Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cyril Dabydeen. Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2013. 204 pp. $20.00 sc. An author is successful when the story stays in the reader's imagination after the reading is done. Cyril Dabydeen is a writer who enhances the reader's share of the narrative. A story that engages the whole person is what serious readers are always eager to find. Such novels and short stories are the gold standard of literature. Once the mood is set and the characters are in place, then the reader can riff to his heart's content; the reader can perform like Miles Davis transported by a 20-minute set of All Blues or My Funny Valentine. And if one is not inclined to riff, then one can listen to Dabydeen riff. Fie does that very well, as you might expect from a short story writer with the soul of a poet. By reader's share I mean the same sort of thing that the famous art historian and theorist Ernst Gombrich meant when talking about the beholder's share. The reader's share describes the grappling or soul searching that the reader is encouraged to do in order to make sense of the text at hand; such a deciphering effort only adds to the pleasure of reading. The understanding that flows from being in the grip of a good story is rewarding and pleasurable to the same degree that one grapples with it. Dabydeen makes it all the more interesting in that he writes about us while skillfully muting the artist's touch. Good fiction reflects real life in its many pauses and facets, in its dialogue and character sketches. Good fiction should never be about the author's presence. When certain authors' signature styles are too obvious then the story risks being lost and the reader risks worshiping at the feet of an idol. On the other hand, we know that an author succeeds when we hardly know he is there. When an author disappears it is easier to get lost in the flow of the story--we can clearly imagine the setting, hear the inflections of voice, identify with the search for meaning, and be frustrated by the grappling the characters endure. The drama, the anguish, the isolation or the fulfillment that the story, as in real life, confronts us with are essential elements. These elements will not come to life if the reader is distracted by the author's style. An author is successful when the story stays in the reader's imagination after the reading is done. This is what happened to me after reading Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories, Dabydeen's recent collection of short stories. The host of characters depicted in these stories stayed with me long after the last page was read and the cover closed. Echoing still is the authenticity of the clipped conversations of the beleaguered characters who struggle with dislocation, exile, and doubt. Regarding the lives of immigrants and the difficulties of creating new identities while still freighting remembered ones, the depictions are affecting, realistic, and insightful. The simplicity of style belies both the depth of reflection and the authenticity of voice. That these stories all ring true is, in large measure, due to the subtle and understated method that Dabydeen brings to bear on the narrative. The echoing after-life of his stories and their authentic voice set the stage for an unexpected conversation--one that enriched my reader's share and at the same time validated Dabydeen's excellence. Mavis Gallant, another great Canadian short story writer, observes in her essay, What is Style: Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express. The lie, the look, the grief are without permanence. The watch continues to tick where the story stops (1988, 1177). Gallant' words are a caution for writers to not betray their true voice (that is, to not dress up the structure in order to hide a slipshod or discordant voice). …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".