How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Frank, Marcie. How to Be an in the Age of Lessons of Gore Vidal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.156 pp. $17.95. This book's tide suggests that the reader will learn something useful about how to be a public intellectual. That probably is not true, since the primary lesson is one that most people, let alone intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, already know. In any case, the lesson does not require an entire book. Marcie Frank, an English professor at Montreal's Concordia University and author of Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism (2002), concludes in a pseudo-theoretical way by crediting Gore Vidal's success at negotiating the print-screen circuit. Her refrain throughout the book, quoting a line merely attributed to him, is blunter and simpler: never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television. book includes an introduction and five chapters: The Print Intellectual, The Screen Intellectual, A Fine Romance, Sexual Politics in the Print-Screen Circuit, and TV: Another Erogenous Zone. first chapter rushes superficially through recent scholarship on public intellectuals by Richard Posner, Edward Said, Neil Postman, and Michel Foucault (none of whom are/ were historians or traditional social scientists) before focusing on David Foster Wallace's article about the novel's decline and Vidal's position on that. The Screen Intellectual discusses some of Vidal's television appearances and the appearance of television in his books. A Fine Romance brings up romance in his books and how he transmit[s] his sexual politics on-screen (for example, he argues that there are homosexual acts but not homosexuals as persons). Sexual Politics in the Print-Screen Circuit goes further, discussing his homosexuality-themed novel, City and the Pillar, and his transgender/sexual books, Myra Breckinridge and Myron; William F. Buckley Jr. shouting queer at Vidal on national television in 1968; and more on his views on (homo) sex. final chapter dwells further on Myra and Myron plus his novel Live from Golgotha, in which television is used for travel to biblical times. Thus, ostensibly there is a lot more to this book than simply substantiating recommendations of sex and TV appearances, and the book can be short in part because it usually assumes readers' familiarity with the entire Vidal canon. But, simultaneously, Frank examines neither the minutiae of exactly how someone (especially anyone other than Vidal) should or could negotiate the print-screen circuit nor compares and contrasts his experiences with those of other writers who were on TV or could have been. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
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".