[fhe]

my Chinese teacher supplied me with this supposedly ancient piece of Chinese scholarly wisdom: read any book a hundred times, and its meaning will be obvious.

i have found this to work amazingly well -- particularly with poorly written technical papers.

your comment also reminded me of this one time I was hanging out and watching the Matrix (for the 100th time probably) with a film maker friend. and he was pointing out to me that American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen, whereas European films did little of that and the viewer has to search for what to pay attention to in a scene. after he showed me the editing techniques it all made sense, and explained why i could mindless follow hollywood movies, whereas watching an european film i'd get lost if not paying attention.

[lqet]

> American film editing guides you with a rather heavy hand on where to look on the screen

There are notable exceptions, and I think the most commercially successful US director who largely ignored this advice was Francis Ford Coppola. In the "Godfather" trilogy, nothing is spelled out. You are not guided to anything. If you miss a minor detail in some scene, you are on your own, and you might not be able to follow the plot to the end.

[mannykannot]

That is probably what it will take for me to finally understand Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch.

[germinalphrase]

aka ‘intensified continuity editing’ which is the modern evolution of the ‘Hollywood style’. David Bordwell out of UW-Madison did a lot of work on this.