Spewing for the Balcony

While you were watching Super Bowl ads on network TV last night, six grown-ups publicly vomited in front of each other in the course of 2 half hour shows on HBO (The Righteous Gemstones and Somebody Somewhere).  From a viewing perspective, I think 6 vomits in an hour was a personal best for me, but that's just a gut feeling.   I can't say with certainty because I have noticed that sometime over the course of I would say the past 10 years, vomit has become a universal device for expressing the inner emotions of a character in movies and on television.   

The Gemstones do nothing by halves and the communal distraught emesis of four of them in front of the hospital where the patriarch lay in a coma from injuries sustained in a crash after an ambush by machine gun toting cycle riding gunmen at the climax of last week's show, involved spectacular fountains of effluvia.  But the Gemstones is the kind of show that would have its characters vomit satirically. The shared vomiting of sister characters in the more gentle and realistic Somebody Somewhere that followed is more typical of what I'm talking about.  One sister, on learning from the other that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend emoted emetically onto the floor of the barn where the two were sheltering from a brewing tornado, upon which the sister who had struggled with having to be the messenger of such bad news followed suit.  

Impressive as it was, the second show suffered a bit from having its puke act have to follow the spew-laden spectacle of the former.  

I could have done without any vomit, but unless I'm very much mistaken, somehow the stress-puke has become an inescapable trope in dramatic entertainment.  It is the go-to deus ex machina for terminating an emotional scene--the signifier of the heightened seriousness of a plot point, in case you hadn't gotten the message from context.

As a very small child, nothing displeased me more than vomiting. By the time I was seven I had developed flawless mastery over the reflex with the result that until I discovered the social lubricant and control inhibiting qualities of alcohol in my late teens, I threw up exactly 0 times. It became my superpower.  An inability to control myself with liquor made my late adolescence a minefield of puke, but once I learned by age 24 not to binge drink,  even having had stomach flu on more than one occasion since, I have somehow managed to avoid vomiting all but one time in my adult life-- and it was as unpleasant and traumatic as  I ever remembered it being.   And needless to say, I have never once thrown up merely because something really stressed me out. So perhaps I'm living in a dream world, but I'd like to think people vomit not remotely close to how frequently they now do in movies and on television shows.  Then again, most of our lives are generally not an escalation of cliffhangers or an arms race of tortuous plot twists designed to be worthy of water cooler conversation the next morning.

It wasn't always like this on tv.  In the 60's, when I was forming my expectations about television, vomit was one of many taboos to the precious sensibilities of the sponsors who brought entertainment into our homes.   Toilets didn't exist on TV at all until All in the Family broke the barrier in the Nixon administration.  Until the special effects revolution in the 70s, it was extremely rare to even hear so much as a retch on the big screen.  The Exorcist was perhaps the Apollo program for cinematic vomit, but aside from an occasional gross-out in a horror movie or outrageous comedy (Terry Jones' gluttonous blow-out in Monty Python's Meaning of Life is perhaps the Everest of gag inducing comedy), vomits on screen remained relatively rare.

How did it become such an appointment TV cliché?  I assume there must have been a template-setter for the trope. It must have occurred to some primordial screenwriter that drama could be telegraphed effectively, or a punchline fashioned, with a suspenseful lunge for the commode.  Whenever the original archetype debuted, I imagine it made some kind of a stir.  While typical audience members no doubt set down their popcorn and covered their eyes, the critics and awards givers must have sat up and taken notice.  Perhaps the novelty pushed a performance over an Oscar or Emmy finish line.  Whatever engendered it, it seems to have caught on among the scriptwriting caste like a stomach virus, because by now it is ubiquitous.  Screenwriters as a class may not be the most innovative bunch on the whole, but when it comes to on-screen vomit, they are lemmings.  In COVID lockdown, I have seen characters vomit their emotions in show after show-- to use just some of the HBO shows I've seen over the past year or so as an example, characters vomit expressively in episodes of Succession, Silicon Valley, Search Party, The White Lotus, The Flight Attendant, Hacks, and Euphoria.  While some of the aforementioned are among the best TV I've seen recently and most are sparing with the prop vomitus,  I gave up on Euphoria when characters had "dram-ited" three times by the 5th episode of Season 1.

While I know news of this phenomenon can't come as a shock to anyone still watching mainstream movies and television, I've been sitting on it for a while. So thank you for listening.  For it is only through acknowledging and talking out loud about the problems that we as a society face today that we can begin to address them.

Endtimes Confidential

I can't decide whether I reject the mantle of "guru" for myself because I reject the authority of anyone, including myself, as part and parcel of my philosophy, or rather, because I somehow understand on a fundamental level that I personally have no business instructing anyone on anything.  Faced with the current global pickle, I want to think of a way out.  But who am I to say what to do?  This is why it amazes me that so many people out there have so much to say about it unreservedly.

On the matter of progress, it’s a well established principle that we’re not good enough to actually have anything nice.  The more logical it is,  the better it sounds for us, the less likely we’re ever going to get it.  The more sane and desirable it is, the more likely a right wing think tank has already worked out the talking points to murk up the waters around it with the result that regular people are going to actively (or at least passively but effectively) work against making it happen. "They're going to take away your right to have whatever damn health insurance your boss wants to give you!"  "They want a healthy environment even if it spells death for American business!"  "They want to change the rules and abort the life terms of the supreme court justices your president picked as was his constitutional right!!1"  "They want your senator to have less of a voice than some socialist from Vermont!1"  "They don't want you to be rich because you're white!1".  We should prepare for this kind of attack, but we ain’t prepared to prepare.  This is what they do basically.  The left doesn’t really have anything comparable in terms of effective tactics.  Our standards get in the way.

Somehow this reminds me of the end of a recent interview of Alex Hochuli (Aufhebunga Bunga podcaster and Zero Books co-author of The End of the End of History which has informed a lot of my thinking since I read it last summer) by Emma Vigeland on Majority Report a while back.  It was a good conversation, and it gave me warm and toasty feelings to see two of my worlds colliding so agreeably for such an extended chat-- like an opening for a rapprochement between warring sides of my own personality-- but there were inklings of a clash of paradigms only in the last 5 minutes or so.  Hochuli had a kind of provocative closing statement, provoked himself a tad by an opening Vigeland attempted to make for Hochuli’s take on the Jimmy Dore / Tucker Carlson / Glenn Greenwald axis of dissent.  Hochuli didn’t rise to the bait but instead urged those on the left to be open to rebellion, revolution, dissent taking unexpected forms.  His basic premise, in his words, “The good news for the left is that things are even worse than you think they are.” The end is near for liberalism, and as such there are frantic attempts to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and  the left should be careful to land on the right side of those attempts if they sincerely want to see change for the better. 

Another thing he said at one point was something Glenn Greenwald said to Ben Burgis about the culture wars in an interview of the latter by the former at the beginning of the summer: The left won that war.  As the youngsters say: Yeah, no. I don’t believe that for a minute.  To me the culture war is a never-ending war over nothing that is designed to have no winner.  Deciding who is the arbiter of victory in the culture war is a deadly battle in itself.  In addition, Hochuli said the right is weak.  He made clear he was talking not about say the Koch bros, et al, but about the movement among real people.  It’s smaller in number, doesn’t have a lot of firepower.  I think that’s a distinction without a difference.  That side is winning—the aims of that side are being met-- by force it seems to me.  It seems to me that when the right is actually owning the left, it gives cover to those who want the glamour of the left without the commitment, hence the Kochs pass themselves off as anarchists rather than the neoliberals they truly are and thank goodness one of them is dead.  But I think in short, Hochuli's point is, it is not how it seems to you, silly person.

Sounds great, but I have qualms about the thesis.  The part of the right that gets things done is strong.  Meanwhile, the splintered left wins disparate battles which it rallies to when the right threatens to suppress something, but on the whole, the whole war is seemingly impossible for it to win, because while it was dicking with knobs here and there to put out fires set by the right’s agents of chaos, the grownups on the right seized the engine.  (And actually all those little legal battles the left won are now threatened by virtue of being legal.)

It’s also worth remembering that the mission of the right of course is not to capture the engine, but to re-capture it, to spray it for cockroaches.  To them it’s not winning history, really, it’s trying to put a stop to it.

The left won the culture wars.  The right is weak.  Therefore the left is strong?  I do think Hochuli thinks it’s stronger than I think it is.  While I don’t believe what replaces neoliberalism is necessarily going to be an improvement, Hochuli seems to be saying stay open.  Stay loose.  Whatever is coming is going to come with opportunities so let it come.  He really thinks neoliberalism is on its very last legs, and that what comes after will be better.  

He could just be wrong, of course.  

If you want to know what I think.  I think the planet or at least the species is on its last legs, but neoliberalism, which is why, is going down with it.  I too could be wrong.  I could just be depressed.  But could that be why I’m depressed?

Breakfast Machine

 

Revisitations

Josh Tuitahi

Byung-Chul Han's 2015 book The Burnout Society begins with these words:

Every age has its signature afflictions. Thus, a bacterial age existed; at the latest, it ended with the discovery of antibiotics. Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons.

Han is not an epidemiologist but a philosopher whose thesis, that neurosis is the affliction of the age, still has some heft to it.  But I'd be surprised if he wouldn't take an opportunity to re-do the opening if it presented itself.  

With respect to its emphasis on mental health in the late stages of neoliberal capitalism, Han's work bears a lot of similarity to Mark Fisher's as expressed in Capitalist Realism.  Both Han and Fisher accurately describe how, in an age in which  the burden of improving or acceding to our own discrete individual predicaments is on each of us, the proletariat at the end of history has been made obsolete by neoliberalism's implication of the individual in his or her own exploitation.  In light of this atomization, the magnitude of what each of us is up against, and how inadequately armed our alienation from each other prepares us to face it, is illuminated in both writers' works with crystal clarity. 

In stark contrast to the ineffectuality of left-wing movements for the past many decades,  nothing has challenged the fetid neoliberal status quo quite like right wing populism.  Fisher's book is cited in journalist Ece Temelkuran's 2019 work How to Lose a Country, an extended meditation on the ways in which civil society has been and continues to be usurped by illiberal pseudo-populist movements. It has of course happened again and again since the end of history-- in Hungary, in Poland, in the Philippines, in Italy, in India, in Brazil, in Brexit era Britain, and of course in the USA and in Temelkuran's own Turkey.  I started reading Temelkuran's book the year it came out after listening to a talk she gave about it on some internet video site.  (Yes, you know the one.). I'm not sure why I stopped--it's beautifully argued, and I always meant to finish it-- but looking recently for something to read that I didn't have to buy, it appeared among my choices.  Knowing that my original impetus for buying it was as a coping mechanism for understanding how life in the age of Trump related to global concerns, I wondered if it would have any relevance at all now, or if it would just seem even with its cosmopolitan perspective like just so much quaint liberal bellyaching (not unlike Han's unfortunate opening paragraph taken way out of context).  

It has relevance.  Obviously it is a reminder of how things like Turkey's Erdoğan, Hungary's Orbán and our own Trump happen, endure and can happen again.  The chapter titles compose the story she wants to tell:

1 Create a Movement
2 Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language
3 Remove the Shame: Immorality is 'Hot' in the Post-Truth World
4 Dismantle Judicial and Political Mechanisms
5 Design Your Own Citizen
6 Let Them Laugh at the Horror
7 Build Your Own Country

 Illustrating the second step, Temelkuran re-imagines a classic Aristotelian syllogism with a right wing populist interlocutor: 

ARISTOTLE: All humans are mortal.
POPULIST: That is a totalitarian statement.
ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal?
POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life.
ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant.
POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant.
ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question...
POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. ... If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did.
ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human …
POPULIST: ... Socrates is a fascist... You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.

ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.

POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.

ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.

POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.

Sound familiar?  Temelkuran constructed her dialogue to purposely illustrate the various rampant logical fallacies that are enthusiastically and powerfully embraced by right wing populist movements, and her deconstruction of it is worth the price of the book.  But even more than that, in this post Trump respite I'm appreciating her critique of neoliberal vacuity even more.  Viewed through the lens of Temelkuran's thesis, dynamically bad Trumpism gives weak-tea ineffectual Bidenism and its ilk its only meaning.  If not for the stimulus of right wing populism's purposely immoral extremes to react against,  vapid neoliberalism would barely have the strength to clasp onto the status quo.  I don't know what saying this out loud portends in the way of an opening for a leftist resurgence of any kind, but the way things are going, I will view any handle on the composition of our current predicament as nourishment, and if nourishment is life, I will take it as I would any sliver of hope I can get.

Fifty Swifties

Tom and Tom were chatting:

 

"Let's play Scrabble, " said Tom quizzically.

"Have you met my parasitic arachnid Francis?" said Tom frantically.

"How clever your Tom Swifty was," said Tom shadily.

"Read between the lines," said Tom flippantly.

"I can't see through this fog," said Tom mysteriously

"I need glasses," said Tom blindly.

"I see," said Tom spectacularly.

"I'm very knowledgeable about physics," said Tom matter-of-factly.

"I'm voting Green Party for president," said Tom insufferably.

"Politically I'm an idiot," said Tom conservatively.

"What are your pronouns?" said Tom thematically.

"CRT is probably the reason my roof is leaking," said Tom problematically.

"Is my hat crooked?" said Tom jauntily.

"I'm meditating," said Tom thoughtlessly.

"Can I sit over there instead?" said Tom movingly.

"I've got holes in all of my clothes," said Tom tearfully.

"I'm losing my hair," said Tom, distressed.

"Is there a public restroom around here?" said Tom dutifully.

"Can I come in?" said Tom outstandingly. 

"Cat got your tongue?" said Tom with a painful expression.

"I got laid off for some reason," said Tom robotically.

"I'm storming the castle.  Who's with me?" said Tom revoltingly.

"Please blow your nose," said Tom Hanks.

"Let's go for a boat ride," said Tom Cruise.

"That crow can't speak," said Tom Brokaw.

"I don't know what kind of bagel to get," said Tom plainly.

"We don't have butter," said Tom imperiously.

"Pass the Froot Loops," said Tom serially.

"My upper arm hurts," said Tom humorously.

"We're all part of the cosmic organism," said Tom jointly.

"What's on TV?" said Tom programmatically.

"I'm a developer," said Tom programmatically.

"We need a Green New Deal," said Tom programmatically.

"I'm in favor of grammar," said Tom programmatically.

"I'm about to be a father," said Tom laboriously.

"I'm not a vampire," Tom reflected.

"I'm a fan of East German Figure skating of the 1980's," said Tom wittily.

"Have you read Common Sense?" said Tom painfully.

"I know who I'd want to be marooned with," said Tom gingerly.

"I miss us" said Tom exasperatingly.

"I'm sorry for smiling," said Tom with chagrin.

"I take my plomb everywhere," said Tom with aplomb.

"Could I please get some crity?" said Tom with alacrity.

"Did you hear Roy Orbison died?" said Tom mercilessly.

"Time to feed the pigs," said Tom sloppily.

"Time to sing my aria," Tom intoned.

"Time to shout a somewhat impressive-sounding verb," Tom vociferated.

"Could I be lactating?" Tom expressed.

"I'm sick of your games", said Tom swiftly.

"Time is up.  Put your pencils down," said Tom finally.

Songs for Their Fathers

First up we have Låt till Far (Song to my Father), Pers Erik Olsson, composer, with Lisa Rydberg on fiddle and Jonas Knutsson on baritone sax from the album Östbjörka.  Pers Erik was a third generation folk fiddler of acclaim from Dalarna, Sweden who wrote the tune to memorialize his celebrated father, Pers Olof Olsson.  Baritone sax was a really lovely choice for accompaniment in Lisa Rydberg's arrangement.

The tenor sax of Joe Henderson is similarly featured on Horace Silver's 1964 Song for My Father (Cantiga Para Meu Pai), a tune inspired by a trip to Brazil which put him in mind of his Cape Verdean father, John Tavares Silver.  Horace Silver is on piano and the ensemble is rounded out by Carmel Jones on trumpet, Teddy Smith on bass and Roger Humphries on drums.  

I first heard this recording in the latter part of the 70s, so of course the opening would prep my ears for Steely Dan's Rikki Don't Lose that Number from their 1974 album Pretzel Logic.  Now, it works the other way around for me, as it should since I believe Walter Becker and Donald Fagan themselves have acknowledged that the opening of their biggest hit is a nod to Silver's recording.

Gloomy Sunday / Holiday

To close out the year, we offer Pál Kalmár with the original 1935 recording of the notorious Szomorú vasárnap (Gloomy Sunday), with music by Rezső Seress and lyrics by László Jávor:

The narrative of Ilona Péterné Koncz's video tells a fanciful, fast and loose version of the song's story* which is already quite a doozy (Here is another version of it; yet another is here):

Having dropped out of school as a young man, Rezső Seress one day came across a traveling circus. He applied to Mr. Bruno, the circus director, saying that he wanted to be an artist.  He broke into the public consciousness with the song "Another Night" composed in 1925. It sold sixteen thousand copies.

In 1935, László Jávor, a reporter for the evening journal "8 O'Clock", approached him with a poem he had written entitled "Sad Sunday", and asked if he would put it to music. Seress took the job but had a very hard time getting it done even though the poet continually pestered him. He finally debuted the song one night at the Forum Café, having paid a student from the Academy of Music 5 Pengő [roughly $16.25 in today's dollars] to transcribe musically what he whistled to him since Seress didn't know how to score music but composed his songs just by whistling them.  Jávor published the sheet music to no response from the public.  Seress was bitter about the failure and would have forgotten about Sad Sunday but for the appearance of newspaper accounts of a maid  who had committed suicide and left the lyrics of Sad Sunday to be found as her suicide note.  A week later, a ministerial apprentice shot himself in the backseat of a taxi and next to his farewell letter lay the sheet music of Sad Sunday!

On November 7, 1935, the journal "8 O'Clock" referred to the song as a Killer hit, and it could not have gotten a bigger response.  The following week it would be written up in Swiss, Italian, American, German and French newspapers as the Anthem of Suicides. It was sung on stage that fall at the [Berlin?] Olympics, and in 1936 it became a hit in America for Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra among others.

Meanwhile,  in Hungary because he was Jewish and could perform in fewer and fewer places, the composer's situation had become miserable.  At the outbreak of the war in 1941, he was marched to  a labor camp, in conditions that caused his kidneys to deteriorate, but - as he himself later recounted - his life was saved by an SS officer who knew his songs!

After the war, he played the piano at the Kispipa bar on Acacia Street in Budapest still living in abject misery while he was rumored to have $370,000 in royalties waiting for him in an American bank that could not be transferred until Hungary paid reparations for its role in the war.  His act was a must-see, but [in isolated, postwar Hungary at the uncomfortable and obscure Kispipa], he struggled for success.  As was said about attendance at his performances: There was always room on the plane.  He could have performed at Carnegie Hall, where even Oscar Peterson would have had to bow down to recognition by audiences of Seress as the most famous Hungarian songwriter; but he would remain in Hungary even in '56 when the borders opened. He continued to play at Kispipa, where he was seen by celebrities such as the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Iran, Spencer Tracy, Benjamino Gigli, Arturo Toscanini, and Otto Klemperer who called Seress "not just a musician - but a genius".

However, his songs were officially banned after 1949. He lived like a beggar in his Dob Street apartment, where he listened to recordings of Sad Sunday every day, in English, French, Chinese, Danish and all sorts of exotic African languages. At the age of 69, he was fed up with everything, and as if struck by the doom of his most famous global hit, the old suicide anthem,  he jumped off the balcony of his apartment. Though he survived the fall, he must have been very anxious to die because while recovering at the hospital he succeeded in strangling himself with the wire by which his plastered leg had been raised.

By other accounts, Seress, a communist by philosophy, had originally written his own lyrics for the tune which he had called Vége a világnak (The world is ending) in response to the precarious political situation brewing in Europe at the time (1933), and it was Jávor who was tasked to tone it down with a more upbeat suicide theme.

Jávor's lyrics in Hungarian (Note: Not all lyrics are heard in the video.  The song is truncated before the end of the second verse and the truncated clip is then repeated twice):

Szomorú vasárnap száz fehér virággal
Vártalak kedvesem, templomi imával
Álmokat kergető vasárnap délelőtt
Bánatom hintaja nélküled visszajött.
Azóta szomorú mindig a vasárnap
Könny csak az italom, kenyerem a bánat.
Szomorú vasárnap.
Utolsó vasárnap, kedvesem, gyere el
Pap is lesz, koporsó, ravatal, gyászlepel
Akkor is virág vár, virág és koporsó
Virágos fák alatt utam az utolsó
Nyitva lesz szemem, hogy még egyszer lássalak
Ne félj a szememtől, holtan is áldalak.
Utolsó vasárnap.
Ősz van, és peregnek a sárgult levelek
Meghalt a földön az emberi szeretet
Bánatos könnyekkel zokog az őszi szél
Szívem már új tavaszt nem vár, és nem remél
Hiába sírok, és hiába szenvedek,
Szívtelen rosszak és kapzsik az emberek.
Meghalt a szeretet.
Vége a…

The above in English: 

Sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers

I was waiting for you, my dearest, with temple prayer

Dreaming of a Sunday morning

My sorrow has returned without you.

Since then, Sunday has always been sad

It's just my drink, my bread is grief.

Gloomy Sunday.

This last Sunday, my dearest, come to me

There will also be a priest, a coffin, a funeral home, a mourning cloth

You can also expect flowers, flowers and coffins

My journey under flowering trees is my last

My eyes will be open to see you again

Don't be afraid of my eyes; they will bless you from death.

Final Sunday.

It is autumn and the yellowed leaves are wilting

Human love has died on earth

The autumn wind is sobbing with sad tears

My heart is no longer waiting for a new spring and is not hoping

I cry in vain, and I suffer in vain,

People are heartless bad and greedy.

Love is dead.

Finally…

And it's got a beat you can dance to!  As alluded to in the video, on the global spread of rumors of the song's potency, it made appearances in languages the world over.†   Two American versions debuted in 1936-- a more faithful translation of Jávor's lyrics by Desmond Carter, recorded first by Paul Robeson, and a less strictly literal version (with an "it was all a dream" bridge to provide some relent from the gloom) by Sam M. Lewis, made famous later by Billie Holiday's utterly enthralling 1941 recording of it in particular.

Sunday is gloomy my hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?
Gloomy Sunday
Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all
My heart and I have decided to end it all
Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know
Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you
With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you
Gloomy Sunday
Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart dear
Darling I hope that my dream never haunted you
My heart is telling you how much I wanted you
Gloomy Sunday

If you need a lift or a reason to live after the above (and who wouldn't?), how about Confidence Man's Holiday?:

Zest for living supplement:

~~~~~

* Please note, unspeakable (as heck) does not endorse the video's version of the song's story.  The translation is provided for the curious. 

† Certain types of Hungarians (you know the type because they're everywhere in every culture) will tell you, as if they could somehow know, that you can only understand Gloomy Sunday in Hungarian which they think is a way of saying that there is something extraordinary and exclusive about how their own Hungarian brain interacts with Hungarian lyrics-- a way of claiming glory for themselves for someone else's work-- glory that you as a non-Hungarian cannot ever be privy to.  It's a Hungarian thing!  You wouldn't understand!  But what they are really saying, in order for that to be true, is that Hungarian poetry is provincial.  Not universal.  Limited in scope and application. Which would be pretty pathetic if true, but having some experience with Hungarian lyrics and poetry and literature, I can assure you as you suspected all along, that's pure horse shit!