the gentle madness

The Fire Next Time

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

- James Baldwin

The muscles of his naked calves bulged below his worn and dirty kimono.  The dark cloth flapped behind him as he strode with chest out and sword over one shoulder.  The top-knot stood high on the back of his head as a badge and a warning.  Everything about him declared: I have earned this.

So begins William Dale Jennings’s The Ronin. When I hefted my stack of books out of the Goodwill store in Blacksburg I knew exactly how the young Ronin felt. At Goodwill prices I bought ten good titles and still had enough change to buy a twenty ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to sip while I sorted my loot.  I earned this.

OK, I’m exaggerating.  Really all it took was about ten bucks and the will to endure the green glow of fluorescent lights and the horrific music oozing down on me as I made my selections.  My tooth enamel will never recover, but I found books.  Books I grew up with, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and happy accidents like Calvin Trillins’s Travels With Alice.

So, what’s the score?  Title for title, “the Thrift,” as it is known locally, had more books of lesser quality – which is to be expected this close to their annual book fair – and I had to search carefully to find the keepers. But if you look hard enough the quality is there, for cheap.  The Thrift feels old-school, funky, and cool.  In one pass the Goodwill store had a better selection in a smaller space (I left without a few I would normally have taken if not for that bottle of beer ruining my budget) but my ears were bleeding from the saccharine heartbreak anthems drilling into my skull by the time I staggered to the checkout. Subsequent visits have not turned up the same quality of books.

True bibliophiles care less about the shopping experience than they do about finding the books they came for. Neither the YMCA Thrift nor the Goodwill Store qualifies as a bona fide bookstore.  That’s part of the fun.  The YMCA staff have dedicated themselves to it longer and on a good day, it shows.  The shelves are organized and they stock enough gems to maintain a high level of anticipation among bargain book lovers.  The selection at Goodwill might surprise you, though.  It surprised me.  Spend a Saturday afternoon thrift-shopping for books in Blacksburg and you will certainly find something worth reading.  If you have time for only one stop, then the YMCA Thrift’s selection will prove to be more consistent and rewarding.

I am (imp)ulsive.  Saturday mornings are busy here at the Easy Chair but the afternoons are sleepy and we close at two o’clock.  An evening off is a rare gift and I decided to spend one feeding The Gentle Madness.  I had about thirty dollars to spend.  First stop, the YMCA Thrift Store in Blacksburg where I found these books.  I was pissed off to find Bee Season in the free pile on my way out the door, not because it cost me two bucks but because I don’t actually have time to read it.  Not while I have Infinite Jest to finish, or Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness, begging me to forget about Infinite Jest, enticing me with words like sandhog and manlock.  The copy I found at the Thrift was dogeared and it contains this:

“When he was a ten-year-old boy in the swamps of Georgia, Walker forced a water snake to stay on a rickety wooden pier for five hours.  He had heard it would dehydrate in the sun.  The snake fought ferociously at first, wiggling from the pier toward the water, but he kept pulling it back by its head and tail.  Remembering an old saying, he knew the snake wasn’t poisonous: Red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black be nice to Jack.  He didn’t want to kill it himself, he just wanted the snake to die in the heat, but it just kept on thrashing.  The sun began to sink low in the Okefenokee sky.  In frustration, the young boy put his foot on the snake’s neck and slipped his knife in.  Its innards were warm and he knocked them into the water.  He brought the skin home to hang on his wall.  Most of the house was made with logs, but his own room was composed of cinder block.  He made a lot of noise hammering the nails.  When the snake was stretched above his bed, his mother came in and asked him where he had gotten it.  He told her the story, and she whipped him for his lack of respect.”

All right.  So, score one for the Thrift.  Add a New Stories From the South anthology and a near-new copy of Midnight’s Children to the mix and the Y is out in front.  (Insert foreboding here.)

So, what happened at the brand-spanking-new Blacksburg Goodwill Store?

50 years later, does anybody still give a “fug” that the Post Office was once an agent of censorship?

July 21, 2009 brings us the anniversary of the United States Supreme Court decision rejecting America’s obscenity laws.  This month also marks the publication of the first edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.  A new book of essays edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen and published by Southern Illinois University Press is available (click image).

Fred Kaplan has an essay about the Court’s ruling here.

The Naked Lunch website is just too cool.

Gotta hand it to Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre, they just keep trying to make this a better music town.  According to the Lyric blog, the Canadian band Cowboy Junkies, whose sound is so difficult to categorize but so recognizable, will make an appearance on October 15 at 8:00 PM.  To get a sense of what experiencing this band in that great environment might be like, check out this review.  And get ready to get your tickets.

Click Image to Go

QUOTE: “George Orwell’s masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a piece of literary work that few are ignorant of. Yet after a bit of time looking at different covers designed since its first edition, I began to think that there weren’t many that felt like true reflections of the original.”

The economy continues to pummel independents.  Which is why it is more important than ever to support your locally-owned businesses.

Far from home, but we can relate.

Wait, an editor and a publisher couldn’t agree on a format for citations, so they used none?

Lured by a Tweet of all things (girlinblack), I decided to get on the Infinite Jest summer reading bandwagon.  A common thread is, “I’ve started it several times, but never finished.”  I am firmly in that category.  But now my buddy Cohen is 33 pages ahead of me, so it’s on.

Check out the Infinite Summer website for the whys and whens of this project.  It’s like being in an ever moving flock of birds, picking up travellers and probably losing some along the way.

I’ve already learned that although I buy big books, I don’t actually like them.  Maybe if they were sold by the pound:

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, paperback: $7.17/LB

Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, paperback $25.72/LB

It’s 4:30 AM and I gotta get home.  I’m posting this before I roll out:

Paul Toth has really captured something(s) at Hit and Run Magazine.

“They squatted in a bleak wood and drank ditchwater strained through a rag.”

I can’t be the only person hoping Cormac McCarthy never writes another book.  Not because I won’t read it.  Not because somebody won’t make a movie out of it.  I hope he never writes another book because I have so little time to read I cannot keep reading the same book over, and over.

My father taught me to swim.  He taught me to fish and how to clean fish.  He taught me to box and in the basement laundry room of our house he taught me how to do push-ups and run from junkyard dogs.  He set me on sandbars and said if I wanted to learn to swim I should swim to shore.

The man in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road teaches his young son how to blow his brains out if the bad guys should come.  The man, all the time dying, all the time suffering, shows his young son how to survive because they must survive because they are the good guys.  They are carrying the fire.  The man in this story tells these lies to his son because he remembers the world the way it was and though he believes it can never be that way again he needs his son to believe.  But the bad guys are coming and coming and coming.

I keep a short list of books that changed the way I read and think about this world.  Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.  And, now, The Road.  The movie is scheduled for release in September 2009.  You will wish you had read the book.

I jealously guard my free time. Presented with the choice of browsing the hundreds of books littering my house or tackling the long list of menial chores needing attention, I choose the books. And a cup of coffee better than I deserve. Moving between the bar and the bookshelf, moving between work and bed leaves little time for anything else, like housekeeping or organizing a neglected CD collection. I doubt I have opened the black binders that hold my music twice this month. But I have scanned all of my bookshelves frequently, pulled titles down, handled them, felt their weight, opened to a favorite passage, read aloud and returned them to their place or stacked them on a table so that they were always comfortably within reach.

Books are old technology. I know they will disappear. We will eventually feed them post-apocalypse into abandoned fireplaces to heat ourselves or heat our food. Stories are the oldest technology. They don’t burn except in our eyes and ears. That is why we cling to them. We don’t want to give up on this thing, this part of us. Have you ever tried to cull your book collection? What goes first? We all have the airport book, already disintegrating on the shelf, the book we bought as a guilty pleasure to get us to Detroit, Dallas-Fort Worth or LAX. Throw it into the yard sale pile. Tell yourself you got rid of it not because you don’t want it, but because somebody else might.

So, today is a lazy Friday spent sorting music and books. The Gun Club’s Fire of Love is torching my ears. John Lee Hooker is cued up. The Replacements, Let it Be. Minutemen: Double Nickle on the Dime. These are the books I want to revisit, at this moment:

White Noise, Don Delillo

Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann

How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman

Collected Poems, E.E. Cummings

A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia

Cummings was a gift from my sister with an inscription dated 1994 and a reference to cloudbusting. The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia is the best and most complete reference book printed in the past ten years. Blood Meridian because, well…

“They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.”

Back to cummings for a second:

if learned darkness from our searched world

should wrest the rare unwisdom of thy eyes,

and if thy hands flowers of silence curled

upon a wish,to rapture should surprise

my soul slowly which on they beauty dreams

(proud though the cold perfect night whisperless

to mark,how that asleep whitely she seems

whose lips the whole of life almost do guess)

if god should send the morning;and before

my doubting window leaves softly to stir,

of thoughtful trees whom night hath pondered o’er

-and frailties of dimension do occur

about us

and birds known,scarcely to sing

(heart,could we bear the marvel of this thing?)

James Kelman wrote the strangest and most atypical novel about the post 9-11 experience in You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free. Some time before that he wrote How Late It Was, How Late. Dirt, darkness, drunkenness. Blindness. Not an easy book to finish because of the Glaswegian accent and the painful struggle of its protagonist, but worth the effort. Worth it because it takes you to a world you don’t know, don’t want to know. An ugly world described so hideously and beautifully. Our world.

Which brings us to Vollmann. It takes an incredible imagination to invent a color blacker than black, with bits of blood, teeth and piss worked in. The Royal Family is every wrong turn you ever made:

“Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE-CA. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all. “

Enough has been written about Bastard Out of Carolina and White Noise. I’m not a critic. I’m a fan. We all have great books falling off of our shelves, enough to keep us engrossed, obsessed for every lazy Friday afternoon.  Those are books I am happy to own.

Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go;
But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.

-Walt Whitman

I regularly scan two or three newspapers per day. This pastime eats up much of my book reading time, but directs me to more great reading to add to The Stack. I crave stories about the people who make the stories. I am as much interested in the craft of writing as in the adventures of the people who engage in the craft. Or whatever. Often, their lives aren’t worth reading about or don’t live up to the expectations set by the myths they set down on paper, but years of reading interviews and profiles of writers in the daily papers have led to a restless devotion to nonfiction, biography and memoir. Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side jumped off our own shelves on a hot July afternoon, followed me home, poured me a thick belt of bourbon and stayed with me until the brown bats began circling the yard. I was hooked after the author’s statement that, “I have no area of expertise outside of my imagination but that has to be enough because that’s what I have.” The cool kids were and are still reading the Beats and Bukowski but aren’t digging deep enough to find Jim Harrison. A mere seventy pages of introduction and “early life” passages drive home Harrison’s belief that the “overexamined life is also not worth living.” Then we are off to Seven Obsessions, including The Road, alcohol, private religion, hunting, fishing and dogs. How many are we up to? The hidden chapter covers food, or more accurately, eating. Eating the foods we grow, kill and catch.

“Sometimes my father would take an iron skillet, a baby-food jar of bacon fat, salt and pepper, and a loaf of my mother’s salt-rising bread along to the river so we could fry some trout for lunch. This was simple enough, far better than a sandwich, and an integral part of what you were doing. Catching fish, then eating them goes back a long way. Years later while deer hunting we usually ate the liver and heart right after the first kill.”

I’ve selfish reasons for loving this book. Michigan. Rilke. Dogs. But I enjoyed it mostly because when Jim Harrison talks about writing he is talking about reading. When he talks about cooking he celebrates eating. When he describes the road, it isn’t his road it is your road and my road.

The Stack includes new chunks of paper like Andrzej Stasiuk’s Nine. Read the Wikipedia entry here.

From the jacket:

Pawel, a young businessman in debt to loan sharks, wakes up one April morning in a sea of debris, broken glass, ripped upholstery, and clothes spilling out of the wardrobe. He turns to two friends for help: Bolek, a former coal miner, now a drug dealer who lives in tasteless luxury; and Jacek, an addict, who is himself on the run through Warsaw, a washed-out city, a hostile landscape of apartment blocks, railroad stations, wild gardens, factories, and suburban wastelands.

In this novel Andrzej Stasiuk portrays a generation of Poles, freed from outdated ideologies but left feeling adrift and disconnected from family, neighbors, and friends. At once existential crime fiction and a work of art, Nine establishes Stasiuk as a major voice in European literature.

Sure. I’m not a judge. But this book is full of places and character names I have never seen, voices different from any I’ve stumbled across even under the spell of the best Vodka. An excerpt used without permission:

“When she came out of the Stoklosy metro station, she called. No reply at Pawel’s place. the sky over Stegny and Wilanow was the color of the public telephone and as cold as the receiver in her hand. Nearby, a red mailbox mounted on the wall, an empty Krolewskie beer bottle on top. The wind blew; from the phone, from somewhere deep in the city, an electronic beeping.”

Or this:

“In the garish light over the pool table, hands, cuffs, and cues. The players circled lazily. They took off their jackets. Their shirts as if cut from black paper. Smoke gathered and hung beneath the lamp. The balls scattered with a crack, and one man said: ‘F*** Sarajevo.’ They moved slowly, prepared in an instant to leave on serious business. In their veins, not blood but images of actions. They were actors in a reality they had made up, because the time when sons repeated the gestures of their fathers was over.”

Order it from us, because that box in c-burg won’t have it. info@blacksburgreads.com

Two of my favorite people have decided to read books together. Not the same copy of a book, but copies of the same book at the same time. Even when they are apart they are reading together. I love this idea, despite my belief that reading is a solitary activity. Talking about books on the other hand, well that is what we do.

On this blogsite, you will see a page called The Stack.  That is simply a list of books waiting to be read.  Books I couldn’t part with, so I put them on the stack.  Real readers understand what I mean.

…read the New York Times Book Review, especially the essay by Joe Queenan. Baaad books. Bad. We read them, we love them.

What we gonna do next is read this article in the Washington Post about Grundy, Virginia’s efforts to lure Walmart. Both pages will probably require you to register to be able to view content, which you should do, but you can also obtain paper, ink-smudged copies at the Easy Chair Coffee Shop.

Where we discuss:

• The catharsis of 4/16
• The Walmart effect
• Summer comes too early
• Remodel update
• Shelfari

Huh. Thought this was a commentary about books, coffee and all that. Blaahgh about that. But I can’t write about the books I read without writing about the things that drive me to the books I read. Take Flight, Sherman Alexie’s perfectly timed novel about large-scale violence and introspection. This book ended up in my hands thanks to a customer who pointed out the striking graphic on the cover of a silhouetted gunman against a background of target rings. He (the customer) apparently assessed our ignorance of the wretched murders on campus and enlightened us to the inappropriateness of the positioning of this book on our shelf. We just weren’t paying attention. We had callously missed this display. We were too busy running around, serving coffee, keeping people away from windows, locking doors, adjusting the volume on the radio for updates as the numbers climbed from two to twenty to thirty-two, when we should have been worrying about our image. What happened next explains everything you need to know about why we keep working, why we find books and put them out for you to also find:

I bristled, I recoiled, and I reacted unpleasantly. And then I bought that book, took it home, and read it cover to cover. In agony over the senseless killing on Virginia Tech’s campus I buried myself in a book that was the worst book and the best book for that moment. It is not a Great book. It is a very good book. It devolves into cliche at moments. At other moments it embarrassed me for my ignorance of Native American political and social issues. It reminded me that I have weighed violence, been injured by violence, participated in violence, and turned away from violence. Some people don’t turn away. Some people embrace violence. We must figure out how to disturb that embrace. Removing visual, written, and spoken examples of violence is not part of the answer.

Walmart is already here. There should be a filter on the petition websites circulating in Blacksburg email inboxes to prevent anybody who has ever shopped in the Christiansburg Walmart from signing. It won’t happen, and yes, you should be able to change your mind. But there is a wild, hypocritical animal running loose in this town.

Some Blacksburg residents, like Margaret Breslau, have been speaking out about the Walmart Effect for years. Margaret has also been trying to do something about it through her amazing, tiny economic engine called Homebody. She was part of the driving force behind Blacksburg’s fundraising dinner for hurricane Katrina relief (along with Mike Soriano, owner of Champ’s, another shameless capitalist who emptied his freezers to feed people and raise money for New Orleans residents he’s never met.) Margaret has been present at every important grassroots event since the earth cooled and became inhabitable. I would guess she has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s books. If she is willing to publish her reading list, I will post it here. In the meantime, shop at Homebody. Unless you need fifty pound boxes of Puffed Rice.

The Math Emporium grinds down. Summer is here. Summer in a college town is different from summer at the time-share or your favorite fishing hole. Summer starts early. This year it starts earlier than ever. Today is reading day (I love that label) which means last night was The Crawl and today was The Creep. The Crawl is when you say hello and goodbye to every bar in the ‘burg. The Creep is when you muster the strength to go to your favorite coffee shop and order a bagel and coffee or some other food you can keep down. You give over your money with hands so smudged with ink it as if you tried to mail your fists and had the stamp hand-cancelled by a drunk carp. Need to read more? Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story is a start.

The Easy Chair Bookstore’s new home is almost ready. Seriously.

The people behind Shelfari have apparently been scanning my dreams. I’m sure I will get some kind of nocturnal royalties to spend. The Amazon connection sucks, but check it out anyway.

Thanks for reading.

Drinking cafe La Minita. Reading James Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand. Yeah, I’m still reading that. In the meantime I finished Flight by Sherman Alexie and Promise Not To Tell, by Jennifer McMahon. You can read a NY Times review of Flight here. Or read the Harper Collins reading guide to Promise Not to Tell here.