It seemed unusual for a Western in a couple of ways. First, it has a very large cast of characters: I ended up having to write out a long dramatis personae to keep track of who was who. Otherwise it's very easy to keep the mule skinner straight from the freight operator and so on.

(Apparently a mule skinner doesn't literally skin mules: he just drives mule teams. This confused me for a while: I wasn't sure what you'd actually want to do with all the skins you'd get from someone skinning them full-time.)

Second, it's written from multiple viewpoints: you switch between the povs of half a dozen or so characters on various sides. It works well since the character are pretty fully realised: you get to see things from different sides. The characters all have proper motivations, and the plot fits them: very well done from that side of things.

It only seemed a little unrealistic in a couple of ways. There are more pulpy quicker-on-the-draw confrontations than seems likely. Hall seems to be putting his own road agent spin on the genre clichés. And the characters can be a little too prone to homespun philosophising. Even there it works well sometimes.

"Blaisedell has run his string," Wash Haggin said grimly.
"Thought he had," the judge said. "But he hasn't if you are going to go on taking law and order as set pure against you every time. Ike, when I was a young fellow there was a statue out before the courthouse that was meant to represent justice. She had a sword that didn't point at nobody, and a blindfold over her eyes, and scales that balanced. Maybe it was different with you Confederates. A good many of you I've seen I've thought it must've been a different statue of her you had down south. One that her sword always poked at you. One with no blindfold on her eyes, so you always thought she was looking straight at you. And her scales tipped against you every time. For I have never seen such men to take her on and try to fight her."

"And maybe with a fraud like that one you could win. But this here now is the United States of America, and it is my statue of justice that stands for here. You can cross swords with her till you die doing it, and you are always going to lose. Because back of her, standing right there behind her -- or maybe pretty far back, like here in the territory -- there is all the people. All the people, and when you set yourself against her, you are set against every one of us."

Pynchon mini-review, review amazon.com.

Museums
Had a quick stroll through Tate Britain. They've got a tiny exhibition of Edward Burra paintings, themed around Harlem. Good, pleasantly stylized stuff.

They've also got an eclectic collection of sketches on display at the moment. (Too fragile for permanent exhibition). Includes a few big names: Turner, Gainsborough, Rossetti. Some of the lesser-known stuff is most interesting. There's a nice plan for an installation that I'm not sure was ever deployed, where a cube-crushed light aircraft was to be slowly pulled back out into an approximation of its original form.

Also sat through Derek Jarman's 1984 video. Imagining October, mostly because I needed a sit-down. Seemed a bit like a Simpsons spoof of any art movie: long bombastic captions about market forces and oppression, earnest pictures of Lenin. Had some surreptitious footage of Moscow which may have been more impressive at the time. Some nice textures in the painting scenes though.

Web
YouTube. Dam Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMfBKrdErY

Were the Jersey orphanage deaths exaggerated?

Economics. Does financial regulation discourage good banking?

A good bank is one that lends to a borrower that other banks would not lend to because of their superior knowledge of the borrower or one that would not lend to a borrower to which everyone lends because of their superior knowledge of the borrower. Modern regulators believe this is too quaint, and, to be fair, many banks were not any good at it. But instead of removing banking licenses from these banks, regulators decided to do away with relationship banking altogether and promoted a switch away from bank finance to market finance where loans are securitised, given public ratings, sold to many investors including other banks, and assessed using approved risk tools that are sensitive to publicly available prices. Now, bankers lend to borrowers that everyone else is lending to, the outcome of a process where the public price of risk is compared with its historic average and a control is applied based on public ratings.

Empirical research, however, indicates that limited liability is just not that big a deal. British firms had unlimited liability until 1855, California firms had unlimited liability until 1931, banks had double liability until the 1930s and American Express had unlimited liability until 1965. None of this seemed to matter very much.

It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT.