This is following the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 15, which took place in summer 2008. Apparently this is the first volume, with 14 articles. I have no idea how many volumes there are altogether, but I think it’s nice to be picked among 14 articles covering historical changes in English syntax.

Besides, pink and red is a beautiful combination. Here’s the table of contents:

Mine is the article on prevent. My professor’s is the one on the TIME corpus. The editors wanted us to cross-reference to our articles, but neither of us saw any point to it…

It’s kind of funny now, considering that I’ll probably never take up my postgraduate studies again. Having an article published and some conference presentations under my belt might even be a hindrance in my CV when I apply to jobs elsewhere than in the academic world. So I’m not exactly underlining it, it’s just there. Something I did.

Well, there is a student in England who’s working on prevent and other verbs of prevention. She’s enthusiastic and has been asking me for help a lot, apparently thinking that I’m a lecturer at the University of Tampere. Whatever, it’s not like she’s my competition anymore.

As more time goes by, I feel more certain that it was never meant to be. I simply don’t feel at home in the field of research. There were too many external issues that I couldn’t stand at all, unrelated to the actual work. And I could never convince myself I was doing anything useful. It’s no help if others think it’s useful if I don’t believe in it myself.

I’m not supposed to be a thinker. I’m supposed to make things happen. I’m happy with my life like that, and I think that’s what counts the most. Why pursue something that doesn’t make you happy? I believe we only have one life, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to waste it when you know what makes you happy and what doesn’t. I’m lucky to have found what I enjoy doing.

They’re huge! They’re shapeless! They’re absolutely ridiculous!

I laughed out loud when I finished the first one. I can’t wait to see the expression on my dad’s face when he uncovers these. I bet he’ll need a minute or maybe ten to figure out what they are.

Good thing though, I used nearly three 150g skeins of Novita 7 veljestä on these slippers, yarn which I didn’t have any other use for. I think the mismatched colours go well with the general ridiculousness of these slippers.

If for some completely strange reason you now feel the urge to make a pair of your own, I used the pattern by Gabriela Ordenes, Peter Pan’s slippers. They were easy and fairly quick to make, one of those brainless-projects-for-watching-tv.

In other news, my yarns are even better organized now, thanks to Deniselle‘s generous gift of these pretty canvas bags:

She got these by attending some religious happenings or events. The black one has a slogan which has the idea that people have even chances of finding happiness. (I’ll get a better translation as soon as Deniselle wakes up, she’s a better translator than I am.) And the white one on the right has a cool drawing of a church from Leppävirta, with the slogan “strength from the stream of mercy” (again, horrible translation).

Aren’t they really cool? Deniselle asked me if I wanted them on the spur of a moment and was surprised and amused that I jumped at the chance. I had been wanting some canvas bags for my yarn, and I got these for free, with pictures and text too!

I’m a very unreligious person, but I think for that reason it’s wonderfully random and funny to have religious yarn bags. Amen.

The pattern is very simple and allows for brainless tv-knitting, yet it creates this nice ribbing effect.

Puro is 100% wool, loosely spun plies, so it feels soft and warm. Some of the colour choices are quite weird and not really my cup of tea, so I had no other choice but Revontulet. Even so, I wish there were more yellow and orange and less red and blue. My ultimate dream would be to find yarn that only had yellow and orange, changing softly as in Puro! One can always wish… Another problem was that I had to use two different colour batches for the 4 skeins, but I don’t really mind it so much.

I also like the blue/green/pink Tundra, but I don’t have any ideas what I’d do with it. Puro is quite expensive and I already have more yarn than I can knit or crochet in the near future. If only I was richer, I’d fill my small apartment with much more yarn. Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not rich.

I had a slight problem with the skeins escaping my yarn bag, so I got a brilliant idea. I stuffed my souvenir conference bags with yarn and hung them up on show!

That’s my old yarn bag, still full after delegating some of it into the conference bags. I like the Liverpool conference bag  (from Corpus Linguistics 2009) with the grey, white and purple. And here’s my ICEHL conference bag from summer 2008:

I realized I should have more hooks on my walls. Anyway, now I can have my souvenirs out from the dark closet so I can look at them more often and they’re useful too!

Right now I’m crocheting another scarf in the Skunk-Punk style with three different light blue yarns for my cousin, because my mittens turned so ugly and she likes blue more than I do. I also started on another knitting project, the Heelhead Scarf, with the result that I can now knit cables without an auxiliary needle!

I’m so happy to learn new things with every project. On the one hand, I like having a brainless project which I can work on while watching tv, but on the other hand, I don’t want to repeat something I’ve already done before. The skunk-punk blue scarf has been boring because of that, and I wouldn’t have gotten it this far without tv! There’s my justification for having more than one project under way at a time – you can always do something, depending on how you feel at a given moment.

So what have I been up to? Art-wise, nothing. Niente. Nulla d’importante. Non so che dire.

Io amo molto italiano. E una lingua molto bella. Si semplice, pure, logica. Delle lingue che so parlare, italiano è per vero la lingua la piu bella, eccetto finlandese.

Oh, I did buy a book, the Art of Mass Effect.

It’s got beautiful pictures, but I wish they’d put in more discussion about how they actually designed the characters and levels of the game. I’m interested in reference pictures and theme design and such. It was worth the moderate price though.

Fairly recently I also bought Videogames and Art. You can check out some pages at Google Books, over here.

I haven’t read it very thoroughly as of yet, but  I have mixed feelings towards what I have read. It’s a collection of articles pondering on whether videogames can or should be considered art – very academic, and no pictures! Well, actually the style isn’t always that high-brow, and some articles were badly edited. A couple of sentences were completely incomprehensible because of bad English grammar! You don’t see that too often.

Overall though it’s reasonably respectable writing, despite being aimed at the general reader. You can’t make much sense of it without some background in university-level literary analysis. Besides, it was published by Intellect Books. Books with intellect to those with intellect.

The topic is very close to my heart and topical to anyone interested in video games. There should also be another book on videogames coming out this year, written by some people at the Hypermedia department at the University of Tampere. I’m so looking forward to that!

Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecker, “whinge” is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.

David Foster Wallace is (or was, rather) amazing. I get enormous kicks from reading him, especially the footnotes. (I do have a minor complaint with his slight misuse of the term semantic.) He’s a genius. Infinite Jest is exactly the kind of book I would like to write if I was more talented, if I were a genius and if I wanted to write a book.

In fact I’ve been wanting to write medical poetry in English. Or “poetry”, let’s put it that way. I was pre-cleaning my apartment (necessary in order to be able to actually clean anything) and found some old notebooks with English natural sciences and medical terms. I used to love memorizing them, for no real reason.

Let me illustrate to you just how wonderful and delightful all those Greek and Latinate scientific terms are.

I have been wondering why I have been feeling light-headed and even nauseous at times. I don’t really feel ill anymore other than that. Then I figured that it must be the ear infection I had. Since your sense of balance is partially determined by the fluids flowing inside your ear, I thought perhaps the disgusting pus from the infection has messed up that delicate function in my ear.

I was right in my self-diagnosis. My mum told me that it can take months until my sense of balance, or equilibrioception, is recovered. Sometimes you never gain it back, which is what happened to my dad 15 years ago. Of course he has two ears, so he’s not falling and stumbling all the time.

The coolest part about this (except for the nausea) is that I learned a new term, equilibrioception. Don’t you just love the way it sounds? I love the stress pattern, a bouncy threesome.

Well, the reason I started writing this is I had to take a break because I was getting nauseous again. I think I will write more about Wallace in the future, and also about this book that I bought in Munich. It’s a dissertation on Canadian English as a newly forming dialect. It’s a nearly perfect book, and the topic is immensely fascinating.

I’ve kind of given up on my ambitions for an academic career. The only reason I still feel pulled in that direction is that I’m getting more and more interested in Canadian English. To make it even worse, I have a wonderful, hard-to-get-your-hands-on source on my very own laptop, ready to be exploited. Pfff.

Then again, I’m fairly certain I could settle for keeping it as a hobby. “So, what kind of hobbies do you have Elina?” “Well, I’m really intested in variation and diachrony in the dominant Englishes, especially with regard to the phenomenon of infinitivitis and the distinction between the infinitival and prepositional to particles with -ing clauses.”

Somehow that doesn’t sound so cool. Well, I’d never use with regard to in my speech.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

I feel a certain affinity to Henry David Thoreau. I can share a lot of his thoughts on solitude, nature and the society, even with the 150 years (or something to that effect) between us.

He sounds like a grumpy old luddite when he claims that we should simplify our lives and refuse the comforts of modern living standards and new forms of transport. Sometimes I am exactly like this: I hate having to learn how to use some new thingamajig, and I complain how I’ve been perfectly happy before they invented it.

I also agree on his ideas about solitude. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a hermit. As soon as I made friends on the first grade at school, I started making excuses so I didn’t have to spend every day with them. I just needed a lot of time alone, and I still do.

The only reason it is a problem to me is because it’s a problem to everyone else, or so it often seems. The society cannot approve the fact that people sometimes prefer being alone to keeping company with others.

I don’t hate people. I don’t hate having company. I enjoy being around people, a lot too. But for some reason, my  natural instinct always tells me to seek solitude. Being around people for too long at one time makes me very nervous. And honestly it also makes me a really annoying person, and since others don’t deserve that kind of treatment, I try to prevent that.

A very small part of me envies Thoreau for his life style. He built himself a cabin away from the town, by a little pond. He explains how little money you need to earn if you don’t crave luxuries in food and living. After he’s taken care of his beans and vegetables, he spends the rest of his time on educating himself by reading. Such a simple, satisfying life – until I realize that they didn’t have Tampax back then.

He mentions that some Latin classics haven’t been translated into English yet – in the 19th century! I wonder how come he’s so well educated himself. He scolds his fellow men for not being very well educated. Sound like a familiar complaint?

Postscript. I know this post is kind of random, but I wanted to blog something, and I haven’t been doing anything else lately but reading Thoreau and playing Mass Effect.

Yeah. Sad.

He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

This quote from Hamlet is a little funny if you know the play. Hamlet remarks on his father, the king, that he was such a great man as to never be equalled by anyone. Hamlet mourns the fact that he’ll never see anyone like him again. As it turns out, however, he does. The king appears to him later as a ghost.

It’s actually kind of cruel from the author of the play. Have the character portray great sorrow over losing someone and deliver touching words of idolation. Then bring the deceased person back, to drive the knife in deeper.

I suppose, to Roger Stritmatter’s mind, this would be the 17th Earle of Oxenforde lamenting about his disappearance into the shadows of history. I vaguely recall that was his main interpretation of Hamlet, but I should check that some day. It’s just that I stacked away all my Shakespeare notes underneath hundreds of others, so the task of retrieval seems a little daunting right now. I guess there was some logic in putting heaps and heaps of corpus data on top of them, so I’ll go through those first. In fact, I would love to, but I won’t let myself. No play before I’ve completed my degree.

I did allow myself a small trip to the English section in the library. Only to remind myself that the only way I can ever start defining my research topic is by going through all that damn data first! Gahhh. I wouldn’t mind though, if I didn’t know I wouldn’t do anything else for a long time.

As for Mr. Strimatter, I actually find it hard to be hard on this guy. He’s among the most genius of the Shakespeare heretics, even if also one of the most vehement and overly assertive. When he accuses orthodox Shakespearians of misinterpeting Shakespeare completely in utilising Cartesian logic, you can’t help but tip your hat at him. (I wonder how he personally resisted its charms.)

We should truly take him for all heretics, all heretics in one person. He is a man the like of which we shall not look upon again when he’s gone. Before that, though, there’ll be plenty more entertainment to come.

Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. He’s a great writer. His personal empire of hereticism is growing by the day like a newborn. A small part of me hopes I could just jump in the bandwagon and enjoy the ride.

I couldn’t believe it when I was the only one to laugh at all these silly things throughout the film. How can you possibly take Batman seriously when he speaks with that ridiculous husky voice? And what’s the deal with that voice anyway – does his headmask somehow constrict his throat, so he can’t speak normally?

And what’s up with all the cheesiest dialogue being allocated to Batman, exclusively? Isn’t he supposed to be the hero? Why would the director make the hero the comic relief of the movie? I can’t believe that a critic whom I’ve always held in such high esteem actually described the film as dark and devoid of humour. Did he keep his eyes and ears closed?

Oh well. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m so loony that I’ll laugh at anything.

But the weird world of the films and their criticism aside, the fanfiction is extremely enjoyable. On Fanfiction.net, people usually post their stories one chapter at a time, so it’s easy to get hooked when you have to wait for the next instalment.

Somewhat counterintuitively, fanfiction writers are actually sometimes really good at writing. Published fiction, especially novel-length stories, can often be kind of contrived, too carefully constructed and strenuous to plough through. The books that I usually read are very much plot-driven, but there’s always a lot of world-building – creating a background and an environment, a brand new political setting for an alternate universe, more or less. It can get tedious.

In fanfiction, however, you already know the setting, or you wouldn’t be reading it in the first place. So you’re on board from the start, ready to discover and enjoy the way the writer may have changed some minutiae in the canonical story.

What I didn’t expect in the slightest was how much of this Batmanfiction is erotically charged. Ok, so fanfiction in general is naturally full to the brim of so-called “lemon”, which in fanfictionese means anything erotic. It’s hardly surprising that people like to live out their fantasies, unfulfilled by the original story, by writing them down. But Batman? And sex?? Batman + sex?! Don’t get me wrong, the actor himself (Christian Bale) is probably the sexiest male celebrity I could think of, but as Batman…not so much.

Having survived my initial shock, there is a certain love story between the Joker and Rachel that I like in particular (there are heaps and bounds of those), Rachel being Batman’s ex-lover. I quite enjoy the idea of this school girl writing steamy fanfiction after school and dancing class, literally.

I wasn’t terribly surprised by the lovey-dovey, namby-pamby aspects of the stories, but then I started discovering other ones, each even steamier than the last. Not only that, but the Joker is often paired with the Batman! Now that I think back to the film, I can see how you could sense some kind of a homoerotic vibe to their relationship. After all, the Joker says at one point that the Batman “completes” him. Hmm!

It’s hilarious. For a mass-murdering, schizophrenic psychopath, the Joker sure is on the receiving end of a lot of sweet lovin’.

And all these Batman fans are such a kinky bunch, I never knew! I should have seen it coming though. The Batman is an obvious epitome of the wet dreams of people who are into roleplaying and such. Black leather, a mask, boots… and the Joker with his knife and pencil, and drag-queeny makeup. Need I say more?

Disturbing, certainly. I think it’s great anyway that anyone can enjoy their fantasies and share them with the like-minded on the internet, uncensored. I don’t see many of those stories having much of a chance of ever getting published. Not all “literature” has to be deep and meaningful, it’s ok to read just to be entertained. One way or the other.

What’s most interesting (to my boring mind) about it all is how people don’t know whether to call Batman “Batman” with or without the definite (or even indefinite) article. In the film, the Joker refers to him as a/the Batman, but there’s more than a hint of ridicule oozing through.

The same goes for the Joker: sometimes it’s used as a proper name, sometimes as some kind of a descriptive moniker that requires the determiner. It looks like whenever characters directly address the Batman or the Joker, they leave out the article. Fascinating, isn’t it.