True West and Lying Marks:<i>The Englishman's Boy, Blood Meridian</i>, and the Paradox of the Revisionist Western
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is difficult, by all evidence, not to write a western. The canonized titans of the genre produced on a scale to match the immensity of the open plains tirelessly traversed by their lonely heroes. Zane Grey, after abandoning the claustral confines of a dentist’s office, quickly found that pulling stories from his brain was easier than pulling teeth from others’ jaws, writing some fifty-six westerns in the course of his career (Blaha 949). Frederick Faust despised the novels he wrote under the pseudonym Max Brand; nevertheless, the “Shakespeare of the Western range” would commit to paper a staggering thirty million words, the equivalent, his biographer Robert Easton calculates, of 530 “ordinary books” (vii), before his death at the age of fifty-two. Their literary descendant Louis L’Amour would prove a worthily productive successor. In the 1950s, his contract with Bantam called for three westerns a year, and his bibliography would eventually list well more than seventy frontier fictions (Bloodworth, “Louis L’Amour” 956; “Writers” 58). If it is not precisely true to say that the western writes itself, it appears fair to suggest that the conventions of the genre are so potent and fecund that the individual author assumes a role less like that of a seminal genius than of a startled midwife, assisting at a seemingly perpetual parthenogenesis. The power of the western’s narrative conventions can be detected not only in the fertility of the genre, however, but also in the way in which they
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".