A possible future book title:
“The One-sided Coin or How To Avoid Being A Complete Arsehole When Discussing Things.”
The subject is very dear to me.
A possible future book title
In English, Life, People, Writing
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Jul 172011
Stolen words and a clean kitchen
In English, Writing
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Jun 262011
When I started on this book I figured that 333 words per day would be a reasonable goal. It might still be, but today I wrote one(!) sentence, and it wasn’t even made by my own words (I stole them from the neighbouring table at the café, where I was waiting for some friends of mine). Today’s word count: 7. Some days are better, of course, but I better shape up if I’m going to make my own deadline.
Procrastination is, however, not all bad; my kitchen is quite clean.
En sådan där författare de talar om
In Swedish, Writing
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Nov 182010
Jag ska bli en sådan där författare som de talar om. Jag har ju skrivit i hela mitt liv och älskar att leka med ord, men fånigheter har hindrat mitt storhetsvansinne – nu är det slut med det! Här ska skrivas tills det är färdigskrivet och det sista jag skriver ska stå på min gravsten (vilket jag innerligt hoppas inte är det här).
I am home
In English, Life, Writing
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Aug 162010
The book that I am writing, although mostly still only in my heart, is being re-written and again written on new, fresh pages. The story is as new as it is old and it takes me there, to a place I once was familiar with, a place that I used to know and lived in. My travels brought me far away from the place I once called home.
I am going back there now, to the place which once was home, and I find that the path is slightly different than I remembered – it’s still the same, but different, as though I see it with the eyes of the child for the first time.
The sea is calm and draws me nearer my birth place in a slow but steady pace. The winds are favourable and view is clear. I can see the shores where I once used to run as a child. The child that is still within me, me the man, the newly born soul with the open heart.
There is a beacon beckoning me home, steering me right. I can hear it sing through the air, brought by the winds, the voice of the almost forgotten. There is a promise of peace again. I can feel it as it flows through my once uneasy body.
As I land and feel the sand under my feet, I know that this adventure has only just started and I lay down right then and there, just to stay in that moment for a little while longer. I am, strangely as it may still seem to me, home again. I start to cry. I am home.
Vårt ointressanta språk
In Swedish, People, Writing
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Jul 182010
Jag har inte läst en enda skönlitterär bok på svenska under de senaste 10-12 åren. Det svenska språket är helt enkelt för fattigt och tråkigt. Det menar jag förstås inte, vad jag menar är att det svenska språkbruket idag är genuint ointressant och i det närmaste oanvändbart för litterärt användande. Det är inte så konstigt att svenska författare inte fångar mitt intresse – de har inget att säga och även om de skulle ha det, så har de inte språk nog att säga något med.
När förlagen beställer översättningar av engelska ungdomsböcker så vill man inte ha korrekta översättningar; man vill ha förenklade översättningar med motiveringen att svenska barn och ungdomar “inte har det ordförrådet och skulle inte tala så själva”. Idioter. Hur tror de att folk ska kunna skaffa sig ett ordförråd om de aldrig stöter på för dem okända ord? Förlagen tar inget språkligt ansvar. Nej, det ska vara lättläst och lättsålt. Idioter.
Att läsa en bok översatt till svenska är för mig ganska frustrerande; jag märker ganska snart när man försökt förenkla eller när man inte lyckats översätta idiom eller kulturspecifika referenser och begrepp. Det blir bara fånigt att översätta sådana saker till svenska. Motiveringen att de gör det är att “svenskar känner inte till dessa saker”. Trams. Det spelar ingen som helst roll. Om jag läser en bok på engelska och det finns referenser till samhälls- och kulturspecifika saker och personer i den som jag inte känner till, så gör det inget. Jag förstår tillräckligt för att veta att det är just så det ligger till och att det därför är roligt och intressant – och dessutom är det inte så svårt att söka information om detta om man nu verkligen vill ha reda på exakt varför författaren nämnt det i boken. Ta inte för givet att att läsarna är ointelligenta – och skulle de ändå vara ointelligenta, så blir de inte smartare av att läsa förenklade böcker. Det säger sig självt.
Jag har länge haft en teori som blev verifierad för några dagar sedan av forskare någonstans: vårt språk definierar vårt sätt att vara – vårt beteende. Man hade undersökt beteendet hos tvåspråkiga personer för att se om de gav olika respons på olika språk. Inte överraskande för mig så var det så att de faktiskt reagerade olika på olika språk. På det ena språket kunde man reagera mer aggressivt än på det andra. Varför det är så får vi väl fortsätta att spekulera i, men min poäng med att nämna det är att språket är viktigt. Det är mycket viktigare än folk kanske inser, för det handlar inte bara om ordförråd och att kunna uttrycka sig; det ligger mycket djupare i oss än så – vi är de vi är genom vårt språk. Så sluta förenkla och utarma språket. Förstår du inte ett ord, så fråga om det – det gjorde jag när jag läste som barn och jag gör det fortfarande. Om vårt språk är fattigt och ointressant, så är även vi, vi som talar språket, fattiga och ointressanta.
I guess I must be
In English, People, Writing
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Jul 152010
A new day. People are still crazy and I am still around: all the fixings for a good novel and a never boring life. I would like to say that living in this world is like watching the blind leading the blind, but that would be an insult to blind people. Complete crazy leading the complete crazy is more accurate. Sometimes I consider myself both blind and crazy to put up with this. I guess I must be.
Jun 182010
This is somewhat terrifying: I am in the mood for writing, but I have nothing I want to write about. I envy writers that can make anything into a story of some sort. I cannot do that. I have done it before, but it seems harder and harder to write about nothing and turn that nothing into something. I need to meet more people and see more places, that’s what I need to do.
There are some options open to me; either I go north for a while and work with the homeless or I go south to Paris and do whatever there is available to do there. The bottom line is that I have no more money at the present and no input to create anything from, so I have to do something and I have to do it quite soon as well – the experience of stale bread and canned beans is only delightful for so long. Besides, I am afraid the pile of bills in front of me will tip over and kill me if I do not find a way to pay them soon. Never trust stacked unopened envelopes on your desk – there’s something sinister and fatalistic about them.
In the darkness of my mind
In English, Writing
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May 142010
I forget the words. They do not linger. They never do. All that is left is a sort of feeling of the meaning of the words and that feeling stays a lot longer than the actual words themselves, but eventually even the feeling moves into the darkness of my mind. Way inside of my mind, all I ever said or wrote resides there in some darkness, just waiting to be lit up again so that I can use whatever there was again. The light needed for me to remember things sometimes come unexpectedly, like now, when I was lying in my bed thinking about communication. I wish that everyday communication could be more like art; that I could express things with music and photography at an instant. Just think how it would be to instead of using words you could just produce a picture at an instant to show someone what you mean. Or to express your feelings with a song, complete with backup instruments, perfectly arranged.
My mind, or rather my memory, is a dull instrument. It does not function like most people’s; it lives in the now and hardly that sometimes. It seldom goes back to retrieve and re-use whatever knowledge or wit that once were obtained or created by me – unless triggered by something. Remembering the words is not hard work – I wish it was – it is just not possible most of the times. So, writing, for my part, is not as fluent as I wish it would be. I can forget a noun and spend a long time trying to remember it without any success, making me abandon a whole sentence or even a paragraph, or even worse, making me abandon the whole text for the time being. It can be any noun that is forgotten, even the simplest one. The hard thing is that I know that I know the word and that it is there, inside my mind, in the darkness, hiding, refusing to come into light. I can feel the word and I know what it means, but it stays away from me, like lost loves.
Perhaps the reason why I love words so much is because they are hard to keep? I spend much time reading and listening to other people and I always know when something is not correctly phrased or if the said does not follow logic. I think I have become that way because of my… well, I do not really want to call it a handicap, but I guess that that is what it really is. My mind is flawed. I am not as complete as I would wish to be. Although, I have always been this way. I cannot remember a time when it was not so. I do not know how it is to remember, because I have never been able to. Like a bird born in a cage does not know how it is to live in the open wild.
In my younger days I was always in awe of people that could remember and cite almost anything. I always thought of them as so much smarter than I. Later, much later, I realized it was not about being smart or not, it was just about me not having the same capacity for remembering things. Still today, I feel a bit inferior to those people. I wish I could cite – anything at all. I cannot even cite my own poetry, not even the really short ones. But like other handicapped people, I have grown super powers because of it, much like the blind develops a great sense of hearing, I have developed a keen sense of picking up emotions in anything said or written. Say anything and I know how you feel. Granted, it is not an exact science, but I am seldom wrong. Another funny thing is that I nearly always know if a person has said something or not if someone else claims it. I can tell if it is within the character of that person to say something like that in those words. The problem is that it is most often quite a useless super power to have. I wonder how many people there are out there with completely useless super powers.
I wish I had a super power flash light to light up my brain with, so that I could use everything in there that I have forgotten over the years and all the knowledge that is still in there, hiding in the dark. I still know all these things, I just cannot use the knowledge verbally. It saddens me. Often. But in writing, with some research, I can manage and I feel so much more alive and well. Not inferior, not handicapped, not damaged and not useless. I write and therefore I am.