Bibliographic record
Abstract
As readers of this journal will know, the premise of Ghostbusters 2 is that the negative affects of the city of New York have manifested in the sewer system as a river of slime that threatens to wash away the goodwill and good citizens of Manhattan.John Metcalf 's latest book, Temerity & Gall, engages in a similar kind of projection: a veritable curmudgeonomicon wherein all of Metcalf 's bad feelings threaten to ooze from the page.The cover is a sketch of Don Quixote with Metcalf as white knight striking down critical fallacies, bad writing, and limp verse.Metcalf has been lashing out at illusory windmills and sounding the same note of complaint since his first critical forays in the 1970s.His thesis then remains his thesis now: Canadian literature is formally and aesthetically incompetent and is thin gruel when compared to the great works of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Ezra Pound.Given that Metcalf 's criticism has struck this single, droning note for upwards of forty years, need he play it again?Temerity & Gall is nominally structured as a travelogue of the remaining Montreal Storytellers: Ray Smith, Clark Blaise, and Metcalf himself.Yet this structure is largely superficial as Metcalf 's dissociative narration quickly loses the plot.Compelling anecdotes give way to rambling excoriations, sneering dismissals of Canadian authors, generalizations about the foppishness of the Canadian culture industry, and praise of antiquarian booksellers.This would be more entertaining were so much of it not recycled from Metcalf 's previous works, including Kicking against the Pricks (1982), Freedom from Culture (1994), and An Aesthetic Underground (2003).Metcalf loves lengthy, nested quotations and takes great liberties to quote his own past work; there are so many quotations that one wonders about the need for this book at all.In the original sections Metcalf is in his usual Palpitinian form, lashing out at Canadian authors and critics who fail to align with his vision of the literary.Michael Ondaatje's "writing has ripened into arteriosclerosis, dangerously florid, possibly suffering from ischemic incidents manifesting themselves in overwrought, incomprehensible metaphors and similes" (21); this is Metcalf 's idea of comedy.Jane Urquhart is the "author of a string of potboilers, a Canadian Maeve Binchy, resolutely middle-brow" (21).Sam Solecki's dismissal of the short story is an "ill-educated tantrum" (381), and Ronald Sutherland's claims about Canadian literature are "straightjacket material" (382).Metcalf insists that "Literature is not . . . the ludicrous twaddle of . . .Bliss Bloody Carman" (145) and asks, "How 'quick to the touch' do we now find the writings of
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
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".