The table talk of W.H. Auden
In New York, between 1946 and 1948, the scholar and poet Alan Ansen made rapid notes of Auden's inimitable conversation. This book is a record of Auden's private, offhand and sometimes wayward remarks and opinions about art, literature, music, politics, religion and sexuality.
'The north, my world':W. H. Auden's pennine ways
Where, in England, does the South end and the North begin? Despite a recent survey suggesting that on the western side of the country the economic boundary now falls between Gloucester and Worcester (a finding which the still more recent economic downturn may have rendered obsolete), other definitions have been more persuasive. Philip Larkin’s novel Jill (1946) shows Lancashire-born John Kemp, newly up at Oxford, meeting the mother of his public school roommate. She observes, ‘You’re northcountry, aren’t you?’ and herself admits, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve never been farther north than Crewe.’ His response, ‘That’s funny – I’d never been farther south than Crewe’ (Larkin 1975: 91), confesses his own provincialism rather more than it offers a rebuke to her implied indifference: but for both of them, Crewe marks the spot where the South turns into the North – and, characteristically, southerners turn back. The following year, from across the Atlantic, W. H. Auden agreed: ‘Years before I ever went there, the north of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did those feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins’ (2002: 335). Writing from New York City, he was even more remote than he had been when, in infancy, the family moved to Birmingham from his birthplace in York; but, distance notwithstanding, his attitude is resonantly different from Mrs Warner’s calm incuriousness: the ‘north of England’ constitutes for Auden a landscape of belonging, attachment to which repudiates the worldview of people like her in his active disdain for the ‘alien South’. Indeed, such is the power of Auden’s imaginative propulsion northward that Crewe Junction becomes a ‘wildly exciting’ point of transition – in a transfiguration likely to be at odds with most rail-travellers’ experience of its stubbornly prosaic actuality.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.