Boring Bill Nichol

For my Experimental Approaches to Non-Fiction Media class we’re reading Representing Reality by Bill Nichol. I’ve slaved through two chapters and I’m not sure how much more I can take.

The man clearly knows his stuff - every five pages or so he writes something really thought provoking and I’ve definitely learnt a good deal through what I’ve read. But did it really have to be so painful?

The book is written in the language of the academy - it’s unncecessarily dense and difficult to understand. It’s written for other academics who like being unintelligible to people who don’t spend their time reading tiresome pointless crap and building up a vocabulary of jargon and misapplied technical terms from other fields.

One of the reasons I left the academy in the first place was the necessity of reading shit like this. My eyes have been protesting the return of this kind of reading material - they have been steadfastly refusing to look at the page for more than a minute or so at a time.

Maybe his other book Blurred Boundaries will be something better.

1 February 2006 | video | Comments