The artist and the automation

I had some time before the Bruegel exhibition, so I looked at the two nearby rooms. So I stand in front of Titian's Danae, and my automation turns on uninvited: 'This shadow under the left breast should be deeper... and this forearm is too long... and this hand was clearly painted by an apprentice from a male model..." Shut up, automation, you are interfering with my enjoyment of painting!

(Illustrations: the Vienna version of Danae I was looking at, and Bruegel's wonderful 'The Artist and the Buyer'. Or, in this case, the artist and the automation.

Brueghel exhibition report

I had returned from the big exhibition of Bruegel the Elder at the Vienna art history museum.

They've shown, besides their own collection (they have a whole room of Bruegel, including The Tower of Babel, The Massacre of the Innocents and the Seasons series) works from Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Vienna Albertina and so on. A roomful and a half of drawings and woodcuts, five rooms of paintings, a little historical context and thematic exhibitions on Bruegel's painting techniques and restoration. 

Overall impression was great: not just the pictures, but there also was an educational component. Some paintings were exhibited in multiple versions: e.g., two variants of The Massacre of the Innocents and both Towers of Babel - their own and the Rotterdam one. There were no Blind Leading the Blind, but they brought the newly (and excellently) restored Mad Meg (Dulle Griet) and two of the three Adorations of the Magi. That was easily two thirds of Bruegel's known paintings.

Of drawings and prints there were the Sins and Virtues series, early studies, miscellany, and the wonderful Artist and Connoisseur drawing from Albertina. Especially nice was hanging many of the woodcuts next to the preliminary drawings they were made from. There were also several preparatory drawings for elements used in paintings.

Overall, everything was picked and presented very well. My favorites are still the Babel Tower and especially The Hunters in the Snow, but Mad Meg is also great, and the Swiss variant of Adoration of the Magi with the snow and The Triumph of Death. Bruegel was clearly a forerunner of the zombie apocalypse genre.

More impressions:

Bruegel, in places, is quite a Bosch. They both must have gotten some of their weed from the same vendor.

The younger Bruegels were for the most part pathetic imitators.

Some minuses: the descriptions would have been better placed to the side of each painting, not in front: in such dense crowd the readers had been causing unnecessary jams. The audioguide must die especially; I do understand it is extra profit for the museum, but it makes four or five m...useum-goers stand before each painting listening to their paddles and block the access. But overall the museum handled such heavy crowd well; it was much worse in Albertina in every regard. The hardcover catalog was available only in German; would it have killed them to make some in other languages?

To the Hunters, the Tower and the Artist and Connoisseur I treated myself twice.

Bruegel was wise but terribly sarcastic. To the level of truly poisonous caricature. And not just in his treatment of the characters; in the middle of the Procession to Calvary painting, which features hundreds of figures in furious action (Bruegel the dad was certainly not lazy), one suddenly notices a white horse with a rider standing still, staring directly with a viewer with an awfully cynical grin. A real troll.

Bruegel's drawing is plain, almost medieval, none of the Italian prettifying, and his painting is likewise simple, done in clean spots, early Renaissance wise; but his color and atmosphere sing like few painters could ever manage. He obviously loved to paint tiny detail, with all the hair-thin branches and matchstick-tall soldiers, but it never turns into noisiness. Everything done masterfully, freshly, appropriately.

It was good.

The pen is mightier

When the movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai" came out, tourists flocked to Thailand to see the bridge that the British POWs had built.

Problem was, there was no bridge. Or rather, there was, but in the wrong place. Pierre Boule, who wrote the book which the movie was based on, did not check his facts, assuming that if the Bangkok - Rangoon railroad, building which the Japanese killed off 12,000 POWs and around 90,000 local residents, had run along Kwai, the bridge must have crossed the same river. In reality the famous bridge was across Mae Klong.

In the end, Thailand renamed the river. Now a stretch of Mae Klong a few miles long, across which the bridge runs, is called Kwai Yai - Big Kwai. I expect the tourists are happy.

(S)He shouldn't have dressed that way

The scientists and engineers landed a machine on a comet, and all the crowd is interested in is the way one of the scientists was dressed. He was bullied to tears - because he wore a shirt, painted by his girlfriend, which featured some women in swimsuits.

Apparently, he invited that on himself because he dressed too provocatively.

Spritzing is not reading

These guys: http://www.spritzinc.com/ are in the news. They claim to have reinvented reading, they even call it "spritzing" in an attempt to go viral on the net, and claim that you can do it at the whopping 250, no, even 500 words per minute!

Problem is, this is a STEP BACK. I, like many people, already read 600+ wpm without their tech, and skim at 1200+ if I don't need full comprehension. I stop comprehending at maybe 1600, but I still get enough glimpse of the text to know if I want to read it attentively.

I know that there are a lot of people who read slower than the speed this app offers. But what the app does is not reading. They flash the text one word or syllable at a time at predefined speed and claim this increases reading speed because you do not have to move your eyes along the lines.

Why is that a problem? Well, they might as well say it increases reading speed because you do not have to move your lips as you spell out every word.

You see, speed reading is exactly about the level of comprehension of written word where you do not have to follow the lines. You just look at the paragraphs and move the eyes only a little side to side, to register the full width of the text if it is too wide, or nearly not at all if it is, say, a newspaper column. As your reading skill grows, you stop focusing on letters, then on syllables, then on words, taking them in whole. Then you begin to take in whole phrases in an instant. Then you begin to be able to glance a few times around a whole paragraph and see its meaning without effort, reconstructing the whole from fragments even out of order.

As an example, I cannot look at a piece of text in English or Russian anymore without comprehending its meaning automatically. It's like not being able to hear a clearly said phrase without knowing its meaning. (I am near-dyslectic in Hebrew, but that is a different writing system.) If you learn "speedreading" the Spritz way, you will never go to that level because you are never shown the whole phrase, you are fed syllables through a straw. And you cannot go back and re-read; reading becomes a linear experience like an audiobook.

They might as well claim to increase your moving speed by teaching you to crawl really fast, instead of letting you run.

Did people lose reading skills so much that this throwback to syllabic reading is what we have come to?