Sunday Literary Interlude, no. 3 - the warm glow of vindication. I slogged through all twelve books of Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time", hating almost every minute of it, searching in vain for the cause of breathlessness such as:

“I think it is now becoming clear that A Dance to the Music of Time is going to become the greatest modern novel since Ulysses.”
—Clive James

“I would rather read Mr Powell than any English novelist now writing.”
—Kingsley Amis

But now relief comes; V. S. Naipaul agrees with me that, whatever other good qualities he might have had, Powell was a great big boring windbag as a writer as far as Dance... was concerned. Naipaul reviewer Ian Jack puts it thus:

Powell, by contrast, looked to be engaged in a long-winded private satire, with footmen posted at the door to keep the wrong sort of reader out.

(Wish I'd said that. I did write to a friend while I was reading the opus that "...it is as though the narrator lives his entire life encased in layers of cotton wool, layer upon layer of deadening verbiage and analysis choking off all air and human contact" while discussing the most obscure, indirect, opaque, verbose, and yet sexless sex scene possibly in all of modern literature, near the end of A Buyer's Market.)

I think the secret behind all the glowing reviews was that Powell was basically writing about a world shared by himself, and by the reviewers, also; people are always apt to fall prey to the navel-gazing instinct, and I'm sure the reviewing set found Powell's endless &ndash endless! – meditation upon their mutual experience fascinating.

(Note to self: Do not give in to temptation to read In Search of Lost Time).

Saturday Morning lagniappe*. Waiting for the coffee to brew, reading Dustbury, and coming across this item, I was intrigued by the link to the Oracle of Bacon. (Those unfamiliar with the Oracle of Bacon, or the concept of Bacon Number, should see here to salvage any degree of comprehensibilty from the remainder of this post.) Whenever I stumble across the Oracle, I test it by sticking in someone whom I would consider obscure (however, to me most actors are obscure, so my judgement is probably a bit off there). We've been watching DVDs of The Jewel in the Crown** recently, so I popped in the name of the only person from that production whose name I could remember, Art Malik.

Lo and behold, Mr. Malik has a Bacon number of 2, even lower than average:

Art Malik was in Booty Call (1997) with David Hemblen
David Hemblen was in Where the Truth Lies (2005) with Kevin Bacon

While Mr. Bacon is legendary for existing at the center of a vast connected web, it turns out that there are many other actors who are even better connected. The Oracle's site is a bit coy on the subject, but cutting to the chase, apparently Rod Steiger (yeah, I think I've heard of him) is the true center of the Hollywood universe.

*lagniappe – "a small, meaningless blog post, written solely for the purpose of making the blog appear active."

**Oddly enough, the two 'plot keywords' that IMDB lists for The Jewel in the Crown are "Based On Novel" and "Shirtless Male Bondage". Both are true, strictly speaking, but anyone looking to TJitC for the latter will be pretty disappointed.

"Bite like a pirate" month. (Obscure hazards of the Midwest — an occasional series.)

One of the best things about living in Colorado, or Oregon – no bugs. Well, obviously, there were insects out there, but they stayed out there, not invading the personal living spaces of their betters, e.g., me. (One thing that has always detracted from my interest in seeing Australia is the universal agreement that it's crawling with the nastiest, bitingest, stingingest bugs on earth.) We could have open, unscreened windows in Boulder or Portland, and never suffer more than shooing the occasional errant wasp out of the house.

Here, in midwestland, a different story. Not only do we have to screen out myriad species of mayflies, houseflies, horseflies, fruitflies, wasps, bees, cicadas, and hornets, we have to deal with more insidious vermin, stealth bugs so subtle, so cunning, that most people living around here don't even know they exist. (And no, they're not invisible bugs crawling all over my skin.)

The first year we lived here we had what I understand is the usual upper-midwestern summer – and extended warm and damp period, punctuated by week-long bursts of vile heat and humidity. By September, things cooled down and dried off, and the weather became quite nice, enough so that I could spend hours working in the yard without fear of heatstroke. One day, I was puttering about the garden, planting bulbs or whatnot, when I noticed a slight twinge on my arm, as though someone had poked it lightly with a needle without puncturing the skin. I didn't think much of it, and just brushed whatever it was away.

A few minutes later, I noticed another twinge, and another, and looked down at my arms to see them peppered with tiny black dots, each dot apparently corresponding with one of those twinges, which were now progressing to being painfully itchy. Hmmm. Time to go inside. Brush all the little buggers off, retreat into the house.

The litle bites became progressively itchier and itchier. As time progressed, more of them became evident, on my neck, arms,and legs, until by that evening I lay rigid in bed, unable to comfortably move in any direction without provoking an even more intolerable urge to scratch than just lying still. Having had chicken pox as a youth, I can attest that this was itchiness of the same kind and scale.

When I described these events to long-term residents, they pretty much all looked at me as though I was crazy. Tiny bugs? Incredibly itchy? Uhh..... no, Don't know what you're talking about. Moira was never affected, nor was the daughter. I just happened to be the lucky guy, alone in all of Iowa, with the major immune reaction.

Eventually, I found out who my tormentors were, thanks to ISU's extension service – minute pirate bugs ("minute" as in "tiny", not "minute" as in "minute rice"). Voracious predators of many herbivorous insects, they spend the summers in the corn and bean fields, munching away, and then in the late summer as the fields are harvested, they move on, seeking greener pastures; alas, they find only suburbia and exposed human flesh, which they spitefully attack, though it gains them naught but a curse and a squashing. Because of their role in controlling crop pests, they are considered "beneficial" (ha!) and therefore their victims are advised to hunker down and deal with it. Humans are highly variable in their reaction to the bites – it seems most people are unaffected, but an unfortunate few go into histamine overdrive. Interestingly, my reaction seems to be less severe now than it was when we moved here, which is the opposite of what I'd expect; but maybe I've just developed habits that discourage being bitten, like spending September hiding in bed.

("Minute" barely does justice to how tiny these things are – they are tiny enough to crawl through windowscreens, though thankfully they don't seem to do that much. The '1/5th inch' listed in the ISU piece is far larger than any I've seen; 1/10th to 1/16 seems more like it.)

Yep, time to buy a few more shares in that ethanol plant down the road. The Times reports:

...maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to ... 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised.

Thoughts:

• Whenever a new Evil Gas (e.g., N₂O) is revealed in global warming scenarios, it is invariably far more evil than the previous Evil Gas (e.g., CO₂).
• Last weekend, I visited my brother-in-law's home biodiesel factory. He takes waste oil from a Chinese restaurant and converts it into diesel, and runs his '81 Isuzu pickup on it. It seems to run ok, but does smell like greasy Chinese food. Really.

Badlands, "bad" part.

This is the part you don't try to ride your horse across.

(Sorry, very busy lately.)

[All trip entries]

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A moment of silence, please. For Alex.

At play in the dismal fields. I will admit it; I am ... a ... Wikipedian, one of those thousands of anonymous electronic scriveners, laboring in our hidden mole-like way, creating the vast compendium of garbled falsehoods and uninformed opinion that is Wikipedia – no, no, wait, that didn't come out right. Let's start again – ahh, whatever.

Anyhow, I do occasionally dabble in editing Wikipedia, tossing in bits of information gleaned during all those years of excess post-graduate study. This means I usually manage to stay away from the dodgier and controversy-generating areas of WP. Nobody really cares that much about tarsal bones, for example, or the bones of the middle ear. (You wouldn't believe the fight over Chicago-style hot dogs, though.)

Recently I link-surfed further afield than usual, and found myself lost in a dark and rough thicket of economics-related Wiki pages. One page led to another, and I was soon confronted with the Liberal Paradox.

In its pristine form, the paradox apparently goes something like this:

[Amartya] Sen considered what Pareto might say thinking of two agents lewd and prude. Lewd wants to read porn but finds even more exciting the thought of Prude being forced to read porn. Prude finds porn appalling but is even more disturbed by the thought of Lewd reading and enjoying it. Freedom is not Pareto optimal in this case. It is Pareto better to block Lewd from reading porn and force Prude to read it. This is crazy. In any case it shows that liberalism and the Pareto principal might hypothetically be in conflict.

If you're mumbling to yourself, "Am I supposed to know what 'Pareto-better' means? Why is Fleck being such a pompous ass?", have no fear – it's economist-speak for "a situation where one person's well-being can be improved without reducing another person's well-being". I know this, because Wikipedia told me so.

So anyway, the point, I think, is that it is possible to construct a situation where granting people what they want ends up making everybody unhappy, at least if the people involved are assholes and what they really want is to control other people.
This doesn't seem like a stunning insight, and Amartya Sen is supposed to be a real smart dude, so possibly I'm missing something here. But the example given on the WP page doesn't help me, either:

Suppose Alice and Bob have to decide whether to go to the cinema to see a chick flick, and that each has the liberty to decide whether to go themselves. If the personal preferences are based on Alice first wanting to be with Bob, then thinking it is a good film, and on Bob first wanting Alice to see it but then not wanting to go himself, then the personal preference orders might be:

* Alice wants: both to go > neither to go > Alice to go > Bob to go
* Bob wants: Alice to go > both to go > neither to go > Bob to go

There are two Pareto efficient solutions: either Alice goes alone or they both go. Clearly Bob will not go on his own: he would not set off alone, but if he did then Alice would follow, and Alice's personal liberty means the joint preference must have both to go > Bob to go. However, since Alice also has personal liberty if Bob does not go, the joint preference must have neither to go > Alice to go. But Bob has personal liberty too, so the joint preference must have Alice to go > both to go and neither to go > Bob to go. Combining these gives

* Joint preference: neither to go > Alice to go > both to go > Bob to go

and in particular neither to go > both to go. So the result of these individual preferences and personal liberty is that neither go to see the film.

But this is Pareto inefficient given that Alice and Bob each think both to go > neither to go.

I'm still not seeing it. However, I think a big part of the problem is that I'm a die-hard empiricist, not a theoretician, and I just can't accept the axiomatic conditions here. Ok, I can accept that Alice most wants to see the film with Bob (first preference), then wants to be with Bob in any case (second preference), and oh, yeah, wants to see the film (third preference), but I think I can safely state that it makes no sense for Bob to really, really want Alice to see the film alone. Bob probably really, really wants to be with Alice, alone (first preference), and for this will put up with some stupid movie (second preference), which he would rather gouge his eyes out than watch by himself (third preference) and whether Alice sees it or not doesn't even factor in, just as Alice wouldn't realistically give a hoot whether Bob saw the movie or not. So the allegedly "Pareto inefficient" result of neither seeing the movie is in fact what Bob, the sly dog, had in mind all along! He's managed to dupe Alice, and the audience of onlooking economists, into thinking he's making some sort of sacrifice – "See? Neither of us got what we really wanted, so we're even" – when he's really achieved his main goal. And the economists all still think he'll respect them in the morning, too. Let's hope Alice knows better.