“When you say you love me, do you really mean it?” Iris asked.
“Of course I do. I love you.” I said.
“No, I mean, is this just a sentence to you? Like when I say ‘I love you’ in German, I don’t really feel that much.”
“I feel it’s cheesy to say ‘I love you’ in Chinese.”
Continue reading “Two Languages and an Imaginary Number by Jie Wang”
Acton had never spent much time contemplating writer’s block. This had everything to do with the fact that he had never previously found himself its victim. Perhaps everything is too strong a word. Acton had no trouble considering the ins and outs of things and events he had no personal experience with—although these things and events necessarily carried with them some intellectual element that sparked his curiosity in the first place. Writer’s block, as an idea, had never presented such an element to command his attention, and on top of that, it seemed too cliché a notion to even deserve it. Nevertheless, the prejudice of abstraction doesn’t always hold up under the weight of actual experience, and he now found writer’s block to be a fascinating object of examination.
Acton was at his desk, unable to write.
”Sit down, my good friend, sit down.” Adam gave Tobias a stout. “There you go. Something imperial to take your mind off of things.”
“Thank you, kind sir. My mind has been racing, that’s for sure.” Tobias took a big enough sip for it to be called a chug, but he did it in such a gentlemanlike way it remained a sip. “Mind if I share with you what burdens me?”
“I’m all… wait -” Adam chugged a stout and slumped down. “Ears.”
“I’m a Swede, as you know, and therefore when I write English, prone to make mistakes. Some are because it’s a second language and some are genuine mistakes. Let’s start with the latter. Take for instance the word mistake. In Swedish a miss is always spelled with two S. Even when writing mistakes-”
“I’m sensing a pun here…”
Continue reading “Tobias Haglund in conversation with Adam West”
literally stories 