Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.095 | 0.041 |
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".