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

Tag: literature

  • 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.

  • Rainmaker

    The wandering
    Rainmaker
    A stranger
    To her power
    Invokes ever
    A benevolent rain
    Of inspirations
    On an arid terrain
    Of imaginations
    That are blocked
    In the Acheronian
    Wilderness barren
    Of wordlessness.

  • A band of hope

    Step by step
    Side by side
    Left and right
    Near and far

    One mind more
    One world more

    A band of hearts
    Marches together
    In parades poised
    Honoring Humanity
    Along Life Route
    Into Avenue of Hope.

  • Labor and Laborer

    People living upstairs
    With the power of means
    To let you live or die
    De facto or de jure
    Have their sovereign parlance
    A sign of class consciousness
    That goes by saying thus:
    “No offense. It’s just personal.
    For work is work, and that’s that,”
    As if it were a recitation
    Of indemnifying themselves
    From injuring the other’s soul
    And absolving them of the offense
    They have committed willingly.

    People living downstairs
    With the need for means
    To live and not die
    Physically and mentally
    Have their sovereign credos
    A sign of universal humanness
    That bellows from within thus:
    “No offense? It’s personal,
    For I am not mechanical
    Without sense and reason.
    What is it, then, addressing me?
    Is it nothing but a talking head?”
    Such is an echo from the valley
    Of the injured soul, weeping inside
    Forcing to remind the values of stoicism
    That works not for everyone’s soul.

    Masters of slaves, transcendent of time
    Slaves of masters, regardless of race
    In different costumes, in changing scenery
    Have kept their footings in their places
    According to lots assigned by Wheel of Fortune;
    Some say luck ensues from efforts and geniuses,
    And many believe it so as though to numb the pains
    From the ills of society, the reality at face value.


    Nevertheless, work is personal in the guise
    Of the professional that which even Adam Smith
    The father of the Wealth of Nations affirmed
    In the selfish human ego distilled in work;
    “Nothing is personal” is, therefore, a fallacy
    A res ipsa loquitur of illogical defense
    Of offense on the hangers-on by the upper hands
    Although they may refuse to agree with me
    In the security of their infallible power to decide
    The livelihood of those in need of their mercy.

  • Circuitous

    The witching hour
    Like a raven’s hair
    The moon’s gone
    Few stars shone
    The heart’s beating
    The body’s shaking
    Pan’s flute fills fear
    Hecate’s prime hour
    A traveler’s lost in it
    Wandering in circuit
    Of roaming, wandering
    neverending.

  • Dark Water (2005) – film review

    Here’s a young mother with a five-year-old daughter freshly divorced from her husband who thinks she’s delusional, paranoid even, and wants to keep sole custody of their daughter. The daughter is everything she has reason to live, a life that has been so hard to endure with an indelible traumatic childhood. Yet, because she sees herself in her daughter needing constant unconditional love, which she was not allowed to have, she will do anything to protect her from the harsh reality of life, even from the supernatural peril of the beyond reality.

    So the story of Dark Water (2005) narrates Dahlia, a young divorcee trying to take full custody of her daughter Ceci away from her assiduously hostile husband. Instead, he embarks on a legal battle to claim sole possession of Ceci because of Dahlia’s unstable mental state. Dahlia, a once copy editor from Seattle, takes a low-paying administrative position at a Manhattan Radiology office for livelihood in a delipidated apartment in Roosevelt Island with Ceci. The semblance of the apartment is the working-class version of Rosemary’s apartment. Dark water is leaking everywhere: from the elevator to their bedroom ceiling, and the laundry room, which is a prelude to the finding of a tank on the rooftop where the traumatic ends of a certain young Russian girl abandoned, unloved finds her and her memories. Or is it Dahlia’s phantasmal delusion of confronting her own child self in her painkiller-induced pill to alleviate the cruel migraine caused by the yoke of woes?

    Dark Water is an American adaptation of the original Japanese film Dark Water (2002) by Koji Suzuki, the famous writer of the Ring trilogy, excellently translated to an American audience who will find broad universal themes of human nature, psychology, and behavior. You don’t have to have perfect childhood fed on parental love to be a loving parent. Of course, unhappy childhood will affect the development of one’s character and behavior pattern more or less, but it all boils down to one’s nature to be loved and be loving. Dahlia wants to counteract the demon of the past, which still grabs her with its tenacious tentacle of recurring nightmares and murderous migraine, by being constantly -and eternally – loving and kind to Ceci despite her unhealed scars left in her child self. Perhaps that is why her name is Dahlia, whose flower word is loyalty, dignity, courage, and support due to its withstanding of harsh conditions.

    Jennifer Connelly, playing Dahlia, is not only beautiful but also talented in a way that few actresses on screen possess in our time. Her presence in scenes is unique in that her character is downright realistic yet oddly out of the world in a riveting way, as exhibited in this film. No wonder the late film critic Roger Ebert admired her for the same reason. With her exceptional performance and the storytelling that grips the eyes and ears of the beholder, Dark Water is a worthy film for those who delight in supernatural horror without blood and screams.