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.