“People often write in about the conventional terms for groups of animals and people, especially birds, such as parliament of rooks or murder of crows. Many of these, including tiding of magpies, murmuration of starlings, unkindness of ravens, and exaltation of larks, are poetic inventions that one can trace back to the fifteenth century.”

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.”

• that cummerbund was spelled with a “b” (as in cumberbund)
• that chartreuse was a shade of red (actually: green)
• that puce was a shade of green (actually: reddish to purplish brown)
• that myriad requires an “of” (as in “myriad of colors” not “myriad colors”)
• that the phrase was “another thing coming” (instead of “another think coming“)

Amazing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystals_%28Las_Vegas%29 (designed by Daniel Libeskind of Berlin Jewish Museum fame!).

Also amazing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_Resort_%26_Casino (the largest hotel to receive LEED gold certification)

More cheesy, less amazing part of Aria:

• 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.”

Technically the Earth rotates around the barycenter of our solar system, not the sun.

Gravity travels (right word?) roughly the speed of light, so just like if the sun disappeared we wouldn’t see the light disappear for ~8 minutes, we also wouldn’t leave orbit for ~ 8 min.