Differential ttˉt\bar{t} Cross Section Measurements as a Function of Variables other than Kinematics

An overview of cross section measurements as a function of jet multiplicities and jet kinematics in association with $t\bar{t}$ production is presented. Both the ATLAS and the CMS collaborations performed a large number of measurements at different center-of-mass energies of the LHC using various $t\bar{t}$ decay channels. Theoretical predictions of these quantities usually rely on parton shower simulations that strongly depends on tunable parameters and come with large uncertainties. The measurements are compared to various theoretical descriptions based on different combinations of matrix-element calculations and parton-shower models

Measurements of differential ttˉt\bar{t} production cross sections at CMS

An overview of recent measurements of differential top quark pair production cross sections performed by the CMS experiment at the LHC is presented. Measurements at different proton-proton center-of-mass energies are available using the dilepton, lepton+jets, and all-jets decay channels of the top quark. In addition to the measurements of parton-level top quarks, many measurements at particle level in an experimental accessible phase space are now available. For these results the dependence on theoretical extrapolations is reduced. A common observation of all measurements is a softer transverse momentum of the top quark than predicted by state of the art standard model calculations. However, new calculations with NNLO QCD and NLO electro-weak precision show an improved agreement

Sounding Two Notes: Re-Reading Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop

Near the end of the first part of Virginia Woolf\u27s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), The Window, the Ramsay family and their invited guests have withdrawn for the evening after a feast of boeuf en daube—the children to bed, the guests to their rooms, and finally Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay to sit across from each other reading. Conscious of her husband\u27s attention, Mrs. Ramsay wishes that he would not disturb her in this pleasant moment of reading but allow her to go on perusing lines of poetry at random and dreaming over them, that he would for once, for now, not demand her sympathy and attention. Woolf then changes the focus to Mr. Ramsay who is in a conciliatory mood, silently indulging his wife to go on but imagining she hardly understands what she reads. Mrs. Ramsay, granted this reprieve, reads a line of Shakespeare\u27s sonnets to herself: Yet seem\u27d it winter still, and, you away, / As with your shadow I with these did play (123). Woolf writes, she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet. (123) This passage is an extraordinarily adroit observation of the strange pleasure felt when engaging with art—literature in particular. Further, as a scene about the powerful effect of reading, it signals Woolf\u27s fascination with the ways in which our narrative horizons shape our lives. For Woolf, the narratives we are able to imagine are those we may be able to live

The Professor: Room 433

If I should die / in this sterile bed / think not this of me, / me paging listlessly / through one of those magazines that eddy / as flotsam here. / Let me be found / not with an expired glossy / slippery, over my cavernous chest / a surreal bust and brilliant white teeth / arched, grinning / or, perhaps seeming clenched / as if she knew of the skeleton stretched beneath her. / Instead, when the monotone / drops from beating, / beating, / ceases. / Find me with Beckett or Barnes, / Whitman or Woolf. / Rather than Judy pronouncing justice, / let there be silence / in this corner of a hospital wing, / or, if you must, / let a fly buzz. / Judy, of course, is ubiquitous / elbowing around corners, / there when I’ve dozed and the nurses come through. / Perhaps others are comforted / by the theme with variation? / Black robes and white jackets. / Red halter tops and blue smocks

Reading Moments of Being Between the Lines of Bach’s Fugue: Lyric Narrative in Virginia Woolf\u27s Slater’s Pins Have No Points

The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gathering some on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted. (Between the Acts 220) This epigraph provides an adroit map for reading Virginia Woolf’s lyric narrative experiments, particularly her short story Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points. It captures Woolf\u27s fondness for a fugue\u27s exposition: one note\u27s call prompts the answer of an other. It expresses Woolf\u27s interplay of form and content. Here, as throughout her work, Woolf evokes metaphors of surface ( flower gathering ) and depth ( descending to wrestle with the meaning ) in order to give them a twist, privileging their productive tension rather than opposition. Woolf\u27s tune is the synthesis of these various rhetorical levels and the complex harmonies of multiple auditors. Moreover, her auditors are not mere passive receivers of the tune, but active participants who create the tune in their listening: ourselves went forward [. . .] all comprehending; all enlisted (220). That this line from her last novel strikingly reflects the form and themes of many of Woolf ’s works, particularly her short fiction, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, attests to the centrality of lyric narrative—and the exemplary model of the fugue—in Woolf\u27s oeuvre, from 1919 to 1941.1 As Patricia Laurence has noted, the rhythm of the fugue as an aspect of feeling and form has been largely unexplored in Woolf\u27s work (239). Woolf\u27s rhythm, according to Laurence, is an undertow in language and might be defined as being composed of auditory, visual, or thematic counterpoint with different dimensions of mind and the novel being played off against one another in varying combinations (240). This undertow, an alternate or counterposing progression to a conventional narrative progression, might also be defined as the lyric departures of her narrative experiments

Falling out of a Picture : The Australian Landscape in D.H. Lawrence\u27s \u3cem\u3eKangaroo\u3c/em\u3e

[T]he mind and the terrain shape each other: every landscape is a landscape of desire to some degree, if not always for its inhabitants Rebecca Solnit (Landscapes 9) Modernist writers, captivated by the work of mapping the complex terrain of desire, present a variety of encounters with, studies on, and reinventions of the landscape. Although critical attention has focused on the fláneur in the cityscape, a focus on pastoral and hybrid (suburban) landscapes can reveal the way modernism engages with these terrains in order to make it new in aesthetics (the mythical method T.S. Eliot identified with James Joyce\u27s Ulysses) and critique the new of modernity (mass culture and globalization). Novels and poetry from the year 1992, which Michael North has read as a defining moment in mapping modernism, evidence a multifarious and wide-ranging engagement with the landscape, including Eliot\u27s The Wasteland, Joyce\u27s Ulysses, Rebecca West\u27s The Judge and Virginia Woolf\u27s Jacob\u27s Room. In each, characters\u27 interactions with pastoral, hybrid, and metropolitan landscapes frame central questions about identity in modernity. Landscape likewise plays a crucial role in framing questions of national and gender identity in D.H. Lawrence\u27s 1922-1923 novel Kangaroo, a novel, however, ill at ease with the modernist response to modernity

Virginia Woolf and Illness

On Being Ill. “Is that a user’s guide?” This question, or a clever variation on it, became a familiar refrain when the elegant Paris Press edition’s cover, conspicuously abandoned on my bed table, caught the eye of one of the many nurses or phlebotomists who rotated through my ward over four weeks—weeks coinciding with what should have been my rereading of Woolf’s 1926 On Being Ill (OBI) as well as the impressive range of essays which you may now also read at your leisure in the second section of this double issue of the Miscellany, whether “in the army of the upright” or “lying recumbent” (OBI 12-13), and certainly with the reassurance that pants provide. The truth was (and “illness is the great confessional” [OBI 11]), although that was my intent, and its presence on the valuable real estate of the bed table certainly was an incentive, I didn’t quite get around to rereading Woolf’s essay while in hospital that first month. With the hubris of the ill and without “the cautious respectability [that] health conceals” (OBI 11), I felt at that point I could sing the thing. I had the unfortunate habit of quoting it at visitors and the rare hospitalist calls—sometimes drawing on Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to consider the metaphor of citizenship that both authors explore—“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (Sontag 3)

Virtual Works – Actual Things

"Beyond musical works: new perspectives on music ontology and performance What are musical works? How are they constructed in our minds? Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place? Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative potentials? Which alternative, more productive images of musical work can be devised? Virtual Works – Actual Things addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, questioning their authoritative foundation and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies and music pedagogy alike. Contributors: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Andreas Dorschel (University of the Arts Graz), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Kathy Kiloh (OCAD University, Toronto), Jake McNulty (Columbia University, New York), Gunnar Hindrichs (University of Basel), John Rink (University of Cambridge)