English
About me and the texts in polvall.com
for a long time I have been writing in swedish. During a travel to England in October 2010 I started to write in English. I like it, and from time to time I will let my fingers roll between waves of english and my native tongue Swedish.
When you think of forests in Norden you don´t think Denmark. You should. Just north of Copenhagen there is a wonnderful wooden park called Dyrehaven. I walked there yesteraday wiyh my camera.
from a trip to northern England with english text
REFLECTIONS IN THE STREAM
The first picture is how most people see the stream when they walk from the harbour to the beach in Hornbæk where I have lived for 25 years. For many years that was also what I saw. This winter has been different. This winter has been cold. Snow fell and cold came in november. It stayed for months.
I started to walk with my camera to see if there were any pictures out in the cold. I found them everywhere and with shifting temperatures and winds new pictures were waiting for me nearly every day. We are born to create habits and it did´t take long before I have to go out and see what kind of pictures waiting for me. I learned that most places around my home had no pictures at all and some places had a lot. One of those places is stream with a wooden bridge a few meters long. The water runs in what can be described as a tiny valley. On the west side of the stream there are some trees formed by winds. In one tree hangs a rope where some people spends a couple if minutes swinging. That´s on saturdays and sundays. Weekdays I am mostly alone except for a few people with dogs.
I do not walk to the beach directly. I stay and look at the light and the wind and the water with my camera. Some days it looks that the scene has no picture at all, but I always take a few shoots to see and I learned that the camera see things I had not expected. I take what I call normal pictures also, looking at the pictures in my homepage I hope you agree, but the thing I really get excited about is reflections or mirrors as I call it. I have even got a suggestion for the title on a forthcoming book with this kind of pictures: The World as Mirror and the Mirror as World (Världen som spegel och spegeln som värld).
Yes I travel and in april 2011 I spent a lot of hours on the best place in the world for taking pictures of mirrors. And that is in Chicago taking pictures of the sculpture Cloud Gate. Later I will show you some of those pictures, but this time is the stream in Hornbæk that has been in my focus. You have to find a place near home where you like to be and you have to find something there you like to do. For many years I have been running, but my left hip don´t like it. So I stopp. I miss it a lot. I think my obsession with taking pictures is a work of sorrow for not being a runner any more.
So I don´t run! I stand still or walk very slowly a few meters looking for pictures. I go down in my knees for pictures, walk up for the tiny hill for pictures, lay down for pictures, climb the trees for pictures.
I create pictures of what I see, by staying on the same tiny spot for a while I see more and by coming back day after day winter and spring and summer and autumn I see more and more. To change the mirror of the trees and the sky and the sand and other things you have to change the surface of the water. When there is no motions on the surface of the water it can be hard to see if a picture is a mirror or not. When there is to much motions it just gets blahablaha. With a little motion you start to think what kind of picture it is. There are many ways of getting motions in water. You can throw a stone, and when the stream is small you can spit!
AMERICA ALONG THE RIVER – APRIL 2011 – LOOKING BACK
(bad and good things in United States of AMERICA and some days in Louisiana)
I am home now. The idea of writing in english when over there I have been writing in swedish is of course not very smart. But I like the idea of not always being that smart (laugh) and I like writing in english. The great advantage of doing it is the lack of knowledge. I don´t know that many english words so I don´t spend much time in choosing the right word since I often just know one word for one thing. The disadvantage is the same. The lack of words can be frustrating, but then, what a joy to return to my native swedish.
One reason I click my fingers in english is the people I´ve met when traveling from south to north in the middle. I like meeting americans as much as I dislike the politics of USA. I enjoy the friendliness of so many I have met as much as I hate the stupidity of american authorities.
To require the right to enter the country as a journalist you must answer more stupid questions than you can imagine. It was not enough to show letters from the papers I write for to get a visa. I should have a written contract which detailed the stories I intended to do and how much the papers paid for those stories. For a freelance journalist like me, who has been working full time as a freelance for 29 years without ever having a written contract that demand was an insult.
However, after entering US I soon forgot those things, because people are nice, even when it´s freaking cold as it was the spring day I arrived to Chicago. The temperature was +3. Yes, that´s Celsius, after the swedish meteorologist Anders Celsius. I´m glad to return to a country with a much better way of measuring temperature than Fahrenheit. I have no intension of writing the not so smart Fahrenheit any more.
One thing I hate about US is the television. “55 channels and nothing on” to speak with Bruce Springsteen. The truth is that more and more americans don´t bother to see channels with stupid programs filled with stupid ads. One other thing I don´t like is the often repeated remark that everybody wants to be american. NO NO NO. We don´t. I have travelled in US nearly every year for the last 25 years. I love doing it. Do I want to become an american citizen? Absolutely not. And I don´t know any person in Scandinavia who longs for that. On the opposite. Most people don´t like America. There are lots of reasons for not doing that. The lack of respect for human rights just to mention one thing. Obama just said it is OK to keep Guantanamo going for more years. What a shame.
Europeans don´t want to be americans. I guess millions of americans want to be europeans, at least the millions spending their life in american prisons and the millions without work and the millions with works so badly paid that living is poor and the millions that get sick without good help in the hospitals and the millions that can´t afford to pay for their childrens education.
In most european countries you don´t pay to go to school, and that includes colleges and universities. You don´t pay to go to hospital. You get a decent check every month when you get old and don´t work anymore.
Yes, we do drinks and drugs – but if we look how it is done in United States of America we don´t.
Many things in US europeans can learn from. Americans don´t give up. They fight for themselves and they fight for each other and they fight together. They work hard and there are more creative thinking and doing and good education and wonderful writing than in any other country.
From Chicago I took a flight to New Orleans and got, in double sense, a warm welcome. + 27 and then it was just to walk in the French Quarter and enjoy the show that take place in the streets. The Big Easy the town is called and even if you still could sense reminders after Katrina, the biggest natural and man made catastrophe in the history of USA ordinary life here is not ordinary in other american cities. It was a joy to be there, talk and walk and taking picture. So many laughs and so many people taking pictures makes it easy to work. It is easy to understand why the city has been a magnet for people who like to live the way you wanted to live. For many years that was not that easy in most american societies, since either history or geography is any highlight in the country that is easy to forget. I were in the town to write about Tennessee Williams. When he arrived his name was Thomas. In New Orleans ha found that he could live good both as a homosexual and as a writer. To celebrate that he changed his name.
To leave the music, the people and the streets of New Orleans and driving south as long as I could was to enter a total different world. First of all it was a silent world. Then it was a world where signs av Katrina still was visual. I have hoped to find a nice place to listen to cajun but no. One day in Lafayette gave the impression of a nice town and a visit to Lake Martin was a walk into a strange world of big trees and waters.
A taste of my English from England is found
I live in Denmark and Sweden. Just a tiny stretch of water between the countries where I live. Do we like it here? Think so. Most days I do. Most days most people do, I guess.
This is mainly a homepage in my native swedish. Some texts will be written in english. Write and say you like it and I will write more. Below is one text I wrote listening to a tune from a hometown band. The other texts are from my book Both Sides, published in english.
LIVING IN AMERICA
There is no song with the title “We don’t live in Sweden – but we’re not sorry.” There is no song with the title “We don’t live in France – but we’re not sorry.” There is no song with the title “We don’t live in England – but we’re not sorry.”
Most people living in these countries are living there because they are born there. The thought of living somewhere else is not common. The thought of people wanting to live in Sweden for other reasons than getting away from poverty and no freedom rules is not common.
Malmoe
Hornbæk
Once upon a time Hornbæk was far from the madding crowd, an isolated outpost on Öresund’s west coast inhabited by fishermen, farmers and no one else. Until, that is, the artists started arriving in the 1800s. The journey from Copenhagen was arduous at first but got easier on completion of a coastal rail link to Helsingör in 1897. From Helsingör, the remaining miles to Hornbæk were by horse on sandy roads.
FLAKFORTET
The sun should be waning by now and the heat subsiding. Yet the summer just goes on and on, as if pretending not to notice how the shortening days. When the calendar says it’s time for a change of season the mind gears up for the transition. This year, though, the change fails to arrive. The sun is parked over Öresund and seems determined to stay.
Skäralid
It’s almost like an Amazonian rainforest, but less oppressively hot. Or like the Grand Canyon, yet greener. But Skäralid National Park is in Sweden, in the heart of Scania. Even so, the hikers milling about on the grass at the end of the trail between the car park and Skärdammen pond are more reminiscent of an American national park. There, social chatter sometimes appears more important to visitors than the surrounding nature (though at least that leaves more space for the real nature-lovers to enjoy the scenery).