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

Category: book review

  • ‘Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee’, by Casey Cep – review

    Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper LeeFurious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    The theory of “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”might have been a rule of thumb in the Wild West, but that was anathema to Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has become an epoch-defining classic in the canon of American literature.With her restive independent spirit that knew no compromise with tampered artistic sensibilities, Lee labored and waited until she found satisfactorily truthful narratives on her own, no matter how much time it would take. This journalistic trait of authorship combined with intellectual conscience could have been a reason that Lee, despite criticism of being a one-hit wonder, chose not to chase successive fame and discontinued what might have been her next best oeuvre called The Reverend. Casey Cep discovers Lee’s unfinished work and brings it to life and offers an unbiased portrait of one of the greatest American writers in this ambitious Furious Hours.

    Furious Hours is composed of three parts: Reverend Willie Maxwell, Attorney Tom Radney, and Harper Lee. Reverend Maxwell was a black provincial Baptist preacher accused of killing five of his family members allegedly by means of Voodoo magic for insurance money in the 1970s. Into this courtroom drama entered a clever and magnanimous Alabaman lawyer named Tom Radney, who helped the reverend to be acquitted of the murder charge, but later found himself defending the killer of his former client. It was an irony of Fate, tragedy and comedy of a drama called life. The trial of the murder of the reverend was also a reprisal of the courtroom drama of To Kill a Mockingbird, where a black dependent was represented by a liberal white attorney. This real-life scenario in her beloved native Alabama piqued Harper Lee’s curiosity, and she decided to write a book called “The Reverend” by attending the trial herself. Cep introduces the elements of the trial in the discourse of the backgrounds of the trial as though she traveled back to the time and witnessed it all like an intelligent, observant time traveler.

    Although Furious Hours is primarily about the forgotten case of the Reverend that was something of an OJ trial of the day in the context of regarding a black defendant and white legal bureaucracy, its linchpin behind the facade of the drama is Harper Lee, who thrived at the expense of Nella Harper Lee, an ambitious intelligent writer who moved from a big house in Alabama to a rent-controlled apartment in the New York City to pursue a literary career. It seems to me that Lee was disillusioned with the glamor of the city literati scene that looked priggish and stuffy. Her peers dismissed her book as a one-hit wonder and criticized it for being a lesser of serious literature. Notwithstanding this asinine and supercilious criticism, Lee did not conform to public demand of the next bestseller by declaring she had “said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.” Lee was in fact a writer who wanted to write a book with universal themes of human life, not bound by a vocation of regional specialty of “Southern” cultural backgrounds littered with sinful racism. She was a writer struggling to live up to her literary principle and personal conviction that her contemporaries did not appreciate. Maybe that’s why Cep introduces Lee in the last of the three parts of the book in the sense that a fashion designer always walks the runaway last in a fashion show escorted and applauded by models, staff, and spectators.

    Furious Hours is a fine act of literary ventriloquism fused with Lee’s story-telling voice in Cep’s own narrative, which results in this ingenious creative nonfiction. It is a wonderful collaboration of two writers, a predecessor and a successor, bound by the magic of literature, transcendent of time and space, just as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Grand Horse” was superbly completed by Nina Akamu centuries later. This book will have more admirers of Harper Lee’s literature and new admirers of Cep’s feat of narrative skills that grasp the attention of the reader cap-a-pie.

  • Will to meaning – chapter 9

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    All strange and terrible events were welcome, but comforts she despised. And there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting sun. It was just her wish that was father to the thought; the thought that the man would be interested in her and talk to her. But it was just a foiled dream, vain hope, blind passion, and cruel deception. Iris was left all alone again. Francis Bacon regarded anyone delighted in solitude as a wild beast or a divine being, and Iris wanted to think of herself as a divine being because she could not bear to accept the fact that she was left out of warmth and love of humanity, and that she was perching on the brink of social isolation as a recluse. It was safe that way to protect her already bleeding heart and bruised soul from the acknowledgment of reality. The world had never seen so perilous and cruel to Iris, who began to doubt that human nature was selfish and violent.

    Sitting at her desk at home, Iris was watching the chariot of Apollo moving toward the grand horizon to return to his celestial palace. She wanted to put her soul into the world of writing, but the words became all hodge-podge in bottomless chaos. Now all the forces of darkness were unleashed from an abyss of her inner world and trying to infest her mind with all lies that began to gnaw it till she collapsed in despondency. The age-old self-consciousness felt renewed and resuscitated, egged on by the diabolic echo that everything was set to work against her and that all things would end in naught. Her intention to write was about to be erased from a tablet of her mind, as well. ‘What good will it be when my writing will always reverberate with sighs and more sighs because it is not as polished as her admiring writers?’ Then all of sudden, Voice of Reason began to speak, breaking the silence of gravitas: “Iris, let nothing disturb you, let nothing disparage you because you are indeed a good writer who writes the language of the heart and the mind. Forget the supercilious rabble raving about immaculate textual aspects of writing, for they are blind to see the essence of writing that possesses the soul and the mind of the writer. Remember Tolstoy, who was himself poor at grammatical respects of writing. So was Jane Austin, who was a weak speller. Focus on opening up the treasures kept in your Wunderkammer in writing.”

    Whether it was just an imagination or a last thread of will to write was open to a myriad of questions. But Readers, that was what sprang from her mind when Iris wanted to surrender herself to the end of hope, to the abandonment of everything she had tried thus far, and to the killing of her near-forsaken self. And yet, it alleviated acrid heartaches that tormented her like a huge carbuncle and saved her from falling into a bottomless pit full of fire consuming her everything to ashes without mercy. Iris wanted to preserve a sense of purpose and a tenacious grasp on her hopes, thinking that present fears were less than horrible imagining. Then she ceased to die.

  • grand fanfare for the heart

    Sometimes, life surprises us with its unexpected in-between amuse-bouches when all seems drab and dreary. So here was something bright and cheery for my routine existential life; my letter to the editor of  BBC History Revealed was published in this month’s issue. AWESOME!

    I was reading it on my Kindle Fire on the train and was delighted to read my own writing in print. It was written following my reading on celebrities who had fought in wars featuring on the June issue of the magazine. The original letter is as below, but the last paragraph was omitted in print.:

    Dear Editor:

    Although it isn’t about a celeb served in WWII, I would like to stretch the time and the theater of war to further and farther because the following celeb is worth noting.

    James Garner was an excellent actor as well as an exemplary citizen. His major roles in “Maverick” and “The Rockford Flies” commanded his screen presence carved in the American television firmament with his rugged good looks and no-nonsense parlance that embodied proverbial American machismo. But what the public eyes saw in the actor was a reflection of his virtues: Garner was a decorated Korean war veteran, a recipient of Two Purple Hearts for his selfless service, valor, integrity, and honor demonstrated as a US Army private assigned to a combat team which sustained heavy casualties. In fact, Garner sustained several wounds on his face and hands resulting from shrapnel and a mortar round. Nevertheless, he was a fearless warrior in its true sense and threw himself against the showers of bullets to save his wounded battle buddies and to accomplish his missions with all his might. After the war, Garner pursued his career in acting and began to star in a number of war movies, such as “The Great Escape”. James Garner was a man of respect and honor.

    Thank you for your reading! By the way, I am a subscriber to your magazine living in California. I enjoy reading every issue thereof during my lunch hour and commute to and from work on the train.

    I am planning to get hard copies of the magazine as a keepsake and for distributing them to my family and friends. I am also glad to know that a magazine like BBC History Revealed featured my humble, imperfect writing. It is my opinion that a British magazine knows how to educate the public with universally interesting topics in plain English and witticism with a general reader in mind in comparison with its hyper intellectual transatlantic counterparts.

    I am writing this on my Blog, so that I can remember in writing that it happened and that my writing was communicative to the editor despite my textual foibles. Nevertheless, I have the temerity to write in English to speak of Reason and Taste for its being a lingua franca, a modern-day equivalent of Akkadian. With timeless adages of George Orwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Kurt Vonnegut as patient and encouraging ethereal guardians, I write for sheer egotism of making my soul grow and expressing myself to the world, come what may. For this reason, I want to pat myself on the shoulders 🙂

    hrev

  • ‘In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England’ by Keith Thomas – review

    In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern EnglandIn Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England by Keith Thomas

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars


    We live in an age of casual manners that would alarm the folks who still remember when letters and rotary telephones were the prime means of communication, not to speak of those in days of yore. But the leniency of manners is not a thing of our age, but it has been constant of every age as a note faintly scribbled on a tablet discovered in an ancient Roman archaeological site reveals, “Today’s kids are rude imps.” Which also brings us to the ensuing questions of what defines civility. Does civility equate submissiveness with anachronistic fogyism and therefore must be overruled with unrelenting individualism? Keith Thomas’s In pursuit of civility delves into the history of civility in England in an attempt to reach the subjectivity of civility as a universal social cohesion to live harmoniously as citizens of the world.

    Civility is a tacitly agreed social duty, a state of refinement equivalent to one’s moral character that subsumes civilization in its widest sense, opposite barbarism, a primordial state of beastliness dispossessed of all things antonymous with humanity. Originally derived from the Greek word, “barbarous,” meaning a person whose speech was incomprehensible, a dichotomy between the civilized and the barbarian has retained its rhetorical utility throughout the centuries: Civility is of good manner and good citizenship, whereas barbarianism denotes vulgarity, ignorance, and violence. Thomas discourses that civility as the crucial index of a country’s social harmony and political stability has set a template for a leviathan module of defining civilization, the end product of cultural, moral, and material condition of the civilizing process. That is, where civility reigns, there is civilization and therefore humanity. For civility sprang from a necessity of communal life rather than from an abstract ideology to subjugate the unseemly at the low rungs of the social ladder. Surely, the aristocrats refined a distinctive code of manners as the merit of the elites to distinguish themselves from the melee, but in a wider picture of a society, civility was a must to make all lives easier to live as they, especially the middle class and the working class, strove to progress by being interdependent of each other for economic gains. Thomas points out that intensive labor raised people above rude and sordid barbarism and begets arts by which human life is civilized because productive, labor-driven industry is the bedrock of civility from which economic, artistic, and intellectual benefits ensue.

    Thomas unpicks that nowadays politeness is synonymous with effeminacy, acquiescence, servility, foppishness, kowtowing, even, as opposed to the fierce slogan of “equality to all.” Politeness is politically and socially and liberally misconstrued as a weakness of character or diffidence of self-esteem or an exotic cultural custom. People misidentify politeness, a set of good behaviors as servility because they are foolishly led to a belief that politeness is an anachronistically incoherent legacy of the racist conservative history of the past that they must thwart with full force and effect. However, Thomas benevolently keeps us in a positive light in this vacuum of civility by saying that what we have these days is “a new and more equal form of civility,” which indicates that we as a collective human enterprise is not retrogressing but progressing toward the better future if we understand that civility is as important in an egalitarian society as in a hierarchical one by learning to disagree without being disagreeable. All in all, this is a highly informative read accessible to the general reader who regards politeness as sweetness of the mind and who extends it to all humankind as a citizen of the world.

  • Afterthought

    I didn’t anticipate her response, let alone her thanks. After all, she’s a celeb in the constellation of high stars, a goddess in the pantheon of divine knowledge, and a grand master in alchemy of literature, Or in recognition of her self-titled epithet, she’s the Comma Queen who will not/does not suffer from the grammatical benightedness of ambitious literary proclivity. But it happened, and she did; Mary Norris, author of Greek to Me about which I wrote a review, responded thereto in the following fashion:

    Well, it’s nice to be complimented for my work by someone who is famous, and I certainly wouldn’t mind being rich and famous if I turned into an overnight sensation in literary firmament. Yet, I do not write to make a living nor to be popular with hundreds of likes. Writing to me is an act of sovereign remedy for the existential ills, of personal treatise on the workings of the mind and of sheer egotism of relieving the creative urge from within. Come what may, a little tweet from the celebrated writer will not turn love of the book into worship of the writer. For it is the work of her intellect manifested in her literary craftsmanship, not the person herself. Whether or not the author liked my review does not/will not/should not affect my reason for and act of writing with a million dollar memento from Kurt Vonnegut: “To practice art, no matter how well or badly, is to make your soul grow. So just do it.”

  • ‘Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen,’ by Mary Norris – review

    Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma QueenGreek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen by Mary Norris

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    The ancient Greeks knew what appealed to the senses. The cult of beauty was the caryatid pillars of the culture that sublimated the human body into a divine canvas of the mind. So much so that they codified the value of beauty in their belief system, ranging from mythology to philosophy, in pursuit of kalokagathia , the harmonious combination of physical beauty with spiritual goodness. The perennial upshot of this Greek admiration of kalokagathia is Mary Norris’s charming Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, a wonderful cabinet of her infatuations with all things Greek, ranging from awesome Goddess Athena to dashing Sean Connery as Agamemnon, to the whimsical variations of Greek pronunciation, and to her exhilarating skinny-dipping in Aphrodite’s Beach. With her gift of scintillating narrative skills flavored with accessible erudition, Norris warmly invites the reader to her own delightful Greek festival of words, gods, romances, and delicacies.

    It is said that when you love, you want to know. An erotic impulse charged from the imposing physical presence of Sean Connery as Agamemnon became a stimuli that galvanized a shy celibate Catholic bluestocking into her never-ending solo odyssey in pursuit of a mystical ambrosia, the food of the Greek gods, for the sensuous delight of the arcane Eleusinean Mysteries. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part reference book, Greek to me is a lovely treatise on Norris’s lasting affairs of the heart with words and adventures in the land of the capricious Olympians, olive trees, and phonetic alphabets with infinite varieties. The scholarly subjects of mythology and language of Greece are never dealt with academic superciliousness or elitist snobbishness that separates them (and the author) from a general reader. Contrariwise, Norris is an intelligently gorgeous writer who wears her erudition lightly and writes in plain language felicitously topped with her artless witticism that makes her a winsome literary troubadour. If Edith Hamilton, author of Mythology and The Greek Way, has an aura of dour-faced platonic conservative teacher of the ancient Greek mythology and the culture, Mary Norris is of a coterie of amiable Socrates, sharing her knowledge with the public – literate, illiterate.

    In the exhilarating sensation of naked freedom astride the gushing foams of wild waves in Aphrodite’s Beach, the reader feels connected to the author’s paroxysm of pleasure and transformed into a votary of the goddess of love. Norris’s solipsistic adventure becomes a tour of coterie, traveling beyond the territorial borders into the mythological world of gods and goddesses in search of the Golden Fleece fit to one’s appropriate need. Although the chapters devoted to the lexicons of the Greek language can be taxing to comprehend to whom it all looks Greek, most of the book is invested with the vicarious Eureka pleasure of going there, being there, and seeing there, all made possible by Norris’s goddess Athena-like literary prowess. Besides, if the reader happens to be a quiet solo Catholic woman graduating from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (more specifically, all-women Douglass College therein), secretly desirous of solitary skinny-dipping in Aphrodite’s Beaches basking in freedom from insecurity, this book will feel like a new friend.