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Record W4380928295 · doi:10.3138/ctr.131.018

Finding Utopia in the Collapsing Shit Factory

2007· article· en· W4380928295 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Melanie E. Bennett

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Theatre Review · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicYouth Education and Societal Dynamics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsShitDreamCourageArtDirtEntertainmentAestheticsMedia studiesSociologyArt historyHistoryVisual artsLawPsychologyPolitical scienceCartography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I’m naked, lying on my back on the fifteenth floor of an apartment full of stink and people in a city of a million other citizens. I’m at the centre of this booming metropolis and yet I’m ENTIRELY ALONE. I hate my life, my job, the city I live in and this screwed-up world that continues to disengage itself from me. I spend the next four hours staring at the water-stained stucco ceiling imagining ways to “off” myself. I don’t have the stomach or the courage for suicide, so the time is wasted. I kill (pardon the pun) another hour being angry that I threw away precious hours on something I never intended on carrying out. Is this what a breakdown feels like? Should I see a shrink to get some prescription drugs to numb me? But of course, I don’t trust doctors and the only drugs I’ve ever managed to digest are Vicks cough drops. I reach for the remote and turn the television on. There’s an Oprah feature about her new Leadership Academy for young girls in South Africa. I weep so hard I get hiccups as two young girls talk about how their father shot their mother and then himself in front of them. From my upside down position on the carpet, I see the girls emerge from their dirt floor to enter the dangerous streets of their community with hope. They study, read, dream, thank God for their blessings and find ways to play childhood games without the luxury of Nintendo Wii. I begin to feel a glimmer of relief that we’re not living in the apocalypse, but the glimmer is soon washed away by an overwhelming wave of guilt. I live in one of the most prosperous, safe countries on the globe, with the added luxury of studying my love/hate of performance, and I can’t even get myself off the floor to get dressed. Oprah’s girls remind me that I am a pathetic, self-indulgent, self-pitying western idiot. I remember the words of dead people. Kierkegaard tells me the “sickness unto death” I’m experiencing is “despair.” St. John of the Cross reassures me that a “dark night of the soul” is a journey to enlightenment. Camus reminds me that life is both “meaningless” and “important.” To hell with the philosophy of corpses, I need a live person to talk to. My brother, a cog in the Microsoft wheel, is on a conference call with a dozen other cogs. The most I can hope from my husband is a “cheer up,” since he is working one of his three jobs to pay for this overpriced dump. I telephone my best friend, and he’s wading through his own meaningless bullshit and brushes me off, but not before saying, “I’m miserable too.” Finally, my retired dad tells me he’ll call me back, since he’s “in the middle of driving terminal cancer patients around.” Did he just say that in front of them? I feel like a prick for even calling him. It’s bloody Sunday for God’s sake! Is there no one who has time to talk? Or is this world turning us all into selfish assholes who don’t care about each other anymore? Where’s the community? If I were honest, I’d admit to not trying very hard to find it. We bitch about the bubbles we’re in, but we’re too damned afraid to see what’s outside of them. I hate feeling cynical, self-absorbed, nihilistic and whiney, but I can’t help wondering if my symptoms are a result of something wrong in the wider social realm. I can’t worry about that now. Everyone else is working in their bubbles and so should I. I have six enormous papers to write, two performances to prepare for and endless reading to do – all of which is due within the next six weeks. And still, I cannot get myself off the floor. One of my tasks: ’finish book review for CTR.“ So, I decide to tackle that first, only because the subtitle of the book has the word ”suicide“ in it AND I’m a big fan of the author. Still lying on my back, I read the opening sentence, ”The world is a collapsing shit factory“ (11). Ah, ok. So, I’m not alone in my misery.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.067
Threshold uncertainty score0.225

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0440.022
Scholarly communication0.0230.012
Open science0.0020.022
Research integrity0.0050.015
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0670.008

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.

Opus teacher head0.051
GPT teacher head0.353
Teacher spread0.302 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

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Citations0
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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