Francis Berger's Blog, page 171

Here's Hoping Alexander Gustafsson Wins at UFC 232

I have nothing but the deepest respect for mixed martial arts fighters because I cannot think of another sport where athletes train so hard and put so much on the line when it comes time to perform. The sheer endurance required to be successful in MMA is enough to boggle the mind. Having said this, I have lost considerable respect for the UFC, the premier MMA organization in the world today, due to its various controversies and marketing gimmicks that occasionally rival those of professional wrestling outfits. Nonetheless, the UFC remains the place with the most elite fighters and the most compelling fights. Case and point, UFC 232 is set to go down today and the card pits two longtime rivals – Jon Jones and Alex Gustafsson – against each other for the second time as they vie for the recently-vacated light heavyweight title.
 
This rematch has been a long time coming – nearly five years – and promises to be an exciting affair. Jones and Gustafsson first met at UFC 165; in that brutal match Jones was pushed to limits he had never experienced while Gustafsson came up just short of shocking the world. The question in every MMA fan’s mind today is will Gustafsson come up short again or will Jones finally suffer defeat within the octagon? I am hoping for the latter because I believe that Jones, for all his self-destructive, arrogant, and undisciplined behavior both in and outside the octagon, deserves to lose, and Gustafsson, for his stoicism and dedication to the sport, deserves the win. Unfortunately, MMA cares little for who deserves what, and if history is any guide, then Jones will likely defeat Gustafsson again. Regardless, I will be cheering for the Mauler and hoping he will tonight.
 
Go get ‘im, Alex!

Házi Áldás - Sentimental Kitsch or Profound Wisdom?

Walk into a household in Hungary and you are likely to see some variation of what is depicted above. Be it embroidered on cloth, or carved in wood, or framed calligraphy, or a simple postcard, the Házi Áldás (Home Blessing, roughly translated) is a staple of many a home in Hungary. I have translated the simple message into English below:

Home Blessing

Where there is faith, there is love,
Where there is love, there is peace,
Where there is peace, there are blessings,
Where there are blessings, there God is.
Where God is, 
there is no want. 

I have always liked seeing this comforting and sweet message whenever I stepped into someone's home in Hungary, but in the past three or four years I have come to understand the complexity and profundity within this seemingly simplistic little stanza. Of course many would argue the verse is nothing more than syrupy sentimental sap - the very epitome of greeting card kitsch - and I suppose they would have a point. In all honesty, I held similar thoughts for many, many years whenever I encountered things like the Házi Áldás.  

Nevertheless, I have learned to be somewhat wary of the mockers and the belittlers who callously dismiss everything as laughable, for I have found their attitude reveals more about their own ossified and shallow approach to life than it does anything else. Simply put, in their knee-jerk contempt, many fail to understand that wisdom - real wisdom - often hides in plain sight in simple little passages like the Házi Áldás. Of course, these same people would immediately begin to question the very notion of wisdom itself, but that shall perhaps remain the topic of a future blog post. 

Note: The final line could also be translated as there is no need, but this could be misconstrued in English and not reflect the original that essentially states there is no lack of anything or scarcity in a home where God can be found. 

Overwriting = Too Many Notes

I have been thinking again about the criticism of overwriting that is so rampant in contemporary literary criticism and just how vacuous and flippant this criticism actually is in most cases. If I were to apply the average critic's disparagement of overwriting to some some classic novels, nearly all of them would be deemed overwritten:Anything and everything by Dostoevsky, especially Crime and Punishment and The Brothers KaramozovDitto for Dickens, especially Bleak House and David CopperfieldWar and Peace, Anna KareninaMiddlemarchEast of EdenEverything from Balzac, for sureSame goes for Stendhal, particularly The Charterhouse of ParmaD.H. Lawrence's novelsPerhaps even Tolkien's books The next time you encounter the overwriting criticism, consider the brief list above and the countless other classics that would also be stamped as being severely overwritten, and take the criticism with a giant grain of salt.

Or better yet, remember Mozart whose music was often criticized for being "overstuffed." The film Amadeus did a wonderful job capturing the essence of this criticism through the Emperor's casual "too many notes" barb. 

​

Reading the Gospel of John in Isolation

Bruce Charlton has gathered his insightful and thought-provoking interpretations of The Gospel of John into a new 35,000 word mini-book that he has recently made available online. I re-read the gospel last night and then studied Charlton's ideas concerning the fourth gospel this morning. I feel I will have to read both again many more times before I am able to add anything meaningful to the subject (presuming that anything meaningful needs to be or can be added to what Bruce suggests).

Lazarus writes: reading the Fourth Gospel in isolation can be viewed and downloaded here. 

Let's Get in the Christmas Spirit

This usually does it for me . . . 

The Four Ghosts - Still My Son's Favorite Christmas Story

The Four Ghosts is how my son refers to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and it is still his favorite Christmas story for the second year running. We have watched three different animated retellings of the classic so far, and I am fairly certain he will want to squeeze one or two more in before the season is over. Perhaps next year I will read it to him so that he can enjoy the prose of the original.

On a side note, as I have been watching these various animated versions of the story, I have been struck once again by the inherent conflict between Christian and utilitarian doctines that permeate so many Victorian-era novels. Perhaps a fusion of Christian and utilitarian doctine would be more accurate. Regardless, the utilitarian yearnings and scorn for harsh industrial capitalism Dickens expresses in his slim classic are understandable when one considers his own life and the general milieu in which he lived, but I would be curious to know how Dickens would feel concerning the full embrace of utilitarianism and almost complete abandonment of Christianity in contemporary Britain, or the entire West for that matter.

Perhaps he would rewrite his story and feature only one ghost - the Ghost of Christmas Forgotten and No Longer Needed.

I will probably ask my son about this one day when he is old enough to converse about such matters. In the meantime, I'll simply let him enjoy the story and the joys it offers. 

Budapest - A City of Overtourism?

My love affair with Budapest began at an early age when the spirit of the city’s former late-nineteenth-century grandeur was still evident despite the destruction of the Second World War, the Hungarian Uprising, and the quarter-century of communism that followed. As a child, I found the baroque buildings – the grimy plaster facades of many marred by bullet holes and artillery fire – fascinating, and I remember spending much time studying the neglected angels and classical figures over the doorways wondering if and when they would emerge from their enforced hibernation and regain their former glory. Beyond the baroque and neo-classical buildings forming the inner city core stood ugly the lines of panel apartment blocks, which not only provided a strong contrast to the inner-city architecture, but also stood out as the unsightly testament of socialist utilitarianism.

I spent much time in Budapest as a child, and as a young adult I was fortunate enough to witness Budapest shake off its communist oppression and begin its renewal. Of course, this renewal was not without its trials and tribulations as the turbulent and tempestuous assault of unconstrained liberty drowned the city in feverish impulses and ruthless ambitions. Budapest of the 1990s and early 2000s was indeed a City of Earthly Desire, its streets marred by poverty, homelessness, and crude businesses that exploited the upended social structure and lured many of the country’s inhabitants to sell their souls in exchange for financial gains. These forces were dissipating when I lived in the city from 2001 to 2003, but the ill effects of the hyper-liberalization that filled the vacuum communism had left behind could still be felt, and I drew much inspiration for my novel The City of Earthly Desire from the two years I spent living in Budapest.

Before moving back to Hungary in 2015, I considered settling in Budapest again, but after having spent most of my life living in or extremely close to big cities – Toronto, New York, and of course Budapest – I had little desire to reside in an urban center again, especially after the rather pleasant experience of living in a small rural town in northern England. Hence, I turned my back on the possibility of Budapest and settled instead in a small village near a minor provincial city near the Austrian border. Though I have been to Budapest many times since moving back to Hungary nearly four years ago – mostly visiting relatives who live in the suburbs and outskirts of the city – my forays into the city itself were few and brief. I could feel the city’s magnetic pull, but I was reluctant to spend any significant amount of time wandering through its streets and reacquainting myself with its charms. I don’t know what the source of the reluctance was. Was I afraid of what I might find there, or did I simply wish to preserve the city that existed in my memory?

Fast-forward to 2018 and after my brief two-day visit I can proclaim that Budapest continues on its seemingly endless transformation from a capital debased by communism to a city that has recaptured and may even surpass its former glory. At the surface level, Budapest has never looked so good. Many buildings have been refurbished or rebuilt; the bridges gleam as they stretch across the Danube; the public squares are both tidy and inviting. The grime and soot that previously besmirched landmarks such as the Parliament Buildings and the Buda Palace is gone. Streamlined streetcars and busses have replaced the noisy, ramshackle public transportation vehicles of the past. As I walked through the city with my wife, I was overcome with wonder and admiration at the transformation that had taken place since we had moved away from the city, but the more we walked, the more my admiration became tempered by mild displeasure.

An unsettling form of over-cosmopolitanism has settled down inside the city’s refurbished exterior, especially within Districts V, VI, and VII. Here one can walk for blocks without hearing a single word of spoken Hungarian or seeing a single storefront sign that is exclusively written in the country’s language. The sidewalks here throng with tourists of every shape, form, and age – young Brits out on a boisterous pub crawl, kitschy Russians and Ukrainians sauntering past the marquee stores lining Andrássy Street, timid Japanese shuffling about the Parliament, groups of bewildered American retirees overwhelmed by the hustle of a guided city tour, and everyone else one can imagine mixed in among these crowds sloshing through the streets like ceaseless, almost liquid, human waves.

The amenities in these districts cater almost exclusively to Budapest’s international visitors – trendy burger restaurants, sushi stands, fusion cuisine bistros, burrito bars, and glorified street food venues have replaced the often grimy, but delightful eateries than once lined these sidewalks. You can enter one of these new restaurants and encounter serving staff who speak no Hungarian, and chances are even the native-speaking staff will greet you in English when you walk in the door. Concentrated between these eateries are the many bars, nightclubs, and drinking establishments where the price of a beer is easily triple what you would pay for one in another part of the city. And of course there are the boutique hotels, the designer stores, the high-end beauticians and barber shops, and the trendy clothing shops.

I walked past these establishments and tried to imagine the amount of money all the tourists milling around spent and how positive that undoubtedly was for the local economy. The only problem was I had a craving for a good, old-fashioned bowl of gulyás soup while I thought of these things, but I could not for the life of me find a simple Hungarian restaurant and ended up settling for an overpriced, modish goose meat hamburger instead. As my wife and I walked back to our hotel, I cast glances up at the apartment windows above the many rowdy bars, glitzy souvenir shops, and chic eateries and wondered how the locals felt about it all, assuming there were any locals left in those apartments. For all I knew, the lit windows might now be Air BNBs.

Overtourism is a difficult concept to define because it is hard to set the parameters delineating it, but I would hazard to guess that Budapest has morphed from being The City of Earthly Desire to a City of Overtourism. If I had to choose, I would find the latter preferable to the former, but that does not imply that the rampant overtourism Budapest is now experiencing is not without its pitfalls. Statistics show Hungary welcomed well over 50 million tourists last year; that works out roughly to five tourists for every citizen. I imagine at least two-thirds of the 50 million visited Budapest exclusively, which would put the tourist-to-local ratio somewhere in the ten-to-one or perhaps even the twenty-to-one range.

Now there is no denying the vast economic benefits tourism can bring to a city or a country, but I cannot help but wonder what some of the drawbacks might be, especially over the long term, and whether the short-term benefits are worth the long term negatives. Whatever the case may be, I humbly assert Budapest needs to be careful – another decade of the kind of hyper-tourism I witnessed may transform the city into nothing more than an urban playground for budget-airline party seekers and the global well-to-do.

​And that would be a shame, to say the least.
 

Some Music I Have Been Listening to Lately: Hildegard von Bingen

I am ashamed to admit that I was completely ignorant of Hildegard von Bingen (1098 ? - 1179) until about two years ago. Now I listen to her music at least once or twice a week. I highly recommend von Bingen for those with a penchant for sacred, medieval music. Her life makes for interesting reading as well! 

At Least the Week Before Christmas Was White

The yearning for a white Christmas must be particular to those who live in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, as is the minor disappointment of waking up on Christmas morning to find the landscape not blanketed by a thick cover of snow. Having spent most of my childhood and a considerable part of my adulthood in a small town north of Toronto, Canada, annual white Christmases could almost be guaranteed. Having said this, I have lived in many other places where a white Christmas was either unpredictable (Frankfurt, Germany; New York City, NY, USA; Morpeth, England) or practically impossible (Sarasota, FL, USA). Though I enjoyed the Christmases I celebrated in these places, the lack of snow dampened the festive aura of the season for me, which is ridiculous when one considers the place and climate of the very first Christmas. Perhaps the whole white Christmas thing is more closely connected to some ancient pagan tradition or corporate marketing campaign, but I have no desire to wade into all of that right now. 

Irrespective of its relevance to the true meaning of the Holy Day, a white Christmas has always held a special place in my heart. Unfortunately, the area of the world in which I currently reside - a small village near Sopron, Hungary - also falls into the unpredictable category as far as snowy Christmases go. Though it snows during the winter, the chance of snow at Christmas time is slim. I have lived here for nearly four years and have not experienced a single white Christmas to date. The forecast this year does not bode well for snow either; however, there was some snowfall last week, and consistently cold temperatures have kept it around for the better part of a week, which has been great. The best experience was having snow on the ground during the small Christmas market celebration my village holds every year. Milling about in a wintry landscape around the village church while drinking mulled wine and speaking with neighbours and friends was a truly memorable and wonderful time. 

Just like last year, the chance of a white Christmas in this part of the world this season is small, but at least the week before Christmas was white, which was great all the same.

Could the Fear of Overwriting Lead to Underwriting?

Of all the faults one can find in prose, overwriting is the one perhaps most frequently cited by both readers and reviewers. On the surface, the criticism appears valid, obvious, and clear. On the one hand, it is simply a case of too many words. Overwritten prose can be identified as such if it contains more words than necessary or describes events in more detail than is required. On the other hand, prose may be deemed overwritten if it employs ornate flourishes, ostentatious descriptions, and orotund phrases. As with culinary dishes, which can be over-spiced, overly-fused, and overly-complex, there is no denying that writing can indeed be overwrought, overripe, and overdone. As in cooking, a general principle of simplicity and a less-is-more approach often yields the most consumable and satisfying results in writing. Yet with writing, as with cooking, defining the overworked gets tricky once the obvious inflated and overly-complex hallmark examples are identified and cast aside. In other words, like some culinary dishes, some examples of prose can safely and objectively declared to be bloated. In instances like these, consensus among diners and readers is quick and nearly unanimous. Having said that, I have come across many examples of overwriting being cited in cases where there a) really was none, or b) was determined on a purely subjective basis, and this has lead me to become rather wary of the criticism of overwriting whenever I encounter it.

A general rule of thumb is that good prose is rigorous. There is no denying this, and I believe all writers strive to be clear and comprehensible. In this regard, I subscribe to White and Strunk’s rule of omitting needless words. Very few readers admire pointless word salads, and if sentences were cuts of meat, most readers would prefer them with the fat trimmed off. This is all fine and well but as any good cook knows, an overly-lean cut of meat can become dry and tough when cooked. I would argue the same principle applies to prose – trimming the excess fat is perhaps desirable, but trimming every trace of fat can render sentences and paragraphs dry and unpalatable. What some might term needless could in fact be the flavorful juice that not only enhances mastication, thereby aiding digestion, but also increases delight and satisfaction. Seen this way, a little of what could be defined as overwriting might actually be useful and enjoyable to the reader. Like a great chef, a good writer must determine the fat-to-lean ratio for their own work, and vary this ratio according to the objective of their work. Adhering fanatically to a rigorous prose approach has its limits, too; one need look no further than Hemingway to see examples of when his terse style works – the masterful short stories –  and when it is, for lack of a better expression, painfully inadequate – as is the case in some of Hemingway’s novels.

When I wrote The City of Earthly Desire, I anticipated the overwriting criticism ahead of time. I went so far as to criticize the criticism of overwriting within the novel itself. More to the point, overwriting is the most common censure the protagonist, Béla, encounters when he tries to get his first novel published. He is told that if he wishes to see his work in print, he must set about “tightening his prose,” which leads him to rewrite his book so many times that he eventually no longer recognizes it as his own. As for my own novel, there is no denying that the prose could be tightened. I could pick out dozens of pages and paragraphs where the writing could be deemed overwrought, places where sentences could be rearranged, adjectives cut, perhaps entire sentences eliminated all for the sake of rigor. Perhaps one day I will revisit the text and “tighten the prose” a bit to suit this taste, but I will likely not carve away an excessive amount of prose because I fear I might lose the stylistic essence I had chosen for the novel.

Though my novel may have many faults, perceived or otherwise, I am confident that the prose within it more or less works. Regardless, one of the feedback morsels Stephen Vizinczey was kind enough to impart upon me after he read my work was that it was, in his view, overwritten. The criticism was both unsurprising and understandable. As I mentioned above, I acknowledge parts of my novel may indeed be overwritten. This notion, coupled with Vizinczey’s personal preference to say much with as little as possible, made the criticism rather expected. Having said this, as correct as Vizinczey may have been in assessing my own work, the economical stylistic approach he used in his most recent novel If Only is, apparently, not without its own shortcomings. For example, Vizinczey's obsession with conciseness caused John Self of The Times Literary Supplement a considerable degree of consternation. In his March 29, 2017 review of If Only, Self complains of Vizinczey’s underwriting which, the reviewer argues, negatively affects the plot. Self writes, “Don’t ask this reviewer how Jim got where he is: like many other aspects of the story, Jim’s effortless rise is reported with minimal insight. Turning points are dispatched in a phrase . . .” Overwriting is a negative for sure, but underwriting poses problems of its own, it seems.

As readers of this blog well know, I respect Vizinczey, and I am not referring to the negative TLS review to disparage him. I know for certain that if John Self, or any other TLS reviewer for that matter, read my book he would probably defecate all over it. Nevertheless, Self’s critical rebuke of Vizinczey’s most recent effort highlights a fault many writers, even seasoned ones, tend to overlook as they incessantly focus on ensuring their prose is not overwritten. As they trim their sentences and search their imaginations for wonderful aphoristic phrases capable of capturing a century in a sentence, many writers may, in fact, fall into a trap that could be more pernicious and dire than overwriting. The heroic effort to say much with as little as possible may expose one to the danger of underwriting; that is, of not writing enough or, in extreme cases, not writing much at all. As John Self points out, underwritten prose carries its own hazards, chief among them, a lack of plot continuity.

Which makes one wonder – which is the greater sin for writers? Writing too much, or not writing enough? Neither is desirable, but is one ultimately more troublesome in the end?