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

Tag: book reviews

  • ‘Just So Stories’ by Rudyard Kipling – book review

    I believe history is a branch of literature full of events and stories made by artists and artificers weaving facts into myth, and vice versa, into a timeless tapestry of the world that was, is and will be. In that regard, Kipling is an artist who spins beautiful tales of how animals became what they look like into a poetic wheel of ear-delighting and cadenced words aided by gorgeous illustrations distinctively graceful and dazzlingly beautiful.

    Kipling’s evolution of animals explains why they look the way they are, such as a Leopard with spots, a Carmel hump, and many more. The stories become a fable and a history of its kind. It’s a literary version of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the wonderful menageries of Man and Beast that cannot live alone despite the differences in species because we are the inhabitants of this world, Earth. But, above all the fantastic tales of wonder, the Cat’s tale stands out in the story and the subject. Kipling’s Cat is proud but not arrogant, independent but affectionate, and vain but graceful. It’s a cat who walks by himself, and everything is alike to him and nothing else. The Cat is a beautiful stranger even if he likes to be a family, a kind of forever loner, the Puss in Boots with a cowboy hat and an empty holster. Kipling’s writer’s eyes saw the romantic solitude in a cat, and the result is one poetic Cat that rhymes well like the graceful way cats do their amazing somersaults.

    Just So Stories are not just for children even though it is classified in Children’s literature on the shelves of libraries. It’s a book for everyone who loves legends and magic, who still has a childlike innocence that refused to put away as an adult because it’s in nature. The stories are not for academic analysis or psychoanalysis but simply for the enjoyment of the mind and the delight of the heart. Remember Freud’s saying, “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.” So are Just So Stories, so delightful and so pleasant.

  • Auto-correction and Titivillus

    Writing has never been easier these days than in the bygone days before the advent of the computer. If you are unsure about how to spell “Tomato,” then the computer will spell it for you by way of auto-correction. And it can even reconstruct your sentences like a pro. The magic is inside the computer, as if it has a mind and even a soul, as it were. This wizardly power of auto-correction can sometimes, however, lead you to an embroglio of nonsense, especially when writing emails or tweeting. Quite devilish, so I think and wonder: are things like auto-correction and the likes a wicked invention of science or science of diabolical existence? Hence, I am talking about Titivillus, the patron demon of scribes.

    The birth of Titivillus could trace back to the 13th century when Franciscan theologian John of Wales pinpointed the malicious demonic trickery for the scriber’s mistakes. That’s not a footless excuse for the faux-pas made in a beautifully ornamented medieval script. In medieval times, copying the passages of the Holy Scripture was a painfully punctilious task for a monk to accomplish with perfect penmanship and exquisite illuminations. And the job cost a good amount of his youth with arched back, squinted eyes, and cramped arms and fingers, not in the least due to the time spent scribing. Toiling (even though for the glory of God) and Rejoicing (for the joy of self-fulfillment), Sorrowing always hoovers over the glories. Titivillus often brings this Sorrowing by making the scriber err in labor, such as misspelling or miscopying. When that happens, a corrector scraped off with a penknife or an acidic solution was applied to loosen the ink. Or sometimes he just made little dots under a wrong word, meaning the reader should ignore that bit. In case of more significant errors, the passages were sometimes lined through, and the correction was written in the margin or copied on a smaller piece of parchment and glued into the book.


    To think of it, Titivillus has not returned to the Ninth Circle of Hell, always making himself a reason to stay as long as humanity continues writing. Writer’s block is a dark cloud hovering over the soul’s palace, the dome of thoughts. Philological carbuncles, including misspellings and awkward syntax, combine the demon’s interruption and the writer’s fear of writing. The fear is more than devilish trickery or neurotic obsession because it stifles creativeness and imagination of the writer. Still, I cannot help but think that today Titivillus manifests himself in the form of auto-correction, which can change the entire meaning of a whole sentence, often most embarrassingly and awkwardly. You agree?

  • Hounds of Night

    The curtain of the night has drawn. Selene has started her nocturnal promenade with a moon mirror carried on her celestial chariot across the starry highway. Then the earth begins to bellow with great silent roars, trees to dance with leaves rustling in the wind as the chariot is racing, owls to call with their wings flapping, and the hounds howl from the end of the horizon in the glimmering light of the distant stars like lamps flickering in the desolate wilderness amid the haunting sound of Pan’s flute yonder. It’s Hecate’s Time, the Wandering Goddess of Night, appearing from the crossroads with her faithful hounds, heralding the staging of their divine mistress.

    Hecate has often been associated with all things witchery, magic, and death, not in the least due to modern-day Wicca practice identified heavily with the Greek goddess, but there’s more to her. She is a protector of the wrongfully accused, a goddess of retribution against injustice and impurity, and an advocate for underdogs. Perhaps, that’s why her animal is a dog, not a cat, which betrays a common association of the latter with someone like her. (In fact, Artemis is the only goddess whose animals are a cat because she was once transformed into it when chased by a besotted man.) Her hounds all have names: Kynegetis (Leader of Dogs from the Orphic Hymn), Kyneolygmate (Howling like a dog), Kynokephalos (Dog-headed), Kyon Melaina (Black Dog), Philoskylax (Lover of Dogs), Skylakitin (Lady of the Dogs). Of all the hounds, Kyon Melnia, aka Black Dog, used to be the wife of the last Trojan King Priam named Hekabe, who threw herself into the sea after the collapse of Troy by the Greeks. Hecate took pity on the queen and transformed her into a great black dog that became her familiar. What a manifestation of divine mercy it was.


    It is said that dogs and cats see the spirits of the dead, especially at night. If you have heard a dog howling, another howl, then another, and so forth, as if all of them sing in a canine polyphonic coda. When Hecate’s hounds howl, mortal dogs respond to their divine canine entity as the goddess and her entourage pass by. The hounds also bring victuals offered to Hecate to their mistress at a cemetery where she partakes her daily victuals. So if you think it’s just an ancient myth, listen carefully when your dog or any dog within your earshot howls. It’s either it sees a spirit or Hecate and her nine hounds. For me, well, I have a tabby cat named Toro, and he sees it and them but won’t participate in the chorus because he has her mistress at home.

  • ‘Life below Stairs’ by Alison Maloney

    The idea of domestic servants and their relationship with the masters is superficially romanticized not in the least due to period dramas, such as ‘Downton Abbey’ or Victorian masterpiece theater. In such fictionalized stories, the social dynamics between the classes are often bowdlerized or beautified, in addition to the romanticization of the working class as though to neutralize class antagonism in fear of marring a lofty literary theme. That said, ‘Life Below Stairs’ by Alison Maloney is a documentary of the real people who had to find themselves in servitude of their betters and their live-to-tell accounts of what it was like to be servants.

    While reading the book, I could not help but think that the professional domestic service in the capacity of maids, footmen, and butlers was not so much different from today’s social dynamics of at-will employees who provide their labor to employers for livelihood. Of course, the labor conditions and workers’ rights have been considerably improved, thanks to continuing reformation of workers’ compensations. However, the essence of the exchange of labor for necessities of life and the nature of employment is often precarious and insecure on the whims and caprice of businessmen and women. For example, recent union movements of Starbucks employees have prompted the company to close down under the pretext of low sales or redundancy. It betokens that the company will not tolerate such defiant action by the employees who provide their service in pure physical labor and mental exertions in catering to the needs of customers daily. Servants in the Victorian and Edwardian eras were employed chiefly by the middle-class bourgeoise who regarded keeping servants as a status symbol in the emulation of their upper aristocratic betters. In the States, servitude equated the slavery in the South, which was also maintained by merchant and business classes. Although I am not a proponent of aristocracy, aristocrats knew better how to treat their underlings because the need for servants arose from the necessities of keeping their estates and domesticity, not from a flash of ostentatious wealth that their jealous middle class was envious of.

    I envision myself as a housemaid in one of the early Edwardian eras (1900-1930), working from 6:00 am till 11:00 pm for a mistress whose temper is mercurial like Hera. That would be miserable with no weekend offs and mandatory church going with her. Then I feel okay to live in this moment of history even if my mistress boss is a modern-day bourgeoisie woman who wants her underlings to do thngs in her way because thanks to labor law, I only work from nine to five with saturdays an sundays to myself. Thank God for that.

  • Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond – book review

    Jared Diamond’s Upheaval analyzes why a nation is how it is now. Of course, culture plays a role in changing the ethos of each new zeitgeist. Still, it is not so much a differentiating element as a distinguishing factor to characterize a national character. Instead, it is a mindset of individuals, including the governing elites in the nation, that determine the success and stagnation of the nation’s progress.

    Of all nations’ approaches to and results of political and sociological revolutions, the most successful example is Japan’s Meiji Restoration in the 19th century and democratization in the aftermath of WWII, both of which are one-of-a-kind upheavals yielding to outstanding progress. Japan’s confrontation with the West might have blown their isolated cultural prestige. However, rather than coiling in fear of the changes, Japan sprang back with new attitudes adapted from Europe’s and the U.S.’s technological development and cultural legacy to survive the new zeitgeist as the time’s juggernaut.

    On the other hand, the United States today needs change because it is highly polarized by political affiliations, ideological inclinations, and racial stratifications. The U.S. seems to have lurched in the above marsh when it should focus on the constructive, substantial, and realistic aspects of political agenda and social movements. For example, Americans tend more to ideas than facts that collectively affect individual needs, such as universal healthcare, a better educational system, employment opportunities, housing assistance, welfare programs, and workers’ rights. It s because American politicians aim to mobilize an army of people, aka constituents, to win their ideological war for occupying more congressional seats. In fact, American exceptionalism, that America is the best of all other countries in the world, averts the eyes from the lessons from other countries simply because they are beneath.

    Diamond is a polymath well versed in science, literature, philosophy, geography, psychology, and sociology. He talks about his family, students, and friends from other countries. He is no stranger to their cultures with the knowledge of the languages and cultural cues, which entitles him to an appellation of “a citizen of the world.” This book reads persuasive and perspicacious, among other books on similar subjects. Maybe I am biased, but if the man whose assessment of nations strikes my chord, then I can’t help it.

  • Amaze Yourself: Take a Quantum Leap by Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler – book review

    Amaze Yourself: Take a Quantum Leap… by Jill Ammon-Wexler

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    We know our brain is our body’s and mind’s control room, but how much do we know about the superlative organ and the supernatural power? So relax. Have no fear because Amaze Yourself: Take a Quantum Leap by Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler will be your Cumin Sibyl to the mysterious world of the brain where the secret of the universe is locked in and waiting for you to unlock it if you believe in it.

    Dr. Jill is a doctor of psychology and a 47-year pioneer brain/mind researcher who has devoted herself to enlightening the public about the psychosomatic effects of the brain that are so wondrous and magical that they give the brain the status of a supernatural being. For example, stress isn’t just an easy, convenient excuse for our burned-out selves; it is, in effect, the evil of psychological and physiological ailments. Also, negative thoughts are not a metaphysical concept without a scientific foundation but are like a cancerous cyst that impedes the production of glucose (the brain food), which hampers a faculty of thoughts and a sense of imagination. The wonder doesn’t stop here. There is a third eye called the pineal gland in the brain that responds to altered mental states. So we all have some degree of ability to foresee the future, but that’s only if we consciously endeavor to access the subconscious mind. No wonder some of us can see and hear ghosts, and that’s true to the end of reckoning by way of a quantum leap from one sphere to another without effort.

    Suppose I am being captious by playing the role of Devil’s Advocate in the review of this admirably elegant and inspirational book. In that case, it is this: like any renowned figure of academic researchers, Dr. Jill’s successful experiments on positive thoughts confine to a pool of comparatively well-off human subjects with statuses. Of course, it’s unfair to cavil at her intention to find the truth, as her contemporary peers do the same. But I hope that someone like Dr. Jill, who writes with general readers in mind with her wealth of knowledge, includes a broad spectrum of classes in her study so that none of her readers will feel left out of the selected few. Nevertheless, Dr. Jill is a pioneer in her field, translating the mystery of brain power into our everyday language to make us realize that we are indeed starstuff harvesting sunlight only if we believe in ourselves. Therefore, this book is an excellent primer for the beautiful world of neuroscience, met with the supernatural power of the brain within us.



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