Bibliographic record
Abstract
Δ Adam Dickinson (bio) Fat is an organ. It echoes with music and memory. Fat is a slowly oscillating wave. It embodies the constancy of transition, clinging as a perpetually updated fuel reserve, an accumulation expressing—through hourglasses, pears, and apples—the energy balance of a life being lived. Fat is a metaphysics conditioning experiences of reality. It regulates hormones and directs the transitional modalities of metabolic processes. Fat provides stability, padding, and insulation to equip a body in transition, moving through climates and calories, catastrophes and capitalism. Fat feeds us, but Western-style commerce has afflicted many parts of the world with obesity. Children fill with accelerated derivatives of excavated sunlight and profitably supply-chained processed foods. Fat is an archive of this historical moment. Military, industrial, and agricultural history bioaccumulate in adipose tissues. I know this because I have tested my blood and urine for chemicals. I found phthalates, perfluorinated compounds, organo-chlorine pesticides, organophosphate insecticide metabolites, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, flame retardants, triclosan, parabens, bisphenol A, and heavy metals. I also found one of the most widely distributed environmental contaminants on the planet: polychlorinated biphenyls, pcbs. Principally manufactured by Monsanto for industrial and commercial [End Page 149] applications, these highly persistent organic pollutants are lipophilic, collecting like comment sections in the fat of creatures everywhere. Where we test for them, we find them. pcbs constitute a form of writing in the Anthropocene, a recursive script where industrial innovations find their way back into the metabolic messaging systems of the biological bodies that have created them. As edits, as subtle revisions to the hormonal cascades that precipitate bodily morphologies and affective experiences of the world, pcbs are messages in the fat of our humanity. My work, a metabolic poetics, attempts to take into account a broader conception of writing that includes the rewritten fat of a species in anthropogenic transition. The epigraphs to the sections in the following poem "Lipids" indicate my blood plasma levels of various pcb congeners. Depending on your age, Dear Reader, you may have slightly more or slightly less than me. But they are in you. LIPIDS Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 146 Plasma 0.014 ug/L Angulararches.Inwardly curved,short final strokecompulsively avoidsresponsibility. Open top,stabbed.Two parts hypocrisytight-fisted.Loops in the ovaldeceptive. Wide, wakefullystreaked.Selfish with handsinhibitedby persistenttapering at reversal. [End Page 150] Watchful and hooked.Startwith secretivesharp-tongues.Selfish figuresarc or claw. Whether rightor wrong,emphatically squared.Avaricious finishat the double knotgossip close. Wide, wakefullystreaked.Selfish with handsinhibitedby persistenttapering at reversal. Split stemwhip-likelong barmimicry.Self-protectivepressures disloyal. Open top,stabbed.Two parts hypocrisytight-fisted.Loops in the ovaldeceptive. [End Page 151] Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 153 Plasma 0.11 ug/L When my mother's breasts were building my brain, her milk sent me a postcard from the postwar boom. The message was scrambled. Proprietary. Windborne elsewhere's outfall spikes. Face-swirled factories with disjunctive hair loss. Heat-waved skin. Malignant neoplasms of indefinite dose. Headquartered in the subtext were inscrutable companies conflicted with interest, like urban forests or chlorine, sending people to work under crumbling narrative arcs. Smoothing their loose leaf, they made us believe we were victims of atmosphere. My jaw owes its plot lines to my mother's breasts, even as they are ghost written by power grids redesigning sensoria from a diaspora of unseasonal thunderheads. In a world that persists on bottles of cabin pressure, her milk beaded my lips with formulas. [End Page 152] Click for larger view View full resolution Metabolic Typeface (My urine photographed through a microscope) [End Page 153] Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 183 Plasma 0.011 ug/L baby fatblood fatbutter fat milk fatfatalistfatiguefat lipfatherlandfatuous fat cityfat chequekill the fatted calf fat as a beached whalefat as a pigthe fat lady sings chew the fatfat catfatwa fat dayprefatoryfat chance fat farmpuppy fatfat fuck indefatigablefatuitythe fat is in the fire infatuateunfathomedfat of the land [End Page 154] Click for larger view View...
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.240 | 0.174 |
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".