Happy Rodent Monday
Feb. 2nd, 2009 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicHappy Groundhog Day! America's weirdest and most charming holiday. I wish I had time to go to this tonight.
Had a lovely time in D.C., staying with [LJ friend] and her family (so sweet!), visiting the National Institutes of Health to do what I had to do for school (so cool!), and dropping by the Holocaust Museum (so…not what normal people do for fun!).
Some of the people who went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem with me over the summer said that the one in Washington was more affecting. I'm not sure if it was. My experience in both was very different—on a tour with 40 people and carrying a two-week sleep deficit in the first (four hours), alone and at my own pace in the second (two hours)—so it was hard to judge. Yad Vashem had far more artifacts, so you had a better opportunity to connect with something personally moving. You were also seeing everything in a profound context: in the country where so many survivors took root afterwards, in the language that by its continued existence proves that the Final Solution did not succeed. But I also had a hard time soaking it all in because I had to follow someone else's lectures and stop where he stopped/not stop where he kept walking.
At the U.S. memorial I was more removed from and had better perspective on my trip, so when I got to the sections on the Warsaw ghetto or Pawiak prison or Birkenau, for instance, I could stop and remember standing on those grounds. The cast "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate lacked as much power as the ones physically at Auschwitz. There were video clips from mass executions, camp liberations and medical experiments that I hadn't seen before, and a train car you had to walk through with a shaft of light slanting in through one small window. Here more than in Israel I thought about what the other museum visitors knew about the Holocaust before coming in. I was paying closer attention, too, to the reactions of the people around me: the sniffles and quiet gasps, the head-shaking of disbelief, the schoolchildren shouting for each other to "come see all the teeth!", the couples of all ages murmuring facts to each other. I trailed a Japanese man for a few exhibits as he walked from case to case with his hands clasped behind his back; I wondered if he was thinking about American internment camps, and whether anyone else considered the echoes on our own home ground as they thought that no one here would do what the Nazis did, then, now, or ever again.
But nothing hit me in the gut the way reading someone like Primo Levi does. I don't know. If anything, I've concluded that for me, going to museums is a less effective way to try to comprehend the Holocaust than reading memoirs or listening to survivors.
.
The SGA pornlet I wrote yesterday when I was supposed to be working on the stuff that I'm still putting off has so far only attracted five commenters. I wonder whether it was the timing (Superbowl), characters (het threesome) or warning (dubcon & kink).
.
Anyway, just to say that since classes start again tomorrow and I have, you know, a thesis to write, I will have to cut way down on reading the f-list, posting and writing fic for a few months—if I am responsible. Then again, when I panicked about schoolwork all through January I ended up writing more fics than in any other month ever, and I have chosen an elective partially because it only meets once a week, so maybe I will squeeze in some stories. But back to the responsibility thing.
Had a lovely time in D.C., staying with [LJ friend] and her family (so sweet!), visiting the National Institutes of Health to do what I had to do for school (so cool!), and dropping by the Holocaust Museum (so…not what normal people do for fun!).
Some of the people who went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem with me over the summer said that the one in Washington was more affecting. I'm not sure if it was. My experience in both was very different—on a tour with 40 people and carrying a two-week sleep deficit in the first (four hours), alone and at my own pace in the second (two hours)—so it was hard to judge. Yad Vashem had far more artifacts, so you had a better opportunity to connect with something personally moving. You were also seeing everything in a profound context: in the country where so many survivors took root afterwards, in the language that by its continued existence proves that the Final Solution did not succeed. But I also had a hard time soaking it all in because I had to follow someone else's lectures and stop where he stopped/not stop where he kept walking.
At the U.S. memorial I was more removed from and had better perspective on my trip, so when I got to the sections on the Warsaw ghetto or Pawiak prison or Birkenau, for instance, I could stop and remember standing on those grounds. The cast "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate lacked as much power as the ones physically at Auschwitz. There were video clips from mass executions, camp liberations and medical experiments that I hadn't seen before, and a train car you had to walk through with a shaft of light slanting in through one small window. Here more than in Israel I thought about what the other museum visitors knew about the Holocaust before coming in. I was paying closer attention, too, to the reactions of the people around me: the sniffles and quiet gasps, the head-shaking of disbelief, the schoolchildren shouting for each other to "come see all the teeth!", the couples of all ages murmuring facts to each other. I trailed a Japanese man for a few exhibits as he walked from case to case with his hands clasped behind his back; I wondered if he was thinking about American internment camps, and whether anyone else considered the echoes on our own home ground as they thought that no one here would do what the Nazis did, then, now, or ever again.
But nothing hit me in the gut the way reading someone like Primo Levi does. I don't know. If anything, I've concluded that for me, going to museums is a less effective way to try to comprehend the Holocaust than reading memoirs or listening to survivors.
.
The SGA pornlet I wrote yesterday when I was supposed to be working on the stuff that I'm still putting off has so far only attracted five commenters. I wonder whether it was the timing (Superbowl), characters (het threesome) or warning (dubcon & kink).
.
Anyway, just to say that since classes start again tomorrow and I have, you know, a thesis to write, I will have to cut way down on reading the f-list, posting and writing fic for a few months—if I am responsible. Then again, when I panicked about schoolwork all through January I ended up writing more fics than in any other month ever, and I have chosen an elective partially because it only meets once a week, so maybe I will squeeze in some stories. But back to the responsibility thing.
no subject
Date: Feb. 2nd, 2009 05:50 pm (UTC)I went to the Shoah museum many years ago also, but alone, on my own. It was a more affecting experience for me, for that reason. Though I've never actually been to the camps -- it's fascinating to hear you point out that the simulacrum of the place isn't as powerful as the place itself. I mean, of course not.
Sigh.
no subject
Date: Feb. 2nd, 2009 05:57 pm (UTC)I resented that, because I felt like it would have been plenty moving if they'd just let me experience it on my own
Yes, I felt that too. I guess the curators don't trust their visitors to be able to draw that power from what they're seeing without being helped. Maybe it's true for many people.