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

Tag: books

  • ‘Essays of E.B. White,’ by E.B. White – review

    Essays of E. B. WhiteEssays of E. B. White by E B White

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    The essay as a respectful literary genre has not yet established its firm meritorious footing in American intellectual society where the novel, poetry, and journals featuring de rigueur social/political issues with gravitas, surrealistic individualism, or puritanical heroism that has recently morphed into a rags-to-riches memoir are the only select legitimate royalties worth being decorated with a laurel. Perhaps it has something to do with the level of American intellectualism being at its still developing stage in consideration of its relatively “youthful” history. For what is worth, despite its general cold reception from the literary hierarchy, E.B. White is nonetheless a quintessential American English writer and a very fine essayist of the twentieth century in the English language into the bargain. In this collection of his essays published in various magazines over the years (from 1920s to 1970s), Whites recorded the overtones of humanity, democracy, and social concerns in ordinary things and experiences described in elegant and crisp prose style that resembles none other than his, thus making him one of the central figures in the canon of American literature without dispute.

    Being an essayist means something of a modern day literary troubadour, an independently-minded man with childlike streaks of artless interest in all things worldly and unworldly and innocent belief that everything he thinks about and everything that befalls him is of general interest. In a way, he’s a likable egoist with venturesome effrontery and verve to write a very egoistic essay on his whims and caprice. However, Whites gently rebukes us for our general perception of the essay as an expression of exalted rootlessness without self-discipline and an intellectual basis; rather, it is a panoply of sensibilities, senses, and intelligence, all broken loose from the hidden private closet of the essayist. For this reason of being egoistically concerned in a panorama of contemporary daily that many serious writers of the other literary genres tend to downplay, an essayist should accept his self-imposed role of small-fry writing gentry in the class of scribe, advised White with a kind of avuncular manner. However, it is this estate of an essayist Whites feels exhilarated about; it provides him with a valve of the emotional influx and outflow, so that he can wield his pen across a page in an expense of his curiosity, conviction, observation, and self-discipline, producing a dazzling delight of literary pleasure in its simplicity of language and subject.

    To illustrate, White’s subjects of his essays vary from his experience of moving from New York City to Maine as in “Goodbye to forty-eighth street,” to the humorous political essay of “Bedfellow,” featuring his canine family member Fred, and from his keen and humane observation of a circus girl rehearsing her show in “The Ring of Time” to his youthful poetic experience of working as a waiter on a ship to Alaska in “The Years of Wonder.”All of the aforesaid deal with a cast of everyday character and contemporary daily life written in simple but perspicacious words to contextualize the inner realm of White. There’s no priggishness or pomposity in his prose style, which I find very appealing and endearing. For someone who’s as erudite and intelligent as White, such simplicity of writing betokens that he wears his knowledge lightly with a general reader in mind. In fact, White thinks it his duty as a writing man to record all items as though he would be held personally responsible if it were to be omitted. This idea of a writer as general secretary of humanity parallels the reasons of writing as posited by George Orwell: It serves as a platform of expressing our sheer egotism, aesthetic pleasure, political evidence, or historical record. A priori, both of the great essayist of the English languages strike the mutual writing chords in their hearts.

    At the heart of the essays lies White’s love of the world where he collected the flotsams and jetsam of what our contemporary human life could bring to us, which were washed up by the waves of time and memories. This collection of essay by White, I think, bestows in spades its sovereign royal heritage of its own on the American essay that merits its own section in nonfiction aisles across the country. That is, in a wide stretch of literary imaginations imbued with historical evidence, the book has made itself the founder of new royal blood in a way that reminds me of William the Conqueror’s  becoming the first Norman king of England by establishing a new royal bloodline in 1066. With a variety of topics, and the practicality of language, this book is a gem that holds the reader’s attention throughout the pages including the unforgettable cover featuring Fred and the author himself, which so fittingly and wittingly demonstrates the Element and Style of Essays of E.B. White. It’s a lovely read that warms your heart and piques your curiosity of the inner world of the writer whose thoughts and feelings chime the bells of ours own in one way or another because White is ageless in his writing and his writing timeless in his essays.

  • ‘Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of Reading Brain’, by Maryanne Wolf – review

    Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading BrainProust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    The act of reading is a noble achievement of mankind that has been developed through a succession of ages; it is a collective biological, cultural, and spiritual progress because human beings were never born to read according to Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid. Wolf guides the reader in the capacity of a learned cicerone to the ancient worlds of Sumer, Egypt, and Greece to show us the cultural history and the neurological development of reading through a succession of ages. Wolf’s provocative theory that we were never meant to be natural readers corresponds to Darwinian evolutionary theory in terms of its illuminating reconstruction of fundamental beliefs in the reading brain that we take for granted in this book about the magic and mechanism of reading.

    As the title of the book indicates, Wolf’s analysis of the history and development of reading encompasses the two dimensions in the reading process. – biological/neuronal as symbolized by the squid with tentacles of each different function vis-a-vis cognitive/spiritual by Marcel Proust, a French visionary writer who sublimated a reading experience into a sovereign miracle of transcendence into a spiritual realm. These two complementary dimensions in reading process are a testament to evolutionary traits of our reading brain and our innate spiritual essence that is our prerogative. Wolf starts with explaining the neurons and the brain structure responsible for decoding letters and grasping their meanings in coherent linguistic arrangements. We come to understand the context of reading by dint of retinotopic organization of the eyes and capabilities of neural circuits until the received information reaches the frontal lobe, the control room of all our cognitive activities. What seems to happen in a blink of eye is the grand beginning of a wondrous phenomena of human psyche from the moment of perceiving letters to passing over to the world of the book itself and mind of the writer. In fact, this reading brain is an epigenetic manifestation, which explains a modification in our genes can upend the whole functions of neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to rewire the connections between neurons) and neurogenesis (the ability of the brain to form a new neuron). The epigenetic revolution in the brain started with the invention of writing in the form of Sumerian cuneiform developed out of accounting necessities. Then came the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician, Linear B Script of Crete, the Greek, and the modern day global lingua franca English, and what’s more fantastic is that the evolution still continues in our time.

    The leitmotif of this book is to know the history and development of our reading brain, which are a remarkable collective human biological, cultural, and cognitive progress, and to preserve it against the prohibitive surge of the Internet on which we mindlessly surf the on-screen letters for instant information. Wolf’s concerns about the increasing dependency on the Internet for easy information relate to Socrates’ disagreement to the encouragement of reading at the time when the ancient Greece was in transition from the oral tradition into the written culture. It was not that Socrates was a Greek version of luddite against reading, but that he distrusted the effects of the written words to become internalized knowledge itself in the minds of readers because by reading, readers would absorb the letters without wholly understanding the gist of the meanings. The mutual misgivings of Wolf and Socrates are understandable, but I opine that they stem from the unfamiliarity of the new modes of learning at their incipient development. Just as Socrates were unfamiliar with the power of the written words as an unlocking key to the inner dialogue with the mind of the other, Wolf seems to magnify the manifest and latent dysfunctions of the Internet that can be used as an effective educational tool for spreading knowledge under sagacious guidance. For instance, nowadays volumes of classic literature can be retrieved from the Internet, let alone be downloaded as e-books on Kindle. Books are books in whatever form they are fashioned. A book is merited by its content, not by its design or form. Moreover, it’s up to the reader’s ability to merit the content of the book and to reach the most profound realm of spiritual experience, which Wolf seems to disregard.

    Perhaps, Wolf should have considered the case of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Roman Catholic priest who volunteered to die instead of a married Polish man in a Nazi concentration camp; he was all for the advantages of modern technological inventions, such as films and radios, to use them for the benefits of mankind under wise discretion, instead of worrying about the presumed dysfunctions. All of the human inventions are neutral, and whether or not they are harmful to our human enterprise boils down to our own wisdom and guidance of how to use them to our advantage.

    Written in a kindly tone of an altruistic scholar trying to explain the modus operandi of the reading brain and process as easily as possible, the book is not entirely intended for the uninitiated without  basic knowledge of neurological terms and the brain structure in the background information on the ancient civilizations. Also, Wolf’s frequent dichotomy between the Chinese language and the English language in attempt to differentiate the neuronal and cognitive functions in the mechanism of the reading brain is less effectual than her assumed efficacy, for the syntaxes of the two languages are not totally apples and oranges. It could have been more apt for Wolf to pinpoint a language whose grammatical structure is wholly different – say, Japanese or Korean belonging to the Ural-Altaic lingual family that also includes Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian – from English of the Indo-European lingual family.

    Notwithstanding the dissension as aforesaid, the book is an informative guide to the history of how our brain has been geared to read through the ages, which speaks to the wondrous capabilities of the brain and the infinite varieties of the human mind that is always in progress of evolution. All in all, the book transforms an act of reading to an act of magicking in the panoply of the biological, cognitive and spiritual dimensions that creates the wonders of connecting us to the minds of the others in solitude, uniting us with the souls of the book, and thus making us a citizen of the world. For this reason, we become what we read, and we are never the same ones we were before reading the books of our choice. And Wolf wants to make sure we know of this secret magic of reading. That is the beauty of this book.

  • ‘Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street’, by E.B. White – review

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    To come upon E.B White’s essay “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street” could not have been more opportune than at the time when I was in the middle of sorting out flotsam and jetsam of the paraphernalia that imperceptibly commandeered in my dilapidated apartment over the years. The logistics of moving from one place to another is, I think, really a Herculean task of clearing the famously filthy Augean stables; you have to decide which ones to discard or bring along with to your new habitat, which you would not find easier than you presumed. Then there comes the physical exertion of putting the stuff into boxes or thrash bags before movers come and have those lucky select items of yours shipped out to your new domicile. In peculiar synchronicity of literature, White’s musings on this task of dispensing the contents of  the apartment chimes the bells of my feelings and thoughts in tandem.

    I ditto to White’s witty comparison of a home to a “reservoir equipped with a check valve that permits influx but prevents outflux” on account of its being filled up with the detritus of the sundry things that have come to me and clung to me even though many of them escaped my radar of affection quite a long time ago. Maybe I don’t have the guts to throw it all away, but as those things now all of sudden show me a phantasmagorical display of the memories of how they came to me, it’s most likely that I will bring them with me to my new place.  I believe that whatever you have possessed for a long time or wherever you have lived for long, you have ingrained a vestige of your spirit, your inner part in them, willed or unwilled. It’s called “place memories,” imprinting part of you to the outside of your world. Thus you become part of that something, and that something part of you.  Come to think of it, wouldn’t these place memories also become ghosts themselves in haunted places?… Just a thought.

    The solitary process of upending the apartment would have been brutally lonely and cruelly vexing were it not for my fortuitous reading of the essay by Mr. Whites whose own moving experience strikes the chords with me. That’s the joy of reading: you get a fresh viewpoint of your own matters, making you feel you are not alone in it. With this uplifted encouragement, I shall complete the Aegean task of moving out before heading for my new sunshine destination in less than a month.

  • The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

    the-jungle-book-hero

    It was my first moment of spiritual Eureka mixed with awesomeness and bewilderment in terra incognita when I first read The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. It was a wonderful pictorial book painted with the scenes from the Disney’s classic animated film version. To the child’s eye, it was like a fiesta of vivid colors and vivacious characters set in motion in the heart of jungle I had never seen. What’s more, the animals were so humanlike and likable into the bargain that while reading the book, I almost forgot that they were beasts speaking their own language, which I was able to understand through the presence of Mowgli, who looked a lot like Tarzan in diminutive stature and size wearing only a loincloth and long dark hair. Mowgli’s knack of communicating with his beastly friends who were always there for him even compelled me to try talking to my domestic puppy Nena at that time by using a quaint conflation of the human alphabets and the doggie phonetics to a moderate success.

    Now I am pitchforked forward in 2018, but the childlike sensation of reading The Jungle Book still resonates strongly with me in defiance against the existential horrors of life that I deal with everyday. Amid the the detritus of daily chores and duties, I turned to Disney’s remake of The Jungle Book (2016), which I chose to watch on my Kindle Fire a few nights ago. At first blush, I had a certain indisposition to watch the highly-acclaimed film: although I am not altogether unreconstructed in terms of watching a film version of classic literature, I tend to shun adopted film versions of classic literature because of the gratuitous rendering of post modernist revisionist interpretations of the books they put on screen. But such misgiving was proved to be an unnecessary mental albatross.

    The Jungle Book is a cinematic eye candy to children and adults with its stunning visual impacts and a spectacular scale of the story set in the background of a deep jungle somewhere in India populated with a cast of magnificent characters representing human characteristics in different forms. To classify this film as an anthropomorphic children’s film is to miss the essence of Kipling’s allegorical allusion of our human nature to multifarious animal forms: Sloth, Integrity, Conscience, Humor, Greed, and Vengeance, all of which is manifested in contact with the nature itself whose essence is of neutrality. It is in this background of nature, which is neither paradise nor hell where our human nature becomes conspicuous in its very essence, a primeval form. The manifestation of such human traits is a fortiori overcome by the figure of Mowgli, a feral child brought by a benevolent wolf family. Mowgli is an emblematic of resilience, independence, and courage against the gravitas of trepidation, death, and despondency.

    9780385389839Given the authenticity of the storytelling aligned with the original context by Kipling and the performance of the characters studded with breathtaking scenes of nature so characteristic of Disney’s creative imaginativeness, it is a film worth of the spending your time on screen. It is a kind of film that stimulates your mind by inviting you to think about a meaning of our human life and existence and of our purpose of life. It will also thrill your heart with the adventures of Mowgli in the heart of the jungle and the stereoscopic views of the nature on screen created by a wonderful collaboration of our timeless human imaginations and 21st century feats of technological bona fides.

  • Passing over

    01a14x14ChildeHassamWomanReadingdetail

    Divine Pleasure of Reading travels
    To the world of imaginations
    Perceived by the eye that decodes
    Words thru a rapid firing of cells
    At the behest of the frontal lobe
    Mustering the neuronal minions
    To the seat of the noble spirit of
    Feelings breathing life into letters
    Linking to the sovereign experiences
    With the intellectual flexibility to the
    Fore to prepare your soul to pass over
    To the beyond and the far beyond thither
    In a brand new mind evolving evermore.

    • AUTHOR’S FOOTNOTE:  “Passing over” as used herein is interpreted as immersing yourself in the world of a book you are reading or you have read by identifying yourself with the characters and/or the authors. The term was coined by the late American Roman Catholic priest and theologian John S. Dunne (1929-2013). He referred it to a spiritual experience of entering into the psyches of others and building empathy with them in order to understand their woes, travails, and frailties. This simple but profound concept of spiritual togetherness is wonderfully cogently  applied to the principles and development of our reading brain as the apotheosis of why we read in Proust and the Squid by Dr. Maryanne Wolf. Hence this seemingly riddle-like poem of mine reflects a meaning of reading that depicts a reading process starting from the sensory perception of texts to decoding the perceived texts through reptinotophic organization in neuronal circuits, and to the understanding of the texts in our brain, the final destination to get ready for a journey into the minds of others. 

  • Cry Wolf for Huck, Mariner, and Mowgli

    Fake news is not an unique thing of our social media era. As there is nothing new under the sun, ludicrously fake news dealing with fatalities, especially of the famous, irked the nerves of the victims of such falsity. Subsequently, the selling of the newspaper like hot cakes was all over but the shouting. The logic of the fake news is a priori simple:  sensationalism has always been a tacitly cardinal principle of journalism to bring the grist to the mill for instantly skyrocketing readership with consummate profits in no time. It’s all linked to mob psychology, often without moral and ethical culpability when the media rashly trumpets a premature death of a living person.

    mark-twain-350Let’s go back to the time when the great American humorist and writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) regularly featured in the nationwide newspapers with his trademark scintillating remarks on just about any subject that piqued him; but none other than reading articles about his own deaths twice in the New York Times would have perturbed his otherwise usual sanguine nature. After the first ignominy, the writer told the Times that it was an exaggeration. But after the second occasion, when the Times suggested that he had been the victim of a yachting accident, he thought he had it enough for such media farce and remonstrated to the Times with a public complaint that he would make a thorough investigation of the fallacious report. To think that a respectful newspaper such as The New York Times published such fake news of the famous writer of the time twice is something of a bitter pill to swallow, but it also shows that reputation isn’t necessarily likened to integrity or even probity.

    Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge

    It’s also interesting to see how a falsely presumably dead person reacted to the news of his own demise in the newspaper. Now I am going to pitchfork my reader to the early Victorian period to introduce you Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a great English poet and literary critic who wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In 1846, a man’s body was found hanging from a tree in London’s Hyde Park and was identified as the poet himself by the very name stitched into the jacket, which had been stolen from the alive-and-kicking poet. Upon our asking him about the fallaciousness of his printed death, Coleridge stoically, wittingly, and leniently piped up: “It is a most extraordinary thing that he should have hanged himself, be the subject of an inquest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you.”

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    Would all those famous people cope with their prematurely published obituaries as the aforesaid with magnanimity? Surely, Humanly No. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who wrote the timelessly fascinating Jungle Book, was anything but human after the ignominy of reading his own obituary in the newspaper. Naturally, he resisted biting the dust and wrote the letter to the newspaper as thus: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.” How brilliantly he wielded his pen to vindicate such false killing of his life with intelligence and witticism! I wonder if any of our contemporaries responds or will ever respond to any fake news to this effect. Does this also mean that our reading brain that helps us to develop our cognitive abilities has been adversely affected by mindless decoding of the digital letters on the Internet as presented by Dr. Maryanne Wolf whose book Proust and the Squid I am reading at the moment?

    As the sudden surge of accusations of insensitivity to cultural, social, and personal traits is presently all the rage, it is helpful to retrospect to the precedents that might provide us with universal truths about life and how to respond to existential dealings in life that are not too much anachronistically different from ours in contemporary time. It is hardly likely that the social media will rein in their impulsive dissemination of sensational news on their platforms because it is a fortiori their modus operandi of generating profits as far as I know. And yet, we can learn from the way Twain, Coleridge, and Kipling reacted to their ludicrous false demises with intelligence, poise, and wit, let alone something about the sensational nature of journalism that is aimed at producing ever provocative – however false it is – news to the public.