pallet burning is actually an ancient tradition that has it’s origins with the coast salish tribe. when george vancouver first sailed into our coastal waters and landed near the head waters of howe sound, he unloaded many gifts in order to make peace with the natives. he had to perform this task expediciously as the tides were turning and storms were approaching. instead of delivering the gifts of fine silk, porcelin, gold, myrrh and frankenscence, slowly by hand he fashioned a makeshift crane and tore up some of the ships planking to create large platforms (pallets) with which to put these many gifts on. the system worked but after george vancouver left and drowned off the coast of alaska when he took on water, the natives found little use for the gifts but the pallets were good in that they had a dry fuel source for the winter. thus pallet burning was born.

Instead of burning pallets, maybe we could burn meth-heads and hippies? I suspect the meth- heads would burn bright but the dirty hippies may give off some noxious fumes.

Anyone have any experience with this?

actually, it’s a little known fact that the word hippy comes from the coast salish word hixoulpi. this was the name they gave to the european explorer/sailors who were in the process of being disciplined during the time their ships cruised the coast and landed in the salish settlements.  these men were seen to be in the process of hixouo, or sitting in a group, smoking, often chained to a nearby tree while the rest of the crew worked. the salish thought them lazy, not helping unload the pallets of gifts.

so i guess yeah, there were dirty hippies at the time…a condition of the time scooped by unoriginal modern rock bands and weed smoking rubes.

Jargonic bullshit is heavy in the arts cos

a) most people working in the art-criticism industrry have very little new to say– how many times cna youre-interpret Wordsworth, or Tarrantino, or MSN convos– in new ways?

b) most arguments in art-cirt can be understood (and refuted) by a retarded twelve year old; so dressing them up makes them look profounder than they are. 

c) the jargon quoted above translates roughly as we used to think of bad cultural stuff as ONE BIG HUNK of bad stuff; now we think of it as chunks and strings of bad stuff that wrap aroudn each other in weird repetitive ways (i can’t see it; i am doing this from memory)

d) As Noam Chomsky pointed out, in science jargon has a clarifying function (one word means one thing in order to reduce ambiguity, since science experiments need to be repeatable to be valid) while in art, jargon increases ambiguity since if anybody else comes to the same conclusion, you are being less original and mighht not get scarce tenure or the free black turtleneck that comes with being a Theorist

sorry for the rant; i took crit theory in grad school…but i escaped the maze alive.

Will,

Having published more than a few papers in scientific journals, and having dedicated a fair bit of thought over the last decade to clarity in writing in the sciences, I would suggest that the writing sample you’ve provided is simply poor writing - it’s jargon-heavy, overly wordy, and, given the amount of text, information-poor.

I certainly can’t speak for the arts, but in science the simplest writing is often the best.  Occasionally (or even often, in some fields), the use of jargon is unavoidable.  Montane, for example, doesn’t exactly mean mountainous in geology, and proglacial lacustrine sediment is unavoidable.  However, I could do without constitute an equivocal proxy… or is consistent with regional evidence..  These are dense (to borrow a term ) phrases used when simple phrases constructed from simple words would be both easier to understand and aesthetic.

If the science (or philosophy, or history) is theoretically difficult, why do so many writers feel the need to bury their ideas in rhetoric and multi-syllabic words?  Don’t scientists (and philosophers, and historians) want to be understood?

I’d love to go on at length, but I have to do some work sometime this weekend…  And weffriddles haven’t been any help.  But this issue is a bit of a debate in the sciences (and elsewhere) - I’ll tell you sometime about the ‘Fog Index’ (a simple metric used to determine how clear writing is), but you may find the idea offensive…

good luck with exams!

Trent.