This music sets five poems by David Vogel (1891-1944), sung without a break:
1) On Summer Evenings
2) How Can I See You Love
3) An Autumn Day will Breathe
4) With Gentle Fingers
5) There is One Last Solitary Coach about to Leave
In his work and life Vogel was always an outsider. In Vienna (during WWI) he was imprisoned as a Russian subject; he subsequently adopted Austrian nationality then emigrated to Palestine before returning to settle in Paris. At the outbreak of WWII Vogel was arrested in France as an Austrian subject; on the Nazi invasion of France he was released and then re-arrested as a Jew before being transported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1944.
Today Vogel is chiefly remembered for two short novels but there are also some thirty poems. The only anthology published in his lifetime was Before the Dark Gate (Vienna, 1923) from which I take my title, but some of the poems I have set were written later. With the benefit of hindsight they seem deeply imbued with the horror of the impending holocaust but this is only made explicit in the final poem, which is probably his last work.
I learned about Vogel and his poetry two or three years ago but after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau in January 2016 I felt compelled to compose this piece, to re-tell Vogel’s words and to reflect on my own memories of that place.
Abstract In lattice calculations, the approach to the continuum limit is hindered by the severe freezing of the topological charge, which prevents ergodic sampling in configuration space. In order to significantly reduce the autocorrelation time of the topological charge, we develop a density of states approach with a smooth constraint and use it to study SU(3) pure Yang Mills gauge theory near the continuum limit. Our algorithm relies on simulated tempering across a range of couplings, which guarantees the decorrelation of the topological charge and ergodic sampling of topological sectors. Particular emphasis is placed on testing the accuracy, efficiency and scaling properties of the method. In their most conservative interpretation, our results provide firm evidence of a sizeable reduction of the exponent z related to the growth of the autocorrelation time as a function of the inverse lattice spacing.
Motivated by the problem of sorting, we introduce two simple combinatorial models with distinct Hamiltonians yet identical spectra (and hence partition function) and show that the local dynamics of these models are very different.After a deep quench, one model slowly relaxes to the sorted state whereas the other model becomes blocked by the presence of stable local minima.
A recently formulated statistical mechanics method is used to study the phase transition occurring in a generalisation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) known as the centred TSP. The method shows that the problem has clear signs of a crossover, but is only able to access (unscaled) finite temperatures above the transition point. The solution of the problem using this method displays a curious duality.
In a typical multihop Ad-Hoc network, interference and contention increase when flows transit each node towards destination, particularly in the presence of cross-traffic. This paper observes the relationship between throughput and path length, self-contention and interference and it investigates the effect of multiple data rates over multiple data flows in the network. Drawing from the limitations of the 802.11 specification, the paper proposes a scheduler named Hop Based Multi Queue (HBMQ), which is designed to prioritise traffic based on the hop count of packets in order to provide fairness across different data flows. The simulation results demonstrate that HBMQ performs better than a Single Drop Tail Queue (SDTQ) scheduler in terms of providing fairness. Finally, the paper concludes with a number of possible directions for further research, focusing on cross-layer implementation to ensure the fairness is also provided at the MAC layer.
Worth Reassessing David Lancaster Anthony Asquith. Tom Ryall. Manchester University Press, 2006. 200 pages, $74.95 The British film director Anthony Asquith is best known for The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), a meticulous adaptation of the Oscar Wilde stage play that contains all the qualities that later film makers, like Lindsay Anderson, would abhor. These include emotional limitation, over-reliance on literary sources, gentility bordering on blandness and (horror of horrors) middlebrow concerns. The disapproval has been contagious; David Thomson dismisses the director as “a dull journeyman supervisor of the transfer to the screen of proven theatrical properties.” Yet, as Tom Ryall shows, Asquith was a far more versatile, and appealing, figure than this reputation would suggest. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s to its end in the Swinging Sixties, he directed a wide range of material from documentary-style war films to Gainsborough melodrama. All this means that he is worth reassessing. Ryall has done a very good job of it. On set, Asquith was famous for wearing a shabby boiler suit to indicate his sympathy for the workers but, as a man and a film maker, he was very upper crust. The son of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and an alumnus of Winchester College and Oxford University, he was a founder member of the Film Society in the 1920s and, as such, was well up on the new cinematic styles and aesthetic debates that were flying in from across the Channel. His silent films expressed these concerns, so [End Page 99] much so that Shooting Stars (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) helped to place him in the same critical bracket as his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock. The sound era was less congenial, however, and his career faltered until 1938 when, with its star Leslie Howard, he co-directed Pygmalion, a superb adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play. From then on, Asquith was king of the hill and top of the heap. He directed outstanding war dramas like We Dive at Dawn (1943); with the playwright Terence Rattigan, he collaborated on screen versions of Rattigan’s West End hits, such as While the Sun Shines (1947) and The Winslow Boy (1948); there is even a British film noir, The Woman in Question (1950), a Rashomon-style thriller set in a Grahame Greene world of seedy boarding houses and fairground stalls. As Ryall shows, Asquith was not just a middle class middlebrow. He was a chameleon who shifted and changed depending on the work available. Thanks to production conditions, then, it was impossible for him to establish a clear directorial identity. The nearest he got to one was as a maker of post-war “quality” films, which Ryall points out were a very British compromise between European art house and down and dirty Hollywood populism. The author demonstrates this hybrid quality in his chapter on Asquith’s theatrical adaptations. For example, The Winslow Boy possesses all the attributes that Lindsay Anderson despised. It is set in the past (the Edwardian era), it is middle class (the film concerns a retired bank manager’s fight for justice) and, being based on a play, it appears to be driven by words rather than images. Yet, as Ryall demonstrates, the film is infused with cinematic technique. For example, in one tense interrogation scene, lifted more or less intact from the play, editing, shot length and camera placement are used to make a dynamic piece of film drama, not an inert slice of photographed theatre. As Asquith said himself, he had “re-imagined his material in terms of his medium.” It is mild snobbery, perhaps, to dismiss this approach to directing as being bland and unimaginative. By the 1960s, with international film financing becoming more dominant, the director ended his career with The V.I.Ps (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), two sleek all-star packages for MGM-British that did nothing for his reputation (although both are a very pleasant way of wasting a Sunday afternoon). Ryall makes no great claims for that reputation; he does not hail Asquith as some forgotten David Lean or Michael Powell. He does prove, however, that this...
John Boorman. Adventures of Suburban Boy. Faber and Faber, 2003. 314 pages; $27.00. Search for Grace The landscape of imagination is formed early; it grows out of first childhood tensions and dreams. At least, this would seem to be case with John Boorman, British director of Point Blank, Deliverance and The Emerald Forest. Although his autobiography does everything that one would expect of famous film director (it covers youthful struggles, on-set traumas and encounters with famous people), it is, in essence, more interior story about search for vision and about how human frailty and industrial contingency make this life-long quest. Boorman has written graceful, even poetic book, as good in its way as Michael Powell's two masterful autobiographies. In fact, like Powell, David Lean and even Derek Jarman, Boorman is one of those English directors for whom films are way of battling with, and escaping from, social and emotional limitations of this overcrowded island. As his opening chapters point out, he was born in 1933 into particular class trap, a faceless, mindless London suburb amongst people who had lost their way in world, who had forgotten who they were, and had fallen from grace. In his memory, neat, semi-detached houses of Carshalton contained deracinated lower middle class cut off from its natural instincts by industrialisation and First World War; as in his beloved Arthurian legends, the Grail was lost because men had sinned against nature. For young John, there were personal falls from grace, too; his mother was really in love with his father's best friend, and there was an unstated rivalry for her affection between boy and elder Boorman. Yet redemption was at hand in surprising form of Adolf Hitler. With his father away at war, John and his family fled bombs by moving to his maternal grandfather's bungalow by Thames at Shepperton. Here, boy developed his lifelong love of water and sense of spiritual wholeness that it offered: We had left landlocked and earthbound suburbs and embraced flow of river life. Our lives were fluid. One summer's day, when he was teenager, he took off in his canoe to Runnymede, and, in water, experienced what he calls an epiphany: knew myself to be in state of grace...That experience, so profound, sent me on quest for images, through cinema, to try to recapture what I knew that day. Viewed in this light, much of Boorman's work is search for grace and Grail with men pitching themselves against forces of nature (Deliverance ( 1972), The Emerald Forest ( 1985)), or, in Excalibur (1981), returning to roots of lost England, to primordial battle between pagan and Christian. (Division haunts Boorman's world; although an Anglican, he went to Roman Catholic school.) Yet he has been as fascinated by modern trap as by its mythic and elemental shadows. As he notes himself, Point Blank (1967), his first Hollywood film, places Lee Marvin in kind of emotional triangle that Boorman witnessed between his parents and his father's chum; his other film with Marvin, Hell in Pacific (1968), has an American airman and Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune) stranded on lonely Pacific island; it plays out ironies of two enemies forced to rely on each other in kind of Arthurian wasteland. Moreover, effort of getting these stories on film has been as dramatic as any of conflicts that they contain. Apart from meddling executives (who are an occupational hazard), Boorman has had to contend with inhospitable locations, upturned canoes and near drowning, malevolent tropical diseases and highly unreliable examples of light aircraft. …
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