The Politics of Henry James
Each great writer acquires an image that owes its energies to certain felt airs and essences associated with his creative imagination. The cut and quality of that imagination, its character and code, its reach and ambit, finally determine its dynamics. The image is uniquely answerable to such a dialectic; it sustains itself through a certain "chemistry" of effects, and, at times, through a certain aesthetic "mysticism." In short, it attains, en route, an unmistakable ambience. Considered thus, Henry James figures to the responding imagination as a writer of such rare refinements, subtleties and felicities as to become in the end a kind of vintage wine to be taken in slow, measured draughts. To be sure, his fastidiousness has in some later tales a distressing aspect, and his "transcendence" a false ring, but where the Jamesian imagination is true to its inner energies and does not let the human situation turn cold or abstract or static, the compact between reader and writer has the quality of a shared dream. Its ceremoniousness has a purposive aspect; it becomes a kind of aesthetic tender. The "great good place" holds and compels.
Keats and James and The Princess Casamassima
H ALFWAY THROUGH The Princess Casamassima, in chapter 22, as "the grave automatic servant filled his glass with a liquor," Hyacinth, a guest at the Princess' country house, is "reminded ... of some lines of Keats in the 'Ode to a Nightingale.' He wondered if he should hear a nightingale at Medley."' By this one explicit reference to Keats's poem, James, in his characteristic fashion,2 calls our attention to a whole body of Keatsian material that is folded into the book. It has been overlooked because the story is primarily a rich, dense, political and social novel, although much of it relies on references to many other works of literature. In this Bildungsroman recognizable allusions to Keats's poetry and to the legend of Keats's life underline Hyacinth's conflict between the aesthetic and the socially dedicated life.
Multi-layer inpainting on Chinese artwork
Digital inpainting uses spatial or frequency information to restore partially damaged/removed photos and artworks. Most restoration algorithms take a picture as a single layer. We propose a new approach, which subdivides a Chinese painting into several layers. Each layer is inpainted separately. The layer fusion mechanism then finds the optimal inpaint among layers, which are restored layer-bylayer. We apply the algorithm on Chinese and western drawing. The result shows a high PSNR value as well as a high user satisfaction. The demonstration of our work is available at: http://www.mine.tku.edu.tw/demos/inpaint.