Steaming Thursday

[flemmings]

Today was the kind of marathon I'm no longer up for, a mere six hours with a two hour break in between that saw me ordering a Manhattan when what I wanted was a Cosmopolitan. Whatever. Alcohol is alcohol.

But the return of a p/t body meant I had the first three days of this week off, and I profited by it to go see the wakashu exhibit at the ROM. What it says on the tin: "Four hundred years ago in Japan, male youths, called wakashu, were the objects of sexual desire for women and men. Creating a third gender, wakashu looked different from both women and adult men and played distinct social and sexual roles." So now I know how to tell the men from the women in woodblock prints. Fun enough, but they had a two minute clip from Gohatto on rerun and the voices kept interfering with my reading of the exhibit labels.

I'm also appalled to learn that our museum's collection of woodblock prints was given to the museum in 1926, but were largely left underexplored. "There were boxes that nobody had opened for years," (the curator) said. "It was very challenging because not much was on the museum database, so we had to record all of the information."

Comments

[incandescens]

On the positive side, you have just supported my plotline of "X donates stuff to the museum and nobody actually realises it's there or has checked up on it".

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I'm certain that it happens all the time, as Ringo sang. In fact I vaguely recall an exhibit on ROM history that cited a bunch of overlooked items from the early days, collecting in the 19th century being the haphazard thing it was. Someone's Canadiana donations, someone else's buncha boxes from Warlord China- hey, we're building a *museum* here, we don't have time to look at everything people send us!

[incandescens]

Plus of course, if they had found it, then we wouldn't have the whole plotline about "can't find a copy of X".

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(scoffs) A minor consideration. Most plotlines would be negated if we lived in a world without human error or human laziness, but of course we don't.

[incandescens]

Right. But the problem is that in fiction it comes across as much more unlikely than it is in reality. ;)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

That's the chiz curses of writing fiction.