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

Category: book review

  • The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

    The Glass CastleThe Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Dickensian world of poverty is so abominably tenebrous that we tend to think of it simply as an anachronistic, if not antediluvian, work of fiction apropos of a bygone Victorian era, without translating its elemental essence of nobleness of human spirit that arises from predicaments into our own zeitgeist. The fictitious characters of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip are the embodiment of such resilience, phoenix-like spirits enduring sordid conditions that life could impose upon us to the extent possible. Spinoza, the Dutch thinker and watchmaker, once said that it is Amor fati, love of fate, by which man’s inner strength could raise him above his outward fate. In fact, Nietzsche centuries after corroborated by saying: “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.” Given the above axioms, what if someone in our contemporary time a fortiori lives to tell such victory of human spirit? That was the reason that I chose The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. All of the aforesaid noble triumph of human spirit over existential horrors of life is substantively and stoically recorded in this compelling living memoir with all her spirit, with all her intelligence, and with all her heart.

    The story starts as Walls invites us to board her memory train and travel back in times until we return to where we depart along the long and winding railroads of her windy but beloved past. We meet her charismatic, intelligent father whose engineering feats are passed in smolder by his ever independent, anti-establishment, recalcitrant spirit a fortiori emboldened by a spirit of Dionysian portion. The artistically inclined mother is all liberality: She is a devout Catholic – although far from being sanctimonious – and has a heart of gold, save a practical sense of the world. Then there are one brother and two sisters, all of whom are highly intelligent and well-behaved thanks to the moral upbringing by their parents. The parents do not have the gumption to support their children, let alone themselves in terms of economic security, which was the cause of the existential ills of the family, pushing Walls into a position of  a de facto breadwinner of the family.

    What is most profoundly august about Walls through living amid the straits of constant economic insecurity, frequent threats of family separation by social agencies, and dangers of physical harassments was her strong sense of responsibility for her life and for her family that enabled her to endure the existential predicaments. Many people mired in such situations might have develop disputatious streaks of rebellion against everything ascribed to them. However, Walls and her siblings took different attitudinal values to their existential dilemmas: they held on to a sense of purpose and a tenacious grasp on togetherness nurtured by their yearning to achieve a higher aim in life. In fact, such attitude toward life corresponds to one of the tenets of Logotheraphy: in order to find a meaning of life however trivial or nihilistic it many seem, taking a different, constructive stance on what is ascribed helps us to rise above biological, social, and cultural inhibitions during a difficult times because we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to. Which also brings us back to Spinoza’s Amor fati axiom: a different approach to our suffering is sublimated into supremeaning of life in travails by believing in its meaning to every situation with will to live a meaningful life, which then ceases to be a suffering itself.

    The literary merit of this memoir lies in its absence of unbridled namby-pamby outpourings of emotions in the narrative with a certain air of stoicism. Ironically, Walls’s frank, touchy-willy, matter-of-fact manner of discoursing her story belies her overwhelmingly heartrending heartaches, disappointments, and dismay smothered under factual descriptions of her past that renders the authority of truth and the power of reality without hindrance of prohibitive emotions that often results in fabrication. In her literary confession, Wall achieves catharsis by putting what was in her mind on pages after pages, pushing her pen through in expense of her will to come to terms with her parents, let alone herself, producing forgiveness of her parents’ wrongdoings and acceptance of their frailties in a package of love and tenderness.

    All in all, Walls’ s message to her reader is clear: you can’t choose your fate, such as a family, but you can choose what to make out of what you are given. In one way or another, the story itself chimes the bells of emotions and thoughts of many of us: the problems and issues that the Walls had and the ones we have or had are not oranges and apples through our voyages of life. Walls shows us that notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of life, self-reliance, resilience, and determination helps us to sail through with cheerfulness and humor as handmaids to courage. This honest-to-goodness tale of a woman rising above the planes of her inhibitions speaks straightly to our hearts. This book is a one-of-kind testament to its veracity and quality that upon reading this book, you will feel as if you knew Walls telling a story with a sense of elemental kinship which you can relate to. Moreover, this bona fide memori gives us a sense of relief that no family is perfectly blissful, which resonates with Tolstoy’s view of families as inscribed on the first page of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

     

  • Rose that smells as sweet

    1918-yardleyChristian Dior, the father of modern women’s fashion, said of a perfume thus: “A woman’s perfume tells more about her than her handwriting. ” How rightly so. A scent is stronger than a sight because it not only creates a certain mystery of ambience but also unlocks a cascade of memory. Hence is my approbation of a certain perfume I have begun to like.

    This is my first time to wear this historically famed English brand Yardley perfume, and I am already hooked on its enchanting fragrance of English Rose. It is a delightful conflation of rose petals on the top lightly sprinkled with drops of magnolia and violet enveloped in a hint of woody notes as a base. The result is a light, crispy pleasure of convivial sensuality and playful innocence that will make you feel just like it. This perfume is not a tawdry perfume as some of us might suspect just because perfumes are obtainable from Amazon, not department stores or Sephora.

    The fragrance is ageless and the effect effortless. This perfume will make you feel prettier all day long with sweet smell and flit in rose garden of your cerebral lobe. Which also brings me to conjure up by sheer dint of the essence of rose the following quotation from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare: “That which we call rose by any other names will smell as sweet.” This one is called English Rose, and it smells just as sweet.

  • Dogs and Psychospirituality

    RE: 9/3/2018 The Los Angeles Times article of “Convicts and canines get a new leash in life”

    No one is either excellently good or extremely evil. It’s this ambiguous nature that we must guard at all times lest we should give free reins to our defiant, recalcitrant horse in our soul which can prompt us to go beyond the pale of Reason and Judgment universal in human societies. Nevertheless, this does not mean that those who are sinned against the principles must be forever stigmatized by their wrongdoings in public and barred from turning over new leaves because by doing so, we not only estrange them from a sense of belonging to society but also oblige them to resort to their former errors. That is why every person deserves of a second chance without question to right the ship of the life with wise, practical, and altruistic supports from good folks.

    Janette Thomas, aged 53, strongly believes redemption of the souls of human and the lives of dogs from whatever predicaments they are put in either by will or against the will. Every human as well as every dog needs second chances. Out of her firm conviction in redeeming the lives of Nature comes in a form of 10-year-old organization named “Cell Dogs”. In fact, the program is for the benefit and behoof of both the inmates and the dogs. Throughout the year, the organization takes dogs from various shelters and brings them to correctional facilities where inmates put the dogs through 8-to-10-week training course. The course begets mutual munificence to both of the estranged spirits; inmate handlers gain new skills with confidence, patience, and responsibility that provision them with new career opportunities. Canine trainees go on to become companions to autistic children, veterans with post-traumatic disorders, and physically disabled individuals. In effect, the records show that there is a low rate of recidivism by inmates who participated in this program and that more than three hundreds dogs found their new homes upon completion of the program.

    This program is indeed all things to all people and our canine friends by giving both of them second chances to start their lives anew. The act of bonding between a human and a canine produces the very essence of trust, security and happiness in a psychospiritual way. An inmate who trained his canine partner attests to his noble ends of turning over a new leaf as corroborated by the following verse from the Gospel of Luke: “He who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.” For any possible criticism of cynics jeering at this beneficial and altruistic program and dismissive of bestowal of second chances to the neglected, it is perhaps high time that they should thumb through the bible and read the following Gospel of Matthew:

    “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”

  • On “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”

    91NQY9pyARL._SL1500_J. K. Rowling bewitches us again with her famed literary magic wand. Her fabulous creation of fantastic beasts, a young brilliant wizard, white witches with hearts of gold, an ominous black magician, and an amiable non-magician all coming vividly alive on the screen, will please your senses and touch your heart in no time with delightful feats of magic and boundless imaginativeness without interventions of boredom or cheesiness.

    Set in the 1920s New York City, the film yields the verisimilitude to the story-line that anchors the world of imagination in reality where magic is smoothly laced with chores of everyday life without forcing you to accept the fictitious ludicrousness and cinematic anachronism. At the heart of the film lies the wonderful chemistry of the actors and actresses harmoniously manifested in their illustrious performance of the characters in their own roles, coupled with a dazzling technical employment of bewitching visual special effects.

    What’s more, this film will get to your heart, so after watching it, you do not want to leave the world of the fantastic beasts and remain with them even though you may be non-magicians. A feast to the eye, a festivity of the mind, this film will take you breathtakingly from the humdrum life to the world of magic, making you wonder if you could also find the fantastic beasts just as I did, for “There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Shakespeare believed too.

  • Who’s the Real Ripper of Whitechapel?

    My Review of  9/1/2018 BBC History Magazine article of “The Ripper of our Nightmare”

    It was a diabolical killing spree of the late 19th century that made the residents of Victorian capital shudder with visceral fear, and swivel their heads in incredulity. No one dared to venture the nightly labyrinthine streets of Whitechapel in London’s East End between August and November 1888 when five women were found dead and grotesquely mutilated with surgical precision in a ritualistic fashion. The unfortunate victims of this heinous crime were all prostitutes in the slums of the East End into the bargain. With the evasive killer still forever on the run in the wings of imaginations of many to this date, the stupendousness of the crime and its phantasmal committer still egg the inquisitive minds on coming up with zany theories as presented herein.

    The turpitude of the extraordinary epochal net murder case has gripped the minds of many with journalistic bent who often go to extremes in search of novelty in what is established now as its own field of study. They are called “Ripperologist,” the individuals, as it were, with mission to provide the most feasible cue on who-done-it. Naturally, these Ripperologists have often looked for their suspects in a group of outsiders in the time of the era who were regarded as misfits, introverts, loners with hints of eccentricity because they are easy to be gorged out of the melee without much strains of their cognitive faculties and mental exertions. Yet, out of a pile of idiosyncratic mugshots of their suspects come some profiles I think are worth the noting by sheer dint of ingenious entertainment .

    The Likely Suspects

    • Francis Thompson: A poet with radical religious views was posited as the killer on account of the fact that all of the crimes were committed on Catholic saints’ days. However, this theory is hamstrung by the fact that those days are the feast days of the particular martyrs in celebration of their sacrifice of their lives to the Faith.

     

    • A Mad Midwife: In 1939, a certain author named William Stewart posited that the killer was most likely a bloodthirsty deranged midwife. But then anterior to Mr. Stewart’s theory, Frederick Abberline, an inspector investigating the kills, had also suggested that it could also be a woman’s act of crime on account of a witness who had seen a female figure leaving one of the victims. Yet, the inspector later concluded that it’s more likely that the killer was a man dressed in a woman’s clothing as a way of quelling his potential victims.

     

    • Lewis Carroll: Of all other suspects, I think this eminent writer of Alice in Wonderland stands all alone in his prodigality of literary fame and notability. In 1996, an author named Richard Wallace suggested that the Ripper was, in fact, none other than this famous writer and Anglican deacon into the bargain on the ground of the anagrams in his novels which indicated the carnival of killings in 1888. Surely, positing Carroll as the Ripper may be regarded as ludicrous and beyond the pale and even defamatory. However, Wallace must have exerted himself on interpreting the anagrams to decode the messages that Carroll had left as an act of contrition for his mortal sin. Otherwise, he would not have published his theory, knowing that doing so without any factual grounds might have incriminated one of the most renowned English writers and his descendants.

    It is always interesting to see how people become fascinated with crimes and criminals of the most wicked and bestial beyond the pale. Maybe it’s because of the ignoble, recalcitrant horse that we have in the soul, always inclining to a raw, precarious stimuli to our senses, spurring the other noble, reasonable horse toward such pleasure. But why not so when our minds wonder when they spur our imaginations on devising brilliant theories such as the aforesaid? The theories will only remain possible in the domain of poetic justice and in the wings of our imaginations so long as no substantive facts surface out of the mists of the eerie past. And I defy any of the Ripperologists not to come up with any such ingenious theories to that end – all for the Truth of who-done-it in deference to the victims.

  • Vet’s long-lost wallet comes home

    RE: 8/26/2018 The Los Angeles Times article of “Long-lost wallet’s unlikely return”

    For the times passed by, you can just look away and say, “they are gone away” because they are woven by your memories that you have collected through life, willed or unwilled. They become part of you, making you of spirit, fire, and dew, an unique star in a constellation of the universe. Hence nothing could be more pleasingly surprising than discovering that part of you or your beloved kept in photographic images or words of the frozen time, evocative of distant nostalgia that beckons you to reminisce about them, by a happy stroke of serendipity paired with benevolence of a stranger. Something like that happened to Ms. Sharon Moore, a daughter of one former army corporal Robert McCusker.

    When Ms. Moore received a “Friend” request from a certain Frenchman named Patrick Caubet on her Facebook page, she deleted it. But then Mr. Caubet messaged her inquiring about the lost wallet of her father Mr. McCusker with the pictures and documents contained therein that he had accidentally found in a basement of his building presumably used as an America officers’ social club. This time she responded and verified that it was her father’s. Prior to Mr. Caubet’s contacting Ms. Moore, he had launched a campaign for locating the rightful owner of the wallet, which encompassed an aid of his English-speaking friend and inquiries to the Pentagon and the U.S. Embassy for help to no avail. Then the help came from a French military office in Paris that located the names of Mr. McCusker’s children in just days. Being a military man himself with a certain feeling of soldierly camaraderie, he was determined to succeed in his campaign, which ultimately came to fruition.

    Thanks to this benevolent efforts of one French military man, Ms. Moore and her brother living in Dover, New Hampshire, could reminisce about the lost pages of his Korean War veteran father who had died in 1983. The wallet had pictures of their mother and aunt, military documents, Massachusett Driver’s License, and a Social Security Card, all of which were still kept in a mint condition. Ms. Moore said that since she had her father’s Purple Heart, her brother would be in possession of the wallet that their father had lost on his way from the Korean War to home. In return of her gratitude, Ms. Moore sent Mr. Caubet a lovely basket full of sweet jars of maple syrup she had made herself, some of the candy her father had enjoyed, and a New England Patriots Jerky. Thus, the wallet became their treasure of their beloved father’s memories that they had not known – the terra incognita of their father’s memories before they came to the world -. It became the part of their memories that bound them together to the legacy of their lineage, reminding themselves of their father’s valorous war efforts as a soldier and of his tender loving memories of their mother as a man.

    Amid the news of endless politicking, peddling of social media that goes beyond reasonable measures, and a litany of social ills, this article stroke me as a bonanza of altruism that still thankfully kept alive in everyday life, a fresh breath of air that made me feel grateful and hopeful for our future in which so long as we don’t lose a thread of sanity and milk of human kindness, we can make constraints of our lives bearable with a lightheartedness. The kindness of the Frenchman speaks to us that no matter what language you speak, the feelings and emotions that you and I have can strike the chords of our humanness because the principles of reason and of sentiment are universal in all human creatures. The return of the lost wallet as the living record of Ms. Moore’s father attests to the truth.