TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a series of related essays that culminate in a rough outline for a collaboratively designed, coded, and maintained application to replace the Foundation’s website. Whatever benefit might result, replacing archival mechanisms of racial capitalism while remaining within its systemic modes of value creation is at best a form of substitution: it is not an actual change in relations and not a transition to anything. Doing so may, however, allow greater clarity in understanding how poetry is situated within US-based institutions, beyond the images and values that poets and critics in the US often help to maintain. Chapter one, “‘Indianness’ and Omission: 60 Indian Poets,” reads the anthology 60 Indian Poets, published in 2008 in India and the UK (with US distribution), as argument about the contours of Indian Poetry in English and about the contours of India’s relations in the world. It relates Rashmi Sadana’s work on the meanings of English in India to decisions made within the anthology, and look further at Pollock’s conception of cosmopolitanism and vernacularity, particular as it applies to the Indian North-East and the poetry of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. The second chapter, “Archival Power: Individualization, the Racial State, and Institutional Poetry” engages Roderick Ferguson’s concept of archival power to explain the 2015 “crisis” within contemporary US poetry driven by practitioners of conceptual poetry, and an attempted archival act with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter ends with a fragment of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s recent account of US university life as experienced by Black artists and scholars. That chapter is followed by “The Poetry Foundation as Site of Archival Power,” which extends Jodi Melamed’s critique of US university value-creation mechanisms to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation’s website. It argues that the Poetry Foundation functions as a de facto arm of the US university system as outlined in the previous chapter, and aids in capitalist value-creation. “TextFrame: An Open Archive for Poetry,” the fourth chapter, is an attempt to begin thinking a replacement for current mechanisms of archiving non-exclusively anglophone poetry. The fifth chapter, “Narayanan’s Language Events as Free-Tier Application,” documents work imagined for TextFrame, as an application, that has actually already been built: the poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan adapted Robert Desnos’s Language Events for the classroom using a variety of discrete free services, and the present author collaborated with Narayanan in creating a stand-alone Web application. Chapters six, seven, and eight function as case studies to be used in creating templates for providing context to specific poems within any built application. Both of the specific moments covered transmogrify the “anti-psychological.” The sixth chapter, “An Unendurable Age: Ashbery, O’Hara, and 1950s Precursors of ‘Self’ Psychology” thus argues that an anti-psychological ethos is developed in Ashbery and O’Hara’s poems of that moment. It shows that Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) is almost certainly a parody of Gordon Allport’s theory of Personalism, of related strands of 1950s American psychology, and of the poetry that developed alongside them in the 1930s. It follows other critics in looking at midcentury conceptions of schizophrenia as a specifically homosexual disease, and argues for the importance of contemporarily published examples of schizophrenic discourse, particularly those of Harry Stack Sullivan. It argues that Ashbery’s poem “A Boy” can be read as directly engaging those ideas, and opposing them. The shorter discussions follow consider the affinities that Some Trees has with anti- or a-psychological theories of mind that were being developed at Harvard and MIT at the time that Ashbery and O’Hara were in Cambridge, including generative grammar and critiques of philosophical analyticity. The eighth chapter, “Before Conceptualism: Disgust and Over-determination in White-dominated Experimental Poetry in New York, 1999-2003,” highlights Dan Farrell and Lytle Shaw’s very different uses of lyric’s peculiar staging of voice to foreground the multi-furcation of white identities and voice in response to state pressures. The last two chapters take up two corollaries, or theoretical concerns that fell out trying to think a cosmopolitanist application. The first, “Why Not Reddit?” examines existing commercial cosmopolitanist solutions for some of the functionality proposed for the application, and reasons for rejecting them. In doing so, it discusses Thomas Farrell’s construct of “rhetorical culture” in detail, and traces a theory of communication and authorship within a community, particularly with regard to thinking history. The last chapter (and second corollary) is titled “Ethos in Pedagogy as a Limit on Norm Translation.” It establishes the Aristotelian concept of ethos as a pedagogical limit for norm translation. The study’s governing interest is not the conflicts or differences between practitioners or tendencies that are detailed here, but their relative incomprehensibility of those differences outside of their formative contexts

Relating on-shell and off-shell formalism in perturbative quantum field theory

In the on-shell formalism (mostly used in perturbative quantum field theory) the entries of the time ordered product T are on-shell fields (i.e. the basic fields satisfy the free field equations). With that, (multi)linearity of T is incompatible with the Action Ward identity. This can be circumvented by using the off-shell formalism in which the entries of T are off-shell fields. To relate on- and off-shell formalism correctly, a map sigma from on-shell fields to off-shell fields was introduced axiomatically by Duetsch and Fredenhagen. In that paper it was shown that, in the case of one real scalar field in N=4 dimensional Minkowski space, these axioms have a unique solution. However, this solution was given there only recursively. We solve this recurrence relation and give a fully explicit expression for sigma in the cases of the scalar, Dirac and gauge fields for arbitrary values of the dimension N.Comment: The case of gauge fields was added. 16 page

Massive Vector Mesons and Gauge Theory

We show that the requirements of renormalizability and physical consistency imposed on perturbative interactions of massive vector mesons fix the theory essentially uniquely. In particular physical consistency demands the presence of at least one additional physical degree of freedom which was not part of the originally required physical particle content. In its simplest realization (probably the only one) these are scalar fields as envisaged by Higgs but in the present formulation without the ``symmetry-breaking Higgs condensate''. The final result agrees precisely with the usual quantization of a classical gauge theory by means of the Higgs mechanism. Our method proves an old conjecture of Cornwall, Levin and Tiktopoulos stating that the renormalization and consistency requirements of spin=1 particles lead to the gauge theory structure (i.e. a kind of inverse of 't Hooft's famous renormalizability proof in quantized gauge theories) which was based on the on-shell unitarity of the $S$-matrix. We also speculate on a possible future ghostfree formulation which avoids ''field coordinates'' altogether and is expected to reconcile the on-shell S-matrix point of view with the off-shell field theory structure.Comment: 53 pages, version to appear in J. Phys.

Overall Dynamic Body Acceleration in Straw-Colored Fruit Bats Increases in Headwinds but Not With Airspeed

Atmospheric conditions impact how animals use the aerosphere, and birds and bats should modify their flight to minimize energetic expenditure relative to changing wind conditions. To investigate how free-ranging straw-colored fruit bats (Eidolon helvum) fly with changing wind support, we use data collected from bats fit with GPS loggers and an integrated triaxial accelerometer and measure flight speeds, wingbeat frequency, and overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA) as an estimate for energetic expenditure. We predicted that if ODBA reflects energetic expenditure, then we should find a curvilinear relationship between ODBA and airspeed consistent with aerodynamic theory. We expected that bats would lower their airspeed with tailwind support and that ODBA will decrease with increasing tailwinds and increase with wingbeat frequency. We found that wingbeat frequency has the strongest positive relationship with ODBA. There was a small, but negative, relationship between airspeed and ODBA, and bats decreased ODBA with increasing tailwind. Bats flew at ground speeds of 9.6 ± 2.4 ms−1 (Mean ± SD, range: 4.3–23.9 ms−1) and airspeeds of 10.2 ± 2.5 ms−1, and did not modify their wingbeat frequency with speed. Free-ranging straw-colored fruit bats therefore exerted more total ODBA in headwinds but not when they changed their airspeed. It is possible that the flexibility in wingbeat kinematics may make flight of free-ranging bats less costly than currently predicted or alternatively that the combination of ODBA and airspeed at our scales of measurement does not reflect this relationship in straw-colored fruit bats. Further work is needed to understand the full potential of free-ranging bat flight and how well bio-logging techniques reflect the costs of bat flight

Antibody 8ANC195 Reveals a Site of Broad Vulnerability on the HIV-1 Envelope Spike

Broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) to HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein (Env) can prevent infection in animal models. Characterized bNAb targets, although key to vaccine and therapeutic strategies, are currently limited. We defined a new site of vulnerability by solving structures of bNAb 8ANC195 complexed with monomeric gp120 by X-ray crystallography and trimeric Env by electron microscopy. The site includes portions of gp41 and N-linked glycans adjacent to the CD4-binding site on gp120, making 8ANC195 the first donor-derived anti-HIV-1 bNAb with an epitope spanning both Env subunits. Rather than penetrating the glycan shield by using a single variable-region CDR loop, 8ANC195 inserted its entire heavy-chain variable domain into a gap to form a large interface with gp120 glycans and regions of the gp120 inner domain not contacted by other bNAbs. By isolating additional 8ANC195 clonal variants, we identified a more potent variant, which may be valuable for therapeutic approaches using bNAb combinations with nonoverlapping epitopes

Complex-type N-glycan recognition by potent broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies

Broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies (bNAbs) can recognize carbohydrate-dependent epitopes on gp120. In contrast to previously characterized glycan-dependent bNAbs that recognize high-mannose N-glycans, PGT121 binds complex-type N-glycans in glycan microarrays. We isolated the B-cell clone encoding PGT121, which segregates into PGT121-like and 10-1074–like groups distinguished by sequence, binding affinity, carbohydrate recognition, and neutralizing activity. Group 10-1074 exhibits remarkable potency and breadth but no detectable binding to protein-free glycans. Crystal structures of unliganded PGT121, 10-1074, and their likely germ-line precursor reveal that differential carbohydrate recognition maps to a cleft between complementarity determining region (CDR)H2 and CDRH3. This cleft was occupied by a complex-type N-glycan in a “liganded” PGT121 structure. Swapping glycan contact residues between PGT121 and 10-1074 confirmed their importance for neutralization. Although PGT121 binds complex-type N-glycans, PGT121 recognized high-mannose-only HIV envelopes in isolation and on virions. As HIV envelopes exhibit varying proportions of high-mannose- and complex-type N-glycans, these results suggest promiscuous carbohydrate interactions, an advantageous adaptation ensuring neutralization of all viruses within a given strain

Rare Copy Number Variants in \u3cem\u3eNRXN1\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eCNTN6\u3c/em\u3e Increase Risk for Tourette Syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a model neuropsychiatric disorder thought to arise from abnormal development and/or maintenance of cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits. TS is highly heritable, but its underlying genetic causes are still elusive, and no genome-wide significant loci have been discovered to date. We analyzed a European ancestry sample of 2,434 TS cases and 4,093 ancestry-matched controls for rare (\u3c 1% frequency) copy-number variants (CNVs) using SNP microarray data. We observed an enrichment of global CNV burden that was prominent for large (\u3e 1 Mb), singleton events (OR = 2.28, 95% CI [1.39–3.79], p = 1.2 × 10−3) and known, pathogenic CNVs (OR = 3.03 [1.85–5.07], p = 1.5 × 10−5). We also identified two individual, genome-wide significant loci, each conferring a substantial increase in TS risk (NRXN1 deletions, OR = 20.3, 95% CI [2.6–156.2]; CNTN6 duplications, OR = 10.1, 95% CI [2.3–45.4]). Approximately 1% of TS cases carry one of these CNVs, indicating that rare structural variation contributes significantly to the genetic architecture of TS

LINT, a Novel dL(3)mbt-Containing Complex, Represses Malignant Brain Tumour Signature Genes

Mutations in the l(3)mbt tumour suppressor result in overproliferation of Drosophila larval brains. Recently, the derepression of different gene classes in l(3)mbt mutants was shown to be causal for transformation. However, the molecular mechanisms of dL(3)mbt-mediated gene repression are not understood. Here, we identify LINT, the major dL(3)mbt complex of Drosophila. LINT has three core subunits—dL(3)mbt, dCoREST, and dLint-1—and is expressed in cell lines, embryos, and larval brain. Using genome-wide ChIP–Seq analysis, we show that dLint-1 binds close to the TSS of tumour-relevant target genes. Depletion of the LINT core subunits results in derepression of these genes. By contrast, histone deacetylase, histone methylase, and histone demethylase activities are not required to maintain repression. Our results support a direct role of LINT in the repression of brain tumour-relevant target genes by restricting promoter access

Bose-Einstein Correlations of Three Charged Pions in Hadronic Z^0 Decays

Bose-Einstein Correlations (BEC) of three identical charged pions were studied in 4 x 10^6 hadronic Z^0 decays recorded with the OPAL detector at LEP. The genuine three-pion correlations, corrected for the Coulomb effect, were separated from the known two-pion correlations by a new subtraction procedure. A significant genuine three-pion BEC enhancement near threshold was observed having an emitter source radius of r_3 = 0.580 +/- 0.004 (stat.) +/- 0.029 (syst.) fm and a strength of \lambda_3 = 0.504 +/- 0.010 (stat.) +/- 0.041 (syst.). The Coulomb correction was found to increase the \lambda_3 value by \~9% and to reduce r_3 by ~6%. The measured \lambda_3 corresponds to a value of 0.707 +/- 0.014 (stat.) +/- 0.078 (syst.) when one takes into account the three-pion sample purity. A relation between the two-pion and the three-pion source parameters is discussed.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 5 eps figures included, accepted by Eur. Phys. J.