A Good Day to Die Hard in Hungary

Sometimes, a preview really wins you over.  That was the case for us with “A Good Day to Die Hard.”  We saw the preview, and decided that the movie looked fun.  Thereafter, it didn’t matter what the critics might say, or how audiences might compare it to the previous films.  The preview won us over on the character of John McClane, and the idea of him teaming up with his son against the baddies of Russia.  So we picked up the third and fourth movies in the franchise, and watched them to catch up on what we had missed after the first two films.

Although they’re primarily action movies, the Die Hard movies are also about family.  The first two highlight how a demanding job can detract from your relationship with your spouse.  As John McClane is an exceptional police officer, by the third film, his marriage is on the rocks.  He repeatedly tries to call his wife, but his pursuit of the villains always force him to abort those attempts.  In the fourth movie, he works to win back his daughter, who blames him for her parents' divorce.  Now, in the fifth movie, John's son has been arrested in Russia during an assassination attempt.  He’s been estranged from his son for several years now, and doesn't understand why his son has taken to a life of crime.  So he travels there to attend his son’s trial, and hopes he can do something to aid him.  Only he travels to Hungary, not Russia.

I didn’t realize until the credits that the movie was actually filmed in the Budapest area.  (At one point, Moscow’s colorful cathedral seems to rise in the background).  Some of the chase scenes were filmed at the Hungaroring, one of my favorite Formula One racetracks.  Filmmakers can do so much with special effects these days, and they used these tools not only to transform locations, but also to heighten action sequences.  The automobile chases, the people falling out of buildings and crashing through barriers, and all the explosions, are portrayed so colorfully and artfully, that they better resemble a professional ballet than the ugly gritty reality of so many action films.  Given my recent research, the story also tempts me to view the movie as a contemporary Hungarian Fairytale, with John McClane as a Taltos, a folk hero with special knowledge that allows him to survive the most extreme situations, and can fly through the air and land without sustaining major injury.

But that might be going just a little too far.

Reviewers may have panned the movie.  Audiences may feel it’s the smallest Die Hard ever.  But for an hour and a half, the movie transported me to Russia (even if it was Hungary), and I followed John McClane as he sought to reconnect with a son who had long ago written him off as a father.  Because John's aims were simple, and born of love and concern, I felt for him, smiled and laughed with him, and cheered him on in his (and his son’s) fight with the villains.  Likewise, the plot may have been simple, but what there was of it was good, and always kept me wondering what would happen next.

If you enjoy a movie with lots of action, built around a protagonist who realizes that his most precious treasure is his family, perhaps you’ll find that it’s "A Good Day (for you) to Die Hard."  Or at least, that it’s a good day to go out and watch a fun, light-hearted action movie.

Now, if only it had a few dragons in it.

Dragon Dave 

Hungarian Folktales and Pancakes

Yesterday I had to return Folktales of Hungary to the library.  I had used up all my renewals; I had to finish up my research and give the book back.  We had skipped a concert on Tuesday so I could finish up my notes.  Yesterday, I focused on stories classified under such headings as Local Legends, Animal stories, stories about Hussars, and Lying.  I finished around five o’clock, skimming the final few sections of Linda Degh’s collection.  Then my wife and I drove to the library, and dropped the book off on our way to dinner.

It had been awhile since we enjoyed Denny's pancakes, so we opted for their All You Can Eat special.  As the waiters presented us with perfectly cooked buttermilk pancakes, my wife told me about her day, and I told her a little of what I had learned about the history and culture of Hungary.  I would never have thought to study the country, had I not enjoyed Steven Brust’s novels so much.  Now I have a better understanding of his beloved protagonist Vlad Taltos, as well as the Hungarian fairy tale he included in The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.

So carried away were we with our conversation that it took us awhile to realize that we had eaten more than our normal serving.  Sure, pancakes aren’t particularly high in calories, and we had worked out this morning.  Yes, we had watched our intake today, knowing we’d be visiting Denny’s tonight, and we were using sugar-free syrup.  Still, a feeling of heaviness overtook me after as I ate.  My body seemed to be bloating, even though pancakes don’t usually give me gas.  And my head and back began to ache, as I hunched over my plate.  So I stood up to stretch, and the table flew up, scattering our plates to the floor.  I heard a loud cracking sound, and suddenly I was staring out at the stars overlooking San Diego Bay.

When my wife rose, she too broke through the roof.  We didn’t want to risk lowering our necks through the shattered wood, so we crawled out the broken roof, and dropped the money for our meals to the waiter who stared up at us.  Then we headed for the parking lot, but we had grown so tall, that each step carried us several blocks.  By the time we stopped our momentum, we stood in San Diego Bay, and we noticed waves crashing through the normally calm waters, and several boats overturned and sinking.  We saw the lights and heard the sirens of the harbor police, and so we took off through the water, keeping along the shore and ahead of the boats. 

Perhaps we shouldn’t have run after eating so many pancakes, but we felt suffused with energy.  Growing wet from sweat, water, and spray, we ran through the darkness, evading the boats, helicopters, and planes that regularly pursued us.  When my wife signaled she was getting tired, we climbed ashore.  Those dining and partying on the beach didn’t look at us strangely, so we realized that we must have burned off all the extra calories and resumed our former size.  We decided to round off the evening with dessert in a beachfront restaurant.  From other diners’ conversations, and the address printed on the back of the menu, we learned we were in Puerto Vallarta.  So we took a taxi to the airport, and caught a late-night flight back home.

The next time we visit Denny’s, we’ll plan our dinner with a little more forethought.  We really need to enjoy their All You Can Eat Pancakes on a Friday evening, so we can spend the entire weekend in such an exotic locale.  Isn’t it amazing how travel can expand the mind, and yet shrink the body?

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries
The Power of Pancakes
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

Andras Albert, Hungarian Storyteller

In a first-season episode of “Castle,” Martha tells her son Richard, the bestselling mystery writer, “Research doesn’t pay the bills.”  She’s certainly correct, as publishers pay Fiction writers not for their research, but based upon sales figures.  Nor do readers care how much research a writer does.  Their sole concern is how entertaining they find his or her novels.  Yet writers need inspiration, and the stories they write need grounding.  So research, in one form or another, seems like an intrinsic part of the writing process, as necessary to the writer as it is for anyone who is paid based upon his knowledge as well as his skills. 

Nevertheless, I’ve often wondered if I have researched too much, and written too little.  Certainly it’s easy to lose oneself in research.  Occasionally research has only underlined all that I didn’t know about a given subject, and intimidated me into not writing. I’ve often wondered how much of the research I’ve conducted was absolutely necessary, and if it contributed to what I wrote in a meaningful way.  Or was research merely pandering to my insecurities?

In her notes on the story “Handsome Andras,” contained in her book Folktales of Hungary, Linda Degh describes the storyteller, Andras Albert, as “one of the most genuinely creative storytellers in Hungarian oral literature.”  She attributes this to the land in which he worked as a lumberjack, but she also mentions that his superior abilities arise from his unique mindset.  Unlike most of his contemporaries, he describes his life as a folktale, populated by supernatural beings, characters from his own tales, and the heroic journeys he undertook.  He described, in exacting detail, an airplane he built.  Unfortunately, it crashed in the forest, and he never found time to build another.  Still, he spent part of his life in a cabin by a lake, where a dragon lived along its shores.  

Life, they say, is full of compensations.

Linda Degh describes his story, “Handsome Andras,” as an example of “the gifted storyteller who can build a complete story around an incomplete episode.  The main topic turns on the hero’s wanderings.  Well-known tale elements are skillfully interwoven to thicken the plot before the final entanglement.  Thus a new story evolves.”  This story offers numerous episodes and fantastic elements, and utilizes motifs common to classic Hungarian folk literature.  “The long wandering of the hero is described with such dramatic sense that never for a moment does it become uninteresting.  The plot is cleverly intricate; a dazzlingly picturesque world unfolds itself before us, and in a fascinating manner the changing moods, the worries and anxieties of the hero are poignantly described.”

At first glance, Degh seems to suggest that research is unnecessary, that great stories arise solely from one’s ability to harness the imagination.  But a careful look at her notes underlines that Albert “remodels the old form in so ingenious a manner that instead of turning the tale into an individual literary composition, he abides by the accepted pattern of folk narrative.”  

Despite his extraordinary imagination, it appears that Andras Albert would not have met the expectations of his audience, had he not memorized the classic Hungarian folk tales, and understood why his listeners loved them so much.  So I guess I'll return to my research, even if the rewards of doing so are not immediately apparent.  At least I can occasionally glance out my window, and watch the dragon lounging in my backyard.

This weekend, maybe I'll get started on that airplane.

Dragon Dave

Hungarian Folktales and a Changing Publishing Market

In Folktales of Hungary, Linda Degh demonstrates the importance of Folktales to the Hungarian poor.  Great importance was placed on the overall form of each story.  Individual storytellers were allowed to embroider, but audiences demanded they retain the key elements of any story.  Thus, while researchers might discover hundreds of variations, they could identify which particular story a person was telling.

Folktales preserved a community’s identity.  Legends explained unique aspects of a village or group.  Stories intermixed the religious and secular, as to a certain extent, both were seen as controlling and oppressive.  Parents instilled the culture’s most important stories in their children, so that as they grew older, they would be able to relate the basics of each story.  An essential part of family gatherings involved storytelling.  People gathered in each other’s homes to perform tasks such as spinning wool or making clothing, and sang songs or told stories to keep everyone’s mind off the tedious tasks.

If life took you away from your community, the folk tales you had learned took on even more importance.  After working all day in a new place, what better way to relax in the evening than to listen to a story?  Of course, at some point, you would be expected to contribute.  Tales became a form of currency for the wandering poor, the itinerant student, and discharged soldiers.  If you became a servant in someone’s house, your employer might expect you to lull him or her to sleep with a tale.  And if you joined the military, you had better be ready to tell an interesting story after lights out.  Anyone who could not was forced to shout into a stove, “Oh mother!  Haven’t you brought me up to be a big brute of an ass, who hasn’t even been taught to tell a tale!”

In his blog, author Kevin J. Anderson relates how he and Brian Herbert have been forced to shorten their book tours.

“The very nature of bookselling and promotion is changing dramatically with the closing of the Borders chain, Barnes & Noble announcing the closing of another 100 stores, the rise of eBooks and online bookselling. Another factor: newspapers and local TV news have dropped most of their coverage of book events so it’s nearly impossible to get any sort of media attention for a book signing (especially for the middle book in an original trilogy). Many publishers are dropping their author tours entirely.”

So even bestselling authors have been affected by this societal trend.  Locus Magazine’s February issue is always devoted to the year in review, and this year it highlighted how the number of publishers is increasing.  Traditionally, the major publishers produced certain types, or forms, of fiction.  For example, a Science Fiction or Fantasy reader knew what type of book Baen or Tor published.  With the proliferation of publishers, and the rising ease (and acceptance) of self-publishing, authors will be empowered to write any type of story without adhering to traditional rules.  This may more it difficult for the reader to know what to expect from any particular book, and hence derive satisfaction from the reading experience.

To a certain extent, I think the popularity of ABC TV’s “Once Upon A Time” reflects this evolution in storytelling.  The series follows a soap opera format, with no episode expected to stand on its own.  Hence, a viewer cannot watch a single episode and instantly understand the characters.  Nor does it restrict itself to European fairy tale types.  This season, they’ve introduced Mulan and Doctor Frankenstein as characters.  But does overall story logic matter, provided each episode entertains us, and causes us to tune in next week? 

Folktales in Hungary were always considered passing entertainment rather than art.  With reduced barriers to entry, will overall quality deteriorate?  And with the loss of the gatekeepers, such as the traditional publishers and bookstores, will Fiction still build communities?  Will it uphold genres?  Can Fiction survive the translation to a mostly eBook format?  Or will books become a passing diversion, easily downloaded like any other type of computer file, and no more memorable than this—or any other—blog post?

Dragon Dave

The Race to Collect Hungarian Folktales

If we’re honest, I think most of us would admit we sometimes find reading the forewords and introductions to nonfiction books a tremendous bore.  Yet we know that these textual additions are intended to enhance our appreciation for the author’s efforts.  So we slog our way through them, and hope they don’t extinguish our interest in the subsequent material. 

I won’t claim that the forty-plus pages of introductory material in Folktales of Hungary held me as rapt as a Fairy Tale novel by Patricia C. Wrede or Steven Brust, but it did impress on me the dedication of the scholars who collected and studied this art form.  Linda Degh’s purpose in assembling this volume of simple tales was not to amuse children, but to provide a representative sampling of the types of stories that had proven popular with the country’s peasantry.  Researchers viewed folktale collection as important, and regarded their study as a reborn science.  With their country emerging from a long period of Austrian and then German rule, and the peasantry finally throwing off the shackles of “feudalistic and ecclesiastical tyrannies,” the researchers wished not only to enhance their understanding of their past and present culture, but to forge a beneficial link between modern scientific theory and the practical tasks of building a more equitable society for future generations. 

As my knowledge of modern Hungary is slight (to nonexistent), and this book was published nearly fifty years ago, I have no idea if Linda Degh and her associates succeeded in influencing the evolution of their society.  Nor can I share with you how their folktale tradition has flourished since then.  What the introductory material impressed upon me is how the researchers raced against time to collect these stories.  Except in the more secluded regions, or among those of exceptional storytelling talents, the ability of oral storytellers to capture and hold an audience’s attention was dying out.  Soon, they feared, there would be no more folktales to collect.

Following World War II, modernization and Soviet rule brought sweeping changes to Hungary.  Advances in communication, better access to electricity, radio and TV, libraries, cinemas, and even traveling theaters, were competing for common people’s attention.  Poverty became less of a barrier to advancement as access to education increased for all age groups and social classes.  With the introduction of modern farming methods, not only were people moving to the larger cities in large numbers, but those farmers who remained behind organized into collectives.  Researchers thus headed to remote villages, and the manor houses that were being converted into homes “for the ailing and aged” to collect these stories before those who told them passed away.

We tend to think of literacy as good thing, and of course it is.  But in the mid-sixties, it was that very growing literacy that was killing off the oral folktale tradition.  Why gather with others in a common room, when you could relax at the end of a long, tiring day in the comfort and privacy of your own quarters?  Why listen to another tell a story of his or her choosing, when you could read a book better suited to your own interests and tastes?  While a reader might miss the rise and fall of the storyteller’s voice, and any actions that accompanied his utterances, written stories tend to be better constructed than oral ones, and are unrestricted by traditional conventions.  While the reader identifies folktales with the past, he identifies new stories and novels with the present.  The latter hold an immediacy and excitement that the former lack.  So the publishing industry flourishes, and old traditions die.

Thus, researchers hurried to collect these priceless gems that held the keys to unlock both past and future.  Then they raced back behind the fortified walls of their universities.  There, carrying guttering torches, they headed for priest holes and disguised libraries in which to safeguard their treasure against the ravages of time, unethical collectors, and rampaging hordes of invaders.

All right, I’ll admit that my prose is growing too flowery, and that my summary makes the introductory material seem more exciting than it really is.  But that merely underlines the importance of my blogging, and my superior ability to convey important information.  Had Linda Degh contacted me to write the introduction, and my services been available back then, I surely could have done a better job of it!  (Right?)

Modern folktale researchers, hire me while you can.

Dragon Dave