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

Tag: book reviews

  • 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.

  • Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

    Notes from a Small IslandNotes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    It has been twenty years since Bill Bryson, a writer originally hailing from a small town in Iowa, fell in love with Great Britain where people are delighted in small pleasures, call strangers “Love,” and orderly wait on lines in public without peevishness. So much so that he has even married one. Now it is high time that Bryson returns to the States along the lines of Odyssey, who returned home in Ithaca twenty years after the decade-long Trojan War and another decade of travails. In retrospection of the memories collected on his beloved adopted homeland, Bryson decides to take a valedictory jaunt around the island small but big enough to nurture him with a wealth of culture and a bounty of humanity. And he does it on public transportation and by hiking equipped with his trademark razor-sharp wits, intractably keen intelligence, and his usual touchy-feely way of observing people and things that either irk or pique him. All of it comes to fruition in this highly amusing and genially forthright travel memoir.

    You will be surprised to find out that the British think that the cereals are their invention. You will be overawed by the ubiquitous hedgegrows dated back to Anglo-Saxon times embroidering on the British landscape. Bryson will also take us for a ride in a London cab driven by an affably jocular cabbie who has to pass the Knowledge Test to memorize almost everywhere in the City of London. But London is not his demarcation of traveling. Bryson will further come along with you to Bournemouth, Exeter, Liverpool, which is his favorite city, Manchester, and even up north to Scotland all by train or coach, and by walking. With his truculent feistiness, irrepressible inquisitiveness, and scintillating sense of humor fabulously ingrained in his choice of the apropos words and jovial descriptions devoid of malice, Bryson is a cool cicerone, and your excursion will never be a bore.

    The book seems to be primarily aimed for British readers who might be curious about what a foreigner would think of them and their country as a whole. In that regard, Bryson’s words are predominately British in the sense that the words and expressions he uses in the narrative are familiar to the British. For example, “bank holidays,” “coach,” “lorry,” or “Sainsbury’s” are peculiar to the British ways of life. But this kind of cultural barrier is kindly tackled by Bryson by providing you with a glossary of the British terms at the end of the book.

    I have read other books by Bryson because of the same reason that induced me to select this book: his story-telling like narration is very appealing to me with his proverbial witticism smeared in every word he employs. He may appear to be a grumpy American man, but he has a heart to feel and see milk of human kindness in every quotidian thing or nondescript person by using the most appropriate words in wonderfully lucid expressions. There is a charm in his writing that will make you an admirer of his writings, and this book is no exception. It is Bryson’s long love letter to the small island he has fallen for head over heels with sincerity sealed with kisses and memories.

  • Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

    Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls WilderPrairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    A really good biography by a really good writer about someone fascinating reads like a good novel full of intriguing characters, events, and places. In the peculiar alchemy of literature, such biography creates a literary chiaroscuro, an iridescent interplay of light and shade alloyed in the alchemy of words laced with an internal rhythm of the words that delightfully flavors otherwise flat discourse of nonfiction. On top of this magical incantation, all-around erudition of a writer cognizant of the historical and social contexts armed with exhaustive scrutiny into the subject is the Rosetta stone that consummates the performance by contextualizing the subject’s motivation, actions, and vicissitudes of life that is all very much like a plot. In this regard, Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires about Laura Ingalls Wilder, a prodigious American literary heroine enshrined in the great American literary pantheon, fits into such definition with gusto.

    I first came across this book from an article about The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a significant achievement award in Children’s literature, from The Los Angeles Times a few months ago. The award changed the name into “The Children’s Literature Legacy Award” because Wilder’s allegedly stereotypical attitudes toward people of color were considered to be not in harmony with today’s social core values of inclusiveness, integrity, respect, and responsiveness to the epochal changes. In defense of Wilder’s works, Fraser argued that her works were products of her life and that the reception of her books should be more complicated than we might hastily believe based upon the cursory reading of her books as social or historical contexts. It was this very argument that piqued my curiosity about Wilder and her biographer Fraser. As someone who always inclines to someone whose views and attitudes are dauntlessly unreconstructed and intellectually provocative, I wanted to know more about the accused and her public defender. Hence, Prairie Fires is a testament to its quality that sheds light on the myths and misconceptions on the literary world of Wilder and her fascinating self.

    To many of us, Wilder is most well known by A Little House on Prairie, also translated into television firmament by Michael Landon in many a language, making it a kind of household name in everyday life. I remember watching it with the unforgettable leitmotif music that rendered the ambience of a story of a pioneer family with none other than faith, charity, hope, and themselves on the Great Plains. Notwithstanding a streak of fictionality laced with idyllic romanticism portrayed in the TV show version, it was this very ambience Wilder cherished the most and delineated in words despite her seemingly perpetual struggle against impoverishment in the epochal changes of economic climates of her time. She was something of a pioneer troubadour who sang the chaste and rustic beauty of the wild prairie as well as the acuteness, coarseness, and strength of a pioneer spirit found in her beloved father. Through a series of poverty after poverty, struggle against struggle, and hope against hope on the life of the open prairie, Wilder was already in training to become a great writer.

    It is one of Fraser’s literary finesses that she alludes to “prairie fires” as a metaphorical means for illustrating Wilder’s queasy and passionate character that ultimately spurred her on to writing professionally at a relatively late age in her life. Wilder’s circumstances pushed her into a reluctant lifetime position of a breadwinner and caretaker, making herself to the hostage of Fortune. Her stoic, matter-of-fact manner belied overwhelming fear, dismay, disappointment, and grief as a result of taking a vow of self-denial against her feisty feminine self. All of her aborted dreams and hopes and projections smothered under daily duties that life demanded by a succession of misfortune and became her pant-up fury that metastasized into the fiery images of prairie fires, real or phantasmal.

    Fraser is also excellent in providing us with very intriguing information on Wilder’s inseparable relationship with her writer daughter Rose, who is also believed to influence her mother to write professionally. Rose was a very complicated woman whose literary talent seemed to be prevented from blossoming into full fruition on pedestals by her endless windy rage and self-doubt. She loved her mother and father dearly for sure because whatever money she had earned from writing was a munificent largess to them in the forms of a house and other apparatuses. Moreover, it was Rose who induced Wilder to write about her dramatic life that ultimately resulted in A Little House on Prairie. And yet Rose was also always out of reach of her beloved parents. She loved independence, living in the New York City and Europe with a penchant for cultural sophistication and extravagance, measuring herself against the burgeoning careers of her peers. But even her foibles are pathetic and sympathetic in Fraser’s punctilious portrait of Rose colored by the language she employs from her arsenal of words and narrative skills that guard Rose from misconceptions.

    The paramount achievement of Fraser in this biography is her flawlessly lucid contextualization of Wilder’s philosophy of life, her viewpoints society, and most importantly, her backgrounds of the oeuvres in the context of regarding the epochal social and historical changes of her time, all of which are gleaned from her comprehensive research into the relevant subjects and her impressive erudition fascinatingly laced with her acute feminine sensitivity in the magical play of the words. In fact, her knowledge on the 19th and early 20th centuries are so impressively and naturally incorporated into the discourse of Wilder’s story that you come to an understanding of Wilder like never before and appreciate her oeuvres in the canon of American Classics by exonerating  the accused from being a jingoistic provincial “white” writer. Rather than pontificating the blind idolization of Wilder, Fraser serenely but efficaciously narrates the facts of the controversial author and her meritorious achievements both in life and literature in an expense of will, belief, and truth, producing a mesmerizing biography of a riveting character in literary Americana.

    The book does succeed in shedding light on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder by recasting this famous American literary figure in a candid way which none other than Fraser could have possibly done on the topic with her magistral knowledge of Wilder armed to the teeth with thoroughly exacting research on historical and social resources with utmost solicitous attitude and sweet tenderness. For this very reason, Wilder’s books should read as a classics not as a historical textbook of the bygone era whose zeitgeist irks the populace of this modern time. Literature is an art, and therefore its value lies in Art for art’s sake. We use the real to perfect the ideal, and the real encompasses anything – including our foibles and idiosyncrasies – we deem worth sublimating into beauty, which is what art is all about by appealing to our senses, the pleasure of reading something beautifully profound, evocative, and enduring. In this regard, Wilder was and is an artist making the beauty of life out of the reality of life. All this makes this book an enjoyable and illuminating read with Fraser’s irrefutably magical alchemy of words and consummate storytelling skill devoid of expression of infelicity and authoritativeness. This is a canonical biography of a great American writer by another fascinating writer who deserves of the applauding to the very echo.

  • Marie Antoinette: A Captivating Guide to the Last Queen of France by Captivating History

    Marie Antoinette: A Captivating Guide to the Last Queen of France Before and During the French Revolution, Including Her Relationship with King Louis XVIMarie Antoinette: A Captivating Guide to the Last Queen of France Before and During the French Revolution, Including Her Relationship with King Louis XVI by Captivating History

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    History is a branch of literature made by artificers and artists with stories full of events, people, and places woven into a timeless stereoscopic tapestry of humanity, which in a succession of ages lays bare truths unjustly condemned in the circles of Treachery, Heresy, and Wrath by the winners of the epochal changes. In this regard, Marie Antoinette by Captivating History is a viable account of one of the most arguably scandalous figures in the history of civilization written without prejudice but with facts based upon the extensive collection of historical evidence of letters, small notes, and other written records that is testament to the veracity of the characters and historicity of the events concerning with the lachrymose last queen of France and her family swept in an indomitable whirlwind of epochal changes.

    The book delineates the humane sides of the Bourbon couple, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI with an ample provision of personal aspects of the king and the queen in the context of regarding the historic accounts that give the reader new insights to the last dynasty of France and the bellicose retribution of the revolutionaries. Maria Antonia became the famous “Marie Antoinette” at the wedding with Louis XVI, an academic introvert who was into locksmith work and carpentry with a generous soul and deep love for France and the people. The young couple was bounded by spirit of charity and benevolence and exemplified the epitome of nobless oblige: To illustrate, Marie Antoinette told the French not to pay “Queen’s Belt Tax,” a customary tax that the subjects must pay when a new queen ascended the throne because she had heard the woes of the impoverished states of the people. Also, both Marie and Louis founded the Maison Philanthropique and hosted evening meals at Versailles and built cottages for the needy, which the French willfully forgot and forced themselves to remember the ridiculous price of bread when they later invaded the palace and demanded the lives of the Bourbon family.

    With respect to the monumental achievements of Louis XVI, the promulgation of Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, permitted the French to practice their own religions and marry without converting into Catholicism. In addition, he abolished for the first time servitude akin to serfdom and slavery in France and did cut back the personal budgets to the extent possible by funneling the money into a multitude of charity organizations, all of which was willfully overlooked or ignored by the demagogic revolutionaries and vengefully ambitious bourgeoisie and their populace whom they used as minions to overthrow the monarchy by force.

    The book leads the reader to a kind of Eureka moment of light to see the souls of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in their captivity at the Temple, an ancient royal prison where the family was incarcerated and unjustly tried, during their numbered days before the executions by the mob. We see Marie’s hair turned completely white a day before the execution, which is now known as “Marie Antoinette Syndrome,” as was in the case of Thomas More prior to his execution, and feel her fear at the kangaroo trial where she was arbitrary and intractably accused of (1) stealing French money and sending it to Austria; (ii) planning the deaths of revolutionary soldiers; and (iii) abusing her youngest son, which was patently manipulated by the perfidious revolutionaries to make her a scapegoat for the social ills of the past monarchy because she was a naïve foreigner with soft manners and cultural sophistication, which was an ad hominem embodiment of aristocratic refinement that must be annihilated in a new brave world of the middle class and its peasant class as their henchmen and women.

    Nevertheless, this is not a revisionist book on the last queen and the king of France. Rather, it is a book of rare gemstone that is discrete from so many other books on the subject in a pervasively uniformed perspective that does not cast positive light thereon because of the modern complacent intellectual attitudes that discourage an objective scrutiny of historical facts by safely choosing to remain in the political correctness of history. However, truth will come to light at the length; Truth is truth to the end of discreditable reckoning of demotic, partisan views and defamatory opinions on infamously misconceived historical figures that deserve of equitable judgment of the characters and deeds thereof. All this makes this book enjoyable and enlightening read, which is much to recommend it if you are willing to find out facts that lead you to beacons of truths.

  • The Druids: The History and Mystery by Jesse Harasta and Charles River Editors

    The Druids: The History and Mystery of the Ancient Celtic PriestsThe Druids: The History and Mystery of the Ancient Celtic Priests by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Stonehenge, which he described as a peculiar juxtaposition of primeval-looking stones that resembled “a group of brown dwarves in the wide expanse,” he was also overawed by its mysterious ambience laced with its ancient esoteric elements woven by the flight of ages and the succession of the primordial Druidic spirit peculiar to the British Isles. In the poetical visions of Emerson, the sacrificial stones of the Druids were a phantasmagorical display of the enigmatic nature of the Druidism and the Druids clothed in their long white robes of fierce mystery. Such mysteriousness surrounding the Druids is still paramount to the image and perennial legacy of the clandestine ancient cult with its formidable ritual practices and influences as vividly related in The Druids by Jesse Harasta.

    In this book, Harasta draws up a wide range of historical contexts ranging from a memoir written by Julius Caesar to annals by Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and the Younger, and others, in search of the eyewitness accounts of this notoriously secretive cult and its ritual practices in the context of regarding its social and cultural influences on the colonial Gauls, especially the Britons. According to Caesar in his Notebooks about the Gallic War, which is still arguably the most detailed record of the Druids and their customs written in between 50 B.C. and 40 B.C., the Druids were originally initiated in Britain and that they acted as the grave executors of justice with solemn probity in conjunction with the religious elements to instill respect and order imbued with theocratic fear in people because the Druidism was by nature theocratic. In fact, such theocratic aspect of druidism is evident in Geography published in the 1st Century A.D. by Greek philosopher, historian, and geographer Strabo as follows: (1) the Bards: singers and poets; (2) the Vates: diviners and natural philosophers; and (3) the Druids: moral and natural philosophers. These three strata of the Druid ruled the roost of every aspect of their society with the authority and power tantamount to those of the Supreme Pontiff in later years.

    The peculiarity of the Druidic custom is the absence of written records, save other public and private transactions recorded in Greek. Although the Druidic education was heavily focused on memorization of a great number of verses, writing was strictly forbidden based upon Harasta’s viable hypothetical grounds of (1) to make the knowledge of the study inaccessible to the other castes, such as warriors and common people to maintain their social supremacy and dominion; and (2) to improve the faculty of memory to develop cognitive ability, since an act of writing tended to reduce the ability to memorize.

    The ritualistic practice of human sacrifice is the ubiquitousness recorded in annals and manifested in archeological evidence. Even before the rise of the Roman Empire, the ancient Greek historian Athenaeus in the 4th Century B.C. recorded the Druids’ sacrifice of their prisoners to the gods, which was subsequently echoed by Pliny in the 1st Century A.D, who confirmed that the emperor Tiberius outlawed the Druids and their murderous types of diviners and physicians, while the succeeding emperor Claudius obliterated the  inhuman cult.

    Such ritualistic killing of humans and animals as well as performing ritual cannibalism was the most exquisite act of the greatest kind of piety. To illustrate, diviners stroke a human being chosen for sacrifice in the back with a saber and divine from his death struggle in the presence of the Druids or stabbed the victim with a small knife in the area above the diaphragm. Then they interpreted the future by observing the nature of the victim’s fall, the convulsion of his limbs, and especially from the pattern of his spurting blood in ancient tradition of undivided observation. In another example, the Druids built enormous effigies and filled them with living persons and set them on fire for mass sacrifice. Also, they burnt faithful slaves and beloved subordinates at the climax of the funerals of their masters. All of the aforesaid rituals took place in oak graves, since oaks emblemized sacredness and wisdom as the word “Druid” was originally derived from Celtic word “derwijes,” meaning oak and “wid,” to know or to have a vision.

    Pace other reviews of this book as desultory, partisan accounts of the Druids gleaned from ancient historical resources primarily written by the Roman colonials with supercilious opinions on their barbarous Briton colonialists, this book is an interesting read on this delphic ancient cult and its esoteric customs elegantly put together in plain language based upon the scholastic historical contexts. This is indeed a comprehensive overview of the quaint Druids whose formidable mysteriousness still resounds with the modern day revival of the cult in its outer form to the descendents of the Britons. For the reader who wants to delve into the Druidism in depth, this book serves as a decent primer on the subject as a preliminary requisition of rudimentary knowledge of the ancient cult. For all others, this book is an informative read that will bestow another literary pleasure and self-satisfaction on your mind.

  • Walk like Poet Henry David Thoreau!

    photo (1)
    Sally, the Thinker

    “Give me a box of bonbons and a pouch of fruit candy assorted with gummy worms to sweeten my vapid imaginations! Oh, and a cup of Hazelnut coffee with a little bit of half-and-half to spark up my dormant spirit that resists to awake after a day-off.” Sally was hoping to make a new Monday as vivacious and jovial as possible, so she decided to meet with her lovely alter ego Bonnie for brisk morning sauntering. Yes, sauntering. Or even perambulating, which in fact reminded her of a baby perambulator.

    “Hi, Sally!” Bonnie’s euphonious soprano voice manifested her presence like a spirit conjured up by a magician in an esoteric ancient language. Sally saw her dear friend approaching her from a distance waving effervescently at her with genuine smile. ” Oh, Dear. You look a bit pale… Have you eaten well? And please tell me not you are in a diet because you need it not.” Bonnie was concerned about a noticeable difference in Sally’s outward view: she looked thinner than before, and it did not look becoming to Sally. No, it was not out of that cardinal jealousy of womankind that knew neither friendship nor truth. In the eye of Bonnie, Sally looked prettiest with her round cheeks and dimpled elbows.

    photo (2)

    “No, I am not on a diet, but I just did not have any appetite… I like walking than eating! Well, let’s call it our “sauntering” as the great poet Henry David Thoreau defined. Do you know Thoreau himself was an aumbulater nascitur non fit? He was an avid walker who used to spend about two hours walking in nature. His study was out of doors like his poet pal William Wordsworth.” “Oh, I did not know it, Sally. I only know that Thoreau was a great naturalist poet and died from consumption. “Yes, Bonnie. That too was right. Soon both adorable ladies were embarking on their ritualistic morning sauntering along the Avenues of trees and flowers with larks and bluetits vivaciously chirping and tweeting, all in nature’s symphony that could make you forgive your foes and love humankind at least for that pristine moment of pleasure.

    photo
    Bonnie, La Bonne amie

    Thoreau was right: the act of sauntering in nature would blot out the strains and cares of contemporary life and anesthetize your weary body and minds against the strains of everyday life. It’s absolute freedom from all worldly engagement. Like Thoreau, Sally thought that sauntering was not an exercise but a kind of enterprise, an adventure of a day that invigorated her spirit and mind. And Sally was hoping that Bonnie would share her pleasure of appreciating the symphony of nature. “You know Thoreau was something of an eccentric genius,” Sally decided to add some tidbit of gossip on the poet. “Oh, really? How so? ” Bonnie seemed intrigued.  “Well, he never went to church but believed in God; did not marry, nor did he cast vote, nor did he pay taxes! But this very individuality endowed him with a crown of literary ascendancy, I think.” “How could he not pay his due taxes as it’s his sacrosanct duty and responsibility as a citizen? You know what, Sally? That’s why I do not like any of these intellectuals who put ideas before their civic duties and personal responsibilities.”

    Bonnie’s truculent remark was a bit startling aberration of her usual diplomatic modus operandi of expressing her opinion. But come to think of it, she couldn’t agree more with her friend about the duplicity of so-called the intellectuals, the new ecclesiastical estate of our modern society. And Sally was inwardly glad to have a friend as thoughtful and truthful as Bonnie. But still, Sally wanted to spare Thoreau from the supercilious learned elites.

    1-210

    The ante meridian sun was suavely sunny in the fiercely blue sky that would remind you of the celestial garb of the Virgin Mary in Rembrandt’s paintings.  The Italians would call the color “azure,” and they were good at making the pigment for Renaissance painters who raved about its lucidity and vivacity of the exquisite hue. And the fragrant breeze was a blessing of the beautiful Titan-goddess Aura for their friendship bound by mutual understanding and love of history and literature. As the two good friends were continuing to enjoy their sauntering in nature, it seemed right that without even going to church on Sundays, you could find the evidence of the Creator in awe of nature’s beauty and feel the presence of the existence just as Thoreau and the late Pope John Paul Second had felt and expressed.

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