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

Tag: literature

  • Who were the First People? – ‘The Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon’, – review

    The Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon: The History and Legacy of the First People to Migrate to EuropeThe Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon: The History and Legacy of the First People to Migrate to Europe by Charles River Editors

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    You don’t have to feel obligated to believe that apes are your distant relatives lost somewhere in the missing link because it is one of many theories based on educated guesses anyway.  In fact, few species in the natural world are more indubitably wonderful and incredibly mysterious than mankind that Shakespeare swiveled his head in wonderment and uttered, “What a piece of work man is!”  Accordingly, the origin of races has always piqued the curious, fanning the fiery imaginations of the human race and the wherefores of modern humankind in the discovery of the two kinds of the First People from Africa around 1.5 million years ago. The Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon: The History and Legacy of the First People to Migrate to Europe by Charles River Editions will present you these two unlikely yet compatible hominids in the panorama of human evolution that is unrolled as it narrates the sequentially arranged series of scenes from Africa to Europe and Asia.

    The book helps you to unwind your conditioned belief that the unkempt, clumsy Neanderthals were not the ancestors of strictly non-Europeans; In modern populations of Europe and certain regions of Asia, DNA derived from the Neanderthals makes up between 1% and 6% of human genomes. In fact, the Neanderthals, who evolved separately in Europe, are a member of the genus Homo like Homo sapiens and share approximately 99.7 of their DNA with modern humans. This also leads to a wonderous finding of the co-existence of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens migrating from Africa roughly between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, about the time when the former slowly began to extinct due to weak immune systems, incompatibility with the changing environments, and gradual domination of the latter who knew how to manipulate fire as an essential living tool. The interbreeding of these two different peoples was most successful if a Neanderthal man mated with a Homo sapiens woman because then the offspring became fertile, contrary to the sterile progeny of a Neanderthal woman and a Homo sapiens man.

    In addition to the Neanderthals as an intermediate evolutionary phase between Homo erectus and sapiens, you will come to know that Homo sapiens developed in Africa left the continent in the second wave of migration around 150,000 years ago and settled in Europe and Asia, thereby continuously living and occasionally mating with the Neanderthals, who were eventually displaced by more hunting savvy and physically advantageous Homo sapiens with their domesticated canine companions appearing around 36,000 years ago. The movie ‘Alpha’ will supplement the pictorial vividness of the history of the first anatomically modern human race with their first domesticated beast whose symbiotic relationship continues to this date.

    In all likeliness, this book is a comprehensive read on the pre-historic legacy of the first anatomically modern people and the other hominid whose genetic similarities still manifest their evolutionary linkage in parts of modern Euro-Asian populations. Written in plain language devoid of elaborately subjective interpretation of the theory of evolution, the book will entertain your spare time, and your mind will feed off the sensation of exotic kind of knowledge that will enhance the treasures in your cabinet of curiosities. On a note of persecuted minority creation science follower, this book will provide you with a much less outrageous theory of human evolution than the hardcore origin of the species that graphically strips off even a remotely anatomically human semblance of the supposedly very early human species in despair. That’s quite a catch, isn’t it?

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  • #ShakespeareSunday

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    “My gracious silence, hail!… Ah, my dear, Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, And mothers that lack sons.” (‘The Tragedy of Coriolanus’, A2 S1). “And all my mother came into my eyes, gave me up to tears.” (‘Henry V’, A4 S6). Thereafter, “my thoughts were like unbridled children, grown too headstrong for their mother.” (‘The History of Troilus and Cressida’, A3 S2)

     

    P.S.: This week’s theme is “Mothers and Children”, and the above is what I have found to be fit for the subject. In order to incorporate the quotations into one coherent paragraph of a drama, I have also slightly adapted the original texts to create a smooth flow of the narrative. 

     

  • cheers, cutie

    If you trust to your lucky stars

    For life to be easy on you

    Then look at small things

    To find pleasantness

    That will lead you to the stars

    Twinkling thru the leaves of the trees. 

     

    Author’s Note: I came across this tweet, which I found cute and pleasant to make my morning brighten with a cute smile. This adorable picture of a mouse is taken from Hermit Saints Triptyche by Hieronlmus Bosch, Circa 1495-1505. It is seen in the scene of “St. Anthony the Abbot in a nocturnal landscape with a burning village”. I thought this tweet, together with the painting itself, was an apposite subject to uplift the mind dipped in a moody spirit.

  • flight of life

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    She has seen the strange fear gain

    Advantage on the society of citizens

    And the panic win of the ghost campaign

    Drumming in masks, marching in battalions.

    When she has seen the start of the war,

    It has asked her once again to wonder

    About the cyclicity of history to reflect

    Upon the nature of humanity that retains

    Its dualism of good and evil ever to resist

    The heaven on earth for the glory of heroes.

    This thought is as a plague of the fear

    That has begun to deter me from a cheer.

    Author’s Note: All the locomotion of daily city life seems to have ceased: my regular Starbucks store is operated on a pick-up service only, the security guards at the lobby have gone, the streets are empty, and policemen in tandem are patrolling. The situations also extend to Ventura County, where I live. I tried not to write about the pandemic craze because of its very sheerness of the subject about which many writers are probably writing. But what I have seen for these past four days in my very eyes has fomented me to write about my impression and feelings. Hence this is it. 

     

  • the changeling

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    If she is pretty, she is never lonely because she is wanted and loved. This much is truth, no? Beauty works a miracle in the eyes of a dull man without imagination and of a cruel man without tears. Oscar Wilde, who always had something to say about beauty, affirmed that it’s better to be beautiful than to be good because beauty captures your attention. So, if you are bereft of beauty, then you must work very hard to get people to know who you are. Beauty is indeed a joy for all seasons, rain or shine, and is also a privilege to be loved first before loving.

    Judy always must be in love with someone who didn’t even know of her existence because the feeling of love would transform her from a plain Jane to a sultry Cleopatra as if a pixie had cast a glamour spell on her, pitying her denied sense of pleasure and detachment from a constellation of lovers. Judy, despite some flattering feedback on her appearance from onlookers, was always discontent with what she saw in the mirror that seemed to reflect her what she didn’t want or couldn’t see in her true self. She felt that her features were in want of spectacular beauty that would make herself loved, and her solitary disposition dipped in an exclusive flavor of selectiveness doubled the inaccessibility of the worldly sensuousness that even not so pretty or homely women were allowed as their feminine rights.

    Judy was sitting like a pillar of melancholy at the dinner table embarrassed by the ordinariness of her appearance in the presence of handsome Fred who made Judy feel like an awkward wallflower that nobody would pay attention to. You would say she obviously lacked self-confidence, but self-confidence is also built upon the kind of feedback you get from others. Judy was a firm believer of existentialism which says that experience exceeds essence and of Robert Cooley’s sociological theory of “Looking Glassed Self” that you become the way how others treat you. Or you might say what she lacked in appearance could be compensated by her intelligence, wits, or those other “inner” qualities, all of which she did possess. But let’s be honest, my dear readers. Beauty is the power and the wisdom of women regardless of leaps of times, distances of places, and differences of races. Any man- rich or poor, bigoted or liberal, young or old- loves a pretty woman and will act on his best behavior with kindness. Likewise, Judy, who was not drop-dead gorgeous, always kept herself guarded with a stern look at the sight of a man who might be unkind or curt. However, Fred was different. He was being very affable to her with a genuine smile. This time Judy wanted to claim her right of happiness and make her existence visible to her figure of love, so she secretly wished for a glamour spell to change herself from an insignificant wallflower to a beautiful rose that would make Fred crazy about her.

     

  • ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’, by Susanna Clarke – review

    Jonathan Strange & Mr NorrellJonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Magic and fairies are not the proprietary subjects of teenage novels or esoteric pagan reference books that are exclusive to a select few. They were part of a belief system kept by your distant and not-so-distant ancestors, learned or unlearned, which was a fountain of their norms and mores and acculturated even into a Christian organized religion. So much so that the world of supernatural was thus believed to be hidden in this world of terrestrial, enveloping the outer circle of the earth with a gossamer of ethereal air, thinning the boundary of corporeal and incorporeal. This system of belief has survived particularly in the British Isles, where Celtic mysticism has produced its fairy progenies and dispersed them beyond the watery boundaries of the Isles. Out of such British fairy progenies comes this wonderfully imaginative Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke whose mission is to prove the world that there are more things in earth and heaven than are dreamt of in your rational impulse.

    The story is a fascinating hybrid of history, adventure, and fantasy all entertainingly interwoven in the magical tapestry of literature. It’s also a great house of imaginativeness built upon Clarke’s erudition of the subjects ranging from the rise and decline of English magicians to the changing social customs and values, all the marks upon her mastery of storytelling that will make you steeped in the pages after pages as if you were enchanted by her alchemy of words. Her characters are extraordinary, but their personalities are not far from the ordinary, which endows a sense of verisimilitude upon the story and leads you to a seemingly obvious path to the maze of her fascinating tale. It is Clarke’s own magic that creates this wondrous make-believe world of magicians and fairies who are indeed very much alive in her mind’s theater to which she invites you to join her in the bewitching festival via witchcraft of literature.

    Her vivacious creativity doubled with her alchemy of words accounts for a thick volume of the handy little book, which is also extraordinary for a customary semblance of a paperback. This also shows Clarke’s ability to record supernatural events and things in the ordinary subjects with her dazzling narrative skills and ingenious composition of plots seamlessly connected to one another that would have been an infelicity of redundant multiplication of stories as a result of insufficient creative ammunition. Which is to say that this book will take you from the rut of your ordinary reality to the world beyond where you can summon a fairy to your service and make a wish, especially at this epochal moment of time when you need something delightful to read.

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