The Cost Of An Outright Ban On Fracking; North Sea To Flood Global Market With Oil; Canada Blocks Exxon-InterOil -- November 5, 2016

Fracking ban being discussed again as we head into last few days before election. Remember, Hillary has said very clearly she wants to ban fracking; do to the oil and gas industry what has been done to the coal industry. From Rigzone: 

• an outright ban would hit Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas the hardest
• Ohio: would lose almost 400,000 jobs
• Pennsylvania would lose more than 460,000 jobs
• Texas wold lose almost 1.5 million jobs
• gasoline prices would almost double; natural gas prices would skyrocket
• a $1.6 trillion GDP decline by 2022

North Sea producers to flood global market with oil if OPEC cuts. From Bloomberg:

• North Sea producers poised to ship the most crude in more than four years
• shipments will increased 10% yoy to about 2.2 million bopd in December
• this wold mark the most crude oil shipments from the region since May, 2012
• current OPEC talk: trip output to a range of 32.5 million to 33 million bbls/day
• in its September monthly report, OPEC reported that it produced 33.24 million bopd
• Brent crude: $46.28 at the time of the Bloomberg report

Looks like the Canadian government will block Exxon's attempt to buy InterOil Corp. Story here. It's a story but it certainly is not news.

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Starbucks earnings (4Q16) -- November 3, 2016:

Starbucks: 55 cents forecast; actual: 54 - 56 cents; U.S. comparable store sales increase of 4%; traffic up 1%; apparently very concerned about pace of store traffic; reading between the lines, SBUX concerned that "coffee infatuation" may have peaked; CEO suggests the "Amazon effect;" if so, he's referring to Starbucks stores inside Barnes & Noble; or too many competitors for coffee "just as good" a whole lot cheaper;

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The Literature Page 
Friday Evening

There are days I come this close [ ] to simply packing my bags -- actually one bag -- jumping on a plane and disappearing, much like Connie Converse did many years ago. Only one thing keeps me from doing that. Family. Three granddaughters. Two daughters. One wife. Not necessarily in that order.

Maybe next autumn, 2018. I have a contact. He could arrange it. Far from the madding crowd.

It hit me today. Once a week I treat myself to a 3/4 ounce of Scottish whisky. In today's mail, I had a Medicare bill and the monthly London Review of Books. The Medicare bill will be taken care of later this weekend.

Meanwhile, a 3/4 ounce of Scottish whisky -- Tomatin, to be precise -- with two cubes of ice which are tossed about five minutes into sipping. And then the Review. Some issues are great; some issues are spectacular. This is a so-so issue, somewhere between great and spectacular.

But this is what it would make it spectacular. To be in a small hovel at the far southwestern tip of Scotland sipping Scottish whisky and reading the Review. I say the southwestern tip of Scotland because I really do have a contact who has given me an open-ended invitation to "live" at his summer house whenever I want. He would be thrilled if I watched it over the winter. It's enticing.

In this month's Review, the first of several articles that I can hardly wait to read slowly and fully, John Pemble's "Besieged by Female Writers," an essay/review of Frederik Van Dam's Anthony Trollope's Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form.

It's overcast, like I remember northern Yorkshire, along the Scottish border. It's already getting dark, like northern Yorkshire, along the Scottish border.

And the first bit of whisky is having its intended effect. And the Review is open to John Pemble's article. And I am on the MacBook Air, thinking of northern Yorkshire, along the Scottish border.

Back in 2004, I believe it was, I forget, I began a very, very aggressive reading program. I started with Ovid and moved chronologically forward, culminating with Virginia Woolf, and pretty much ending my journey there, with some exceptions. There were some exceptions: Hunter S Thompson (had read him earlier but then came back to him); Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tim O'Brien.

I thought about all of that while paging through this month's issue of the Review. I completed the essay on Anthony Trollope. I have never read a novel by Trollope but have always been curious about this author. He was a Victorian author but not considered particularly interesting. Then in 1927, 45 years after Trollope's death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. According to the essay, soon after "Trollope made to into the canon and finally into Westminster Abbey where a plaque was unveiled in 1993.

I was curious. Did Harold Bloom include Anthony Trollope in his western canon? I took down my copy of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, c. 1994. There, on page 512, Appendix C, "The Democratic Age", along with Brontes, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, and dozens of others, Trollope is listed, along with two of his novels and two of  his novel series, The Pulliser Novels and the Barsetshire Novels.

It's "funny" how things work out. I am currently reading Dante's Inferno -- a reader suggested that I should read it, and I'm reading one canto of the Inferno every day. I find it fascinating. Now I note that Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon has devoted a full chapter to the Inferno: "The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice." I see I have already that chapter -- some time ago -- many inky notations in the margins. I will read it again.