Charles celebrates twenty years of marriage to his lovely wife Hyunjin. In his touching post, yours truly even gets a brief mention, for which I'm surprised and honored.
In a previous entry, Charles reviews some books he's been reading, quite a few of which are loaded with obfuscatory academe-speak, to which I can only say: I waaaarrrrrrrrnnnnnned yooooouuuuuuuuu! Welcome to postmodern Western academe, buddy. The less accessible your ideas are, the more respect you get from people in that circle jerk.
I was wondering when you were going to say something about the books. However, I should point out that only two of the books I've read so far have been plagued by this problem. And I think it is telling that one of the authors got significant pushback from a reviewer about the jargon--that tells me that hope is not lost. We'll see how things pan out as I read more.
ReplyDeleteAs for the mention in the "twenty years" post, well, we both have fond memories of that hike, and of you sweating enough to hydrate a small African village. Good times. (Although I think I forgot the link... first-time readers will be left wondering who "Kevin" is. Must go fix that.)
I tried reading part of the book you gave up on (via Amazon.com's "look inside!" feature). The intro was dense enough to send me back to grad school. With some books, that's the only way to get through the text: stop midway through a sentence, look up everything about the term or phrase that's tripping you up, then continue only when you're fairly sure you've grasped the concepts in question. Unpack, unpack, unpack as you go. What a slog. Upshot: the prose didn't seem impossible, but it wasn't worth the effort I knew I'd need to invest. Not my idea of toilet reading.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess I wouldn't describe it as "impossible." I probably could have managed to slog through it. But to what end? Life is too short to read stuff like that.
ReplyDelete