"My Mother Is a Fish": All-Encompassing Inadequacy in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Novels tend to get their effects from plenitude, from excess and richness. What, then, to make of Faulkner’s famous one-sentence chapter? Suspended in the middle of his As I Lay Dying is Vardaman’s famous and opaque statement: “My mother is a fish.” Taylor Lemaire takes this weirdness head on, working with the chapter’s impoverishment as a key to its function, paying attention even to its appearance on the page, arguing that “the line floats singularly within the vast, white void that surrounds it.” The line’s richness lies in how it relates to another famous phrase from the novel, Addie Bundren’s assertion that words are merely a “shape to fill a lack” – Addie’s comment itself being another assertion/demonstration of impoverishment and displacement. —Dr. Leonard Diepeveen
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".