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followups on previous posts, plus.
Mar. 13th, 2009 10:12 amIt occurs to me, on seeing where the long thread of comments on vampire cucurbits started, that the whole discussion is exactly the sort of thing that He Who Is Not To Be Named In This Journal liked to report in his books, seemingly chortling to himself all the while.
I woke up this morning realizing that I had misreported and misremembered my thoughts and subsequent investigations as regards the Neues Museum, and wrote the following to post once I was back to a wi-fi source:
"As so often with tales recollected, what I remembered was what happened, or what I believed at the time, but not what I came to believe afterward: I never did find out to my satisfaction whether the Silk Road murals had been installed in the Neues Museum or the Bode Museum, and later decided the Asian collections must have been in the Bode Museum after all.
"I last investigated the question pre-Wikipedia and no longer remember whether Weimar-era museum guidebooks answered the question for me. Twenty years ago, the documents I needed were hard to come by, and I subsequently lost interest in answering the question.
"Likewise, if anyone has any updates on the possibility that the artwork from the museum in Magdeburg was plundered rather than burnt up in bombing, I’d like to know them.
"The Chinese government is still quite peeved that the German archaeologists removed the murals for safekeeping. In defense of the would-be defenders of world civilization, it should be noted that iconoclastic locals had taken to defacing—or de-facing—them. See Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Road for a thirty-year-old recounting of the story. There have been many subsequent accounts as the Silk Road has become a hot topic for tourists and travel study groups."
A Wikipedia search has not resolved the question, probably because I'm not looking up the right search terms. The exported wall murals may actually have been installed in the Ethnographic Museum that was totally destroyed in the bombing.
After writing the post-to-come above, at four a.m., I went back to sleep and eventually (being anxious over an unusually timed work schedule today) found myself gazing at a brightly sunlit, naturalistically colored set of neatly arranged Christmas packages flanking a brightly decorated Christmas tree in the otherwise furnitureless living room of the house where I grew up. I realized soon enough, "This is amazingly real, as though I were looking at the scene itself, but I am dreaming and I know exactly what I will see as soon as I open my eyes, which I cannot stand to do because I don't usually dream this convincingly. But I am awake and I need to find out what time it is." Eventually the scene turned abruptly to the dim and murky shades in which most of my dreams are conducted, and I took my own sweet time about checking what time it was. Then I checked the time again a little later. Eventually I realized that each time check had been wildly different on either side of the initial one and thought, "I never woke up at all. I am still asleep. But I don't care. I don't want to know what time it is. But I have to find out what time it is."
When I finally forced myself to wake up and open my eyes, I had more time left than I thought I had. Hence this post.
I woke up this morning realizing that I had misreported and misremembered my thoughts and subsequent investigations as regards the Neues Museum, and wrote the following to post once I was back to a wi-fi source:
"As so often with tales recollected, what I remembered was what happened, or what I believed at the time, but not what I came to believe afterward: I never did find out to my satisfaction whether the Silk Road murals had been installed in the Neues Museum or the Bode Museum, and later decided the Asian collections must have been in the Bode Museum after all.
"I last investigated the question pre-Wikipedia and no longer remember whether Weimar-era museum guidebooks answered the question for me. Twenty years ago, the documents I needed were hard to come by, and I subsequently lost interest in answering the question.
"Likewise, if anyone has any updates on the possibility that the artwork from the museum in Magdeburg was plundered rather than burnt up in bombing, I’d like to know them.
"The Chinese government is still quite peeved that the German archaeologists removed the murals for safekeeping. In defense of the would-be defenders of world civilization, it should be noted that iconoclastic locals had taken to defacing—or de-facing—them. See Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Road for a thirty-year-old recounting of the story. There have been many subsequent accounts as the Silk Road has become a hot topic for tourists and travel study groups."
A Wikipedia search has not resolved the question, probably because I'm not looking up the right search terms. The exported wall murals may actually have been installed in the Ethnographic Museum that was totally destroyed in the bombing.
After writing the post-to-come above, at four a.m., I went back to sleep and eventually (being anxious over an unusually timed work schedule today) found myself gazing at a brightly sunlit, naturalistically colored set of neatly arranged Christmas packages flanking a brightly decorated Christmas tree in the otherwise furnitureless living room of the house where I grew up. I realized soon enough, "This is amazingly real, as though I were looking at the scene itself, but I am dreaming and I know exactly what I will see as soon as I open my eyes, which I cannot stand to do because I don't usually dream this convincingly. But I am awake and I need to find out what time it is." Eventually the scene turned abruptly to the dim and murky shades in which most of my dreams are conducted, and I took my own sweet time about checking what time it was. Then I checked the time again a little later. Eventually I realized that each time check had been wildly different on either side of the initial one and thought, "I never woke up at all. I am still asleep. But I don't care. I don't want to know what time it is. But I have to find out what time it is."
When I finally forced myself to wake up and open my eyes, I had more time left than I thought I had. Hence this post.
