last Easter we were in Calgary and saw a touring exhibits of the artifacts. This past month I've just finished reading 2 non-fiction books about it. and I saw-and own-the movie -not the 3d version

A couple of things stick in my mind:

1) you had a much better chance of surviving if you were in first class. Later when they went back for bodies-only 1st class bodies were returned to shore-2nd and 3rd class were  "re-buried" at sea. I don't think these class differences are as strong today.

2) The cries of those drowning just after the liner sank. All survivors mention it-and how few boats-only 1-went back to rescue . The others were afraid of being swamped by those in the water.

3) the survivors-for some it really was a pivotal point in their lives-some positive some negative. The suicide rate of survivors seems high. Others-who survived but did not lose family to the tragedy -seemed to make it  a big deal in their lives. And the 3rd group -it happened but was just part of life-and life continued.

The museum here did a fascinating exhibit on Titanic a few years ago. At the entrance you were given a ticket with the name and details of a real Titanic passenger (including what class of passenger they were and who they were travelling with). It was really interesting to go through and imagine just what my person might have experienced. At the end you could find out whether or not you survived. I was Leila S. Meyer - daughter of Andrew Saks (who founded Saks Fifth Avenue). I survived, however my/Leila's husband did not. Being given the ticket with the name and details of a real passenger made the story seem so much more real to me, as did reading the list of people who survived and the much longer of those who did not.

The human stories are probably the most compelling and important part of the whole saga and it's too bad that most versions of the story (Hi, James Cameron) fictionalize so heavily that the real stories get lost or marginalized. In Cameron's case, the main story really had very little to do with the Titanic, though he did at least get some of the class issues in. It was a basic "across the tracks" romance with a tragic ending. You could have done the same story with the San Francisco earthquake or even 9/11 and had it come out not much differently.

Whereas the stories of people like the Saks or J. P. Morgan are tied specifically to the Titanic and are inextricable from it. That said, to get the third class perspective in, you almost have to fictionalize because so few of those stories got told (because so few of them survived compared with the first class folks). I'd love to see a Titanic movie/series that makes more use of the real stories, even it still fictionalizes things a little.

There's a new TV series coming from the writer of Downton Abbey. Will be interesting to see what he does with the material.

Mendalla

We just watched a documentary about it, and read an article, which said that the "unsinkable" adjective only came into use after the sinking. The arrogance would be with the captain not slowing down as he should have, when icebergs had been spotted.

But to me the great war does mark the end of the mindset where esthetics were important. Afterward we no longer looked to create a beautiful civilization any more, no longer dress fabulously, no longer bother with ornamental details, and instead build buildings out of ugly concrete instead of stone and brick. Maybe one day we will care again. Modern is not to my taste.

somegal-that's the same travelling exhibit I went to!

I found this interesting little article that suggests that the term "unsinkable" was actually a result of media-billing: http://historyonthenet.com/Titanic/unsinkable.htm.

I actually enjoyed the movie, but have always considered it as simply a story - not the historical truth.

Tabitha - that's so cool! Do you remember anything about your person?

We are going today to see the Titanic 3D movie. It will be in English with Korean subtitles. I'm eager to note the differences between the Korean movie house and the Cnplx I go to in Canada.

Mendalla,

the "purpose" of the experiment called universe and Hir experiments (which include things like the various physical laws, us, and everything that we create) seems to be to make more experiements :3

not all experiments have the same results

there are more than 5 theories as to 'what caused the Titanic disaster' and not all of them blame the experiments known as humans

some experiments love certain other experiments called media which have already provided easy-to-digest and believe in Titanic myths...

and so forth for such experiments as nihilism, or science, or James Cameron...

what would happen if an experiment known as a human being would try to view the Titanic experiment with the eyes of a child and see where that can take her?  what myths will she find she will enjoy?  dislike?  feel unimportant?

this has been an experiment

My wife and I went to the three cemeteries in Halifax with Titanic victims buried there (Fairview has the most)

Tabitha, I double checked my memory that there are 2nd and 3rd class passengers buried there
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/victims_graves.php?angle=Fairview+Lawn

so I am not sure where your info about them being the ones reburied at sea comes from. It may have been a degree of bloating, decomp... more than status.

Why isn't this an incredible yawn? FAR greater tragedies and far more significant dramas  have overtaken the world since 1912, far more meaningful stories have been generated… I find somethiong morbidly maudlin about the Titanic and the fascination with it.

how sweet death can be (i shudder at the cleanup, the poor workers fighting the conflicting impulses of digging in and trying to dig the bodies out)

i think someone could also do a good disaster movie on the Greatest Time Life Itself (without humanity's help) almost wiped itself out completely, the Great Oxygenation Event

Cool… I included this in a novel 37 years ago, in New Zealand… and no-one in those pre-Internet days believed it was an historical event!

I took this photo in Latvia! And I've seen one of these since… in Ontario. Now they've made the romantic movie, I'm waiting for a bouncy Twin Towers… I guess it's a matter of taste. Am I alone in finding it fairly odious? Is this what Holywood does with human suffering? I guess it does…

Very, very weird…

Somegal- all I remebered is out of the 4 of us 3 of us lived

. SG-It was from a book-I'll check the reference-it was a boat that went back to pick up bodies-later...

Elanor, you wrote:

"But to me the great war does mark the end of the mindset where esthetics were important. Afterward we no longer looked to create a beautiful civilization any more, no longer dress fabulously, no longer bother with ornamental details, and instead build buildings out of ugly concrete instead of stone and brick. Maybe one day we will care again. Modern is not to my taste."

--------------

But: Only after the First World War were ordinary soldiers remembered: previously wars  won were marked with bombastic staues of generals on horses, sometimes even in Romanesque togas and laurel leaves.

If you go to Blair Castle near Pilochry, Perthshire, you'll see something like 120-150 stag antlers lining the walls — and, alongside these, "trophies" stripped from the corpses of the Mahdi's army at Abdullah al-Taashi. The defeat was a massacre. About 10,000 Mahdi troops were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner. British casualties were minimal. Kitchener had remains of the Mahdi exhumed and burned and the ashes were scattered. The trophies are Islamic equivalents of monastic habits, patched short gowns, the patches signifying vows of poverty, chastity, etc. They are STILL there on the walls. Imagine how we might feel if we walked into an Islamic "stately home" and found Christian monks' habits, stripped from the victims of a massacre, displayed like hunting trophies on the wall? This is an example of the aesthetic sense your refer to.

(go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/aycliffepodcast/4884860531/sizes/l/in/photostream/ to see this: you can see one nicely mounted at the far left of this photo — there are many, many more around the walls).

The "cenotaph" as we now know it, listing the ordinary soldiers who were killed started in 1917: my paternal grandfather (a Church of Scotland minister) organised one of the early memorials in Scotland… in Dumfriesshire.

The First World War ended the "glory" story and that was a great and liberating truth… but it was revived again fairly quickly for the Second World War and is still hyped, but to less effect.

It is wrong to say that aesthetics took a hit: the aesthetics of the Romatic era aristcracy was fanciful, self indulgent, often cruel, superficial whimsy — it treated women as simpletons and the "lower orders" as vermin. Women, of necessity, married for money because it was that or the poor-house. In the First World War they shot the shell-shocked and pursued strategies that squandered the lives of tens of thousands of "colonials" (including my maternal grandfather), of junior officers and of "other ranks". Even today, the British military draws most of its officer class from the aristocracy.

The rich may have fressed "fabulously" as you say, but personal hygiene was not a great concern and — all across Europe — the poor lived, ill-dressed, in pitiabe, life-shortening squalor. And when they migrated, life wasn't much better.

So the aristocratic Susanna Moodie, ('Roughing It In The Bush; or, Life in Canada'. McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library edition, 1989), p.29, wrote:

“I had heard and read much of savages, and have since seen, during my long residence in the bush, somewhat of uncivilised life; but the Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen — he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians who form the surplus of over-populous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.”

(First published 1852)

Perhaps you feel that's worsened as a consequence of modernity?

Ooo, can I get it at my local library? :3

And funny picture, that.  I'd be so riding that ride.

Yeah, Hollywood seems to be good at simplifying things, if I were paranoid, I'd say it was intentional *waggles eyebrows*

So many movies these days seem to be nihilism being sold as patriotism...and such blatant mainstream 'racism', "Buy American"...sheesh...

I DO still get taken in by eye candy, though...the new "Prometheus" movie I am totally going to see at the local cheap theatre  ($2.50 for first run movies).

Mike: This is not an example of the esthetic I refer to. You should know that. I was merely talking about elegance and beauty. Maybe one day in the future we can have both the good things modernity has brought, and an artistic culture that cares about the details and how it presents itself. I don't equate ornament with class division and Victorian arrogance.

I'm just saying that this, is a nicer building:

 than this:

You know we live in a throw away society, and it wasn't then. Come on, you know there are good things about both now and then. No need to jump off the deep end at me.

I prefer the Museum of Civilisation (for example) to both. Fancy buildings are only ever built by elites for elites.

Mike,

There is a fascination with Titanic. Just as there is one with the Hindenburg... There are people who go to Civil War battlefields or Vimy Ridge... I suppose it is something in our nature.  

We found ourselves searching the Halifax cemeteries for the gravesite of a relative of my wife based on geneaological stuff.

The Titanic section was not what grabbed us. It was the Halifax explosion gravesites that did that. They made a movie of that event too.

We do wander cemeteries but it is with reverence and not maudlin.

Modern <> bad aesthetic, as Mike suggests. It is a different aesthetic that will appeal to some and not to others. Personally, I can come up with examples of both old and new architecture and art that appeal to me. The Shanghai Museum is a good example of a modern building that is beautiful and elegant but would never have been built in the pre-Modern era. It actually replicates the look of a bronze sacrificial vessel from China's pre-Imperial period (Shang Dynasty, I think).

Back to Titanic, CBC did a comparison of the Titanic to the largest of the modern cruise ships, Oasis of the Seas. While the Titanic may have been more elegant aesthetically, in terms of size and luxury (and safety), I'd say the Oasis wins. On the all important safety front, it not only has enough lifeboats, but they are fully enclosed and built for stability as opposed to the old open rowboats. Like many modern cruise ships, it's basically a floating all-inclusive resort so has multiple pools, restaurants, etc. I love the aesthetics of the old ocean liners (Little M and I visited the Queen Mary at dock in Long Beach years ago) but I think I'd rather sail on a modern cruise ship to be honest.

Mendalla

Hi SG and others-I went back to the books- Titanic First accounts and Shadow of the Titanic-After the Carpathia had docked 2 boats went out to recover more bodies-The Mackay Bennett picked up  and brought to shore 1990 bodies and buried at sea113 bodies. The Minia picked up another 13 bodies.

And yes you are right SG -it doesn't say what criteria was used as to which bodies were taken to shore.

Just given the other class differences-I think it was an assumption I made-without re-reading both books-I can't find where it said that.

Of 143 1st class women-only 4 dies (of these 3 wouldn't leave the ship015% of 2nd class women dies and 53% of 3rd class.

Even in the surivor and death lists the 3rd class passengers often aren't named "Third class passengers and crew are not included in the list here given owing to the impossibility of obtaining exact names of many"

I do find it interesting reading.

remember MikePaterson is from a different generation and has different BS than you do :3  he and you (and i and everyone else here) literally live in different worlds with some things in common...