Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Arnason. Baldur's Song: A Saga. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2010. 236 pp. Photos. $19.00 sc. David Arnason's novel has covers showing a guitar in shades of grey and dun, giving little indication of the colourful story awaiting the reader; it brings home the old adage that one should not judge a book by its cover. Yet it is entirely appropriate as it foregrounds the importance of the main character's musical talent--an uncanny aptitude for whistling, even in infancy, and later for singing as well as playing the accordion and the guitar. This talent opens to him a number of unexpected doors in places high and low. But the musical reference also suggests the social and historical importance of the author's cultural enterprise as he joins the voices of his Icelandic with Canada's multicultural chorus. History has a strong presence in this novel. It is made concrete and visible in shades of greys in the numerous photographs that are credited in roughly equal measures to the Manitoba Archives and the author's family album. But the characters are so boldly drawn and with such vitality that before long you are convinced that the black-and-white eyes in the photographs sparkle life, colour and energy. After making a brief autobiographical start, describing his entry into the world in Gimli Hospital in Manitoba, Arnason asserts that he cannot continue with his own story until he has paid due homage to his who suffered mightily so that he could be born in Canada (4). Told by Arnason, past events assume mythic, tall-tale, comic proportions. His ancestors in Iceland were lovers who would climb every mountain, ford every stream--or else wait and suffer--until their stars were uncrossed; wizards who knew when to quit passing on the family tradition of conjuring; and sisters and brothers so tall and strong that they had difficulties finding their match in life. Arnason explains, People live a long time there, and memories are passed from generation to generation, as if they were still fresh (14). Arnason's Icelandic ancestors were also named for someone else, because that's one way of keeping the dead alive (12). His great grandmother gathered up all the lonely and abandoned ghosts in Iceland and brought them with her to Canada, and she never looked back (13). The quiet center of the book is Baldur, the main character of the main story, who has an uncanny memory and an early ability to communicate with the dead. He is born and raised in Gimli but spends most of his adult life in Winnipeg. Through his consciousness, from infancy through maturity, Arnason provides us with an overview of the history of Icelanders in Manitoba: the early difficulties when smallpox struck the New Iceland settlement and decimated nearby Indian settlements; the fileting and preparation of fish for market in Gimli; work on the railways and sewers and construction of apartment blocks in Winnipeg; life in the Winnipeg Hats, in seedy side-streets, as well as in affluent homes. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".