[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

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I’ve never heard of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’ve read about him. Until earlier this week I knew he was a Dutch painter of repute, but little more. But I’ve only read about him; never heard his name spoken, so I’ve no idea how his name is pronounced. Wikipedia tells me it’s “BROY-gɘl,” but it also says “also” and then “BROO- gɘl.” You got two, you got none. I doubt the man wandered Flanders mouse-like, answering to a handful of first syllable variations so long as the caller followed with a shwa’d “gel.” At some point he declared a preference.

I read it as rhyming with “frugal,” not that I come across the name that often. I don’t know how W.H. Auden pronounced the name in 1938. He was in Brussels touring a museum that was then known as the Palais des beaux arts. The poet was struck by at least three, so he thought, of Bruegel’s paintings—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census of Bethlehem, and The Massacre of the Innocents—then on display. Nearly sixty years after Auden’s visit, experts would determine that Icarus was in fact a copy by an unknown artist of a lost Bruegel, but Auden died thinking he’d seen the real deal and, given the man’s penchant for rewriting even some of his better works, thank goodness such knowledge didn’t set him to fiddling with the poem inspired by his visit: “Musée de Beaux Arts.”