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

Tag: reviews

  • Musee d’orsay in Paris – review

    Musée d'Orsay in Paris - a travel guide and tour as with the best local guide (Paris Travel Stories Book 4)Musée d’Orsay in Paris – a travel guide and tour as with the best local guide by Wander Stories

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Of all the world famous museums, my favorite is Musee d’Orsay in Paris because it possesses most of the paintings of Impressionism, to which I am partial because of its prevalent portrayal of ordinary life of people with simple but innovative techniques of using color and light like never before. In fact, I enjoyed a virtual tour of this lovely museum with a guide of Musée d’Orsay in Paris by Wander Stories, a wonderful reference book on this lovely museum with rich information on the history of the museum, biographies of artists, let alone the backgrounds of their paintings they created, all of which beautifully presented in a wealth of rich color photos and illustrations to conjure up the vivaciousness of life right before your eyes in the comfort of wherever you may be.

    The birth of Musee d’Orsay starts with the zeitgeist of our modern era when the spirit of liberty and expressionism was born out of a pyrrhic victory over the antediluvian customs and dogmas upheld by a few select. Originally, the land surrounding the museum was part of a private garden belonging to Queen Margaret, the wife of King Henry VI. In the 19th century, the Palais d’Orsay was used for the Court of Accounts, most of which were burned down to the ground during the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871. Then in 1897 the government decided to build a new railway station to facilitate transportation of passengers to the center of Paris directly, preparatory to the upcoming 100 World Fair. During WWII, the station was used as a mailing center to send packages and letters to prisoners of the war and to receive them after the war. Finally, the station was re-born as Musee d’Orsay exhibiting all the arts from the second half of the 19th century with a presidential blessing of Francois Mitterrand in December 1986.

    Musee d’Orsay embodies individualism freed from the rigid status quo of the old academics in the French arts scenes. It houses famous impressionist and post impressionist paintings of the 19th by Gustave Courbet, Eduard Manet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, and so forth. All of these painters were revolutionary vanguards of Impressionism, a new genre depicting everyday life of the ordinary not of mythological or even loyal figures and the simple beauty of nature in the most artistically innovative methods of painting that had not been seen in the paintings of previous eras.

    Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Siesta” in the museum deserves a special recognition both by its artistic merit and personal background of the painting. It was painted when Gogh was a patient in a mental asylum. Initially beginning his career as a preacher, Gogh was soon disillusioned with arid rigidity of Christianism, and turned himself to the word of painting in attempt to find a solace for his restless soul. He often copied the works of Jean Francois Millet and thought more highly of him than of Manet. Gogh’s use of vibrantly contrasting colors, such as blue and yellow, violet and organic, Gogh portrayed rural France at its most vividness dynamically.

    As with many creative artists, Gogh lived a difficult life of being let down by his low self-worth. To illustrate, Gogh had a drunken brawl with Paul Gaughin, in which Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor then fled a local brothel, where he ended up cutting off the lower part of his let ear lobe. Moving from one asylum to another, Gogh’s creative ingeniousness was recognized and encouraged by Dr. Gachet, an Impressionist enthusiast who drove this extraordinary patient of his to creative indulgence, leading Gogh to create 70 more paintings in 70 days, although he sold only two paintings in his lifetime. The last day of Gogh was just like another working day, for he shot himself in the chest while painting in a wheat field. Notwithstanding the tragic end and life wrinkled in anguishes and distresses, Gogh’s resilient spirit driven by his creative madness is enshrined in his paintings that have stood the test of times all around the world, canonizing him as a key figure in transformation from Impressionism to modern art in art history.

    Musée d’Orsay in Paris by Wander Stones is a lively reference book about the museum and the oeuvres of the aforesaid and other famous painters with beautifully displayed photos and detailed information on the paintings and the painters in easy language. This is also a lovely book to be viewed on a Kindle Fire with easy references to pages and stunningly colorful photos effortlessly downloaded on the device to enjoy the tour of the museum anywhere, magically transporting you in front of each of the paintings in the museum. Or if you plan to visit the museum, then reading this book will prepare you with arms of information. All in all, the knowledge from the book will help you appreciate the beauty of the arts at their best because as defined by Sir Edmund Burke the standard of reason and beauty is all the more appreciated by the faculty of the mind affected with the works of imagination and the elegant arts, which is universal in all humans and of sentiment common to all mankind.

  • ‘Essays in Aesthetics’, by Jean Paul Sartre – review

    Essays in AestheticsEssays in Aesthetics by Jean-Paul Sartre

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    Jean Paul Sartre was something of a celebrity in the European Intelligentsia in the Swinging Sixties; despite his rather homely exterior equipped with a pair of thick horn-rimmed spectacles covering the squint eyes, Sartre was brought into celebratory limelight with a panoply of illustrious epithets- L’Enfant Terrible of the European intelligentsia, a precursor of modern existentialism, and husband of Simone de Beauvoir, a trailblazer of modern feminism – The truth of the matter is that Sartre loved the attentions bestowed upon him. In fact, he thrived on it. On a question of fame relating to his celebratory statue as an intellectual, Sartre answered with forthrightness: “Fame is good, even at forty or fifty is desirable; there is happiness, an intense enjoyment, in pushing one’s way into the spotlight like this.” It is this unusual, feisty frankness in conjunction with his audacious existentialism vis-a-vis Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotheraphy that inspired me to find out more about the man’s school of thought in this book written by Sartre himself.

    This light volume of essay collection draws on Sartre’s exceptional knowledge of the arts and the creators and yokes it to the tenets of existentialism, which means that the reader should have at least rudimentary knowledge about existentialism. The substratum of existentialism is the experience, the action taken by himself, which constitutes a man’s identity in the world. This might sound materialistic and even bathetic at first blush. However, do we not tend to judge our own self or other people based upon the manifested achievements or deeds, regardless of the character, personality, and/or other planes of circumstances pushing the doer into such actions? With every one of our actions, we particularize our self, thus creating a ‘self’. It is this realization of the abstract self existing as an abstract essence that results in the following dictum: Experience precedes our essence, establishing our own self identity in society.

    In terms of existential analysis of a meaning of life or a sense of purpose in life, our actions becoming our experience make us responsible for our own lives, including our missteps and achievements. In other words, this explication of existence shows us how we look and what we are like as the touchstone of our existential selves in everyday life, as the Russian writer Anton Chekhov once said: “”Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” In this regard, existentialism coincides with Logotheraphy, which identifies a meaning of life, freedom of will, and will to meaning with fulfilling demands placed upon our daily tasks, to achieve ego qua meaningfulness.

    In sum, Sartre’s existentialism strikes the zeitgeist of our time convoluted with reality shows, fake news, selfies, social media approbation, and grand collapsed narratives in which we often find ourselves uprooted in the midst of inflated self-aggrandization, however overtly and incorrectly exalted. Sartre tells us: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself in the midst of his infinite possibilities without help.” That is, the purpose of our life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost by actualizing our purposes amid our daily lives, for we are what we do and create our own reality of the world by acting out our ideation. This book will be a good primer on more in-depth world of Sartre’s existentialism with his no-nonsense perspectives on the nature of humanity and proverbial touchy-feely approaches to the real world and a man’s place as a human being therein, all marked in his literary craftsmanship that is all the more enjoyable to the reader.

  • The etymology of black friday

    black-friday-space-for-rent

    There were long lines of people everywhere today here in this otherwise peaceful sunny Californian city. As I swiveled my head in wonderment to figure out possible causes for the formation of the lines, my eyes directed me to a sign posted on a window of one of the outlet stores bearing “Black Friday Sale.” Hmm, so it was that time again. In fact, the word ‘Black Friday’, I think, always renders me an ambiance of Dystophia where desperate citizens resulting from a carnage of  wars and great famine are hell bent on looting stores for a paucity of goods. Besides, it is named so very dull, tawdry, and crude that the very sound of the name boasts a lack of cultural sophistication of its obscure name-giver who seems to me nothing but a philistine following a cult of Mammon.

    That being said, to come upon an article about the origin of this consumerist feast day from a magazine seemed pat in the paradoxical sense of animosity colluding with curiosity on this whimsically leisurely Black Friday. It’s rather unsurprising to discover that the etymology of the term ‘Black Friday’ is ambivalent  in origin. There are four a posterior grounds of the birth of the term as follows:

    • Black Friday was the day when financial markets collapsed on September 24th, 1869, as a result of the disclosure of a Wall Street conspiracy to raise the gold price.
    • It was the day after Thanksgiving Day when police in 1950’s Philadelphia, having sacrificed their holiday leave, concentrated the force on the cresting influx of shoppers and American football fans into the city.
    • In 1961 retailers in the selfsame city foresaw the potential to galvanize business by choosing the term “Black Friday” as a catchy-phrase.
    • The retailers saw it as the day by which they could have procured sufficient revenue for the year, so that they could move their accounts written in red to black, finalizing a profit for the year.

    black-friday-pros-and-cons-cartoonIn my opinion, the third postulation seems the most plausible, which logically constitutes the fourth one as a basis for the etymology. It’s always this mercantile ingenuity that prompted cults of consumerism, such as Valentines Day, White Day, and Christmas Day. Inevitably, in our modern capitalistic society such promotional encouragement of spending money on consumer products is the grist to the mill of market economy and greases the wheel of monetary circulation for the behoof of the vivaciousness of societal atmosphere in general. Yet, the hustling and bustling of the mindless shopping spree blindly egged on by the media prompting to buy things that you really do not need in frenzy appears to live beyond the principle of the Golden Mean, the virtuous moderation of restraining yourself from indulging in lavish expenditure, as advocated by Plato in corporation with the inscription written on the terrace at Delphi, “Nothing in Excess,” which chimes the bell of our ethos embroidering on conspicuous consumption.

    저장

  • ‘Bitter Orange’, by Claire Fuller – review

    Bitter OrangeBitter Orange by Claire Fuller

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller is a curious case study of a woman named Frances Jellico, masquerading as a fictitious memoir laced with escapism, voyeurism, narcissism, and eroticism, all glowing in the radiant color orange smothered by the shadow of forced guilt, self-loathing, and disorientation. Frances’s narrative is, however, far from being namby-pamby, importuning the reader with her litany of her woeful life. Rather, it is her remonstration of her failed dreams, rejected desires, and unfulfilled purposes with the world she believes has always turned its back against her in the most callous way. Her only revenge for the betraying world is her death, which bestows upon her the kind of liberty she wanted to purchase in one hot summer in an idyllic English suburb twenty years ago. It’s a mad, bad, and sad drama of Frances through which Fuller plays the last swan song of a deeply troubled woman in emotional distress with her masterful storytelling skills.

    Written in the first person narrative, the reader will directly glimpse into the inner world of Frances whose days are numbered without superabundance of mawkish sentiments. In fact, it echoes Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” in a way that  exudes a momentum of gushing stream of consciousness of a narrator that feels a combination of anger and dismay, sorrow and loneliness, and illusion and paranoia. That feeling of abstract emotions becomes physical by the witchcraft of Fuller’s atmospheric descriptions of scenes and rich dialogues. Fuller does a beautifully nuanced job of capturing all the conflicting emotions that put you in trance, carrying you over to the psych of the other.

    In comparison with Dora, the subject of Sigmund Freud’s case study of hysteria, Frances’s dilemma is more existential, more corporeal, and more noogenic in terms of the cause and the nature of her Uber-Angst. To diagnose Frances’s symptoms as a typical case of female hysteria commonly associated with a timid, introverted middle-aged virginal woman does a disservice to the woman who struggled to right the ship of her drifting life all alone. IT goes against the grain to dismiss France’s story as a mere dalliance with a hedonistic couple named Cara and Peter during her brief sojourn or a pitiful attempt to break free from her socially gawky, ill-fitted rotund virginal self at the expense of her naivety. France’s narrative attests a sense of disorientation of her life without a clear vista of purpose in her life due to the lingering influence of her dead gloomy, domineering, sordid mother who bound her entire being under the rigidity of religion and morality.

    Subsequently, Frances suffers from noogenic neuroses, neither pathological not pathogenic of origin, but of existential distress. In other words, Frances is not a basket case, but a human derelict adrift on a sea of life, brutally defenestrated from the comforting mooring of loving relationship and social connections by her also neurotic mother who blamed her daughter for almost anything. No wonder Frances associates her rotund appearance with her weight of guilt that is in fact nothing but her delusional imago forced upon her. In this regard, France’s narrative outstrips Freud’s Dora case with far more in-depth interior monologue of the narrator endowed with high intellect, impressible curiosities for life, and unyielding desire of being connected with the world outside herself.

    Fuller is a riveting writer of dialogue and scenes, all the artistry in the marks upon the page after page, wielding a pen across the pages in an expense of her boundless imagination that seems wholly realistic and ingeniously creative, producing aesthetically sensuous ambiance of the story, as if she were painting a Renaissance triptych featuring three naked adults making furiously and frantically passionate love with one another in an Arcadian English garden tinged with citrus scents of oranges, which likewise symbolize lust, desire, and passion, all flatly denied to Frances in Bitter Reality. And it is in this subtle respect of Frances’s smoldering indignation at such cruel denial of her yearnings only natural to any woman – young and old, pretty and not-so-pretty, smart and not-so-smart – that Fuller’s vivid imaginativeness and keen observation of psyche of characters manifest to the fullest extent and hold the reader’s undivided attention throughout the book with gusto and pleasure that will make you become titillatingly insatiable as you go deeper into this arresting story.

  • Pirate, Writer, and Traitor- on Walter Raleigh

    1_123125_122961_2240504_2273278_101115_poem_sirwalterraleigh.jpg.CROP.original-original
    Sir Walter Raleigh

    The first time I got to know this interesting English notable was through a small paperback compiling vignettes of historical figures in the western civilizations I found from my father’s library. No man stood more gallantly and impressively than this daring figure in the Elizabethan England; it was no less a courtier, writer, and adventurer than Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) himself. The vista of his gentlemanly manner of soaking his cloak for the queen to tread upon in the messy muddy road lingered in my mind. (He was the only man in the queen’s entourage who did not hesitate to do so.) This would generate a possible peal of jeering laughter from many contemporary men and women in the age of insouciant conventions and lax mores. But such gesture of civility, a sign of respect, orderliness, and thoughtfulness, tells a lot about one’s character in the absence of the proliferation of the civic virtue as a result of ignorance, lassitude, and degradation. And based upon this gentlemanly aspect of Raleigh, I have formulated and kept my favorable opinions on him.

    With this as a background of my knowledge of and interest in Raleigh, to come upon the article written by Anna Beer, visiting fellow at University of Oxford, about Raleigh’s years in the Tower of London from the latest edition of BBC History was a kind of nostalgic pleasure, rekindling my first impression on this enigmatic man. In fact, Ms. Beer seems to have viewpoints on Raleigh similar to mine: an explorer (or more precisely, a privateer), a writer, a poet, a courtier, and a gentleman are nominal titles bestowing upon Raleigh. Besides, unlike many other political and historical figures of his time, Raleigh was a dashing, handsome man who would make a fitting character actor for romantic adventure movies or drams, if he were alive. And perhaps it was this physical attractiveness of Raleigh that contributed to his endearment to Queen Elizabeth I, who was offended upon learning that her favorite subject had married discreetly without letting her know in advance. But above all, Raleigh’s prodigious feats of intellect in a spirit of Odyssey were laurels for his distinguishing merits. At the behest of the queen, Raleigh ventured to South America in search of El dorado, directed a settlement of the lost colony of Roanoke in Virginia (even though he himself did not go), ruled the seas by confiscating valuable cargoes carried by Spanish ships (he was also a pirate), and engaged in international trades like a very successful modern businessman. He was in fact flying high under the aegis of Queen Elizabeth I.

    However, after the death of the vestal guardian and benefactor, Raleigh fell out of favor with King James I, who seemed to be hell bent on removing him from the court because of his unyielding individuality, which only the queen knew how to harness to her advantage. So Raleigh was found guilty of treason and incarcerated in the Tower of London on the ground that he and his ilk conspired to dethrone the king. It was groundless, of course, but the king could not wait longer to get rid of him and did not even allow him to retain a lawyer to defend himself. But no such royal counter-intuitive animosity deterred him from expressing his ever unbridled spirit; during his imprisonment in the tower, Raleigh built up a personal library of 500 books, a personal conservatory for drawing on the knowledge of a universal history for his writings, one of which included The History of the World that criticized King James I and his abuse of autocratic power and institutionalized faith. It was a radical kind of thought in his time of England. The recalcitrant subject was surely anathema to the king. Raleigh was beheaded in public in 1618, but even during his execution, he was all man by adhering to his principles without an apology nor a customary reverence toward the king.

    The legacy of this adventurous Elizabethan gentleman continues in his writings that strike the political, religious, and literary chords in our hearts as well as those of the revolutionaries subsequent to his death. For example, Oliver Cromwell was an ardent myrmidon of Raleigh’s writings and even recommended them to his son in earnest. Not only Cromewell championed Raleigh’s political stance but also he reconstructed Raleigh’s dismally pessimistic providentialism, aka Calvin Predestination, based on the futility of all human actions as a result of unavoidable death to an optimism about the potentials of human endeavor under the proper guidance of providence. In addition, Raleigh’s critiques of monarchy and his support of parliament ignited the fuse of insurgencies calling for radical political changes. Surely, Raleigh was not a perfect man with immaculate morality, but he was a man of intellect, courage, confidence, and civility laced with irrepressible individuality whom posterity can look up to, especially in this multifariously convoluted era when so many politicians are just grandstanding from the vantage points of popularity.

  • The Spectator – review

    cover_20181103_issueAlthough I try not to read a newspaper on a daily basis because it is always fraught with starkly existential horrors of life that rudely bestride a secret garden of my sanity like a herd of barbarians in the ancient forest, I enjoy reading a selection of magazines filled with well-written articles of interesting topics aiming to educate us, the citizens of the world, on the state of affairs around us in order that we may formulate our own views of the world based on the acquisition of the knowledge. In this regard, this historically and intelligently renowned magazine The Spectator epitomizes literary journalism in the most scintillating way that makes reading a magazine at once an enlightening and entertaining experience.

    Established in 1828 (but its actual genesis began way back in 1711 by Addison & Steele.), this magazine is packed full of current affairs, reviews of the Arts, essays, and many more that will pique your attention; they are also surprisingly easy to read without the usual journalistic lingo chockablock with gobbledygook, priggish literary expressions, and biased opinions that are common features of magazines of the similar kind.

    My Caveat emptor for The Spectator is thus: because of its political and cultural leaning toward conservatism, many of the first time readers might feel guarded to hold their due admiration of the fine quality of writing laced with the characteristic British witticism. But don’t let it deter you from enjoying this cracking compendium of our today’s world in a wonderfully intelligent kaleidoscope, which is a truly one-of-a-kind. This magazine provides to you all the knowledge with information rarely found in any other popular contemporary periodicals, especially here in the States where the majority of them are proudly anti-establishment, anti-tradition, and just about all anti-anything civility without meritorious writing styles laced with scintillating witticism that was once wielded by the pens of Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, and Roger Ebert.

    All in all, in reflection of Benjamin Franklin’s timeless sage adage “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” it is worth the subscribing to The Spectator. And if you have a Kindle Fire like I do, you will be looking forward to receiving and reading it every week with a kind of expectation you would rarely get from reading just another lackluster periodical.

    P.S. This overview of the magazine was written in response to an email sent by Amazon asking for my customary opinion on it. Hence this review.