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

Tag: hisotry

  • On A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

    On returning to the quiet joy of reading, one discovers that some stories are not only theirs but yours too. Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story was one of those stories—hers and mine.

    It was one of the days I visited my mom at the convalescent hospital for the elderly when I started reading this story, sitting by her bedside. Call it providence if you are religious or coincidence otherwise, but I wasn’t expecting it to become my story as well about my mom, who had been hospitalized since her stroke in January of this year. It was as though Ernaux was speaking to me as a daughter to daughter about her mom and mine, collapsing time and place and the cultural and social differences between us. No wonder I wanted to finish reading it at one sitting.

    This book is not of a certain literary genre. To call it a biography of her childhood and her mom’s influence on her misses the point of why it took her a year to finish the book. It’s much more than that. The absence of her mom made the author realize her mom’s place in her memory. Her mother was the first witness to Ernaux entering the world naked, and later, to her becoming the woman she is. It’s both a biological and an existential view of the author’s raison d’être. That there is no longer anyone on the other side of the first relationship, which has ended forever. It aches. It lingers. It evanesces. And before all of this will vanish into the ether, Ernaux lives to tell about the presence that was so familiar with her being that not seeing, hearing, and feeling it is painful to bear without letting it take the form of writing because writing is personal yet public, pensive but assertive, and quiet but powerful.

    I can understand the kind of ache the author felt after her mother’s death. Whether you loved her or not, you would never see her in life again. She may live in your vision of the past, but her person as a presence does not exist in this world. And that realization of forever disappearance would throw you into the abyss, stifled, blinded, and muffled—by the ineffable sorrow mixed with mystical longing.

    I think about my mom and me. What if she leaves this world soon—tomorrow, the day after, or anytime soon? Oftentimes, I wake up with indescribable terror at the thought that soon I will lose her to eternity if I breathe, like a panic attack. And it dawns on me that it is this feeling of detachment from the relationship, as the bond between mom and daughter is severed forever.

  • glittery wild west

    I have recently read an article about California Gold Rush from my subscribed British history magazine with particular interest as it was somehow relatable to my own experience of being a recent single pioneer woman from the East to the West with new prospects for the future. Although the article was informative in unpicking the social manifest and latent dysfunctions of Gold Rush, there were also new and innovative modes of business as spearheaded by adventurously daring individuals who paved the way to the prosperity of the Wild West in years to come. 

    Wells, Fargo & Company, founded by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, started and prospered the West’s all-purpose business, consisting of transportation, security, and communication agents, buying gold from prospectors and selling them paper bank drafts and delivering the valuables and mail guarded by a hired detective against outlaws. Pony Express, founded by William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell, was the first express courier service in the U.S., delivering mail from California to New York in fifteen (15) days by dedicated excellent employees on horseback day and night until the transcontinental telegraph was established. And there’s the famed Levi Strauss, the founder of the iconic Strauss & Co., who made the first blue jeans for miners, cowboys, etc. 

    California Gold Rush prompted a huge spike in the demand for changes in various sectors of the American society, which was an inevitable calling of the ethos, Manifest Destiny, and it also begot some of the most interesting and impressive enterprising spirits whose establishments are still among us and whose names are made into the history of the U.S. 

  • 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.