• 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

ice cream? whipped cream? I know peanut butter goes with jelly, butter goes with bread, and steroids go with most pro sports. Now I know that cream goes with apple pie (at least in British). Cricket and gambling aren’t like chalk and cheese, I can tell you that much, unless chalk and cheese are like peas and carrots, and then I have no idea.

My goodreads review:
Bill Bryson, as always, covers his topic in an educational, but not dryly academic, manner. The book is easy and really enjoyable to read and full of so many facts and anecdotes that I don’t remember even half of them. He references his sources, so the reader can delve deeper into the topic if so desired, and, (I appreciate this) calls out when the tidbits and *facts* he’s sharing are a bit apocryphal.

Topics: the beginnings of language, the beginnings of English, pronunciation (old and new), spelling (old and new), accents and dialects, creoles and pidgins, English around the world, the present and future of English, &c.

___
Words I learned:
concomitant — accompanying especially in a subordinate or incidental way (Note: This is just one of those words that he uses a few times and I’ve heard several other places lately, so I hope to learn and remember it’s meaning.)
velleity — that “which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action” (Note: This word is not so much in common use.)
polysemy — the capacity for a word (or other signifier) to have multiple meanings (eg., boil = as in heat or skin ailment, policy = plan or in insurance policy, excise = to cut or customs duty)
contranym — a word that means the opposite of itself (eg., sanction = to permit or a measure fordidding, cleave = to separate or to cling to, sanguine = hotheaded or calm and secure, bolt = take off running or hold down, quinquennial = lasting 5 years or happening once every 5 years)
orthological — the art of correct grammar and correct use of words

and many more facts and words and concepts than I can begin to remember

There is really no few quotes or list of facts to sum up this book. It’s all over the place, delightfully and frustratingly.

Here’s a link.

I’ll share one quote, though there are better others.

“[he] fell away into the bottomless abyss of the formerly known.” — “110 West Sixty-first Street”

I particularly liked “Chablis,” “Bluebeard,” “The Palace at Four A.M.,” and “Sentence.”

I particularly did not like “At the Tolstoy Museum,” “The Wound,” and “Conversations with Goethe” (even though the title was so promising).

I imagine that many people’s objections to Rep. Barton’s claim would be that the real tragedy is the deaths and devastation caused by the BP oil spill. But politics aside, my ears perked up at this, not because I object so wholeheartedly to the claim but because I don’t even understand the claim. “Tragedy of the first order,” “tragedy of the first degree,” these I have heard and can make sense of, but “first proportion”? — misstatement, coining a phrase, or just new to me?

Remember kids, the possibilities of language run the gambit [sic].

[brief pause] “Um, yeah.”

“Well the other day I found… a cat!”

“Oh really, in your house?”

“Well, it’s not so much a house as an apartment. But there was a cat.”

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)

“Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.” The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

a lifelong suspension of disbelief amongst knights of faith

also, what makes magic realism different than science fiction.