Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination by William E. Tydeman (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination by William E. Tydeman Jason Hertz William E. Tydeman, Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2013. 194 pp. $19.95. Barry Lopez approaches activism by talking around the enemy. He does not believe in coups and indictments even though now, more than ever, he sees civil society facing a dire situation. He confronts the hostile forces behind social inequality and environmental degradation by expressing the stories and “relationships that will take care of us” (16). The author began speaking in public more often after 9/11, and in the past several years he has worked with the international aid group Mercy Corps, has helped organize the Beyond Sustainability initiative in Hawai’i, and has facilitated a healing ceremony between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University. On the Llano Estacado during February of 2008 Comanche elders and university representatives gathered in Tule Canyon to hold a ceremony bearing witness to the atrocities of the nineteenth-century Red River War and attempting to strengthen relations between the tribe and the university. Lopez explains the rationale for his work organizing and writing as an attempt to move conversations toward direct action. Conducted from 2002 to 2007, these interviews revolve around the Southern Plains, where Tydeman is a professor at Texas Tech, directing the library’s Southwest Collection, and Lopez is a Visiting Distinguished Scholar. Tydeman also provides a detailed biography of Lopez, photographs, a series of notes and letters, and Diane Warner’s extensive bibliography. Tydeman captures Lopez moving deftly between particular experiences and the realm of theory. A clear example of this happens during their discussion of the pagophilic ivory gull. Lopez spent nearly five years in the Far North researching his National Book Award−winning Arctic Dreams (1986). After a time his Inuit friends gave him the nickname naajavaarsuk, or ivory gull, because of the bird’s behavior at seal butchering sites, hanging back while the bigger birds fight over the seal guts until the time is right for the little gull to dart in and pick up some food. His discussion with Tydeman develops the bird’s behavior into an image of the methodology of literary nonfiction. The ethnographer-as-ivory gull may swoop in and out, but the ethical measure of this participation [End Page 302] lies in what he makes of the seal meat. Lopez visits and writes about other places and peoples in order to evoke memories of the times when “loving behavior” was possible: “a person hears the story and they remember who they are, or who they want to become” (35). His fiction and nonfiction join the struggle for environmental and social justice by recalling the all-too-often forgotten capacity in people to do good work with humility and compassion. Jason Hertz University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2014 Western Literature Association
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".