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.

Lately I’ve been enamoured with all these Batman-related fanfiction stories. Sounds so weird, doesn’t it? I’m not even that interested in Batman. He’s a silly character. I can’t believe people take the latest Batman films by Christopher Nolan so seriously. I went to see the Dark Knight three times because I had trouble understanding what all the hype was about. Truthfully though, I simply enjoyed Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker that much.

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.

Note to Amoena: brace yourself for a nice and boring, loooong post.

Studying language has certain side effects. You can’t escape the linguistically analytical way of reading once you get in too deep.

Even when I think I’m completely immersed into a fictional story, or some non-linguistic research/study text, I can pop out of it any time if I notice something unusual. Especially things that I’ve studied in papers during my studies can easily grab my attention.

It can go even deeper than that. Often I admire the writing style of a book as a whole, or I make notice of the terminology. I spend thrice as much time on appreciating all these surface considerations to do with language than I do on learning about the actual subject-matter of the text.

One particularly fascinating subject-matter, from a linguistic point of view, is geography. I don’t mean the boring kind that you learn at school, but the kind that you can learn at university level. So-called “human” or social geography in particular I find intriguing, as far as the terminology.

A few years back I wrote a paper using a selection of articles on geography as my data. The teacher had this wonderful collection of articles representing different levels of specialization from all kinds of research fields. I wanted to read the geography ones so I chose them, although mind you I did have good justifications for the selection research-wise as well.

Funnily enough (in my world of funny), my research topic didn’t even require understanding the articles in any depth. The use of personal pronouns is not usually at the top of a writer’s conscious aesthetic and/or functional agenda when producing text for a specific purpose or readership. Learning something about geography was definitely a bonus for me in the research process, especially as getting to read texts as a whole is a rare pleasure in the field that I’ve worked on for the most part of my studies.

So what is so wonderful and exciting about human/social geography then? I wish I could put my finger on it. It may be the way it’s so distant from reality. Tangible objects become abstracted: from the restricted personal experience of being a small bee in a very large beehive in an ever larger world, you are taken into a world of abstraction where things are malleable and can be controlled at will. Objects are understood together as phenomena, or rather, entities, which come under human power and possession through the terming process.

According to human geography, nature today is not an uncontrollable and dangerous brave new world out there to be both feared and conquered. It’s been trampled underfoot by people, and even when it seemingly transforms into something unpredicted, it is seen as a causal result of human actions. What a wonderful species we are, huh?

Be that as it may, this obsession to terminologize the interaction of humans and geography has produced some interesting research in philosophy too. This article for instance, by David Cunningham, is an intriguing read on metropolises. (How I ended up reading his work is a story of such stalkery proportions that I dare not go into details. Dangit, Google just makes it far too easy!)

All that abstraction sometimes makes it difficult to even be cognizant of the fact that the black markings on the white surface are not just an elaborate expression of somebody’s language faculty, but first and foremost they aim to relay specific meanings to my sorry brain. And then people wonder why I’m a slow reader.

In turn, though, I wonder how some people are able to speedrun through a deliciously written and thought-evoking book without stopping to savour all the delicacies. If I read fiction, I don’t crave for action or imaginative story lines as much as I want deep musings on life, the human condition in general. Even though I enjoy ingenious twists in the narrative, they’re devoid of meaning if the characters or the world are not believable.

This is probably the reason why I love science fiction, but can’t stand fantasy, at least in its most generic form. Scifi is usually at least remotely plausible as an alternate or futuristic scenario. At the moment I’m reading one where you have Sunni terrorists, communist and/or fascist regimes, separatists, oppression of scientists and researchers, downplaying of “soft” values and trumpeting of “hard” ones, environmental problems – everything we have, except it takes place in another time, with improved technology and more extreme proportions.

After that, how can you read anything about a wizard who can shoot lightnings from his fingertips to slay dragons, or about little hobbitsy characters, or annoyingly unhuman elves? The whole point seems to be memorizing the world and all its little details that can’t be deduced from your real experience in the world. I’ll rather ponder on the different hypothetical trajectories that our world can one day take, or drift along.

* To continue in my Ben Jonsonian tradition of elucidating the literary references by footnoting: Whoso list to hunt is a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt. He lived roughly around the same time as Shakespeare and composed the first sonnet in English, if only as a translation from Italian/Latin by Petrarch. I bet you were just dying to know all this.