Retailing and Retelling: Capitalism and Nature in “A monk walks along Orchard Road”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analysing Rodrigo V. Dela Pena, Jr’s poem “A monk walks along Orchard Road,” this paper argues that Pena’s work characterises Singapore’s Orchard Road as an example of what Edward W. Soja refers to as “Thirdspace.” Contradictory in nature, “Thirdspace” questions the epistemic boundaries between binaristic categories. With Orchard Road, these include ostensible dichotomies such as nature and capitalism, urban and natural, asceticism and desire, and past and present. Such questioning is also reified through formal poetic techniques, including polyvalent images and enjambment, which in turn lead to ideological ambiguity. Focalised through the persona of the monk, this multiplicity of meanings paradoxically embodies both a Buddhist abstinence from desire and a hyper-capitalistic yearning after such desire. Thus, Pena’s poem ultimately depicts the very nature of city space as a realm of epistemic and cross-temporal flux. In Orchard Road, the contemporary, cosmopolitan landscape remains possessed by—and tied to—the imagistic residues of its agrarian past.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".