers but for readers with an academic background in Latin. Therefore, for general readers such as myself, its comparison of the original Latin with the English translations—in terms of metrical structures, the choice of words, and their juxtaposition—may not ring a bell. My interest in reading The Aeneid comes from a purely personal curiosity: I want to understand why Aeneas is the way he is, breaking the hearts of the women who loved him dearly. In that regard, Fagles’s translation chimes the bell of my heart and soul because his words are poetic and, at the same time, go straight to the heart. Take a look at these translations:

    Fagles:

    “Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,
    he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
    destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil.”

    Robert Fitzgerald:

    “I sing of warfare and a man at war.
    From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
    He came to Italy by destiny
    To our Lavinian shores,
    A fugitive, this captain . . .”

    McGill and Wright:

    “I sing of arms and of a man displaced
    by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy
    for Italy and its Lavinian shores.”

    Fagles’s version of “Wars and a man I sing . . .” clearly expresses Virgil’s intention to sing about a man destined to put duty before feeling. By placing the mainstay of The Aeneid—the fate of the man—at the beginning, Fagles conveys to his readers that Aeneas was not born to be a romantic figure, or even a heroic star, but to be a man torn between what he wants and what he must do.

    Through Fagles, we hear Virgil sing of Aeneas, a demigod and an excellent soldier: the embodiment of the Roman ideal, whose pietas and gravitas signify personal virtue as well as martial prowess. But Virgil was not a soldier; he was a poet. Bernard Knox, however—the classicist who wrote the introduction to Fagles’s translation—brings the crack of a horsewhip to it. A former U.S. Army captain and World War II veteran, Knox had literally followed in the footsteps of Antony and Octavian during the Italian campaign. He must have carried Euterpe and Calliope with him—the Muses who had also stood behind Virgil thousands of moons before.