I'm mad as hell

and I'm not going to take this anymore.

With props to Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet (Network, 1976) I open my window and put my foot down. I will not submit to the tyranny of academic writing a minute longer.

I've been auditing a class this term, LGBTQ Cinema, and while I've enjoyed the experience immensely, some of the readings have made me crazy. I've come to believe that far too many academics believe one should never use a hundred words when a thousand will suffice.

So many paragraphs I've read go on and on, using words only another academic could love, confusing the reader (me) to the point of distraction (as you see, “trite” doesn't bother me; wordiness does).

Here’s an example I just came across. It’s from an article by Siu Leung Li in Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera

Instead, I find that Lu Xun's brief passage betrays the politics of Chinese opera as a cultural practice: his appropriation of transvestism as a trope in his pungent political protest coincidentally yet appropriately reproduces significant cultural assumptions concerning power as the object of struggle at the intersecting site of cross-dressing, gender construction, and homo/ hetero-eroticism in relation to theatre in a culture where theatre has historically been both an integral cultural product, and one of the most unstable cultural products.

OK, so maybe that was originally in another language and maybe that language has punctuation marks that don't translate into English, but this is what I was given to read and this is what I am not going to read. I will skim it, looking for anything in simple declarative sentences that might make sense to me. Size and length have never impressed me, not in matters biological and certainly not in matters linguistic.

This next one was written in English, by the master of run-on intellectual potty-mouthism, Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Sorry. Call me lowbrow if you want — and pass the aspirin.