Vermeer's Secret

[FreeThinker]

An article in Vanity Fair (linked on The Huffington Post) has fascinated me and reminded me of some comments made in another thread here on Awesome Dude, discussing how poor children with no education are able to perform complex mathematical calculations by "cheating," breaking down a complicated problem into smaller bits and then combining them. This article reminded me of that.

For years, art experts have wondered how the Dutch artist Vermeer was able to achieve such a photographic realism in his art. Many had speculated that he had used a camera obscura, a combination of lenses and mirrors to achieve the spectacular effects in his work. These suggestions have been met with skepticism and even outrage. The contemporary artist, David Hockney, has written a book suggesting this, yet the opposition has remained adamant.

Enter a non-artist and tinkering genius from Texas (Bah. He would be from Texas). I shall let you read the rest:

Vermeer's Secret Revealed?

[The Pecman]

Terrific story. Can't wait to see the Penn & Teller documentary film. Thanks, F.T.!

[Merkin]

A fascinating insight, and very convincing. Also fascinating are the nay-saying comments stretching down the page after the article. It seems some purists still cannot fathom that an artist can be responsive to the technology available and still achieve greatness. It would be equally foolish to insist that writers today don't qualify as artists unless they are still using pen and ink or a Smith-Corona typewriter with carbon paper packs to generate their manuscripts.

[Cole Parker]

I'm sure I couldn't write with quill and paper. When I get going on a story, the ideas and dialog lines and insights can occasionally come almost faster than I can write them down. And I type fairly rapidly. I'll often stop where I was on the story to jot down a couple of peripheral ideas that just occurred, then immediately return to the story. How could anyone do that as facilely while dipping the pen in an inkwell and reaching for his blotter? I have no idea how stories were produced before, even on a typewriter. But however it was done, it wasn't done by me and I doubt it ever could have been.

C

[FreeThinker]

A member of a creative writing group I was in a few years ago--in the real world, not online-- said in group once that she preferred writing her first drafts in longhand on legal pads because its slower and forces her to think. Because typing on a keyboard, whether typewriter or computer, is so much faster, the process is, to her, "like vomiting up words." She finds it more deliberative to write by hand and I have to agree, to a certain extent. Back in the eighties, before I stole my stepfather's old 512k Macintosh, I wrote a number of short stories and a novel with a Flair pen and spiral notebooks from Target. It could be that I was younger and hadn't killed as many brain cells as I would later, but I think it was better. Of course, you can go back over what you write on the computer and edit seven or twelve times, but the first drafts always seemed better in my mind when written with ancient pens and paper.

I think online news sources might consider this. I've noticed that, since most news media have dispensed with copy editors as a useless waste of money, the number of skipped words, misspelled words, (at least use the Microsoft spell-check, for God's sake), and sentences that make absolutely no sense are increasing. I think younger reporters sit down and whip out a quick five hundred words and have no care whether its good, well-written, or even makes a lick of sense. An article on nytimes.com requires more thought that a Twitter fart. I don't hold myself up as a paragon of virtue in this sense. My editor can testify to what happens when I vomit up a few thousand words when I'm in a hurry, but I do think writing on paper first and then transferring to the computer results in something, for me at least, that is higher quality and more thoughtful. I just don't do it as much as I used to.

[Nigel Gordon]

A member of a creative writing group I was in a few years ago--in the real world, not online-- said in group once that she preferred writing her first drafts in longhand on legal pads because its slower and forces her to think. Because typing on a keyboard, whether typewriter or computer, is so much faster, the process is, to her, "like vomiting up words." She finds it more deliberative to write by hand and I have to agree, to a certain extent. Back in the eighties, before I stole my stepfather's old 512k Macintosh, I wrote a number of short stories and a novel with a Flair pen and spiral notebooks from Target. It could be that I was younger and hadn't killed as many brain cells as I would later, but I think it was better. Of course, you can go back over what you write on the computer and edit seven or twelve times, but the first drafts always seemed better in my mind when written with ancient pens and paper.

I've tried both ways and I would not say one is better than the other, they are though different. Writing longhand forces you to give careful consideration to your words. Using a word processor means you can play about with them in ways you probably hadn't thought of. I tend to do most of my writing on a word processor but when I am faced with some particularly difficult technical concept to explain (I a lot of technical writing) I often find it best to write it longhand. I don't write poetry but a friend who is a poet tells me you really need to write that longhand, you run away with yourself if you try it with a word processor, which may explain why I failed all the poetry assignments in my Creative Writing course.

[EleCivil]

A member of a creative writing group I was in a few years ago--in the real world, not online-- said in group once that she preferred writing her first drafts in longhand on legal pads because its slower and forces her to think. Because typing on a keyboard, whether typewriter or computer, is so much faster, the process is, to her, "like vomiting up words." She finds it more deliberative to write by hand and I have to agree, to a certain extent. Back in the eighties, before I stole my stepfather's old 512k Macintosh, I wrote a number of short stories and a novel with a Flair pen and spiral notebooks from Target. It could be that I was younger and hadn't killed as many brain cells as I would later, but I think it was better. Of course, you can go back over what you write on the computer and edit seven or twelve times, but the first drafts always seemed better in my mind when written with ancient pens and paper.

I remember reading an interview with Philip Pullman where he said he wrote his books with ballpoints and paper, saying that it allowed him to take his time - the little flashing cursor in a word processor seemed to be trying to get him to rush. Given the sheer wordcount and the fact that it took him ~7 years to write His Dark Materials, I can't imagine the number of notebooks and pens he must have gone through.

Personally, I can't imagine writing with pen and paper for any great length. For one thing, my handwriting is terrible. It was bad when I was a kid, and I was writing every day in school. Since college, all my writing has been done via typing, so while I can type like a racehorse (well, you know, if it had fingers), I write slowly and sloppily. Second, I'd constantly be afraid of losing my work. If it's all longhand in a notebook, what happens when that notebook gets left behind in a move, or a cup of coffee gets spilled on it, or it simply ends up lost? I can (and do) email copies of my own drafts to myself, so that even if I'm states away and my computer explodes, my work is safe in the cloud.

I usually have a scene written in my head before I sit down at a keyboard, however. I already know who is going to say what, what kind of stage business they'll be doing, and what the eventual goal of a scene will be, along with certain details I want to add. By the time I open up the word processor, my writing is done - I'm just typing.

[Cole Parker]

Write short chapters, do you?!

OK, that was nasty. But, while I know where I want to go, I don't write it all in my head first. I'd forget most of it and would get frustrated trying to remember. Besides, the process of typing actually seems to stimulate thought.

All artists have their own pet ways of doing things that work for them.

C

[The Pecman]

I've tried both ways and I would not say one is better than the other, they are though different. Writing longhand forces you to give careful consideration to your words. Using a word processor means you can play about with them in ways you probably hadn't thought of. I tend to do most of my writing on a word processor but when I am faced with some particularly difficult technical concept to explain (I a lot of technical writing) I often find it best to write it longhand.

I try to use what I think is the best of both: I write on the computer, then print it out and edit and revise on paper. Once that's all done, then I make the changes back on the computer. The other advantage is, if the computer blows up, I still have a paper copy of what I write. That has only happened once in the last 20 years, but I was glad to have the paper when it did.

[Nigel Gordon]

I try to use what I think is the best of both: I write on the computer, then print it out and edit and revise on paper. Once that's all done, then I make the changes back on the computer. The other advantage is, if the computer blows up, I still have a paper copy of what I write. That has only happened once in the last 20 years, but I was glad to have the paper when it did.

That is a very good argument for paper copy, as I know from experience. I have a book on software design, two novels and about fifty short stories on some disks that can no longer be read. Wish I had them on paper, at least I could scan that back in, which incidentally is what I did for Waiting. It is one of the stories on the disks but I had sent a copy to a friend in Holland. He scanned it for me and the scan back to me. After that it was case of OCR and into the WP to redraft it before it came to AD.

[Merkin]

This is a strong argument for backup, no matter what the original media was. Whether we store that backup in a bank vault or in the Cloud, we should all do it faithfully or risk losing fifty short stories, two novels, and a textbook (Ouch!)

[The Pecman]

That is a very good argument for paper copy, as I know from experience. I have a book on software design, two novels and about fifty short stories on some disks that can no longer be read. Wish I had them on paper, at least I could scan that back in, which incidentally is what I did for Waiting. It is one of the stories on the disks but I had sent a copy to a friend in Holland. He scanned it for me and the scan back to me. After that it was case of OCR and into the WP to redraft it before it came to AD.

Tell me what format the floppy disks are and I'll be glad to help you for free if I can, Nigel. You never know: sometimes the stuff IS still usable. I just had a case where a close friend had a 1992 5-1/4" disk with the only copy in the world of a valuable file. We were able to borrow an old computer, get the file, email it (!!!) through Yahoo, and once on Yahoo, I could download it and decode it just fine. 3-1/2" disks are easy. We used to use 8" floppy disks for video edit sessions in the 1970s and 1980s. God knows if any of those work now.

Back to Vermeer: the paintings are brilliant no matter how he created them. I don't look upon his technique as "cheating" at all. If the desired result is there, and the passion, the mood, and the emotion is still captured by the painting, there's no issue.

[Nigel Gordon]

This is a strong argument for backup, no matter what the original media was. Whether we store that backup in a bank vault or in the Cloud, we should all do it faithfully or risk losing fifty short stories, two novels, and a textbook (Ouch!)

Unfortunately these are the backup copies.

Tell me what format the floppy disks are and I'll be glad to help you for free if I can, Nigel. You never know: sometimes the stuff IS still usable. I just had a case where a close friend had a 1992 5-1/4" disk with the only copy in the world of a valuable file. We were able to borrow an old computer, get the file, email it (!!!) through Yahoo, and once on Yahoo, I could download it and decode it just fine. 3-1/2" disks are easy. We used to use 8" floppy disks for video edit sessions in the 1970s and 1980s. God knows if any of those work now.

Thanks for the offer. the problem is not with the disks, they are standard CD-RWs, it is with the file format. Unfortunately the files were backed up using some unidentified backup software which not only compressed the files but also encrypted them. The backup was actually made by a third party who has since died and no ones knows what the program was or what the key is, though I might be able to make a guess at that. Fortunately I have been able to recover, from another source, all my early drafts, so things are not totally lost. Anyway they probably would have needed re-writing.

[The Pecman]

Thanks for the offer. the problem is not with the disks, they are standard CD-RWs, it is with the file format. Unfortunately the files were backed up using some unidentified backup software which not only compressed the files but also encrypted them. The backup was actually made by a third party who has since died and no ones knows what the program was or what the key is, though I might be able to make a guess at that.

That's very bad. Can you tell us the file extension, like ".BAK" or ".STF" or something like that? You never know -- you might be able to do a Google search and figure out what it is.

It's for reasons like this that for more than 15 years, I've refused to use any backup format that won't result in copies that can't be read in a normal Finder or Explorer window as standalone files. Proprietary file formats are for the birds, especially for backups.

On the other hand... a lot of LTO backup systems do this even today.

[Steven Adamson]

Regarding the handwriting=deliberation idea, I can see some merit to it, but that's only if you follow your first drafts by immediately publishing your stories.

Bad advice from Stephen King: He said he quit his word processor when he wrote 'Dreamcatcher' and wrote it by hand on legal pads, mostly during breaks in Orioles baseball games if I recall correctly. 'Dreamcatcher' was not a good book. Of course, not much from that era of Stephen King was that good either, so it's hard to know if we can say the longhand approach lacks merit, but my view is that it doesn't add much of worth.

Good advice from Stephen King: After the first draft, write a second story then go back to your first story after some time and rewrite with a fresh mind. I like doing it on a printed copy when possible since I seem to catch more typos/issues that way.

But the key isn't time spent putting words on paper, but the time spent thinking and if you put in that thinking time afterwards for the rewrite, I don't see it being much of a handicap.

==================

Here's a thought on the whole issue of art changing with the technology. What do you guys think about non-consultive, collaborative style story telling?

Given Google Docs, forums like this were we can start a story thread, and actual wikis where everyone edits and contributes without filter, it's easy to do.

I've seen some experiments with it, and I think that we still haven't found the right mediation for the approach, but I'm keeping my eye on it.

[Camy]

I haven't read King's Dreamcatcher, but as far as movie adaptations go I'd rate it highly.

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Here's more on Vermeer: http://www.printedlight.co.uk/

[Nigel Gordon]

That's very bad. Can you tell us the file extension, like ".BAK" or ".STF" or something like that? You never know -- you might be able to do a Google search and figure out what it is.

Thanks, there are three file extensions present on the backup CDs ".G1Z", ".G6Z" and ".G7Z"

I have determined that the G1Z files contain a listing of the files in a directory, these are not encrypted. For each G1Z file there is a G6Z and a G7Z file, I suspect the G6Z file records the offset data for the position of the file in the G7Z file, though can't be sure of this, however, its length seems to be directly proportional to the number of files listed in the G1Z file. If I am correct on that assumption the G7Z file contains the actual data.

[Camy]

A Gz suffix is gnu zip - though I imagine you've tried a zip or rar program.

Zip allows you to split a large file or folder into as many parts as you like and store the parts of it on sequential media. So, it sounds like you have three of a series of seven parts that need to be re-assembled into a complete archive before they can be uncompressed.

[Graeme]

A Gz suffix is gnu zip - though I imagine you've tried a zip or rar program.

Zip allows you to split a large file or folder into as many parts as you like and store the parts of it on sequential media. So, it sounds like you have three of a series of seven parts that need to be re-assembled into a complete archive before they can be uncompressed.

Unfortunately, the fact that the .G1Z file is readable probably breaks that theory. I suspect it's more likely to be a proprietary format that has three output files, the first which contains a directory listing, but with the content of the other two unknown (at this point in time)