Review of <i>New Moon at Batoche: Reflections on the UrbanPrairie</i> By George Melnyk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his latest book of cultural analysis, George Melnyk deplores the fact that although the great majority of Prairie Canadians live in urban areas, the dominant iconography of the region celebrates the land and denigrates the city. Melnyk asks how such a huge number of people (more than seven in ten) could be "excluded from the region's imagination?" "This is only possible," he says, answering his own question, "because city life has not been associated with the region's identity in any major way." Imagining the city is the role of artists and intellectuals, and in the nine essays that make up this book (only four of them directly on urban issues) Melnyk seeks to understand this gap and to present ways to bridge it. In his preface, Melnyk describes New Moon as the third part in a trilogy begun with his Radical Regionalism (1981) and continued in Beyond Alienation: Political Essays on the West (1993). While there are important links among the books, this latest title is best approached as a gathering of essays that highlight the stresses Melnyk sees in his own life in the 1990s and in the life of his culture. Melnyk struggles with his role as intellectual. He recognizes that like other writers he is displaced; yet he speaks also of a new culture arising only when the "people as a whole" effect the necessary social and economic changes. A similar tension between the popular and the artistic appears on the cover, which offers, despite Melnyk's subtitle referring to the urban prairie, a trite image of big blue sky wedded to golden grass. The title proper is loaded with cultural assumptions the essays never quite unpack. What links Batoche, we might ask, with contemporary Prairie cities? Melnyk seems not to have worked out the connections. In his final essay, "Rivers of the Mind," Melnyk makes a personal argument, including in it his woodcut called The People Are a River in the Land, an image that balances his compelling woodcut of poet Andrew Suknaski. He insists that rivers are the life-blood of Western Canadian urban life. But the essay's subtitle, "Praying to Water," seems to reflect the very attitude Melnyk criticizes in writers like Sharon Butala who celebrate rural life. Since Melnyk is one of Western Canada's leading thinkers, these essays and their discontents deserve our close attention, for they point to issues that will continue to distress and restrict our future development.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".