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

Tag: books

  • ‘let me in’, by john ajvide lindqvist – review

    Let Me InLet Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

    My rating: 1 of 5 stars

    Most of the time, a book made into a film does not fall from the grace of its original literary merit and retains its sovereignty as a textual master over the cinematic adaptation. At least, that’s what I think. It’s really a win-win situation in which both a book and a novel have their own charms with the appropriate bells and whistles. Alas, that’s not the case of Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Not an Iota. The book betrayed my anticipation of passing over to the minds of the characters for empathy and disappointed me with its bleak and dreary narrative. It’s like meeting your hero and ending up with a cold, contemptuous shoulder that cut off the thinnest and the highest note of the mind’s strings.

    The textual version of the Boy and the Vampire named Oskar and Eli, respectively, were hardly pathetic, not to mention likable, roaming the dark alleys of Scandinavian Dystopia plastered with pornography in all sorts of perversion. IT’s there, it’s here, it’s all over everywhere on the pages like pits pull of filth. The matter-of-fact accounts of child molestation defenestrated my mental equilibrium into catatonia, and I recoiled in diabolic horror in the course of wading through the chapters so as just to get them over with in a heartbeat. Any such disgrace of the subject matter could have been reconciled with a felicity of expressions and literary craftsmanship that would have at least rendered it bearable to read and excusable to merit its genre. Yet, the book continued to go against the grain to grant my wish for even teeny tiny weeny bit of pleasure of reading it – to the end. It all seemed to me that the catastrophe was due to the English translation of the original Swedish version of the book by an anonymous translator trying either too hard or too little to articulate the sentiments that could only be rendered accessible in the author’s mother tongue. The result was an ineffective simulation of a style of writing supposedly associated with Stephen King.

    Maybe it’s just me having a difficulty in appreciating the mind of the Swedish writer whom Stephen King generously hailed as one of the top writers of the horror fiction genre. Maybe my adultescent anticipation for the book was precipitately induced by the visual sensation from its film version, which is far better than its textual master in terms of the portrayal of the characters and the interpretation of their minds, capturing the subdued but powerful moments of revelation intelligently played out by Director Matt Reeves, who seems to understand the gist of the book as though it were written by him. Be that as it may, the book was not meant for someone whose heartstrings were prone to be broken if they were to be pulled out perforce. For the book still rings hollow in the valley of bleakness and shrieks in the alley of darkness and nothing more.

  • Life of the Undead: ‘In the Flesh (BBC TV Series)’ – review

    91lCcNIQVvL._SY445_“You can’t go home again,” declared Thomas Wolfe, who even wrote a book titled the selfsame slogan. That is, the place of memory however dearly held and fondly deemed exists only in the world of your reality, not in this world of existential truths and brutal subjective narratives of inflated egos and cosseted self-aggrandization. Once you’re out of it, you’re cut off from its association that binds you in the circumstances surrounding your whole being like a halo of a saint. For you’re one of them, you’re part of their culture, you’re in their clique. But what if you are sent back home after resurrection from death? Will your expectation meet with open arms or less than heartfelt welcome or even guns and knives?

    Meet Kieren Walker, who is one of the undead, a Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer (“PDS”). To put it more blatantly lucid, he is an unlikely zombie who was treated and humanized to return to home and society. Kieren, a sensitive artistic 18-year-old boy who committed suicide, is “reanimated” thanks to the splendid medical advancement. But the blessing of a second life can be also the cursing of resurrection because Kieren the walking dead must confront the ills of social ostracization, which also include his own family’s changed sentiments toward him in their facades of niceness. It would have been better if he had not risen from death. What a rotten fate for a rotter, thinks Kieren until he meets his best dead friend Amy Dyer, a romantic bluestocking who happens to be a PDS. Despite her abundance of undying feminine sensitivity, Amy smothers her woes and disappointments with her vivaciousness and smiles which are her jewels of loveliness. She is in fact a Beatrice who guides Kieren in the course of his unfinished coming of age with encouragement and support and most importantly, friendship that seems matter even in life after death.

    In the Flesh is a well-crafted television drama without shocking suspense or spectacular visual effects associated with Zombies. It is an intelligent drama that draws on social alienation of individuals shunned away for the singularities of their individualities. It spurs the detritus of existential dilemma of anyone who feels estranged from the social mooring made up of jetsam and flotsam of failed expectations, forced conformity, and false valuations of oneself setting against the backgrounds of Social Spencerism, which basically sets forth that might is right to be the fittest. However, this drama doesn’t turn out to be a grand social commentary that vehemently calls for equal rights for all. Rather, its strength lies in the subtle expressions of human feelings and emotions with elliptical scripts rendered authentic by a cast of characters, both imaginary and ordinary. The pathos of the characters is elegantly nuanced throughout the episodes, capturing all the conflicting emotions that one can imagine. For this reason, it is a drama worth viewing among others, all mindless and senseless adrift in Sea of Ignoramus.

  • go francis – viva papa!

    There has been much ado about it. Some say it’s unthinkable. A few say it’s schismatic. Many say it’s heretical. They are talking about Pope Francis’s intention of rewriting a sentence of Lord’s Prayer with their eyebrows raised in contemptuous incredulity. The fact is that most of these dissidents are like the insular Pharisees and have never liked the pope for his munificent largess of humanity without boundary. The so-called “conservative” Catholics do not want the pope to make Lord’s Prayer as close as to what it is supposed to mean, even calling his purpose an audacious challenge to the infallibility of the Holy Spirit by which the prayer was inscribed in the Holy Writ. But is the pope, who himself is an eminent Jesuit scholar, willfully shaking the bedrock of the teaching and faith of the faithful indeed? Or is the pope really an Antichrist incarnate?

    The subject sentence at issue is: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” The Pope has recently told Italian TV that it nuances that it is God himself that puts us in temptation, whereas it is us who fall into the trap of evil by our free will. Yet, the dissidents argue the pope’s bona fide, ad homine intention on the following grounds: (1) the change of Lord’s Prayer will sever and bifurcate Christian unity; (2) it will obfuscate the original meaning of the Greek version; and (3) it is simply outrageous to change the most sacred, ancient form of universal prayer as taught by Christ himself.

    It is understandable that the root of such misunderstood sentence arises out of the old translation from the Greek to Latin Vulgate and then to vernacular language. However, in terms of the original language of the bible, it is hard to pinpoint one because (1) Jesus and this twelve disciples spoke Aramaic; (2) the new testament was mostly written by Hellenistic Jews (Jews speaking Greeks) and Greeks converted into Christianity; and (3) the bible was further translated by scholars into vernacular language, so that it could be rendered naturally comprehensible to the faithful in their own language. In this regard of clarity, the pope wants to make it lucid to chime the bells of the souls.

    If the dissidents regard the pope’s noble purpose of making necessary changes to Lord’s Prayer as a subverting act toward the sacred authority of Lord’s Prayer, then they should look back on the history of Church from the First Council of Nicaea to the Council of Trent and to the Second Vatican Council to remind themselves of the intentions of the Church to render herself accessible to the masses throughout the turmoil of epochal waves of changes according to its corresponding zeitgeist. So why not this time? Call me schismatist or heretic. For all what’s worth in all good faith, I side with Pope Francis.

  • ‘Let Me In (2010)’, by Director Matt Reeves – review

    71wrP9sh2IL._RI_SX300_Love is really everything except what it is.  In the moments of violent delights of the ecstasy, it creates synchronicity of the two minds by surrendering to each other and becomes inseparable from one another. Whether it is erotic or agapeic, everyone regardless of any biological, social, or existential plane deserves this sweet surrender of love. George Sand, the French novelist whose love story with Frederic Chopin is better than a fiction, affirms: “Everyone deserves to love and be loved.” That is everyone, even if that one is a vampire or a misfit.

    “Let Me In” directed by Matt Reeves is a story about this love based upon his Shakespearean interpretation of ‘Love”. It is about friendship that develops into love because the word “Friend” is derived from a Proto-Germanic word “fraendi,” meaning “lover.” As it is a recurring theme of William Shakespeare’s plays, the meaning of friend and love is interchangeably conveyed on screen by the cinematographic recounting of the fateful love in the veneer of friendship between the two main characters, Owen and Abby, who are bound by loneliness and heartaches. In fact, the story of these two very young characters will conjure up the very young figures of lovelorn Romeo and Juliet by the side of the screen lurking in the corner eager to deliver their legacy of love that means to be forever beyond River of Styx. The only difference is that Abby, who is a vampire, never tells her love, but her concealment feeds on her crimson lips by devouring other people’s lives. She only sees Owen, the sensitive boy with a beautiful heart, for none other than a woman’s reason. Abby pines in thought, and with a red and gray melancholy, she watches Owen like Patience on a tree, smiling at grief for what she is.

    There is an original Swedish version of this selfsame film, but this Reeves’ version is more intelligently rendered and is hauntingly riveting with its surrealistic imagery and the stellar performance of the cast beautifully alloyed in the alluring alchemy of cinematography. It is an innovative synthesis of  artistic European neo-realism and a burst of the American no-nonsense realistic pep in the straightforward screenplay. This is a kind of film that makes you walk on the borderline of fantasy and reality, revolt and conformity, fear and courage, and doubt and trust, all of which will make you long for everything that love can come by. Forget Fear. This film is at its most compelling when you follow it with your open mind and let it in.

  • first woman orbits solo in space on 06/16/1963

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    Astronaut Valentina Tereshkova

    Surely, it must have been the Soviet’s ambitious plan to claim superiority of its scientific advance and social progress over the capitalist imperialists. However, in recognition of its achievement, free from bias and embellishment, we should transcend the subjectivity of the political ideology and reach universal truth and applicability, which is a principle of studying history as championed by the ancient Athenian historian and general Thucydides that still reverberates down to date.

    Fifty-six years ago from today was when twenty-six year old Valentina Tereshkova successfully orbited alone in a rocket named “Vostok 6” with her call sign “seagull.” It was two years after Yuri Gagarin had commenced the age of spaceship, and it was the first time of womankind to be in space. Coming from a model proletariat family of a tractor driver father killed in action in the Winter War against the Finns and a textile worker mother, Tereshkova was the “It” poster woman for the Soviet Union’s social and cultural ideological emblem. Raised by her mother, she didn’t go to school until the age of eight and left six years later to work in a local factory. It was during this period Tereshkova discovered a singular hobby of parachuting.

    The Soviet authorities were looking for candidates to become the first woman to go into space two years after Gagarin’s space travel. Goddess Fortuna winked at her and inspired her to apply for the candidacy, which was the job to be had only for the asking, because she was the woman they were looking for: (1) there were relatively few she-pilots to endure the rigorous training requiring mental as well as physical strength; and (2) she was the child of a war hero whose life was sacrificed for a patriotic cause with immaculate proletariat family credentials. That is, Comrade Tereshkova was the Soviet’s ideological manifesto incarnate in all aspects.

    After fifty-eight orbits lasting more than two days, Tereshkova returned to earth and found herself famous. But she deserved such recognition and respect because she demonstrated courage, go-aheaditivess, and strength eloquent of womankind in the most elegantly powerful way without brandishing a banner of feminist screed that the equality of women’s rights must be also exercised in space by orbiting in a rocket. Moreover, her non-elitist social and cultural backgrounds in comparison to those of famous Western European or American woman notables was worth noting that true equality meant for all regardless of rank and meritocracy because it would reveal everyone’s adumbral talent.

  • transit of venus

    art-nouveau-1

    She flies across the Face of the Sun

    Flapping her veil through the stars

    with dancing waves of her golden locks

    To flaunt her Triumph over Reason.

     

    Author’s Note: While I was reading my subscribed magazine on the Kindle Fire during lunch hour, I came upon this subject of Transit of Venus, a cosmic show in which the planet Venus passes directly across the sun in ever 253 years or so. Although I am highly doubtful of witnessing such a phenomenon while I am alive, the idea of it inspired me to write about it as the vision sprang from the mind’s eye.