Gertrude's ashes

"Gertrude's ashes rather weighed on my mind, lightly, but they weighed." So begins chapter 16 of Barbara Comyns's The Juniper Tree. Much has happened to get us to this point, and much more is to come. Just read it... We'll compare notes after. Exceptional.

Cecil Taylor, RIP

A giant, right up there with Coltrane and Coleman in leading the jazz avant-garde. I never heard him in person, but my jazz-loving father did once years ago, in Hartford. He was unfamiliar with the musician, but drove in with Mom, probably because it was part of the Hartford Jazz Festival. The solo performance was in a crowded church, and my parents had to sit up near the front. There was no escape, as this fellow assaulted a defenseless piano during a single piece that went on for a couple hours of aural agony... or at least that's how Dad recounted it. "Cecil something?" "You heard Cecil Taylor, Dad?!" Still fresh.

Report from the meadow, front yard edition

The nemophila are being displaced by poppies and Chinese houses (Collinsia heterophylla). Hoping that something yellow comes out soon. Over on the other side of the driveway, the grasses (Stipa and Festuca) are in ascendance...

A Legacy of Spies

If, like me, you count The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as two of your very favorite novels, well, run don't walk to your neighborhood library or book merchant and get yourself a copy of John Le Carré's latest. A retelling and a reckoning of the central plots and themes of those two earlier books, A Legacy of Spies is one-half epistolary novel built from notes and reports in the secret files of those operations and one-half first-person narrative of master spy Peter Guillam, flashing back and forth between the present day and the depths of the Cold War. The offspring of Guillam's–and George Smiley's–past sins (and triumphs) have quite literally come back to haunt them. All of it is woven together seamlessly: the story simply flies along– it's the Le Carré thriller we loved, missed, and craved.

Of course, it is Le Carré, so a dose of serious moral and political philosophy comes with the thrill. We'd have it no other way. "If I had a mission– if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe." I'm not sure the character who speaks these words near the novel's end would have uttered them in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In the age of Brexit, Putin, and Trump, the character's literary creator is being sadly ironic, a tone consistent with the sadness and bitterness that pervade this late masterpiece by an old master.

Sundstrom meadows

Thanks to the folks at Larner seeds, you too can have some mighty attractive California native flowers blooming in your own personal springtime meadow. Instructions: Open package, mix with compost, scatter. Wait for rain.

The lupine in the first photo is accompanied by the charming (and tall!) purple tansy (Phacelia tanacetifolia). The Nemophila (baby blue-eyes and five-spots) are easy and cheerful. The needle grass (Stipa) is already going to seed in its spectacular fashion.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 80

Só Danço Samba. A cliché, but no less perfect for that...

Francis Bator, RIP

His article “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization” (1957) presents the graphical version of basic welfare economics that many of us have taught to our undergrad intermediate micro students pretty much ever since. I doubt that it's been improved upon.

Taking a quick look after many years, the following passage from Bator's discussion of the utility-possibility frontier (p. 28) jumped out at me:

To designate a single best configuration we must be given a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function that denotes the ethic that is to "count" or whose implications we wish to study. Such a function– it could be yours, or mine, or Mossadegh's, though his is likely to be non-transitive– is intrinsically ascientific.

The only "Mossadegh" I know of is Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the prime minister of the democratically-elected Iranian government that was overthrown in 1953 with the help of the CIA, to be succeeded by the Shah. Given that non-transitive amounts to irrational, is this a racist dig, or am I missing something?

Bator was very clear on the importance of distributional questions, as well as market failures due to externalities and non-convexities. Yet the beauty of the efficiency properties of markets under ideal conditions easily distracts our attention from these problems, as if they were second-order. For this reason, the very effectiveness of his masterly exposition may have contributed to the tendency of well-trained economists toward free-market ideology. We can give Bator himself the last word here: "The Pareto conditions are necessary, but never sufficient" (p. 58).

Trouble in Paradise

The title makes no sense at all, but this 1932 Ernst Lubitsch comedy is justifiably considered a great one. Pre-Code, it is full of good-natured sexual chemistry and innuendo. The cast is great, the dialogue witty, the scenes well-paced. We saw it last night at the Stanford Theatre, where it played in December 1932 along with a vaudeville program. That must have been a fun night out.