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

Tag: Nonfiction

  • ‘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.

  • Divine Serendipity

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    Of all the quotations about learning from one’s experience, none is more tangibly perspicacious than one from the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), who sagaciously said, “Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.” How rightly so when it reflects a posteriori empirical truth. In fact, nowhere is this more evident than in the case of our health, which is subject to illness due to causes preternatural however trivial or diminutive they may be. For being the experience of a painful ordeal, I say that illness has inculcated in me a profound reverence to the disciples of Hippocrates and medical efficaciousness. I could not have been more appreciative of the remarkable medical progresses we often take for granted, one of which is the benevolent agency of antibiotic that has been saving lives of people from infections since its discovery by Dr. Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) in September 1928.

    fleming-rm-af-swDr. Fleming’s finding of Penicillin was something of serendipity or more likely divine providence. Dr. Fleming, an erstwhile captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I, began researching antibacterial substances at St. Mary’s Hospital in London after witnessing so many deaths of soldiers due to rampant pervasiveness of infections even though the wounds were not seriously intractable. Then one day in August 1928, Dr. Fleming left his bacteria cultures stacked up on a bench before embarking on his family holiday. On his return in September, he found a mould growing in one of his sample cultures, destroying the bacteria. What’s more, the mould produced a substance that destroyed the bacteria responsible for scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and meningitis. Dr. Fleming first named it “mould juices” in 1940. Then in 1940, two medical researchers from University of Oxford named Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Florey succeeded in mass-producing penicillin. The concerted collaboration of the three trailblazers of the first modern antibiotic awarded them with the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1945. Indeed, the laborers were worthy of the rewards.

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    The discovery and development of Penicillin is akin to Prometheus’s stealing of divine fire to mankind.  By the end of 1940, more than 250,000 patients a month were treated with the antibiotic for a variety of infections that had meant a death sentence for thousand years, ranging from the time immemorial to the medieval when a scourge of the Black Death swept away thousands of lives to even the simple cases of abscess, especially prevalent in the 17th century London where more than 200 people died therefrom, and to the early 20th century case of Alexander of Greece who contracted sepsis from the bite wound by his pet monkey while trying to pacify a fight between his dog and the monkey and died shortly after from the infection. Furthermore, the use of  antibiotic enabled doctors to perform more invasive –i.e., opening a surface of skin and infiltrating into the inner layer of skin with surgical tools – without having to worry about the high risk of infection.

    To think that I could have been in the canon of the dead! Dr. Fleming’s breakthrough discovery of penicillin that has heralded all other subsequent medical and medicinal munificent largesses contributing to the human race imbues me with exultation at the blessing of having born in this post-penicillin era when I don’t have to have occasional bloodletting for frequent dizzy spells, to have my tooth crudely pulled out without Novocain by a barber, or to endure the gruesome pain of going through a surgery without anesthesia. On a very rare moment of personal note, I wonder if my existence in this era I am living is whether or not truly divine providence. If so, then let it be, and I am all the more certainly happy that I began to live once again in this post-antibiotic era.

     

  • The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

    The Glass CastleThe Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Dickensian world of poverty is so abominably tenebrous that we tend to think of it simply as an anachronistic, if not antediluvian, work of fiction apropos of a bygone Victorian era, without translating its elemental essence of nobleness of human spirit that arises from predicaments into our own zeitgeist. The fictitious characters of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip are the embodiment of such resilience, phoenix-like spirits enduring sordid conditions that life could impose upon us to the extent possible. Spinoza, the Dutch thinker and watchmaker, once said that it is Amor fati, love of fate, by which man’s inner strength could raise him above his outward fate. In fact, Nietzsche centuries after corroborated by saying: “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.” Given the above axioms, what if someone in our contemporary time a fortiori lives to tell such victory of human spirit? That was the reason that I chose The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. All of the aforesaid noble triumph of human spirit over existential horrors of life is substantively and stoically recorded in this compelling living memoir with all her spirit, with all her intelligence, and with all her heart.

    The story starts as Walls invites us to board her memory train and travel back in times until we return to where we depart along the long and winding railroads of her windy but beloved past. We meet her charismatic, intelligent father whose engineering feats are passed in smolder by his ever independent, anti-establishment, recalcitrant spirit a fortiori emboldened by a spirit of Dionysian portion. The artistically inclined mother is all liberality: She is a devout Catholic – although far from being sanctimonious – and has a heart of gold, save a practical sense of the world. Then there are one brother and two sisters, all of whom are highly intelligent and well-behaved thanks to the moral upbringing by their parents. The parents do not have the gumption to support their children, let alone themselves in terms of economic security, which was the cause of the existential ills of the family, pushing Walls into a position of  a de facto breadwinner of the family.

    What is most profoundly august about Walls through living amid the straits of constant economic insecurity, frequent threats of family separation by social agencies, and dangers of physical harassments was her strong sense of responsibility for her life and for her family that enabled her to endure the existential predicaments. Many people mired in such situations might have develop disputatious streaks of rebellion against everything ascribed to them. However, Walls and her siblings took different attitudinal values to their existential dilemmas: they held on to a sense of purpose and a tenacious grasp on togetherness nurtured by their yearning to achieve a higher aim in life. In fact, such attitude toward life corresponds to one of the tenets of Logotheraphy: in order to find a meaning of life however trivial or nihilistic it many seem, taking a different, constructive stance on what is ascribed helps us to rise above biological, social, and cultural inhibitions during a difficult times because we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to. Which also brings us back to Spinoza’s Amor fati axiom: a different approach to our suffering is sublimated into supremeaning of life in travails by believing in its meaning to every situation with will to live a meaningful life, which then ceases to be a suffering itself.

    The literary merit of this memoir lies in its absence of unbridled namby-pamby outpourings of emotions in the narrative with a certain air of stoicism. Ironically, Walls’s frank, touchy-willy, matter-of-fact manner of discoursing her story belies her overwhelmingly heartrending heartaches, disappointments, and dismay smothered under factual descriptions of her past that renders the authority of truth and the power of reality without hindrance of prohibitive emotions that often results in fabrication. In her literary confession, Wall achieves catharsis by putting what was in her mind on pages after pages, pushing her pen through in expense of her will to come to terms with her parents, let alone herself, producing forgiveness of her parents’ wrongdoings and acceptance of their frailties in a package of love and tenderness.

    All in all, Walls’ s message to her reader is clear: you can’t choose your fate, such as a family, but you can choose what to make out of what you are given. In one way or another, the story itself chimes the bells of emotions and thoughts of many of us: the problems and issues that the Walls had and the ones we have or had are not oranges and apples through our voyages of life. Walls shows us that notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of life, self-reliance, resilience, and determination helps us to sail through with cheerfulness and humor as handmaids to courage. This honest-to-goodness tale of a woman rising above the planes of her inhibitions speaks straightly to our hearts. This book is a one-of-kind testament to its veracity and quality that upon reading this book, you will feel as if you knew Walls telling a story with a sense of elemental kinship which you can relate to. Moreover, this bona fide memori gives us a sense of relief that no family is perfectly blissful, which resonates with Tolstoy’s view of families as inscribed on the first page of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

     

  • Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

    Notes from a Small IslandNotes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    It has been twenty years since Bill Bryson, a writer originally hailing from a small town in Iowa, fell in love with Great Britain where people are delighted in small pleasures, call strangers “Love,” and orderly wait on lines in public without peevishness. So much so that he has even married one. Now it is high time that Bryson returns to the States along the lines of Odyssey, who returned home in Ithaca twenty years after the decade-long Trojan War and another decade of travails. In retrospection of the memories collected on his beloved adopted homeland, Bryson decides to take a valedictory jaunt around the island small but big enough to nurture him with a wealth of culture and a bounty of humanity. And he does it on public transportation and by hiking equipped with his trademark razor-sharp wits, intractably keen intelligence, and his usual touchy-feely way of observing people and things that either irk or pique him. All of it comes to fruition in this highly amusing and genially forthright travel memoir.

    You will be surprised to find out that the British think that the cereals are their invention. You will be overawed by the ubiquitous hedgegrows dated back to Anglo-Saxon times embroidering on the British landscape. Bryson will also take us for a ride in a London cab driven by an affably jocular cabbie who has to pass the Knowledge Test to memorize almost everywhere in the City of London. But London is not his demarcation of traveling. Bryson will further come along with you to Bournemouth, Exeter, Liverpool, which is his favorite city, Manchester, and even up north to Scotland all by train or coach, and by walking. With his truculent feistiness, irrepressible inquisitiveness, and scintillating sense of humor fabulously ingrained in his choice of the apropos words and jovial descriptions devoid of malice, Bryson is a cool cicerone, and your excursion will never be a bore.

    The book seems to be primarily aimed for British readers who might be curious about what a foreigner would think of them and their country as a whole. In that regard, Bryson’s words are predominately British in the sense that the words and expressions he uses in the narrative are familiar to the British. For example, “bank holidays,” “coach,” “lorry,” or “Sainsbury’s” are peculiar to the British ways of life. But this kind of cultural barrier is kindly tackled by Bryson by providing you with a glossary of the British terms at the end of the book.

    I have read other books by Bryson because of the same reason that induced me to select this book: his story-telling like narration is very appealing to me with his proverbial witticism smeared in every word he employs. He may appear to be a grumpy American man, but he has a heart to feel and see milk of human kindness in every quotidian thing or nondescript person by using the most appropriate words in wonderfully lucid expressions. There is a charm in his writing that will make you an admirer of his writings, and this book is no exception. It is Bryson’s long love letter to the small island he has fallen for head over heels with sincerity sealed with kisses and memories.

  • Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

    Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls WilderPrairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    A really good biography by a really good writer about someone fascinating reads like a good novel full of intriguing characters, events, and places. In the peculiar alchemy of literature, such biography creates a literary chiaroscuro, an iridescent interplay of light and shade alloyed in the alchemy of words laced with an internal rhythm of the words that delightfully flavors otherwise flat discourse of nonfiction. On top of this magical incantation, all-around erudition of a writer cognizant of the historical and social contexts armed with exhaustive scrutiny into the subject is the Rosetta stone that consummates the performance by contextualizing the subject’s motivation, actions, and vicissitudes of life that is all very much like a plot. In this regard, Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires about Laura Ingalls Wilder, a prodigious American literary heroine enshrined in the great American literary pantheon, fits into such definition with gusto.

    I first came across this book from an article about The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a significant achievement award in Children’s literature, from The Los Angeles Times a few months ago. The award changed the name into “The Children’s Literature Legacy Award” because Wilder’s allegedly stereotypical attitudes toward people of color were considered to be not in harmony with today’s social core values of inclusiveness, integrity, respect, and responsiveness to the epochal changes. In defense of Wilder’s works, Fraser argued that her works were products of her life and that the reception of her books should be more complicated than we might hastily believe based upon the cursory reading of her books as social or historical contexts. It was this very argument that piqued my curiosity about Wilder and her biographer Fraser. As someone who always inclines to someone whose views and attitudes are dauntlessly unreconstructed and intellectually provocative, I wanted to know more about the accused and her public defender. Hence, Prairie Fires is a testament to its quality that sheds light on the myths and misconceptions on the literary world of Wilder and her fascinating self.

    To many of us, Wilder is most well known by A Little House on Prairie, also translated into television firmament by Michael Landon in many a language, making it a kind of household name in everyday life. I remember watching it with the unforgettable leitmotif music that rendered the ambience of a story of a pioneer family with none other than faith, charity, hope, and themselves on the Great Plains. Notwithstanding a streak of fictionality laced with idyllic romanticism portrayed in the TV show version, it was this very ambience Wilder cherished the most and delineated in words despite her seemingly perpetual struggle against impoverishment in the epochal changes of economic climates of her time. She was something of a pioneer troubadour who sang the chaste and rustic beauty of the wild prairie as well as the acuteness, coarseness, and strength of a pioneer spirit found in her beloved father. Through a series of poverty after poverty, struggle against struggle, and hope against hope on the life of the open prairie, Wilder was already in training to become a great writer.

    It is one of Fraser’s literary finesses that she alludes to “prairie fires” as a metaphorical means for illustrating Wilder’s queasy and passionate character that ultimately spurred her on to writing professionally at a relatively late age in her life. Wilder’s circumstances pushed her into a reluctant lifetime position of a breadwinner and caretaker, making herself to the hostage of Fortune. Her stoic, matter-of-fact manner belied overwhelming fear, dismay, disappointment, and grief as a result of taking a vow of self-denial against her feisty feminine self. All of her aborted dreams and hopes and projections smothered under daily duties that life demanded by a succession of misfortune and became her pant-up fury that metastasized into the fiery images of prairie fires, real or phantasmal.

    Fraser is also excellent in providing us with very intriguing information on Wilder’s inseparable relationship with her writer daughter Rose, who is also believed to influence her mother to write professionally. Rose was a very complicated woman whose literary talent seemed to be prevented from blossoming into full fruition on pedestals by her endless windy rage and self-doubt. She loved her mother and father dearly for sure because whatever money she had earned from writing was a munificent largess to them in the forms of a house and other apparatuses. Moreover, it was Rose who induced Wilder to write about her dramatic life that ultimately resulted in A Little House on Prairie. And yet Rose was also always out of reach of her beloved parents. She loved independence, living in the New York City and Europe with a penchant for cultural sophistication and extravagance, measuring herself against the burgeoning careers of her peers. But even her foibles are pathetic and sympathetic in Fraser’s punctilious portrait of Rose colored by the language she employs from her arsenal of words and narrative skills that guard Rose from misconceptions.

    The paramount achievement of Fraser in this biography is her flawlessly lucid contextualization of Wilder’s philosophy of life, her viewpoints society, and most importantly, her backgrounds of the oeuvres in the context of regarding the epochal social and historical changes of her time, all of which are gleaned from her comprehensive research into the relevant subjects and her impressive erudition fascinatingly laced with her acute feminine sensitivity in the magical play of the words. In fact, her knowledge on the 19th and early 20th centuries are so impressively and naturally incorporated into the discourse of Wilder’s story that you come to an understanding of Wilder like never before and appreciate her oeuvres in the canon of American Classics by exonerating  the accused from being a jingoistic provincial “white” writer. Rather than pontificating the blind idolization of Wilder, Fraser serenely but efficaciously narrates the facts of the controversial author and her meritorious achievements both in life and literature in an expense of will, belief, and truth, producing a mesmerizing biography of a riveting character in literary Americana.

    The book does succeed in shedding light on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder by recasting this famous American literary figure in a candid way which none other than Fraser could have possibly done on the topic with her magistral knowledge of Wilder armed to the teeth with thoroughly exacting research on historical and social resources with utmost solicitous attitude and sweet tenderness. For this very reason, Wilder’s books should read as a classics not as a historical textbook of the bygone era whose zeitgeist irks the populace of this modern time. Literature is an art, and therefore its value lies in Art for art’s sake. We use the real to perfect the ideal, and the real encompasses anything – including our foibles and idiosyncrasies – we deem worth sublimating into beauty, which is what art is all about by appealing to our senses, the pleasure of reading something beautifully profound, evocative, and enduring. In this regard, Wilder was and is an artist making the beauty of life out of the reality of life. All this makes this book an enjoyable and illuminating read with Fraser’s irrefutably magical alchemy of words and consummate storytelling skill devoid of expression of infelicity and authoritativeness. This is a canonical biography of a great American writer by another fascinating writer who deserves of the applauding to the very echo.

  • Fiddlesticks! – on Smartphones

    RE: 8/20/2018 edition of The Los Angeles Times on “Your smartphone is a teddy bear”

    We are swimming in a dazzling sea of modern technological conveniences, and we are drowning in it, whether we are against it or not. We have come a long way since the inventions of a talking telegraph (a telephone), an electronic toaster, a walkman, and all other apparatuses that have become inseparable from us, to arrive here in the 21st century where we seldom begin and finish our days without gazing into (or being glued into) monitors with our hands on keyboards. Surely, it’s a marvelous human cultural progress, a fantastic collective enterprise of the human minds for betterment. Hip, hip, Hooray for the magnum opuses.

    Apart from the marvels of our ingenious inventions that have made our lives a bit more bearable to fulfill our daily tasks, how about our non-technological aspects of life then? Do we really think that smartphones provision us with the bells and whistles of our equilibrium? At least two researchers at UC Irvine declare the resounding “Yes.” According to their recent study of psychological impacts of smartphones on our behavioral tendencies, the high-tech gizmo guarantees a feeling of security by saving us from social faux-pas in awkward situations. In fact, they “conclude” that smartphones function as efficacious stress relievers.

    John Hunter and Susan Pressman are the names of such revelation, and they want to debunk the infamy of a smartphone as a mindless gizmo used for killing away our otherwise productive moments. They conducted an experiment that involved 3 experimental groups of those who had (1) the phones but were not permitted to use them; (2) the phones and were permitted to use them; and (3) no phones among a control group of UC students. The results were all over but the shouting: that those with the phones displayed less degree of anxiousness and anxiety than those who had none when they were purposefully estranged from the control group. Conversely, those without the phones exhibited the highest level of the stress hormone alpha anylase in the saliva. Besides, those with the phone but were not allowed to use them showed the least level of the stress hormone. Consequently, the researchers raved about these results, rhapsodizing about the positive effects of a smartphone on our psyche.

    Neither a luddite nor an anachronist adhering to a primeval way of living, I am all for the munificent technological largess of our time with open arms because I also, inevitably, use it myself in my daily life. But the researchers’ triumphant conclusion of their experiment seems rather precarious and cursory in relation to the following speculations: (1) What were the age groups of their experimental groups? Did the researchers target a specific age group? (2) What were the education and social levels of the experimental groups?; (3) were there any variables in the experimental groups and the control group?; and (4) were the researchers by any chance funded by technologically-based companies?  These are the questions that my heart suspects more than my eye can see.

    The image of a devil’s advocate is what I am donning on this topic, but this article pushed me into the position on account of rather superficial results of the experiment devoid of the information on the aforesaid speculations. Also, looking at people wallowing themselves in small smartphones everywhere, especially on the subway and the bus, other than books or kindles, renders an apocalyptic image of the world nearing the doomsday or a scene of horror creatures that turn into zombies every night. “Magnas civitas, Magnas solitude,” Francis Bacon once lamented a great feeling of isolation in a great city. That says it, I should think so. Our sense of belonging and security is not bound by a possession of smartphones, nor does it replace your sweet teddy bears.