GCT and the CB in NYC.

A house near the point of a barrier peninsula a week after Irene hit our town.

Glenmacnass Waterfall, County Wicklow, Ireland. From our trip last October.

The Borribles
Michael de Larrabeiti
Tor (214 pp, $6.99, July 2005)

While on patrol one night in London’s Battersea Park, Knocker and his buddy Lightfinger discover a Rumble trespassing on their home turf. The two Borribles quickly capture the Rumble and then —

Wait. What’s a Borrible? What’s a Rumble?

Borribles, in Michael de Larrabeiti’s razor-sharp novel, are “feral Peter Pans,” to cadge a phrase from the New York Times, pointy-eared children who never grow up:

Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’ve had what is called a bad start. A child disappears and the word goes round that he was ‘unmanageable’; the chances are he’s off managing by himself. Sometimes it’s given out that a kid down the street has been put into care: the truth is that he’s been Borribled and is caring for himself someplace.

They are urchins gone elf, living in loose neighborhood tribes, squatting in abandoned buildings and shoplifting their food; they have no leaders or laws beyond a collection of proverbs (“Don’t get caught”), which they frequently cite in their arguments. Borribles are anarchist lawyers, “outcasts, but unlike most outcasts they enjoy themselves and wouldn’t be anything else.”

Their sworn enemies are the Rumbles, intelligent rodents resembling “a giant rat, a huge mole or a deformed rabbit” that walk on hind legs and even drive cars. The Rumbles dwell in a massive (and very posh) underground bunker in Rumbledom; a native Londoner might better recognize the area as Wimbledon Common. They’re also parodies of The Wombles, a series of children’s books, TV shows, and films which I’ve never read or seen.

The discovery of a Rumble rooting around in their territory incites suspicion of a Rumble invasion of Battersea and beyond. A Borrible council is quickly called, whereupon it’s decided each of the Borrible tribes of London will furnish a warrior to participate in the Great Rumble Hunt. The goal of this expedition: to infiltrate Rumbledom and assassinate the eight members of the Rumble High Command, thereby decapitating Rumble society. And, so that the Rumbles may have a sporting chance, the Borribles release the Rumble prisoner with a message for the High Command, explaining the entire plan.

Thus ends Chapter One.

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Hey nerds! Two of my weird Westerns are now available in new anthologies.

Befitting the theme, editor Eric Guignard assembled an international table of contents for Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations (Amazon | B&N). My favorites include Gitte Christensen’s future vision in which humanity has divided into voluntary yet contract-based subcultures (in this case, a group of ocean-exploring steampunks); and a very smooth ghost story by Joe Lansdale. Besides my own contribution (which Eric touted, “Out of the submissions I received, few struck me as unique and colorful”), there are a couple other weird Westerns in the book too. The publisher is staggering the release of e-pub editions but not by long, so if you prefer to read it on Kindle or Nook, you should only have to wait a few months.

Also out is Low Noon (Amazon | Kindle) from Science Fiction Trails editor David Riley. David mentioned being a fan of ghost stories and so I sent him an idea that had been simmering awhile. I like suspense, not horror; I refuse to watch contemporary horror films because of the sadism and gore, yet I love me some H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, and decades later I’m still traumatized by The Changeling and The Fog and The Shining. One of the items on my weird-West checklist was to write a story about property rights in an abandoned mining town — and so it all came together in “Realgar.”

As always, thanks for reading my stuff, whether it’s here or somewhere on the trail.

My friend Max Borders is running a Kickstarter fundraiser to launch his book Superwealth: Why We Should Stop Worrying About the Gap Between Rich and Poor:

If The New York Times can trot out billionaires with guilt complexes, maybe someone out there will listen to a middle-class guy with a well-considered, well-researched case for why we should:

1. Stop worrying about The Gap,
2. Understand the true nature of wealth and poverty,
3. Stop demonizing the wealthy,
4. Focus on how best to help the poor, and
5. Learn to celebrate wealth creation.

Max’s thesis is something I’ve echoed in my own arguments with folks worried the rich are growing richer and the poor allegedly poorer (I’m looking at you, Dad). If you understand wealth is not zero-sum and is therefore infinite, then there will always be persons who grow richer daily just as every moment Voyager 2 travels farther from our sun. Now, if an individual uses his wealth to prevent others from rising to the same plane; if he and others conspire to raise costs of goods or services through monopolization or price-fixing or corporatism; if he invests unwisely only to be rescued from loss by public money — then that’s wrong and must be combated. But wealth in and of itself is not evil. Camels-through-the-eyes-of-needles jealousy is Nietzsche’s slave morality, simple knee-jerk emotionalism that tars something bad merely because you don’t have it.

And, in fact, because wealth has no inherent moral value — what is steel compared to the hand that wields it? — it does just as much good as evil, if not more. For every Wall Street profiteer deriding his own clients as muppets there’s a Santa Claus handing out hundreds at a homeless shelter. As Max says, instead of fretting over the zeroes in the country club president’s savings, we should concentrate on how those on the other side of the tracks can add digits to their own accounts.

So please — give Max’s Kickstarter page a gander and consider supporting him.

The gravestone of Samuel Smedley is back in place:

In order to repair the historic headstone, it was removed from the Old Burying Ground and brought to Jim Bria for restoration at his Artista studio. Three rods were inserted into the gravestone, which was then epoxyed into a granite base for stability.

When the weather gets warmer, Melanie Marks, a historic researcher and professional genealogist, said the committee will clean the gravestone with a biodegradeable solution.

The solution will scour the lichen from the stone without brushing, which could further erode the inscription. While still difficult to read, the light on the upright stone makes the inscription ten times easier to discern than before. I’m hopeful the solution will increase the legibility even more.

All that remains is to pay for the modest cost of the restoration. Interested in making a donation? See the contact instructions at the bottom of the article.

Bruce Cole sketches an elegant portrait of historian Barbara Tuchman that’s well worth reading in its entirety, particularly for her tips on “practicing history,” as she called it. But Cole focuses on the fact that Tuchman was not an academic — to her credit.

Is a Ph.D.—the union card for the professorate—a hindrance to approaching history as Tuchman did?

Alas, the answer is likely “yes.” The years-long slog of course work, exams and the laborious, footnote-laden dissertation—written strictly to be read by other scholars—have a way of hard-wiring habits of the mind that are difficult to overcome. A few academically trained scholars do survive the tyranny of their doctorates and reach a wide reading audience. But inside the Ivory Tower, where most historians dwell, professors write books, articles, and conference papers for other professors, and mainly for those colleagues toiling in the same small subset of the past.

A grad-school professor once chided me that I wrote in a “casual” popular style. His goal was to gently push me toward a more formal tone in my papers but I stubbornly dug in my heels. Academic English is a baroque dialect, a game of tin-can telephone meant for a minority of receivers, as Cole says, and not intended for a general audience. But what then is the point of writing something no one will ever read? What rationalization can be presented for the public grants, endowments, tax exemptions, and tolerance if no outsider ever benefits? How can you ever argue that professors aren’t just a priest class removed from yet supported by society? It’s an obligation to write in a comprehensible style. I earned very good marks in graduate school — I even enjoyed it! — but the writing was the most difficult for me. I hated the writing.

I shouldn’t complain, though; general-audience historians are the main beneficiaries of this system. Leave the professorial witch doctors shut up in their temples, burning their incense and scrutinizing their chicken bones. I’m more than happy to author the books they never will.

Leafing through my local newspaper, it’s hard to decide what to be more outraged about. There’s the fact that Hartford, in its omniscient wisdom, determines the number of taxicabs allowed to operate in the town, and that requests to increase this number due to the new train station (the first on the New Haven line in a century) have been ignored. Or there’s the town’s Board of Finance rejection of $102,300 for a back-up generator for Town Hall:

McCarthy Vahey asked Director of Public Works, Rich White, why it was important.

White said that if power went out during a winter storm and pipes froze, which could happen since the building is old and has little insulation, the pipes aren’t easily accessible because they are in plaster walls.

[First Selectman] Tetreau said the building not only had the tax collector and tax assessor’s office, but also the Registrar of Voters, and pointed out that the entire state almost didn’t vote in the last election because of power outages from a late October snowstorm.

Generally I’m a spend-as-little-public-money-as-possible kind of guy, but archives and records are fundamental to transparent and functional government. A back-up generator for a building built in 1794 to protect that foundation against the double whammy of, say, an unseasonal snowstorm or a direct hit from a tropical storm and a fire is a reasonable expense.

But no. The measure was voted against 5-2. However, you’ll be happy to know the Board of Finance did vote to spend $105,000 to repair bunkers at the town-owned golf course.

This morning one of my Twitter tweeps circulated a Change.org petition asking Connecticut governor Dan Malloy to reject retail liquor reform:

The Connecticut legislature recently introduced a bill that will endanger your local, independently owned wine and spirits shops. Governor Malloy would like you to think this bill is only about allowing Sunday sales, but its impact is much greater than that. Rather than protecting small businesses and their employees, this is a nod to out-of-state big-box stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and major supermarket chains.

Under Governor Malloy’s proposed legislation, supermarkets, big-box stores and even gas stations could go into the package store business. … Seven THOUSAND Connecticut residents would face unemployment, and hundreds of small, family-owned package stores would be run out of business.

Background if you live outside the state: Connecticut is one of only two states (the other is Indiana) that doesn’t allow retail sale of alcohol on Sundays (you can still go and have a drink at a bar, though). You might think this is a throwback to our Puritan history — as I originally did when I was a newcomer — but you would be wrong: every few years, a proposal to allow Sunday sales takes flight only to be ack-acked from the skies by the Connecticut Package Stores Association, a powerful lobbyist group. Package stores argue that Sunday sales would give supermarkets and other venues an unfair advantage since they are already open on Sundays, so they have little if any extra operational costs; whereas if package stores have to open on Sundays to compete with them, the packies have to bear an extra day’s worth of wages, heating, electricity, etc. The ban on Sunday sales is plain industry protectionism.

There are several flaws in the CPSA’s argument, the most obvious being their muddy math. Opponents of Sunday sales contend that currently Connecticut experiences 7s worth of sales spread over 6 days. In other words, sales of the alcohol consumed on Sunday is distributed over the rest of the week. By opening Sunday sales, they say, consumption and sales will not increase but instead be spread over 7 days (so 7s over 7 days), thereby increasing their operational costs for being open on that seventh day with no new profit to show for it.

This is zero-sum thinking. It assumes we’re seeing the maximum amount of sales there can possibly be in the state.

What Malloy and others are saying — and I happen to agree — is that while this may be true for the interior of the state, along our outer rim what we’re actually experiencing is 6s worth of sales over 6 days, and in fact an extra 1s of Sunday sales goes to liquor-license holders and governments in Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. With Sunday sales, consumers will no longer have to run for the border. So instead of experiencing 6s over 6 days, Connecticut will see 7s over 7 days, reaping the profits and tax revenues resulting from that extra day of business. Put another way: Sunday sales will actually benefit the very same people who oppose it. The proponents’ calculation, albeit probably exaggerated, concludes s = $500 million.

Even if supermarkets and box-stores were to offer wine and spirits, what makes the petitioners think they would suddenly sweep their shelves clear of dog biscuits and detergent to stock anything more sophisticated than Yellow Tail and Jack Daniels? Right now, Connecticut supermarkets sell beer six days a week. But shelf space limits the selection to common denominators: Coors, Bud, Corona. Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada are as artisanal as it gets. BJ’s already offers wine and spirits, but with a like lack of choice; I assume other wholesale clubs are the same. The beer selection at Whole Foods is comparable to a packie but you also pay an extra few bucks per six-pack for the convenience. And you can forget about cider at any of them. Yes, package stores would lose some sales to these markets — just as they already do with beer six days a week. Yet they persevere. Mrs. Kuhl patronizes her favorite shop because of their wine selection and recommendations; I go to another because of its variety of cider. In an America where urchins sold hard lemonade on every street corner, there would still be a niche for stores with diverse inventories staffed by knowledgeable people. It’s called selection and service.

As it turns out, the Connecticut Package Stores Association suddenly agrees that Sunday sales aren’t the industry death knell they’ve always said they are:

The longtime lobbyist for the package stores, Carroll Hughes, said that Malloy’s far-reaching bill could cause hundreds of package stores to go out of business if all of the proposals are approved by the legislature. By agreeing to support Sunday sales, Hughes said, he would focus on blocking other aspects of the bill that would harm the package store owners.

The CPSA instead wants to stop supermarkets and big-boxes from going full liquor and to limit selling hours for everyone. It’s classic negotiation, Lemon. By making vast demands, Malloy has forced the CPSA to submit to one aspect of the free market in exchange for other protectionist safeguards. All the governor has to do now is concede backwards to what he wanted in the first place.