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

Category: book review

  • clothes have important offices

    main.png;compress=true
    Fashion fades, but style reigns.
    91wFifzu9vL._UX342_
    Anne Klein Women’s Dot Print Long Sleeve Blouse

    “A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous,” said Coco Chanel, Godmother of the Mods. Ditto. Hence my choice of this pretty blouse:the sleeves are coquettishly but not provocatively diaphanous with cute stand collars and pretty polka dots adorably decorated on the front and back sides of this tunic-like blouse that gives the illusion of an authentic silk blouse redolent of a muslin black dress I fell in love with from Chanel 2007 Spring Fashion Show because it looked so ethereal, so graceful, and so beautiful even in its simple design bereft of any sparkling ornaments. What’s more, this blouse is very appropriate for work, rendering both professionally sleek and fashionably chic impressions. The loveliest thing about this pretty blouse is the way it hangs on your body when you walk or even stand, especially in breeze: it sways like a willow or a cosmos on a slender reed. This sensible and fashionable blouse will look just beautiful on all women with wings of fairies and aura of mysteriousness in any setting.

    Author’s Note: I love this new blouse of mine, so I had to write about it. Vain? Immodest even? Hardly ever so because even someone like Virginia Woolf , who is revered as a forerunner of feminism, admitted thus: ” Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” This betokens Woolf’s indelible trait of femininity in her regard of fashion as wings of social mobility and status in society. So why not making fashion as an expression of myself in the most fabulously fashionable way?
         9e37742b776e75c983b6194396086d69--peanuts-quotes-snoopy-quotes

     

    저장

  • train of thought

     

    Riding on choo-choo train for a spin in Sunday morning is a warm-up for riding on the commuter train in Monday morning.

     

  • saturday, celebrate!

     

    Cheerfulness and rest are handmaidens to productivity. They come in tandem and frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which stunts malaise and spreads happiness. For the mind is the foundation of the universe. The modes of enjoyment are subjective according to an individual’s taste and personality: creativeness by doing creative things or experience by appreciating works of arts. Whatever it may be, it does good on your soul and body. “Mans sana in coporore sano,” a Latin maxim meaning “Sound mind in healthy body” applies to the all of the above.

  • Charles Dickens wanted to…

    untitled
    Letters revealing Dickens’ attempt to accuse his wife of being mentally unstable (from Google)

    All would have been well if the truth had remained buried under the dusty files of forgotten letters from the past in the bottom drawer of History.  Alas, it happened – a recent revelation of the letters delineating Charles Dickens, a literary great whom I admired, concocting a plot to send his sane wife to a mental institution in order that he and his 18-year old paramour could be forever together.   

    How and why these forgotten letters have been brought into light out of the blue are clandestine from my reading of the article about such letters from the recent issue of a history magazine. Besides, the possession of the letters is curiously divided between the Atlantic Ocean because some of the letters are held by Harvard University in the U.S., while the others by the University of York in the U.K. The article does not provide the reader with more detailed information as to whys and wherefores of such divisional custodianship of the letters, not to mention the background of such uncovering of the provocative textual artifact that would certainly do no good on Dickens in any way. Methinks it would be a possibility that a descendant of the estranged wife Catherine Hogarth or even of their eldest child might have staged this rather dramatic publicity of the letters revealing the other side of the great writer out of indignation as comeuppance for his sins of adultery and perjury, which in a twist of whimsical irony befits the ethos of #MeToo Movement.

    CatherineDickens200
    Mrs. Catherine Dickens

    The content of one such letter written by a neighbor of Catherine Hogarth details the following: (1) Dickens at the age of 45 fell madly in love with 18-year old actress named Ellen Ternan: (2) it was the death-knell of the marriage, pace Dickens’ complaints about his legal wife; (3) his wife confronted him when a bracelet meant for the young actress providentially was delivered to her, after which she separated from him by moving to a house in Kent with their eldest child. The rest of the children were in the care of their aunt, while Dickens continued his relationship with the actress until his death; and (4) after the separation, Dickens tried to seek for divorce from the court by trying to prove that his wife was mentally unstable and that she would be sent to an asylum. However, the attempt to seek such remedy was foiled by the absence of proof of her insanity.

    The whole scandalous charade of this great literary figure reminds me of the axiom by Ralph Waldo Emerson that the admiration of great works of geniuses should not become the worship of idols. That is, one must disembarrass the idea of a story from the person of the author, who is only a fallible, whimsical, temperamental human. The works of writers, I believe, are a separate reality based upon their epistemological knowledge magically alloyed in imaginativeness, ideals, and dreams in the peculiar alchemy of literature that deserves of distinguished approbation and recognition. In this regard, my disappointment with Dickens as a person should be kept separate from my admiration of the humane characters he created and the benevolent stories he entertained. Sometimes, it’s better not to know much about whom you like lest his follies and faults should dishearten you against your wishes and imaginations. For these reasons, I am more in sorrow than in anger upon reading this troubling article about Dickens, one of my all-time favorite writers, which leads me to the lamentation of Et tu, Mr. Dickens?

  • donut queen – review

     

    Place: Donut Queen

    Address: 2650 Ventura Blvd, Ste 105, Camarillo, CA 93010

    The first thing I have noticed since I came to Southern California is the absence of many common food franchises that have become something of a suburban landscape on the East Coast. Maybe I haven’t looked around much yet, but even such paucity of voluntary or involuntary excursion will not yield to a sudden discovery of Franchised Food Emporium. A scarcity of food franchises notwithstanding, these Southern Californians seem to be blessed with a wealth of local food proprietorial to regional characteristics, such as demographics as well as fauna and flora.

    95465d3821ae91541b407bc7276ae7f0That said, a place like Donut Queen is a gem for anyone who likes that bona fide classic tastes of homemade donuts with a cool view of the Wide Wild West. The interior of the store is not exactly up to the standards of the Michelin Star Admirers, but it’s cozy and clean enough to make a customer feel welcome. But the most of all, their selection of donuts is quite pleasing to the eye and delicious to the taste buds to make anyone sworn off donuts for dieting break the vow and become a lover of it. Surely, nothing in excess as written on the terrace of Delphi  should become a motto to stop anyone from inordinate indulgence, but the donuts at Donut Queen is one Witchcraft. Plus, the proprietorial ice coffee is a hidden gem of Donut Queen that tempts you to come back for it again and again.

    It is said that nominal determinism really matters, and I guess it matters when it comes to a place like this Donut Queen. 

    Author’s Note: I have neither sponsorship nor affiliation with Donut Queen. My writing of this essay is unknown to the proprietress of the store. It comes from my appreciation of what I like about the place. 

    4a2680b1f7fb41cbacd7e5fa055445d9

  • ‘Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa’ translated by John Bester – review

    Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji MiyazawaOnce and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    The worlds of fairy tales, folk tales, and fables spring from a poetic association between imagination and nature as inscribed on a mind tablet of the visionary, the dreamer, the innocent, and the humanitarian in the embodiment of the Writer who composes a continual fugue of dreamscapes, visions, imagery, and nature in a phantasmagorical display of such fancy worlds. In this peculiar context of regarding the fairy tales or folk legends anchored in everyday world, Kenji Miyazawa’s tales are full of imagery that bestows a touch of magic on every thing however trifle and insignificant it may seem to the eyes of the melee. The result is a riveting twilight world of legends and folk tales where nature becomes primary world, Reality on its own in a very mystifyingly pretty way.

    Notwithstanding the subject of the book, it merits a classic literature aisle in nationwide booksellers because it contains all the characteristics of profound yet catholic themes of nature of humanity that are illustrated in the works of Hans Christian Anderson, The Grimm Brothers, and Aesop. In fact, this book is strikingly scarcely a false or childish note but strangely not depressing. If Miyazawa does not provide the reader with a sense of jostling braggadocio or a promise of ever optimistic view on reality of the world that are accustomed to and taken for granted as literary license in the Western minds, he presents a prospect of innocence, so ethereal and quaint that it almost feels physical when reading. This tangible feeling of the visions is delivered by Miyazawa’s wonderful storytelling skills enveloped in poetic expressions devoted to evoking the images of a rural Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration in the mid 19th century that no longer exists.

    Kenji Miyazawa (1897-1933) was a Japanese writer who was first and foremost poet at heart concerned with particular beauties and universal truths transcending time and culture. This book, translated by the late renowned English professor John Bester, is a collection of short folk tales of the bygone eras that Miyazawa seems to fantastically incorporate with his contemporary world of reality in which whims, inconsistencies, and follies of humans are everyday occurrence. The tale of “The Earth God and the Fox” shows how love and friendship are destroyed by betrayal and misunderstanding in a blight of jealousy and fury, which then eventually leads to destruction. In the case of “Wildcat and the Acorns,” Miyazawa pokes fun at parvenus and upstarts who suddenly found themselves in the wealth of western-influenced cultural artifacts in denigration of the traditional Japanese customs and values regarded as outdated and culturally backward. However, even such acerbic, poignant criticism of the Nouveau Japan is enticingly swiveled in poetic prose with musicality and choice of the language – simple but visionary- he employs.

    The tales seem to speak to our world of confused syllogism bloated with inordinate wantonness and inflated egotism, decorated with selfies in Facebook and Instagram, and vehement subjectivities, all fragmented and adrift, full of sound and fury. The tales bring the reader to another time out of this evolutionary scale and 24-hour clock, and they can take the reader to a different place of innocence that seems to be out of touch in this existential world of reality. In this regard, this book is a quaintly pretty – or twee even – marionette play, fusing Miyazawa’s poetic words with his cast of interesting characters ranging from a beautiful birch tree to wise foxes, to graceful fawns, to talking acorns, and to deities living in streams and mountains and everywhere, all in the beautiful rural landscapes as picturesque stage backgrounds. It is a fascinating read that matches its fanciful title.