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

Tag: reading

  • Prompt 32

    If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

    I would like to meet Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mary Seacole, and Francis Barber, whose backgrounds and personal aspects interest me not as celebrities but as persons from my knowledge of their extraordinary lives birthing from the ordinary milieu.

    1. Jane Austen – Today, Austen is one of the most revered writers of world literature worldwide. But her novels were not regarded as a lofty tome of literature in terms of academic value in her days. Austen was not of blue stockings, but a woman attending the household cares that feminists call drudgery. She took care of her elderly father, and writing was a means of her creative outlet to express herself. Also, she was weak at spelling, just as Leo Tolstoy was. (What a relief that perfect grammarians are not necessarily great authors!) She was also unmarried, so she and I would have many things to discuss as a single woman taking care of her family with a love of writing.

    2. George Eliot – a great intellectual writer, Eliot used to churn butter out of milking the cows on her family farm. But her family denied it because it would mar her image of an intellectual as if doing chores were considered unfit for a woman of her literary status. She was a strong-minded, independent-willed woman with the power of words to compensate for her lack of physical beauty.

    3. Mary Seacole – I want to ask her how she upheld her confidence and determination to care for the wounded soldiers during the Crimean War after Florence Nightingale rejected her application to volunteer for her Nurse Corps. Her love of humanity and keen observation of societal norms and behaviors have impressed me, and I want to ask her for a word of advice.

    4. Francis Barber – Born into slavery in Jamaica, Barber was a loyal servant of English essayist and author of A Dictionary of the English Language, who took him under his protection against racial injustice and mistreatment. Johnson even bequeathed him a small fortune after his death, so Barber set up his small business and started a family with an English woman. His descendants still live in Lichfield, England. I want to meet him and ask him about what Johnson was really like – as it is the best way to know the character of one’s boss – and how his life became after the death of his master in the time when the blacks on the British Isles were conspicuously existent in small numbers. Was he treated like his counterpart in the U.S.?

    It would be best never to meet your heroes or idols in real life because you will be disappointed with their actual characters. But my list of people will not be a disappointment because they were not from the highest estate of the ether and seem approachable and relatable. Or so I should think.

  • Letters of Note: Cats by Shaun Usher

    Letters of Note: Cats is an adoringly compiled individual narrative about their cats in an epistolary form by famous people, ranging from Nikola Testa, the Romanian prodigy of the electrical invention, to the unforgettable actress of the 20th century Elizabeth Taylor, and so on whose affection for their feline babies is universally communicable across time and space.

    Of all those words from the hearts, Elizabeth Taylor’s letter to her dear cat, who went missing after being moved to a new Californian home from their Welsh home, profoundly touches my heart. Those loves, those memories, those longings all flow from artless words written in tears and project how much she misses her flurry child without florid elaboration. Her cat is not just a “pet” but a “companion” who has seen her in the saddest moment under the darkest sky without make-up. Reading her letter, I felt like I knew the actress personally, as she shared her insecurity without such a dear friend who used to stay by her side. How would I live without my two cats by my side? I would have written a similar letter to Toro and Camille.

    The creator of this lovely anthology of letters, Shaun Usher, never seems to cease his creativity, zeal, and humanity after his first publication of Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience in 2013, resulting in a decade-long successful Letters series. I have seen musicians exhausted with their creative flairs for making new albums, either by adhering to their prior hit album music style or morphing into a different avant-garde-styled musical experiment, but not Shaun Usher, whose fountain of creativity is welled from faith in humaneness universal in all humankind. It is not to lionize or canonize Usher for the Letters series, nor to idolize him mindlessly in the heat of instant adulation as a gullible reader, whom Edgar Allen Poe might have frowned upon, but as a reader of the unique third eye that can see a writer’s true colors. So, if you love cats with hearts and like to read and write letters – okay, I will also include emails for MZ generation readers – reading Letters of Cats will be a pleasure.

  • Prompt 16

    What’s something most people don’t understand?

    Oscar Wilde admired beauty. So much so that he proudly proclaimed that he chose his friends for their good looks, his acquaintances for their characters, and his enemies for their intellect. But at least he’s honest about it, vocalizing what most people do when judging one another based on what the eyes, not the minds, see for the instant recognition of optical illusion morphed into reality.

    Our society favors gregarious extroverts, not reticent introverts nestled in the shade of anonymity, not because they are antisocial but simply because that’s how they are. Not everyone is uniformly outgoing. Nobody is impossibly happy go lucky. I always find it scary that having a happy face all the time is a specialty of a psychopath in disguise. But people do not usually warm to those who are lonely, quiet, or not so attractive, instead pinning them down as anti-social, incompetent, or negative to stay away from them. It amazes me to see people gossip about or ostracize unpopular, reticent people the way people falsely accused innocent women of practicing witchcraft in the past because they were in their selves. Or are they still? Come to think of it; if I had been born during the days of heightened witch-hunting, I would have been burned at the stake.

    I feel that people do not like to talk to me because I don’t have the face of Helen of Troy to launch a thousand ships or do not open up a conversation first, or because of my race being Asian, a race stereotyped as being docile, if not submissive, to voice out what’s kept inside. Notwithstanding the account above, I do not want to force myself to become someone I am not, cannot, and will not because, as Wilde pinpointed, I am myself since others are already taken. I am not a negative person who always accounts for a litany of woes. Instead, I can see people’s ills in the swing of things around me and how they affect me. If discussing the malaise of what’s happening in my life when I need a company to share grief in halves, I call it cruelly erroneous and unjust.

  • Prompt 9

    What activities do you lose yourself in?

    Although I am not an addict, I lose myself in online shopping for clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics. Thanks to the advent of the Internet, now I don’t have to go to an actual store to buy the stuff of my interest without being self-conscious of spending too long a time debating what to purchase or what to give up for the sake of a rental fee.

    My usual online shopping stores are Amazon, Macy’s, and Sephora. Recently, I have been browsing Pandora for my newly budded interest in their signature DIY charmed bracelet. But since the charms are ridiculously overpriced, I buy the imitation charms from Amazon. Macy’s online platform is paramount in a gorgeous panoply of women’s clothing and cosmetic items that usually come with lovey freebies.

    Oftentimes, I wonder if my shopping habit is a symtom of mental defect, say Affection Deficiency Syndrom, Post-adolecent Pent-up Trauma, or Insatiable Desire for Beauty. Perhaps I am all above or none, but the desire to obtain pretty things is only a instinct for humans, especially women. After all, what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, as Osacar Wilde said.

  • Prompt 7

    Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?

    When I look at my two cats, Toro and Nero, I am reminded that pets reflect the personality of their owners. My cats and I have lots of things in common, and I was also born in the year of the tiger, which makes me a little more than kin to the feline family.

    My cats and I are creatures of habit, not readily adept at familiarizing ourselves with changes in the environment. We like the comfort of tranquility, the solace of romantic solitude, and the occasional entertainment of visual and auditory excitement, such as watching movies and listening to music. We are so used to routine activities at home that an iota of deviation feels like the earth moving under our feet. But that doesn’t mean we are peevish curmudgeons sulking and skulking in the background of joy and laughter. We do things on our own, keeping things to ourselves, yet we need each other when we are alone. For example, when I feel down and out, my cats come next to me, especially in bed, and console me with their soft furry, puffy cheeks against mine with purring, which
    also puts me into a sound slumber soon. It’s incredible to realize that my cats know how I feel.

    They say when you love someone, you become one. Or am I already onne?

  • Prompt 6

    Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

    Hello Stephanie,

    You used to wonder what and where you would arrive in each age of life: at 13 you would count the years when you became 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on. Then all of sudden, you are pitchfolked forward, leaping two bridges of 20th and 21st centuries. Still, it all seems like yesterday, and you never changed at heart.

    Who would have known that you will adopt cats and love them to the bargain? Who would have guessed your letters to the editor of your favorite British history magazine have been printed several times? And who would have doubted that your age could not wither you away, nor custom would stale your resistant spirit and hunger for knowledge? 100 years of time in evolutionary scale does sound antiquated or anachronistic, but in truth it amounts to a millionsecond on our 24 biological clock, an amount so infinitesimal that such difference of time is ludicriously insignificant. So don’t sigh but sing that you just hit the centanarian chart. Awesome.

    FRancis Bacon assured us that we don’t have to be anxious about how we should prepare for the end of life because nature will do the job for us. It will let us know at that time when a psychopomp will appear to bring your soul to the beyond. Or in your case, it will be Mothe Mary to whom you used to pray a rosary when you were little. Wouldn’t it be nice for you to meet Mother Mary rather than some scary-looking death angel? I know you have come a long way alone, but this is not the end. Nobody but your fate knows where you go or will go. Yet it would be best if you lived like you are living the second time to keep your youthful spirit.

    All the best,

    Stepheni from the Past