Blacksburg Reads

A. adj.

1. Having no limit or end (real or assignable); boundless, unlimited, endless; immeasurably great in extent, duration or other respect.  Chiefly of God or His attributes; also of space, time, etc., in which it passes into the mathematical use.

“I read,” I say.  “I study and read.  I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read.  Don’t think I haven’t.  I consume libraries.  I wear out spines and ROM-drives.  I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’  My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.

“But it transcends the mechanics.  I’m not a machine.  I feel and believe.”

-Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

I have enjoyed David Foster Wallace’s books, his essays and interviews where I heard a voice not panicked or desperate in the storm surge that is American culture eating itself.  His voice was accurate and original.  I’m saddened by his suicide because he didn’t hang on long enough to pass a torch but left a boulder tottering on a peak and it is hurtling toward us with a noise and clatter from which we can only flee or be crushed.  Or push back up.

LA Times obit here.

Those who knew him as Dave.

The Howling Fantods.

“Why spend time and energy documenting a bunch of bars?”

The question is posed at the beginning of an NPR story about New Orleans hangouts. My ears burned while listening to this story because it covered a different angle of the rebuilding efforts in the Crescent City. Follow the links from the NPR site and you will quickly be bounced from one example of grassroots preservation of neighborhood culture to another. The focus of the story is a locally produced publication called Cornerstones. The motives of the Neighborhood Story Project can be summarized in Bethany Rogers’ statement:

“Barrooms face their own little challenges of people understanding why they’re legitimate,” Rogers says. “They can be patrolled, looked down upon. But they really do ground their neighborhoods. It’s where people trade information and pass down stories and keep cultural traditions going.”

Keep cultural traditions going. After a cataclysm?

The people who pick up the pieces of a community after a disaster do it because they love their cultural traditions enough to forsake everything else, impulsively, to save that one thing. The musical instrument, the birth records, the book, the church, the corner store, the tavern.

These days it seems that for every example of a declining love for neighborhood connectivity there is proof of love for the fight to save that same identity. We’re shifting our loyalties from barstools to the couch, from books to youtube, yet we crowd the taverns during times of crisis and we set sales records for real, paper and cloth volumes of books. What does this say about us as Americans? What does it say about us as Blacksburg citizens or residents of Southwest Virginia?

I think it says we want our stories told. We want people to remember and to carry on. Hopefully we don’t need to run out of a burning building to make that happen or put all of our belongings in a boat. We just need to go to that next fiddler’s jam or listen to that poetry slam or sit around a campfire. We need to write and record and tell. Our stories told by us.

Newport Fest on the Bluegrass Trail in Giles County is coming up on August 30th. Blacksburgreads.com is looking for somebody to attend and get the stories. Larry Keel will be there. Black Twig Pickers, and a host of others, too.  Interested? Email us at newportfest@blacksburgreads.com.

When I arrived in Blacksburg in 1995, there was a handful of excellent independent bookstores.  Printer’s Ink occupied a hideaway in the back of University Mall and Books Strings-n-Things inhabited a brick storefront on Draper Road.  When BSnT closed another ambitious bookseller made a go under the name of The Booksmith.  This is a university town, after all.

Past Pages and Softcovers served the used book lovers until they were pushed out by decreasing demand or increasing rents.

The Booksmith eventually failed and Printer’s Ink, despite the best efforts of its friendly, book-loving staff, closed in 2004.  At Printer’s Ink I bought Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac.  And several volumes of Charles Bukowski’s poems.  I bought a beautiful new edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, complete with a CD-ROM that I never used.  I never left any of these shops empty-handed.

Regular visitors to this site know the story of the Easy Chair Bookstore.  After two locations and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested it became painfully obvious that a bricks and mortar bookseller would not work, even in a university town.  But Blacksburg still reads.  Because somebody dropped these books off at the YMCA Thrift:

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker

Inspired Sleep, Robert Cohen

We Say No, Eduardo Galeano

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (1st US Edition, Hardcover)

Do you see (read) what I am getting at?  Maybe these books were all tossed after hours by the same hand in the same paper shopping bag onto the loading dock behind the thrift.  But I also found Black’s Law Dictionary and Roget’s International Thesaurus, both in hardcover.  I’m not talking collector’s items.  Nothing to keep feeding eBay.  I’m talking about books to feel and fold.  Books to scribble on in the margins.  All for less than three gallons of gas.

So I have reclaimed the Blacksburg Reads website.  For all of us who will still go to independent bookstores when and where we find them.  And when the next independent, local bookstore opens we will give them our total support, our expendable income and our love.  That’s what real readers do.

In the meantime, the blogs of our booksellers are resurrected in links under the Blogroll.  I will add local authors, bloggers about local issues and anything else that contributes to the joy of living in a community of readers and booklovers in Blacksburg and the Southwest corner of the Old Dominion.  Until the power goes out.

For over three years we have been fortunate to serve book lovers in the Blacksburg area. Despite our best efforts we have not been able to sustain this addition to Blacksburg’s Great Good Place. Now we will refocus our energies on providing craft roasted coffee prepared by the most skilled roasters and baristas in the New River Valley. We will continue to provide a community center where people will gather with friends, share big ideas and make Blacksburg a better place.

All of us at the Easy Chair would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the management of University Mall, without whom the move from downtown would not have been possible. Their support, encouragement and guidance gave us our best chance to succeed.

Thank you to all of our registered book clubs, bibliophiles, Story Time participants and local authors. The inspiration for the Easy Chair Bookstore grew out of a belief that a reading culture still exists in Blacksburg and I regret deeply that we could not carry on for these most important customers.

To our tireless booksellers and baristas who persevered, put in extra hours and exhausted every possible effort to sustain this idea, you make me believe it was all worth it. I look forward with new energy to applying what we have learned as we work together to improve and grow the Easy Chair Coffee Shop into Blacksburg’s best.

(For more information, please click the Easy Chair Bookstore page, top of the left column.)