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.

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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 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)

“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.

in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling — Abraham as more than the knight of infinite resignation, as the knight of faith, facing down the absurd, and furthermore willing it

in philosophy / philology
Crispin Sartwell: End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History — references Job and Abraham (à la Kierkegaard) as examples of loss of telos / loss of plot / loss of a “sense of narrative coherence” (18)

in sociology
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority — cites the Abraham story as an example of the age-old “dilemma” of obedience (preface)

in song
Bob Dylan: “Highway 61 Revisited” — “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”

in fiction
Neil Simon: God’s Favorite — Job modernized and made comical

in philosophy / anthropology
René Girard: Job the Victim of his People — Job as scapegoat (not yet read)

in psychology
C.G. Jung: Answer to Job and Edward F. Edinger: Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job (not yet read)

other disturbing lessons:
Cain and Abel (in fiction: East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

David and Bathsheba and Uriah (in fiction: God Knows by Joseph Heller)

the prodigal son (As a child I objected to the prodigal son getting a feast while the “good” son gets no reward. As an adult I’m frustrated that my brain is stuck believing “prodigal” means someone who has gone away and now returned. I always have to concentrate to land on the right definition.)

notes
introduction
1st use of the word “documentary” = “document of reality” in the New York Sun in 1926 about Robert Flaherty’s film Moana
more truth than recreated reality
Lumière brothers 1st documentaries pre-1900 edited ‘in camera’
1907 1st documentary recreation of real incident = Stanford white murder
1900-1920 “scenics”/travelogues; Berlin, Symphony of a City in Europe
escaping the “bourgeois excess” of dramatic fiction (Vertov)
types: newsreels; propaganda; cinéma vérité (editor makes the narrative)

Kate Amend
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)
-secretive so there was no actual footage
-convey traumatic experience
-create shots of train; researchers found (abstract) train footage then slowed down to give dreamlike memory quality
-subjects brought photos—then effects to add movement to photos
-bigger budget than Beah
-watch dailies, select moments from interviews; director had a good idea of how to unfold stories
-super 16–>35mm
Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (2003)
- ~30 40-min interviews while she is sick (she died shortly after)
-they didn’t want a biography but a history of her life as political figure, teacher, actress, and how she is facing death
-”so in the ‘I am’ thing” (Beah)
-LisaGay Hamilton: 1st time filmmaker; didn’t start out to make a film just wanted to talk with Beah (they had met working on Beloved); she was also the narrator
-structure is not linear
-use of Beah’s poetry throughout

William Cartwright
-started out working on Paul Coates television documentaries
-the point of editing is to build energy of a piece
Four Days in November (1964)
-JFK assassination; began work on this while still finished up The Making of the President 1960
-newsreel footage and voice-overs; additional voice-over; photo of death scene not footage
-shots of clocks around Dallas to keep time-frame; shot along w/ book depository footage and driving scenes by crews who flew down to Dallas
-verisimilitude
-16mm–>35mm (doesn’t blow up well, but adds a certain feel)
-detail of Presidents steak being one chosen at random of 2500
-shots of protesters (”Hail Ceasar” [sic])
-”we lost something great…he was not an ordinary man” (Cartwright)
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994)
-Vietnam Memorial
-how film arrives at design (first time we see it is the watercolor)
-then hear the veteran’s dislike of it
-but the immediacy of a person’s name on a wall—being able to touch it
-Cezanne’s theory of cones, spheres, cubes
-her other designs (e.g. in Montgomery, at Yale) include water—living quality

Joe Bini
Grizzly Man (2005)
-Timothy was protecting bears in a national park (already protected); 100 hrs of his footage
-they edited in 6 wks
-when they first watched his footage they didn’t like him, but grew to respect him as filmmaker
-first half is building up the circumstances; second is looking at the psychology of the man
-central thing to be dealt w/ in the film is the tape; one theme of Herzog’s is exploitation
-inventive directoral choice—his listening to the tape then disposing of it
-juxtaposed next w/ scene of bear fight then Timothy
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)
-80 interviews in about 5 years + archived footage + his films and their soundtracks
-film focuses on his trial
-titles instead of narration
-his version vs her version and how they overlap—2 opinions that amount to nearly the same thing (Rashomon)
-life imitating art (The Fat and the Lean) judge staged the trial
-exploitation

Brian Johnson
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
-150 hrs of footage
-24-track applied over camera sound; Ry Cooder remixed for the film
-Ibrahim in his apartment–>live session juxtaposed with street scenes in Cuba
-the vivid colors of the rusty automobile
Fighting for Life (2008)
-trained doctors and nurses of the armed forces
-shots at the school, then the graduates in Germany, the the wounded in Iraq, then back to Germany, then to Walter Reed Naval Hospital
-need to have lighter scenes intermixed to give the audience a break so it’s not so oppressive and depressing

Today I was thinking about how I like the word “teleological”—directed towards an end result. (Teleology is then the study of purpose or design.) That thought passed as I remembered I wanted to look up baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to figure out chemically why it’s just so ubiquitously useful. I got distracted from that goal when I discovered that baking soda is actually an ingredient in some baking powder, which reminded me that in kindergarten our teacher used to add water to cornstarch and let us play with it. (This is more fun than it sounds because this mixture creates a non-Newtonian fluid. Try it.) Anyway, from there I learned that there is a medical condition where you compulsively eat  cornstarch (amylophagia), which  “can be an often-overlooked etiologic factor in gestational diabetes.”

Etiology, it turns out, is basically the opposite of teleology—it’s the study of causation or origin. Of course teleology would have a partner; I’d just never thought to look before.

Lessons: I may have ADD. I may be a nerd. Cornstarch is one of the more-fun food-related things.

“only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Northanger Alley (Chapter 5) by Jane Austen

(I guess the difference being folksonomy is internet-based (tagging, indexing = Web 2.0!) and folk taxonomy isn’t—it refers to the vernacular (as opposed to the scientific/technical) system of naming things—”the naming system of the people”)

in Hebrew these are:

א (which has basically lost its original consonant sound)
ה
ו
י

The tendency of Hebrew (et al) to leave out the vowels—the clues to pronunciation—reminds me in a roundabout way of tonal languages. Someone once told me that in some cases people who speak extremely tonal languages can communicate at a distance with just the tone (whistling/drumming), without the actual word. To achieve communication this way, you obviously have to have a fairly good understanding of the language. Likewise, you have to have a decent background in Hebrew to be able to guess at the correct vowels every time (in my not decently backgrounded opinion). It’s pretty neat—like you’re communicating in code. (But I guess all language is really just code.)