A friend from university told me once that he sees the academic film experts in Hungary as tadpoles floating on the surface of a chamber pot. Even if you somehow manage it all the way to the top, you’re still stuck in a vessel used for pissing. He mostly meant professors and teachers of film, but ever since I heard him say that, I became fascinated with the idea and how it applies to basically everything I am interested in. It is painfully accurate and fittingly disgusting. He since moved to the UK and told me why he is much happier there: the pot finally became moderately sized.
Most people seem content with swimming along the surface here. I am trying to grow limbs and climb out. Ever since I was little I wanted to write. Ever since I started learning English, I wanted to write in my second language. I sometimes dream in English too and I scarily often find myself thinking in English. Last year I attended a journalists’ workshop in Warsaw and finally I was able to produce something worthy in a different language. My mentor told me my pieces were very good. My mentor was also a relic from a ’70s, a European Lester Bangs who told us stories about how Britt Ekland tried to jump him during an interview and what great conversations he had with Ray Davies from the Kinks. He drank red wine all the time and when browsing through the photos of the workshop, I noticed he held his hand if he was holding a glass even when he wasn’t drinking. My other mentor tried educating us about Google Alerts, subscription packages to Screen Daily and moderately useful advice on how to be a more practical film journalist. The Swedish drunk told us why it could be fun.
His praise was sparse. “I’ve read your articles. They are very good.” But it was enough to make me think. I even had one piece published on a website, and I am immensely proud of the fact, despite that for some reason, about three paragraphs went missing. But hey, my name is there, spelt like a Hungarian’s should be.
Recently I have started reading David Foster Wallace and Chuck Klosterman, so now I am aware of the impossible heights I could reach. I enjoy how they dissect minutiae that most people brush off. Wallace’s essay on Roger Federer’s presence on the tennis court is mesmerizing - even though I know fuck-all about tennis. I have a miniscule fraction-to-none of their talent, English isn’t even my first language* and I seem stuck in a country where most popular journalists and aesthetes seem left behind by everything that has happened in the last 15 years in popular culture, yet seem to get in line in front of us every time.
I write because it is the only thing I can. Two days ago I banged out a 10000+ character report on a Polish music festival just for my own entertainment. Sure, it looked like the digital equivalent of an endless scribbled page of a notebook torn from a vicious dog’s mouth, but it felt great to write that in just two hours. I will try to do my best.
*”But hey, Vladimir Nabokov also wrote in stilted, academic English, and look what became of him,” you say? Fuck Nabokov, the humourless bastard, I say.
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