A quiet Saturday with some reading

Not much work today except a bit of reading. Read a chunk of the BFI Film Classics volume "Rio Bravo" by Robin Wood: thinking of whether to use Rio Bravo as some kind of non-Landscape example in my lecture on Westerns and Landscape in the new module next year. Not too keen on this book so far: doesn't focus on the issues I am interested in, and is not written in a style I really like, but at least it gives me a very new perspective on the film. Also started looking at Scott Simmons' "The Invention of the Western Film", for the same reason. Only glanced at it so far but it looks useful. Checked out the new edition of Transactions of the IBG: as usual it disappoints me or, rather, the authors in it disappoint me, but I tried to get something out of a potentially interesting paper about how Wittgensteinian semiotics can be applied to fluvial Geomorphology (trying to show how human and physical geographers could benefit from trying out eachother's languages, I think) and a paper about how awkward moments in conversations can influence our behaviour. As usual for this journal both papers use an awful lot of words to make what seem like pretty obvious points. If I've got the wrong impression, and the points were actually more worthwhile than I realise, then that's the authors' faults for writing so many words (and in such an opaque style) that their papers didn't communicate effectively! The second paper actually illustrated very well one of the points of the first: Human and Physical Geographers speak different languages. To this Physical Geographer it feels today that while the point of my professional language is to communicate ideas clearly and effectively, the point of the language of some authors in the TIBG seems quite different! Perhaps I am biased by the fact that I just got hold of copies of "The complete Plain Words" and "Usage and Abusage" from Penguin. Perhaps the editors of TIBG should insist that their contributors, and the journal's referees, study these carefully.