coffeeslinger's Xanga

Dove that ventured outside.

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:55:07 GMT

Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
Ah the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn't it fill our hands differently with its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Poem Slightly in the Manner of Charles Wright While Listening to Mark O'Connor and Miles Davis

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:26:22 GMT

Waking each morning at dawn,
or before
the floor of this house sings,
tattooed shavings of grain, musty rings of old growth
echoes of strings, mandolin, bells, incense urns.

the floor strains, pushes one hand up under my chin to say it is done.
finished or just needs to catch its breath.

August is unwanted mail sitting in a shell
sweating open its envelopes, curling its pages shouting
Summer comes undone.

There in the background, imperfect, thundering, the footfall of a sailor
across the back of Johns Creek Mountain
trying to catch the line of a sail

failing and falling into the drone
of katydids, hornets, gutter drain
dogs disappear

on the heels of fallen fauns

Buy Local, Be Local, Brew Local

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:00:22 GMT

What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow.
I dream a highway back to you.

-Gillian Welch

What will sustain us through the summer? Where will this year's lessons go? We are a nation that enjoys a tremendous, bland convenience. Give us the red, unbruised tomato, even if it tastes not unlike the packing material that cradled it along thousands of miles of highway from field to brightly lit display cooler. Give us the new bestseller on our doorstep at forty percent savings, even if it means sticking it on a diesel-guzzling truck for three days. Give us omelette on a stick.

Or...

Join me for breakfast at the Farmers Market, Saturday, July 19th. We'll feature Cup of Excellence coffees from small family farms in Colombia and Costa Rica and Fair Trade Organic coffee from Bolivia. Listen to live music and enjoy the wares of local artisans. Dream a highway back to Blacksburg and then walk or pedal your way to a simpler life. Sustainability begins right here, right now.

Continuance

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:55:23 GMT

"Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice."

Mark your calendars, cancel all appointments. Limber up that arm. Arrive. Improvise. Nothing ever happens twice. A gathering such as this will not happen again soon.

August 15-17, 2008.

Bury the television in the yard. Find a babysitter, dog sitter, gold fish sitter. Dismember your cell phone. If you have been yearning for a weekend in the New River Valley, a chance to catch up with friends and breathe mountain air, or you just want to drink good beer and throw round objects at other round objects...this is your chance. We'll feed you.

We have a few roster spots open for Operation Overboard, a ten mile canoe trip down the New and a ten mile hike along the AT to our Clover Hollow home. Details will be forwarded if you email me at operationoverboard@blacksburgreads.com or call the Easy Chair Coffee Shop. You know how to find us.

Don't feel like subjecting yourself to the will of the whitewater, the punishment of the rocky trail? Chop, grind, grill or fry your favorite ingredients into a dish. Cover. Transport. Serve with a bottle of something from Blacksburg's Vintage Cellar (buy local, be local). Plan to drink the greater portion of that bottle yourself? Then plan to sleep in a tent. Acreage we have. Bail money we do not.

August 15-17. Be. There.

Together we burn, together we burn away.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:46:53 GMT

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Roasters Group rolls into Blacksburg town on Friday. The weather greeting this circus befits a gathering of people who play with fire: lightning, heat and sun. More heat when the grills are fired and the mustards are served at Kathi Z's flavor dynamics class. Black lightning when the chocolate is sampled and espresso shots are pulled. Poor Mountain is no longer burning but there will be smoke. Roast smoke. Pig smoke. Tobacco smoke as only Joe Nazare can present it. We'll cool things with a water quality class delivered by Skip Finley of Cirqua. Need a break from the sensory overload? Play with the roast analyzer on loan from Javalytics.

When we sat down to work on recipes for the beer banquet (Did I forget to tell you about that?) planned for Friday night, we quickly diverged into stories of previous MARRG meetings. Stashed bottles of Port, oyster roasts until dawn, bonfires visible from space. I asked The Rev to read the roster of the people heading our way. Because of coffee, we have friends from Virginia's Eastern Shore, Clearwater, Zimbabwe, Matagalpa, New Orleans, Green-vul, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, St. Paul. We wish we could devote more time to those friendships. We neglect them. But here they come, spending their own dough to get here. For one weekend in the summer, for the third straight year, Blacksburg is the center of the Mid-Atlantic Coffee Universe. And we are going to enjoy ourselves.

We do what we do.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:58:42 GMT

"when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by itself
and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was."

A later poem by the later Charles Bukowski. A poem about being a writer. Or a soldier. A bookseller. Until you die or it dies in you. Adventurers, loggers, miners, maybe a few athletes and musicians. Especially poets, pushing the ink-drenched mass up the landscape only to have it roll back and blacken you into the background.

If you have been chosen, it will do it by itself. It is a shitty poem, mostly. But it is pure Bukowski, and eventually it hits a sweet spot. Do what you will do. Be good at it. Work at it. Get dirty. Either things will fall your way or they will not.

For three years we sold books. We built not one, but two great bookstores. First at 101 South Main and then under the same roof as the Easy Chair Coffee Shop. We got dirty. We worked at it. We were good at it. We did what we could do. Things did not fall our way.

So, we return to our roots.

Transition

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:09:55 GMT

Xanga wants to know if I am keeping my site. The one I paid for to have for life. Just like an old car, it might not be pretty, but it's paid for. So, yes.

Major updates coming soon. Bookstore news, coffee roasting news, big changes around the Easy Chair, and the MARRG army is coming to the Burg. Stay tuned.

Most Things Haven't Worked Out

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:22:50 GMT

Been away awhile. Tried to catch up on some reading. Mostly just tried to catch up. I think I am losing ground. I know there are others who feel this way: that the old, sacred things are fast becoming beyond our protection. Maybe they don't want our protection. Maybe we should just let them die. Have you heard about the Homer Noble farm? It was once owned by Robert Frost. A group of bored, idle slackers who will never be heard from again trashed it.

"It seemed once that Robert Frost would be with us forever, like some lichen-laced stone in a field. But finally he did die, in 1963 at the age of 88, leaving biographers to quarrel about his merits as a man and readers to marvel over his body of work, which, among other achievements, twinned a mastery of language with wisdom about natural things."

Aren't we part of the "natural things?" Shouldn't we piss, trash and burn? What other proof will remain?

We work to preserve beauty and ugliness. The Bill Steber photo above depicts a man filling the grave of Junior Kimbrough. In old blues recordings I hear the darkness, horror and exuberance of human life. Evil is going on. Love is going on. We work to preserve, but nothing gold can stay.

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
The leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay."

When the power goes out we will have the graves of bluesmen to visit. When the lights go out we will have dimly lit pages of Frost to visit. We'll drag out guitars with Sitka tops and catgut, picks made of weathered shells. We will repair, we will not preserve. We cannot manufacture these dreams, cannot market them. Nothing gold can stay.

Four-by-four

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:43:29 GMT

I'm reading the opening pages of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, by Chris Salewicz. I really do not want to put this book down, but I am distracted by other books and writers. I am thinking about my lost punk ethic, risk taking, and why I am afraid to piss people off who desperately need to be pissed off.

The other books and writers distracting me are:

The Place You Love is Gone, Melissa Holbrook Pierson
W.W. Norton

Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra
Mountian Trail Press

Pierson is not afraid to piss you off. She is as punk as it gets. She does not try to bring you about gently to the perils facing your favorite places. Hers is the rough middle finger poking you in your glazed-over eye. But she loves those places that are gone and writes of them:

"Five minutes from home and we're driving into the Cuyahoga Valley. From here, I can see that I am driving back years and years, back into childhood, for all that I describe is gone now, or almost all. At the cross of the railroad tracks there is a gas station and a few shops. At another crossroads a half mile later, where one road arches back up the steep hill toward the town of Cuyahoga Falls, there is a a dark little roadhouse called the Lodge, which serves a couple different forms of beef. Then the pavement goes along the banks, and winds under trees, or straightens out past the old farms. One of them is where we pick our Halloween pumpkins, after sitting to be photographed on a small mountain of them in the back of a wagon. The memory struggles under an equal heap of lacerating nostalgia. We simply called this place "the valley," because we knew in some well-obscured part of us that the Cuyahoga was the origin of everything. Not only was it primal in itself, a slow meandering of brown water through quiet brown woods, but we would not be here except for it. We barely notice its existence."

Pierson could be describing the cider mills and sled hills of my own lacerated nostalgia. The train trestles, declining pottery factories and collapsing water towers. The backyard playfields and sandlots. We all love some part of the place where we grew up, even if we fled as fast as we could. We take with us the memories of favorite hangouts, nights out too late, friends who also moved on.

In Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra moves on, and comes home. Very personal stories compiled from her work for the Roanoke Times describe the impact that small-town living and big city chaos have had on the author as a chronicler of the American experience. She came back to Blacksburg, Virginia for the same reasons many of us choose to relocate here. She also pays tribute to her parents' immigrant experience:

"Thinking about it now, I can imagine naturalization is somewhat like being adopted - or maybe the word is accepted. Life doesn't change, but all of a sudden you feel more like you have a place at the table, like you're standing inside the circle, playing on the team and feeling part of a family. Suddenly everything you worked for, everything you left behind - including the relatives in your native country - everything you've sacrificed, has been worth it. With a simple certificate you feel validated. And you feel, as my parents told me, empowered to go forth without hesitation to meet the opportunity you traveled thousands of miles to sieze. Really, it is a staggering experience."

Chachra's book comes to you through the DIY ethic of punk. She wrote a tribute to Blacksburg, found a publisher and got it printed and distributed. She reminds us what a wonderful town this is. Before we are all sitting around over our beers talking about the gone, gone place we loved.

So these two hundred people walk into a bookstore...

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:51:37 GMT

This photo, taken from the second floor of the Easy Chair Bookstore Cafe, pretty much sums up the night of July 20th and the earliest minutes of the morning of July 21st. Cohen (bottom left) and Alleyne (bottom right) were moved to the front of the line because they took the time to call Roanoke Times reporter Angela Manese-Lee who wanted to interview some Harry Potter fans. It was our way of saying thanks for supporting Blacksburg's independent bookstore through all the hype, insanity and ridiculous discounts.

We counted down the last ten seconds, a huge cheer went up, and books were handed out quickly and without incident. The party was a great success and I never had so much fun handing out books. There is a lot of cynicism surrounding J.K. Rowling and her seven volume epic, either from ignorance or arrogance. I haven't personally been swept up in the stories, but my wife has barely put hers down since cracking the cover. She's on the porch in front of our Clover Hollow home as I write this and claims to actually be reading slower as she approaches the last chapters. To savor the experience. This is a person who devours books.

It is hard to argue that Harry hasn't created more readers, even if the growth is short-lived or the young fans move on (or back) to electronic entertainment over time. 8.3 million copies in 24 hours. There hasn't been anything else like it, ever, in the publishing world. And I think that is what gets the detractors so worked up. "Harry Potter hasn't turned kids into real readers, I mean how many of them will go on to read Saxo Grammaticus?"