To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
9
Sep
2018
The video images of flames shooting skyward out of the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, stabbed me in the heart.
I spent close to 20 years alternating between president, secretary, and grunt volunteer with the infinitely smaller Lake Country Museum. I know from personal experience how hard it is to document the past, especially from societies that maintained no written texts.
Every artifact, every letter, every story, is like a clue in a mystery novel. Clue by laborious clue, a museum puts together a coherent picture of what life was like, back then -- whenever “then” was.
The Rio fire, in effect, ripped out almost all the pages from the novel about South America.
How can you read a novel that isn’t there any longer?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: museum, Fire, lobotomy, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, artifacts
28
Jun
2017
Canada will be 150 years old this Saturday. I was asked by the organizers of the Canada Day celebrations to put together a historical presentation about the churches of Lake Country. Eleven, by my count, for a community of 14,000.
So, last Tuesday morning, I drove around to all the current churches, to take pictures. I already had pictures of the earlier churches, thanks to the Lake Country Museum’s archives.
On Tuesday mornings, I discovered, Lake Country is a religious dead zone. Locked doors. Empty parking lots. Closed gates. Silence…
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: churches, dead zone, history, Canada Day, museum