Cultural immaterialism:Wallace Stevens in virtual Paris

This essay explores the paradox in Stevens’s life and career that, notwithstanding his interest in France and especially Paris, he stood out from nearly all other American Modernist writers by the fact that he never visited Europe, even though more than some who did he endorsed the significance of what the French capital could offer. I shall suggest that the Paris Stevens denied himself strangely became the ‘Paris’ he achieved, and that his identification with the city was one that by its own logic not only did not require him to pay a visit, but in time rendered it essential that he should not do so; this uncovers something central to Stevens’s poetry, and also to his Americanness. The quotation above offers terms helpful in discussing his attachment to ‘virtual Paris’: where and what ‘there’ is, and how the strangeness of being ‘there’ is connected with its truthfulness, for the ‘I’ engaged in finding itself

Unbearable lightness:some modern instances in Auden, Stevens and Eliot

In this essay I examine the implicit paradox that, although in conventional consideration ‘light’ is good and ‘darkness’, by antithesis, bad, the antithesis itself implies interconnection and, especially in poetry, the evocation of light can equally imply the possibility of darkness. Further, I suggest that poets have found intermediate or qualified illumination to be a more productive resource than light unmoderated by shadow, whose erasure of uncertainty is potentially disabling. My principal examples are drawn from modern poetry, in W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, preceded by a consideration of some nineteenth-century precursors; by means of these I show how their verse takes animation from the transient and transitional aspects of light, rather than from its plenitude. The implications of this, in a culture shaped by traditional Christian associations between ‘God’ and ‘light’, are suggestive throughout the essay, but become especially resonant in the case of Eliot’s overtly Christian poetry

D-branes, orbifolds, and Ext groups

In this note we extend previous work on massless Ramond spectra of open strings connecting D-branes wrapped on complex manifolds, to consider D-branes wrapped on smooth complex orbifolds. Using standard methods, we calculate the massless boundary Ramond sector spectra directly in BCFT, and find that the states in the spectrum are counted by Ext groups on quotient stacks (which provide a notion of homological algebra relevant for orbifolds). Subtleties that cropped up in our previous work also appear here. We also use the McKay correspondence to relate Ext groups on quotient stacks to Ext groups on (large radius) resolutions of the quotients. As stacks are not commonly used in the physics community, we include pedagogical discussions of some basic relevant properties of stacks.Comment: 51 pages, 3 figures; v2: material on Freed-Witten added; v3: more typos fixe

'Continual Conversation with a Silent Man' or 'Metaphysical Changes that Occur on Sunday Morning'

'Continual Conversation...' is a one-act play, 'Metaphysical Changes...' is a three-part poem; both are written in relation to Wallace Steven

String compactifications on Calabi-Yau stacks

In this paper we study string compactifications on Deligne-Mumford stacks. The basic idea is that all such stacks have presentations to which one can associate gauged sigma models, where the group gauged need be neither finite nor effectively-acting. Such presentations are not unique, and lead to physically distinct gauged sigma models; stacks classify universality classes of gauged sigma models, not gauged sigma models themselves. We begin by defining and justifying a notion of ``Calabi-Yau stack,'' recall how one defines sigma models on (presentations of) stacks, and calculate of physical properties of such sigma models, such as closed and open string spectra. We describe how the boundary states in the open string B model on a Calabi-Yau stack are counted by derived categories of coherent sheaves on the stack. Along the way, we describe numerous tests that IR physics is presentation-independent, justifying the claim that stacks classify universality classes. String orbifolds are one special case of these compactifications, a subject which has proven controversial in the past; however we resolve the objections to this description of which we are aware. In particular, we discuss the apparent mismatch between stack moduli and physical moduli, and how that discrepancy is resolved.Comment: 85 pages, LaTeX; v2: typos fixe

Non-birational twisted derived equivalences in abelian GLSMs

In this paper we discuss some examples of abelian gauged linear sigma models realizing twisted derived equivalences between non-birational spaces, and realizing geometries in novel fashions. Examples of gauged linear sigma models with non-birational Kahler phases are a relatively new phenomenon. Most of our examples involve gauged linear sigma models for complete intersections of quadric hypersurfaces, though we also discuss some more general cases and their interpretation. We also propose a more general understanding of the relationship between Kahler phases of gauged linear sigma models, namely that they are related by (and realize) Kuznetsov's `homological projective duality.' Along the way, we shall see how `noncommutative spaces' (in Kontsevich's sense) are realized physically in gauged linear sigma models, providing examples of new types of conformal field theories. Throughout, the physical realization of stacks plays a key role in interpreting physical structures appearing in GLSMs, and we find that stacks are implicitly much more common in GLSMs than previously realized.Comment: 54 pages, LaTeX; v2: typo fixe

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002: Towards a Social Understanding of Productivity

In this chapter, Tony Fisher and Doug Hostland provide an historical perspective on trends in labour productivity, labour income and living standards in Canada. They find that, once the appropriate adjustments are made, the labour share and the non-labour share (composed of profits, interest and investment income, and incorporated business income) in national income tend to revert to their historical means over the 1926-2001 historical period, although divergences may last for several years. They note, for example, that the decline in the labour share in Canada since 1994 has not been due to any increase in profit share, but to an increase in the share of depreciation or capital consumption allowances associated with the short services lives of high-tech investment goods.Productivity, Labor Productivity, Labour Productivity, Growth, Wages, Income, Living Standards, Well-being, Wellbeing, Well Being, Long-run, Taxes, Labour Income, Labor Income, Non-labour Income, Non-labor Income, Business Income, Corporate Profits, Investment Income, Real Wage Growth