Moderator:
Jonathan Serviss, former KPCC Patt Morrison senior producer; current KNX 1070 Morning Drive writer/editor/producer.

Panelists:
David Simpson, author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Erin Aubry Kaplan, author of Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista

Notes:
-restorative vs retributive justice (see truth and reconciliation)
-consensus reality
-forgotten reality/history; who writes history? who remembers history?
-alternate historical universe

Gods, Graves & Scholars by C.W. Ceram:
“Humanity, which used to be so entirely absorbed in the daily assaults of contemporary events and future threats, has learned to be curious about its past and even fascinated by it.”

• You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
• You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.
• You cannot step twice into the same stream. For as you are stepping in, other waters are ever flowing on to you.
• You cannot step twice into the same river.
• You cannot step into the same river twice.
• It is impossible to step into the same river twice.
• No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

or, I think, a variant: “you can never go home again”

see previous

UPDATE 11/18/11: watch (now you can check if I misquoted anything! and I can figure out what my various illegible notes said…)

http://www.lfla.org/event-detail/666/An-Evening-with-Joan-Didion

Notes:
started with a reading of the beginning of The White Album — For the life of me I still couldn’t remember what Aristophanic meant. “Of or pertaining to Aristophanes” isn’t enough data to hold onto, like meeting a person and trying to remember their name before knowing any facts to hold it in place in your memory.

She talked about learning to live without a narrative and realizing her life didn’t have one.

Blue Nights — began as a book about parents and children and became about aging and death

“No one told me I was going to get older.” [audience chuckle]

how hard it is to allow yourself/accept that you have the “right to write” about someone else

Where I Was From — facing the lies other people had told her about California, realizing she was guilty of lying about CA (ex. imagining you come from an Oregon Trail California, well that’s true, but not true because “it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.”) — tearing down narrative

She’s never written anything not for readers. While working on The Year of Magical Thinking play, she realized that plays are a nightly collaboration between the audience and the players, likewise, writing is a collaboration between the reader and the writer. She doesn’t keep a journal.

passage from Blue Nights about keeping mementos

I sometimes wonder what I’ll be asked about. The fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989)? (I don’t remember, but I remember seeing an actual piece of the wall in school later.) The fall of the USSR (December 1991)? (I don’t remember, but I remember noticing when maps started showing “Russia” instead.) The fall of the twin towers (September 2001)? (I was asleep, then glued to the television and the phone the rest of the day.)

We don’t affect the moment in history whatsoever, but we affect the history itself, the remembrance, the definition of what happened and what it meant. Very quickly, it becomes nearly impossible to separate the various experiences of an historical moment from the actual reality of that moment. Or maybe it was never possible, even at the moment itself, since the observers lack objectivity (due to their being… human). There’s no observer effect listed on Wikipedia for that, but I’m pretty sure it’s real. Maybe it goes by a different name; maybe it’s just built into the definition of “history.”

“For me, nostalgia almost always feels shameful, even when it also feels good.”

“Still, this kind of retroactive anointment is hardly new — every generation eventually trumpets the superiority of its own relics. Getting older almost always means making lesser investments in art. Our heated affairs with albums and movies and books are eventually — inevitably? — supplanted by dynamic, two-sided relationships with other human beings (bosses, spouses, children, neighbors); that’s both the best and the worst thing about growing up.//So maybe we’re only nostalgic for old things because we can’t relate to new ones in the same way. ”

“In response, those old memories become communal commodities. Instead of chatting about the weather, we relate to each other by talking about something from our childhood that we experienced in tandem.”

A: you’ll never work for the Red Cross if you keep that up
E: commies
A: you’ll never work for the Kriss Kross if you keep that up
E: that’s wikkity wikkity wikkity whack
A: image is nothing but thirst….thirst is everything
E: obey your pepsi
A: yeah but where’s the beef?
E: it’s what’s for dinner
A: the choice of a new generation
E: is the other white meat
etc.

obscenity/vulgarity
fudgecicles

blasphemy/profanity
jiminy christmas
dangit
goshdarn
darnit
drat
consarnit
zounds
bejeebus
geez louise
egad
gadzooks
crikey
for pete’s sake
sacre bleu
gee whiz
jeepers creepers
sam hill
heavens to betsy

other
oy vey
oi va voi
ay ya
ay yi yi
huy

“There was a time before the Internet. Innovation and creativity were different then…” p. 104 The Future of Ideas

copyright, patent, intellectual property rights, end to end, World Wide Web, media, the future of technology, the history if the internet, commons

the tragedy of the commons

a list of changes I wasn’t looking for, but have now made actual by witnessing them, r.i.p.:

• Rite Aid — closed, empty
• Hollywood Video — closed, empty
• Circuit City — all remnants of the red now gone
• Mann Festival on Lindbrook closed — “thanks for your patronage”
• National Theatre on Lindbrook closed and demolished (you can still see in on Google Maps street view for living in the past)
• Native Foods — you no longer order at the counter? it’s still as tiny as in memory though
• gift store on west side of Westwood Blvd. where i once bought a prism — closed, empty, along with nearly everything else on the block. There was once a Hawaiian BBQ place.

This is just recent changes. This is just in an accidental few-block tour of the mini-city.

There have been other slower and faster deaths through the years. There are other disappearances I didn’t bother to seek out.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung reflecting on Liber Novus (The Red Book)

The “Milgram Experiment,” along with the Stanford Prison Experiment, is probably one of the better-known sociological experiments of the ’60s / ’70s. While I knew the basics (a person goes in for a psychological experiment—supposedly about the affects of punishment on learning—and is told by an experimenter to shock the “learner” (actually an actor) with increasingly higher voltage), the book was good in explaining how they varied the experiment to delve into the reasons for people’s behavior. Milgram and his colleagues were surprised at the percentages of people who obeyed the experimenter and shocked the “learner” while he is strapped down to a chair and protesting in pain, so they did a thorough job of investigating the reasons for this unexpected behavior. They also went beyond proving that people tend to obey authority and tested out what constitutes “authority.”

Roles: “teacher” — the actual subject, the person who came in for the supposed learning experiment; “learner” — an actor supposedly getting shocked; “experimenter” — the person in charge of the experiment

In the most basic version the teacher and learner arrive, are told by the experimenter about the learning experiment, and draw assignments from a hat as to who will be learner and who will be teacher. The drawing is rigged, but it’s an important aspect of the experiment (one of very few topics that Milgram doesn’t address as much as I would have liked) that the teacher think that he/she could just as easily have been in the other role, getting shocked.

The book is well worth reading, and I won’t get into all Milgram’s explanations and findings, but here are the versions of the experiment:

Experiment (# of people) (explanation)

1 Remote (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down, but no feedback; only deterrent is that shock levels are labeled as dangerous)

2 Voice-Feedback (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down and yelling in pain after the 150v shock level)

3 Proximity (40) (learner in the same room)

4 Touch-Proximity (40) (learner in the same room and refusing to be shocked, teacher must hold his hand to shock pad to proceed)

5 More Meager Lab (40) (new version of same experiment — this lab is not as fancy looking)

6 Change of Personnel (40) (if the learner seems more dominating, would that change things?)

7 Experimenter Absent (40) (experimenter leaves the room, is available by phone to tell the teacher to continue administering shocks)

8 Women (40) (all other groups were men only; this is male experimenter, male learner, female teacher)

9 Heart Condition (40) (learner begins the experiment by mentioning he has a minor heart condition)

10 Office Building (40) (setting is local office building instead of university lab)

11 Subject Chooses Shock Level (40) (teacher does not administer shocks beyond the maximum level he feels comfortable shocking the victim at)

12 Learner Demands to Be Shocked (20) (experimenter says let’s stop, but learner says let’s go on)

13 Ordinary Man Gives Orders (20) (instead of the experimenter being in charge, another supposed subject (actually another actor) is involved — another rigged drawing puts the three in their roles)

13a Subject as Bystander (16) (if in 13, the teacher refuses to admister shocks, the third person says “If you won’t, I will”)

14 Authority as Victim (20) (learner refuses to be shocked until he sees the experimenter go through the situation first)

15 Two Authorities, Contradictory Commands (20) (two experimenters giving opposite commands — continue / stop)

16 Two Authorities, One as Victim (20) (combination of 15 and 14)

17 Two Peers Rebel * (40) (there are three co-teachers (two of them are actors), and the two opt out at certain points)

18 Peer Administers Shocks (40) (subject is in the room in teacher role, but co-teacher with someone else who has to actually push the button)

*This is the only one that’s not entirely satisfyingly explained, which Milgram admits. More of the “teachers” refused to finish the experiment in this situation, but is that peer influence, or realizing there are no repercussions for quitting, or the idea of quitting being introduced as an option, or feeling judged by the other two (who remain in the room) for proceeding when they didn’t, etc.