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At Least the Week Before Christmas Was White

12/19/2018

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.

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Could the Fear of Overwriting Lead to Underwriting?

12/19/2018

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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?

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A Return to Deep and Consistent Reading

12/14/2018

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I have been a terrible reader these past two or three years. Not only have I read little, but I have read poorly.

I have blamed my work and the time I have invested into renovating the old house I bought back in 2016 for my lack of reading, but I know these are merely an excuses. In all honesty, I have wasted the little free time I do have by substituting the reading of great books with the browsing of internet media nonsense. Rather than read one of the thousands of books I have yearned to read, I perused newspapers, blogs, and YouTube videos online instead.

Needless to say, my reading muscles have grown quite flabby and atrophied as a result. Perhaps this is part of the reason I have been so horribly fooled by some rather mediocre books in the past few years. Regardless, I will build my reading muscles back up again, starting today. The one-to-three hours I had spent browsing online content will now go toward books. I am certain the change will improve the overall quality of my life and return to me, what is slowly becoming, an almost forgotten pleasure.

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Jordan Peterson: A Black Hole and A Mirror

12/12/2018

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A black hole because of the odd gravitational force Jordan Peterson exerts with his uncanny ability to draw people in past the event horizon with his words. For me it was his pronoun warrioring, his anti-communism, his respect for Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, his seeming interest in Christianity, and that he was from Canada, the country where I had spent my formative years. For others it may have been his self-help tripe, or his Jungian archetypes, or his free speech rants, or his rabid defense of men. Others may have been drawn to him out of disagreement and outrage. Regardless of the reason, like a black hole, Peterson possesses strong gravitational effects.

I surmise Peterson is able to pull people in because the manner in which he presents his ideas acts as a kind of mirror. An actual mirror reflects what is placed before it - albeit reversed in the direction perpendicular to the mirror surface, but Peterson's mirroring technique is a little different. He seems to possess a manner of communication that is both exact enough and vague enough to reflect back what the viewer wishes to see rather than what is there. He also has a way of expounding certain thoughts, and then walking them back or tempering them somewhat when he later revisits them. He is extremely conscious of his intended audience, and carefully crafts words to please whomever sits before him. Put simply, Peterson seems to have mastered an almost subconscious form of pandering (all definitions of this final word fully intended).

As mentioned above, I was drawn to Peterson when I heard him ranting on about the dangers of communism. I not only found his words refreshing, but they seemed to reflect my own abhorrence of communism. Then he spoke of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, and I began to regard him as a kindred spirit. When he gave lectures on the Bible, I presumed he was finding a way of reintroducing Christianity to the secular masses in the West. Yet as the months passed, the reflective surface of Peterson's mirror grew distorted. I began to pay closer attention to what he was actually promulgating and then compared these re-evaluations to an ever-increasing list of his inconsistencies and sophistries. His mirror losts its allure when I attempted to read his 12 Rules for Life, which happened to coincide with the media's initiation of him into the Intellectual Dark Web.

Now if you are a JBP devotee who does not intend to re-evaluate Peterson, peace be with you.

But if you have been dedicating a considerable amount of time to Peterson's work, are well-disposed to what he preaches, but have never really thought about why, do yourself a favor and take a cold, hard, objective look at what might actually be happening as you read or listen to him.

Are you really hearing his words or are you only hearing the words you want to hear?

Keep one thing in mind irrespective of the conclusions you ultimately draw - black holes are peculiar things.

No light escapes them.

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Somehow Not Asocial Enough

12/11/2018

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And that is the realization I have come to when I evaluate most of the artists, thinkers, commentators, writers, and other assorted platform builders currently infesting the internet. They are far too eager to be social.

Now, I am a fairly sociable person when I am out in the world, but I am averse to social media and the kind of online sociability that now seem almost mandatory to anyone creative.

Try this little test . . .

Next time you go online to search for your favorite online personalities, take a moment, lower your head towards the monitor, and inhale deeply through your nostrils. You may detect a faint, yet pungent odor wafting up from the screen. That sickly sweet smell is an unholy combination of sharpened eagerness, blind earnestness, raw ambition, and cold greed, and it emanates from every platform builder caught up in the pursuit of wealth, fame, and recognition. They want you to befriend them on social media and become their facebook pal, these materialist strivers. Go ahead, follow them on Twitter, subscribe to them on You Tube and, most importantly, send them money through Patreon. Receive their monthly newsletters. Watch their latest video. They are so social; so connected; so in the loop. I guess they have to be because it seems that is what it takes to make it these days. And don’t kid yourself, what most people online want above all else is to make it, and they will make almost anything To. Make. It.

Of course, you must be online. You must have exposure. You must find your niche. You must build that platform because you know that subscribers and followers are a new, faceless digital currency you can exchange on the open market. Without them you have nothing with which to trade, no validity of which to boast, and no latent power to yield. So you must dedicate yourself to increasing your numbers and going viral. With any luck, you could land in the mainstream media, which you publicly scorn and claim is dying. Yet you secretly hope for the day you can ride that dying dinosaur and really hit the big time.

And if that is what you truly want, I hope you do.

Me? I’m not interested in any of and I never really ever was. My infrequent attempts to engage in social media in an effort to build a platform always made me uncomfortable and I have vowed not bother with it again in the future beyond this site. I have a social life in the real world, one that needs no supplementation from the web. If using social media is what it takes to make it these days then I guess I just won’t make it. Besides, I got my sights set on deeper things. Higher things. Regardless, I will keep writing, and I will keep focusing on salvation, and by doing so I strive to truly make it by not really making it all.

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My Blog - A Series of False Starts

12/9/2018

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When I look at this blog, one thing springs to mind - it has been little more than a series of false starts.

My primary reason for setting up this website and blog was to build a platform for my self-published novel. Originally, I intended to use the blog to promote the novel and my writing, and for the first couple of years, I focused almost exclusively on writing-related themes like self-publishing, creativity, editing, and book marketing.

As the years passed, I occasionally dabbled into politics and social criticism by writing vitriolic rants railing against some political or cultural event or other, but I had no overall motivation to become a full-time political blogger or social critic back then. Hence, those kinds of posts appeared in fits and starts and were often followed by extensive periods of silence.

Every now and then I wrote about writers and thinkers I admire (or had admired), but my experience doing this has often inspired regret (see the Jordan Peterson posts in this blog for cringeworthy examples of this).

There were times I approached the blog with the cold calculation of a marketer, writing posts I hoped might get views or trend online in some fashion. I regard these posts as my worst and most regrettable as they are both ingratiating and insincere.

In retrospect, it is painfully obvious that I never possessed any clear notions concerning the nature of this blog, which is why it is literally been nothing more than a series of false starts.

Over the past six months, I have contemplated abandoning the blog altogether, but something prevents me from doing so. Though I doubt it will lead to much, I have instead decided continuing the blog, but only after I establishing a clear sense of purpose.

What is this purpose?

Truth. Beauty. Goodness.

The posts following this one will focus almost exclusively on the transcendentals.

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