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

Tag: reviews

  • 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.

  • Prompt 30

    What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

    Dear Reader,

    After a long and tiring day at work, I look back today and regret not doing things the way I wanted – yet again. Since I spend more time in an office full of strangers with nothing in common with me other than working for the same employer, reflecting on today’s memories and actions brings me a feeling of sorrow and sympathy. It’s always this matter of diplomacy of interacting with others without offending them, which is what I should pay more attention to.

    The art of social interaction is hard enough for me to achieve without having a poker face or a public mask – persona. I have seen people who ingratiate themselves with those whom they regard as socially beneficial and politically influential. I see them, all of whom are women, but I don’t see beauty in their visages, nor their minds and hearts. Those able-bodied, fair-weathered friends or sycophants are unashamed of their deeds, acting as if they were all above others, thinking themselves better than others.

    Not that I begrudge them such a skill of flattering, but I realize that having the diplomatic forte may help me to live a more comfortable life for me and my two beautiful cats. Indeed, smile is the best global language where no spoken words are required. I can smile and smile beautifully, but my beautiful smile is unrelated to currying favor from the powers that be, so to speak. Still, it would work wonders if I could pay more attention to my facial expression and the whole demeanor of my body in a polished way so people would not be rude to me.

    My wish is someone’s daily life or just a fancy, but it is still my wish to induce a good impression on me, no matter where you are from.

    Good night. Carpe Diem!

  • Old People (2022) – Film Essay

    Old People shows the issue of the generation gaps between the young and the old, not in the adolescent revolt against the adult institution, but in the societal and cultural context regarding the weakening familial bond between wife and husband, child and parent, and grandchildren and grandparent.

    Melika is a successful lawyer from a city heading with her children to her sister’s wedding at their childhood home in a village. Upon arrival, Melika finds her once beloved father, who loved her and her children so much, is sent to a nearby nursing home whose environment is no better than a mad asylum in atmosphere and appearance. Seeing her father spiritless and aimless alone in a dark room gives her a pang of leaving him behind for her ambitious future as a city lawyer, but she tries to suppress it by bringing him home just for the wedding day. But that is her self-induced wish to relieve herself of guilt, for her father is so broken with a shattered heart that his daughters deserted him, driven away from their home, their happy life that he still longs for. Such sadness is collected among all the old people in the nursing home, abandoned in dreadful isolation from the community that has put them into such an institutional grave and buried alive. The rest is a prelude to a symphony of carnage burning in the fury of the undead and neglected.

    Although this movie is presented as a horror movie, it really isn’t in terms of its thematic and contextual subject. It is a horror that we as a society have become Logan’s World, where ageism and lookism prevail over humanity and discriminate against those who do not fit in their touchstone of the ideal. And what is old, and how old is old? Are we not all advancing in age? Youth is wasted on the young, as Oscar Wilde cleverly concluded. Being old should not be a curse but a celebration of experience in life and, therefore, must be embraced with respect and dignity. Just because we become old doesn’t mean our feelings are dead, as the grandfather tells his beloved grandson: “Oh, yes! I love you so terribly much!”

  • Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Netflix- Manga and Live-Action film) – 1-minute Film review

    Zombie flicks are in vogue. From Netflix to Hulu and others, they are roaming across the boundaries of the digital world, hungry for popularity and craving high ratings. But none of them is ingeniously fresh, and all are infallibly doomed. If you hold on to it, apocalypse doesn’t necessarily kill off a human spirit. A dystopian world may overwhelm your sensory perception, but it won’t kill you if you don’t dwell on it with humor, a handmaid to strength and hope. That is what this film is about.

    The story develops around Akira Tendo, a young office worker fresh out of college, who soon becomes disenchanted with his innocent vision of the work he does because of the unreasonably demanding high workload and gaslighting of his boss. So, when he wakes up the next day and finds himself living among zombies because of an unexpected bio-weaponry disaster, Tendo becomes ecstatic, lest he should go to work any longer. The optimism galvanizes him to pen a bucket list of 100 things to do before he succumbs to the pandemic. What a jolt to live!

    The film stands out from all other dystopian worlds of zombies with humor, hope, and hooray. It weaves a unique perspective to a heartfelt story about a man finding meaning to live amid hopeless situations and ways to huddle through life’s challenging moments, which we can all relate to daily. Nietzsche was right. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

  • 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.

  • The Pope and the Heretic by Michael White

    I first learned about Giordano Bruno through a tweeter thread about Shakespeare discussing his one of many influences, including this Don Quixote-like miscreant Dominican priest who wrote The Art of Memories, the subject I was and still am keen on to improve my regressing memory. Since then, Bruno has resided in my memory chamber as an enigmatic pariah, a formidable rebel without compromise. So when I came across this book by Michael White, a former member of the 80s pop group Thompson Twins, I knew I had to read it.

    White describes Bruno as a martyr of enlightenment, thinking ahead of his time. Unfortunately, Bruno was born into the wrong place at the wrong time, so he suffered from the Catholic Church’s authoritarian rule that dominated the World’s knowledge. However, Bruno’s theory that Jesus was preternaturally a superb magician and therefore not the Son of God, not to mention that the Holy Ghost was the spirit of the World and that Satan would be saved, was sufficient to raise the eyebrows of the ecclesiastical figures. Also, he opined that the stars seen in night skies were actually suns and that there were other worlds in the universe where living beings like humans existed. I speculate such an opinion might have influenced a modern-day belief that we are not alone in this universe because there are extraterrestrial beings. All these ideas were indeed revolutionary. But unlike Galileo, who was said to murmur, “Still, the earth circles round the sun” after he was acquitted of heresy, Bruno was stubborn in his ideas. He proudly defied the Church’s intention to pardon him if he would recant before the death sentence. In his excellent lyrical portrayal of the dramatic confrontation, White sees it as the microscopic representation of the conflict between religion and philosophy, myth and truth, superstition and science.

    Notwithstanding White’s admirable wealth of knowledge used in defense of Bruno, I cannot help but think that White’s stance on Bruno overlooks or connives at some facts. The Catholic Church put him at stake on account of his theological errors, deemed dangerous to the spiritual formation of the Church and the Faithful as a priest to the Church. Bruno was not a willing martyr of his ideas but a Simon Magus-like figure trying to trade his knowledge for recognition in the arms of different sects of Christianity, such as Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Episcopalianism, across Europe.

    It’s an irony that rather than the man written about, the man writing about him turns out to be a genius in writing. Perhaps White, a former musician, attributes this to his lyrical rhythm of narration drawn from his emulous erudition. Moreover, he writes the language of the general reader in the panoply of academic disciplines, and the reader will find no time for disorientation or disinterest. This book carries a tone of what the Italian anti-Catholic activists campaigned against the Church, with Bruno as the symbol of persecution against what they believed in. Nevertheless, it is worth reading it if you are a proponent of Giordanism or just a curious bystander like me.