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Record W853170988

Flowers of Spit

2013· article· en· W853170988 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueChicago Review · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFrench Literature and Poetry
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryLaughterLiteratureArt historyArt
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Catherine Mavrikakis, Flowers of Spit. Trans. Nathanael. Toronto: Bookthug, 2012. $18Flowers ofSpit is a novel-length monologue of excessive proportions- unctuous, flowering with surprisingly affecting spikes of empathy. Its themes of memory and madness are borne along not by events but by the intensity of its surging, decadent style, phrase by gemmy, gore-slick phrase. As befits a novel with a Baudelairean title, the narrator Flore Forget is a chirugienne maudite, an emergency room surgeon, and the Quebecois daughter of a French woman who fled Normandy after the World War II. Flore is a devastated pill-popper enraged by her mother's recent death from cancer, which she views as the latest thrust in Life's offensive against her. Flore Forget, lady sawbones on Life's battlefield, of course cannot forget. She announces herself on the novel's first page as an avenging angel, but also, one guesses, one doomed to fall in flight:A mayonnaise. That's what I make of life. I sack, I ravage, I ruin, I pulverise. I have mad dreams of eradicating ease. Proudly I swagger, full of myself, looking like a soldier with my greedy, smug, G.I. mug. I think desperately of wrenching life from the dung heap on which it grows so abundantly, the whore. I think I'm a gust of wind, a fierce gale, a wave, a north-wester, a tempest. I'm all about the last judgment. I'm with tactical raids against immensity. I am the of desperate life.As this first salvo makes clear, Flore makes war through her textual excesses; their sumptuous expanse marks the fitful field of battle, and Makrivakis's sentences are her valiant, cracked advances. The author and translator create a pitted, paradoxical surface here, by turns rising and falling. The bad mayonnaise is certainly a ridiculous place to begin, comically deflating Flore's sense of epic scale but also introducing a subtide of contamination, spoilage, and failed attempts at hybridity. She also claims to be a force of nature, a destroying tide signaled by the tidal wave, a northwester, a tempest toward the end of this paragraph. Genders also flex and swirl here. Flore tries on the mask of a purple soldier with my greedy, smug, G.I. mug-the rhyme writes a thick swagger into the Une-and also announces herself pregnant with tactics.A crucial ambivalence in the passage is its attitude toward Ufe. Flore is a ruiner of Ufe who dreams of smiting it, yet by the final image is the justiciary of desperate life, one who stiU might grant a reprieve, however unlikely. …

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.520
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0290.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.211
Teacher spread0.194 · 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