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

Tag: book review

  • Caligula: A Life From Beginning to End by Hourly History

    Caligula: A Life From Beginning to EndCaligula: A Life From Beginning to End by Hourly History

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    For nearly two thousand years, Ancient Rome was a great arena of fearless political gladiators whose ambitious instincts to rule the world coincided with epochal shifts in demography and geopolitics in the regions it had conquered. No wonder the history of Ancient Rome is fraught with memorable figures whose names are immortalized in a variety of literary forms: Plays, Poems, Paintings, and Films depict the deeds and actions of these men of exceptional characters, one of whom is unforgettable Caligula as elegantly narrated in Caligula by Hourly History.

    Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born in 12 A.D. The nickname “caligula” derived from caliga, meaning “little military boot” was attached to him as a term of endearment as Caligula accompanied his father Germanicus on the military campaign to Germania at the age of two attired in a full soldier’s uniform. In fact, Germanicus was a renowned Roman general whose valor was second to none and very popular among soldiers and citizenry. Perhaps it was this great popularity that caused his demise and the tragic end of his beloved family under the rule of Tiberius, the second emperor, the successor of the first emperor Caesar Augustus (which also indicates that Caligula was a distant nephew of Julius Caesar.) It was believed that Piso was responsible for the assassination of Germanicus out of jealousy and imprisonment of the family except Caligula who had managed to escape the arrest by fleeing to Tiberius in Capri when his mother Agrippina the Elder and his two elder brothers were horribly mistreated in prison and beaten to death. And it was this Tiberius who named the only living son of the popular Germanicus to be his successor – the third emperor.

    Thus Caligula’s rise to the throne of the emperor was the sine qua non of the tumulus aftermath as a result of his father’s death that rekindled the ember of political intrigues of the Senate and the Praetorian Guard. What’s more, the first six months of Caligula’s reign was regarded as quite innovative and auspicious. With a huge sum of money in the Roman Treasury, Caligula’s achievements included the following: 1) to reinstate the popular vote allowing all citizens to speak in the government process; (2) to make the ledgers of the use of treasury funds public; (3) to raise the salaries and provide bonuses to every branch of military; and (4) to recall all those who had been exiled under Tiberius.

    According to a popular theory, Caligula was struck with a serious mental illness eight months after his enthronement. Some say that Caligula suffered from a lifelong epilepsy as evidenced by his having never learnt to swim, whereas swimming was a popular form of exercise at the time. It was also this time when Gemellus, the young grandson of Tiberius who had supposed to co-rule with Caligula was executed under his order along with Caligula’s father-in-law and brother-in-law with his younger sisters being sent into exile. However, curiously enough, he saved his uncle Claudius, who had been afflicted with a serious illness that left him with a severe limp and partial deafness.

    Caligula’s stupendousness of eccentricity continued in building two large ships for personal use, one of which was a floating palace and erecting many monuments commemorating himself as well as theaters, temples, and entertainment complexes for his personal use at the expense of the treasury funds. Furthermore, by 40 AD Caligula proclaimed himself to be a god in attempt to dictate religious aspects into political policies by beginning to refer to himself as “Jupiter” in public documentation while still alive.

    However, the reign of Caligula’s pseudo-theocracy met its end when Cassius Chaerea, a member of the Praetorian Guard, and his accomplices faced Caligula during a public event held in honor of Augustus and stabbed the emperor until he fell to the ground and breathed no more. It was only three years and ten months that Caligula ruled the young empire and it was how it was ended.

    Caligula by Hourly History is a comparatively light read, written in plain English from insightful views on the notorious emperor Caligula based upon factual analysis and historical backgrounds that help the reader understand the cohesiveness of how Caligula rose to power in the turbulent time of political intricacies, which might have caused the young and impetuous emperor to be agitated and anxious evermore as his ambition to emulate the ruling style of Augustus and the popularity of his beloved father clashed with a harsh reality. Caligula’s acting upon instincts or “guts” did not work out for him because of his trauma as a result of the tragedy of his once beloved family in combination with his impulsive temperament that needed a wise guardian to tame it. If you have heard about Caligula but do not know much about him other than you have seen him in movies, which have a tendency to portray him as a downright madman indulging in every form of debauchery you can possibly imagine, this is the read you can enjoy in your spare time at one sitting.

  • The Mysterious British Isles by Charles River Editors

    The Mysterious British Isles: A Collection of Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena across Britain and IrelandThe Mysterious British Isles: A Collection of Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena across Britain and Ireland by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    Great Britain, which is composed of England, Scotland, and Wales, is arguably one of the ancient lands imbued with history and tradition, full of primeval sites, historical artifacts, unique landscapes where skyscrapers casting shadows over castles, and a people of equally unique heritage and culture. But most of all, to me England appears to be a gem of the Crown, the archetypal image of Great Britain because there is London that has existed for thousands of years. The Mysterious British Isles by Charles River Editors offers the reader an elegant history of London with interesting information on the city itself, including backgrounds of famous buildings, places, and on its equally fascinating inhabitants who lived and worked to make their ends meet before our time.

    London has been a cosmopolitan city for centuries, and it is a city of amalgamation of the ancient and the new with churches built atop pagan temples, ordinary commercial buildings grounded around medieval burial grounds, and so on. To illustrate, St. Paul’s was built upon an old temple to Diana, the Roman version of Greek goddess Artemis. Also, Westminster Abbey, dating back to the reign of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest, was originally located on the Isle of Thorney – supposedly the site of a Roman temple to Apollo, which was destroyed by an earthquake and then replaced with an Anglo/Saxon temple to Thor. It was in 610 A.D. that it finally made Christian by King of the East Saxons, who had converted to Christianity, in dedication to St. Peter.

    In addition to the aforesaid great churches, the ancient Roman time street named Hounds Ditch, still running through the City of London, was used as the old London’s dumping ground. But Hounds Ditch is not the only place of the disposed remaining to be seen today. There are quite a few modern buildings with part of their plots unused, bits of empty lands in crowded, expensive London with signs warning people to “Keep off the Grass.” In fact, they are old plague pits, mass graves used to place a myriad of infected corps during the period of great plagues in London.

    Since London has been the center of economic activities, many professions have been come and gone as a consequence of changes of social and economic systems. Some of the worthwhile professions to mention in memory of the people who worked in them for their livelihood are listed as follows:

    • Chimney Sweep: It was city law that people should keep their chimneys clean due to a fire hazard. So many poor boys aged between seven and eight started becoming climbing boys, serving the apprenticeship to master sweeps. Unsurprisingly, may of them died of suffocation, suffered from deformity, developed scrotum cancer as a result of residue of soot.
    • The Mudlark: It was a popular job for poor boys in the 18th and 19th centuries; many of them were orphans. They scored the banks of the Thames for items of value. When the tides were low, the mudlarks looked for items through the muddy banks and became easy targets for police harassments, one of which was to throw the boys to the river. So the mudlarks were also good swimmers.
    • The Tosher: After the Great Stink of 1858, a genius engineer named Joseph Bazalgette developed a citywide sewer system that is still in use. It was this great Victorian engineering feat that gave birth to this profession. Toshers were specialized in the sewer system for any valuables dropped out of the pockets of Londoners.
    • The Linkboy: Before the late 19th century, London night was as dark as Persian night without public lamps. Hence these linkboys whose parents were dead or were so impecunious that they had to allow their little child to roam London’s dark nights became the essential night guides with lanterns on poles to drunken citizens or travelers or theater-goers. Sometimes, linkboys were also employed to decoy to guide customers to brothels in addition to their tips.
    • Sandwich Men: As a rise of advertising due to prosperous cheap printing with growing disposable income in the early 19th century, shops and stores were eager to hire the city’s impecunious citizens however old or young to use them as mobile advertisement. These sandwich men worked with poor pay by standing out in the sun and rain for up to 12 hours with their front and back covered with boards held up by ropes over their shoulders. In fact, the term was originated by Charles Dickens’s description of such man as a “piece of human flesh sandwiched between two slices of pasteboard. Sandwich men survived the centuries despite several attempts to ban the profession. Although the Westminster City Council prohibited the presence of sandwich men in 2008 in effort to upgrade the city’s shopping ambience in West End, the other boroughs of London have not yet perished sandwich men.

    The Mysterious British Isles by Charles River Editors encapsulates some of the most interesting facts of Great Britain, such as the aforesaid history of London and facts of its inhabitants. It also covers subjects such as famous criminals, fairies and giants, and legends of historic places throughout the Isles. It is worthwhile to read this book as a concise but essential reference book on Great Britain either to satisfy your curiosity for the country where the Sun never set on in the past or to occupy yourself with something at once entertaining and informative during your lunchtime, coffee break, or before going to bed.

  • Metamorphosis of a Vestal

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    from google

    Like an ancient statue of marble,
    She was sitting there alone, noble;
    Like a flower soaked in crimson waters,
    She was drowning deep in Rivers of Fears;
    Like a fairy ogled by an eager ogre so foul,
    She was seeking a niche to save her soul
    Chased by terrors of the repulsive with a howl
    Until she cried out loud, “Artemis! Save Me!”
    Then was heard no more, seen no more, but a tree
    High and solitary like a statue once sitting there.

  • Sleeping Imaginations

    shep
    The Shepherdess
    1881
    by Camille Pissarro

    I am awake – I know I dream not,
    Making every image in seeing real
    The fancy of the mind I know for aught,
    Riding on a train of thoughts by a mile.

    When I dream – I think myself awake,
    Seeing things in fantasy of the obscured mind
    Buried in the vales of decaying senses at stake,
    Gliding on a Flying Carpet overlooking the world.

    For my dreams are impertinent when unguided
    By the consciousness of reality – Law of Reason –
    Pulling the reins of Rational Truth in on the mystified,
    Hunting out the causes of the Revolt against Reason.

     

    P.S: I wrote this poem upon reading “You and Your Dream” by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in which the philosopher assessed the nature of /evidence of supernatural sights and other related matters. So in a way, this is  my review on his essay, which I thought would be interpreted better in poetry based on its subject matter and the impressions it evoked.  

  • The Brilliant Legacy of the Mycenaeans: Ancient Greece’s First Advanced Civilization

    The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece's First Advanced CivilizationThe Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Advanced Civilization by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Before Homer wrote about the fearless warriors and extraordinary heroes enshrined in the temples of the Olympians in Iliad and The Odysseys, there were a people of invincible spirits and adventurism on a par with those of the characters – The Mycenaean, the torch-bearers of a great Aegean civilization in the Pre-Classical Greece existing from 2000 to 1200 BC, whose bravery and enterprising minds inspired Homer to pay tribute to them as immortalized in the two great Classical epics in the history of western civilization. Accordingly, The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Civilization by Charles River Editors takes us to look back on the Mycenaean culture in the Pre-Classical era when these ancient ethnic Greeks ruled the Aegean Sea as the maritime power and left their indelible marks on the posterity of the Classical Greek culture.

    The Mycenaeans, the first Greeks, were never unified under a central state and were a collection of several kingdoms. Influenced by the earlier Minoan civilization (2000-1450 BC) at Knossos, Crete, the Mycenaean adapted the Minoan art and religious practices and developed them to their highest expectation of militaristic and cultural ideology. For example, the Mycenaeans developed Linear B Script, which was the writing system comprising hieroglyphics, used between 1450 and 1100 BC especially in Knossos and Pylos, the corporate headquarters of the Late Bronze Mycenae. The letters were mostly written in clay tablets largely concerned with documenting economic transactions of the palace administration and various business transactions. In fact, the Linear B Script, preserved as the oldest Greek writing system, indicates that the Mycenaeans were the linguistic and ethnic ancestors of the Classical Greeks.

    In addition to transcribing economic activities Linear B Script also lets us glimpse into the belief system of the Mycenaeans with the names of the deities they worshiped, such as the head of the Pantheon and Poseidon, the god o f the seas whom the Mycenaeans paid special due respect for their being sea-faring people. The Mycenaean reverence for Poseidon is worth noting because it betokens the importance of the Mycenaean as the maritime power of the Aegean Sea as well as the most of the Mediterranean Sea. They eclipsed the Minoans and their Aegean neighbors in terms of open sea trade by establishing trade routes with the islands of Sardinia and Sicily as well as the Libyan coastline and importing more goods than exporting, such as grain from Egypt and metal from Cyprus and Anatolia to make weapons.

    With respect to artistic and cultural historiography of the Mycenaeans, the art of burial practices entailed the Minoan influence assimilated into the Mycenaean of their own accord, which was akin to the fashion of Hellenism, the spread of the Greek culture through enculturation by Alexander the Great centuries later. Likewise, after then conquest of Crete, the Mycenaeans continued to employ many of the Minoan artistic traditions one of which was burial practices and their beliefs in afterlife as expressed in the Hagia Triada Sarcophagus on the island of Crete. Made in a Minoan style under the rule of Mycenaeans, it depicts scenes of funereal game held in honor of a fallen warriors and dead kings, consisting of the following athletic events as part of the ritual:

    • Chariot Race – Popularized by the Hittite and the Egyptian as a symbol of power and prestige; powered by 2 to 4 horses carrying a team of 2 to 3 men. The Hittite had 3 men – a driver, a shield bearer, and a warrior- while the Egyptian simply had 2 men – a driver and a shield bearer. The Mycenaeans would most likely to have either of the styles, though not manifested.
    • Armed Combat – conflated with the Hittite sport
    • Boxing – popularized by the Minoan and developed by the Mycenaean

    In fact, the actuality of the aforesaid athletic sport events is alluded in Homer’s Iliad, suggesting a Bronze Age tradition of funerary games in Greece with vivid descriptions of the games to honor the slain Greek warrior named Patroclus, which were all coordinated by Achilles. However, contrary to the nude events of the Classical Greece Olympics, which were the offspring of the Mycenaean funereal games, the competitors in the funereal sport events wore loincloths called “zoma.”

    The demise of the Mycenaean Kingdom resulted from several factors one by one in a period of times, including the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the emerging of the Dorian in the north, all of which represented the end of the Mycenaean Age, coinciding with the collapse of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East, where the Mycenaeans played an important role as a formidable trade partner with the Egyptian. Notwithstanding the fall of the Mycenaeans as the major sea power in the ancient Bronze Age, the brilliant legacy of the Mycenaean culture still thrives in; (1) the form of Linear B Script, the oldest writing system of the Greek language before the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet system many centuries later; (2) the belief system in which Zeus and Poseidon were first recorded in the writing tablets and revered with due respect; and (3) the initiation of  the sparks of the organized athletic events developed into the Olympic Games in posterity. It is this ingenuity imbued with the spirit of adventure and the policy of engagement in adopting cultural traditions of other people that exemplified themselves among other Pre-Classical peoples, which is something we in the modern time should adopt as well, so that our posterity can benefit from what their ancestors learned and experienced, for it also becomes our legacy of heritage and culture to pass it down from generation to generation.

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  • Demeter and The Eleusinian Mysteries

    demeter
    Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries (from google)

    Veiled in the ancient shrine of the mysteries,
    Robed in the esoteric knowledge of Olympus,
    There appeared a numinous woman on the altars
    Of a great temple built by Keleos, King of Eleusis
    At the instruction of Demeter, the disguised goddess
    Presiding over grains and the fertility of earth in distress,
    For her daughter Persephone, deflowered by Hades,
    The god of the Underworld was still retained in Hades.

    The tale of woes so lachrymose with her eyes so dolorous
    With the tears of the goddess welled with pains of heartaches
    Began as Demeter called Keleos and other priests by the altars,
    All of whom were equally intoxicated by her divine humanities
    Of Anguish, Despondency, Dolefulness, and even Wretchedness
    And listened to the elegy of their goddess of sacred grains
    Of earth where now was barren and fallow for she was without grace .

    “My daughter Persephone, the apple of my eyes, Flower of Flowers
    On earth was ruthlessly ravaged by Hades, that dreadful Hades,
    Of the Underworld, who then abducted her to his realm of darkness
    Where only shadowy spirits wander with eyes depraved of lights,
    Where the shadowy spirits importune for drops of blood for prophecies
    To those a few mortals of valor destined for performing heroic feats.

    There, Persephone, my beautiful daughter, was bound to Hades,
    Who was also a brother of Zeus, god of gods, the ruler of the Universe,
    Who was also an accomplice of this great crime, this god of gods!
    Alas! Where’s Justice? Where’s Nemesis? Where’s God of the Universe
    When this god of gods connived at his brother’s crime and sealed the mouths
    Of other gods and goddesses who were nothing but divine cowards?

    Thus, I searched high and low for my dear Persephone for nine days,
    And on the tenth day, Hecate, a daughter of Rhea, and the sun god Helios
    Came to me, for their pangs of godly consciousness disturbed by the pathos
    Of my grief and lamentation was more divine than their divine essences
    To tell me the crime of Hades and where my Persephone was that was
    Hard to bear, harder to believe when my divineness was betrayed in Olympus,
    Where all but I, the goddess of grains and fertility on earth was left amiss!

    Thereupon, I fled Olympus, the ghastly place of godly beings in idleness
    Who were nothing but abductors of fair maidens, manipulators of wars,
    And conspirators of jealousy, all of it was against my nature and sacred office
    With righteous contempt for all of it, I left that place of lewdness,
    With no regrets, but with a longing heart for my Persephone in darkness.

    Into this land of Eleusis, your land of Eleusis I wandered with hopes
    Of meeting my Persephone one day as an old slave woman in disguise
    Named Doso and met your wife by an old well near your splendid house
    Where I became a burse to your son whom I fed ambrosia at nights
    For Eternal Youth and put in the center of fire for Immortality, my Graces
    To your kindly family till your wife full of foolish speculations
    Betrayed my sacred appreciation and divine intentions and thwarted your son’s
    Gifts of Eternal Youth and Immortality, the essence of the Immortals in Olympus!

    Here, you built me my temple in honor of me, to initiate the Eleusinian Mysteries,
    My Persephone will also preside for her four months’ stay on earth from Hades,
    Alluring her to eat four pomegranate seeds, so she can’t stay here in bliss
    For ever, forever with me, when the land will abound with crops and flowers,
    And when you will purify yourselves with nine days of fasting and celibacy
    with a consecration of the first grain harvested first of the year for the rites
    In honor of me and Persephone, the goddess of spring of blissful liveliness.

    Thus was a tale of the goddess, who was the goddess of humanities in essence,
    Who was the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries with full of arcane principles
    Of Purity, Morality, and Humanity, sealed in ancient secret rites so mysterious,
    With sacrosanct pledges of select a few mortals mystified by the Mysteries
    That would elevate the excitement of the souls and the passion of the hearts
    Like no other in this world and in that world, afterlife where the spirits
    In bliss promenading in the Eleusinian Fields boundless into the Mystic Universe.