We’re on our way to England tonight for three weeks.
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The great man gets a lot of tribute to this day. While we were there today a South Asian woman laid a bouquet in front of the Marx monument.
In front of the monument were a lot of things left by Chinese people; to the right a rainbow beaded bracelet.
At the Marx monument we had a conversation with a cemetery employee of a few decades’ standing.
He said marble monuments aren’t allowed anymore because they erode into illegibility too fast. And granite mustn’t be polished to a gaudy shine!
And…the cemetery is full. This doesn’t mean nobody can be buried there anymore, but only on top of an existing grave. And to do that you need permission from the relatives of the deceased below. And if they can’t be found, well, it’s difficult and time-consuming.
The guy also told me he used to bowl regularly with someone for thirty years before learning that he too was a gravedigger.
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At the Marx monument we had a conversation with a cemetery employee of a few decades’ standing.
He said marble monuments aren’t allowed anymore because they erode into illegibility too fast. And granite mustn’t be polished to a gaudy shine!
And…the cemetery is full. This doesn’t mean nobody can be buried there anymore, but only on top of an existing grave. And to do that you need permission from the relatives of the deceased below. And if they can’t be found, well, it’s difficult and time-consuming.
The guy also told me he used to bowl regularly with someone for thirty years before learning that he too was a gravedigger.
Today was museum weather again, so we headed for the British Museum.
The British Museum used to be as much a library as a museum. It’s where Karl Marx did most of his research for _Capital_, and Orwell, Woolf, Garvey among others worked on their books in the Reading Room.
But now the Reading Room, beautiful as it is, has nobody sitting at those concentric arcs of desks: the institution has decided that the public can’t be trusted to not harm the facilities. So now visitors can just stand at the perimeter and gaze at the awesome interior.
A guard told me with sadness in her voice that the institution is currently trying to figure out what the room might be used for in the future.
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Today was museum weather again, so we headed for the British Museum.
The British Museum used to be as much a library as a museum. It’s where Karl Marx did most of his research for _Capital_, and Orwell, Woolf, Garvey among others worked on their books in the Reading Room.
But now the Reading Room, beautiful as it is, has nobody sitting at those concentric arcs of desks: the institution has decided that the public can’t be trusted to not harm the facilities. So now visitors can just stand at the perimeter and gaze at the awesome interior.
A guard told me with sadness in her voice that the institution is currently trying to figure out what the room might be used for in the future.
To my mind the British Museum isn’t mainly for aesthetic experiences, rather it’s for learning how people lived in many parts of the world over ~5 milliennia by glimpsing their material culture.
The Museum was able to acquire (or loot) some amazing objects like the immensely long relief from the palace of Nineveh near modern-day Basra.
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To my mind the British Museum isn’t mainly for aesthetic experiences, rather it’s for learning how people lived in many parts of the world over ~5 milliennia by glimpsing their material culture.
The Museum was able to acquire (or loot) some amazing objects like the immensely long relief from the palace of Nineveh near modern-day Basra.
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F myrmepropagandist shared this topic
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The British Museum has Yixing teapots!
It also has an insanely impractical (look at the spout!) teapot designed by some artiste in the 1980s.
That 18th century pot is super interesting. The Brits had just started with tea so the early teaware was Chinese in style. But that changes over time, but also because the tea exported to Europe and the US tasted better with milk and sugar or else sugar and lemon since it just wasn't as subtile as high quality tea sold inside of China.
So the brew-ware adds sugar and milk bowls and so on.