Note: The following article, eulogizing Birmingham, Alabama’s Greencup Books, first appeared in the November 2009 edition of Pavo, the “online magazine” of arts and culture in the “Magic City.” Like Greencup, Pavo is now also defunct and, I think, its absence is a loss to the community.
Each month, Pavo organized itself very loosely around a different theme, and in keeping with the Thanksgiving season, the theme for November ‘09 was “gratitude.” Elsewhere on the website that month, Pavo contributors were asked to name a few things for which they were grateful. For what it is worth, here is my list, followed by the eulogy:
The last page of The Great Gatsby; the first two pages of Tropic of Cancer; page thirteen of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; the guitar solos in “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Pale Blue Eyes”; Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon; Lily Tomlin’s face in that one scene in Nashville; carrot juice; Buster Keaton; my parents, and brother, and sister-in-law, and nephews; fried oysters; early bedtimes.
* *
Greencup Books is dead.
Long live Greencup Books.
This is not easy to write—hopefully you know it already, and I am not the one breaking the news—but Greencup is officially no more. Struggling since it opened to keep its head over water, the not-for-profit bookspace on Richard Arrington Boulevard has finally closed its doors for good.
Of course, the day was bound to come. As owner Mike Tesney has been saying a lot lately, “It was never a question of if; it was a question of when.” For months, Greencup’s website had been soliciting donations in an effort to keep things going, relying on the community’s faith in and support of the vision. Certainly, there were lots of factors behind the final decision. Turnout for Greencup events had always been unpredictable at best; a new construction project across the street recently consumed a good stretch of the store’s parking, making things worse. Greencup’s own building, meanwhile, needed a few thousand dollars to get itself quickly up to code. Many locals considered the very premise of Greencup hopelessly quixotic from the get-go. When, in October, word came that the store only had a few weeks left, the announcement, however unwanted, surprised nobody.
Greencup ended, with a fitting touch of symbolism, on the Day of the Dead, Sunday night, November 2. Next door the Bare Hands Gallery hosted its annual Dia de los Muertos parade and festivities; all night, skeleton-faced revelers passed by Greencup’s open doors, some of them stopping in for a read, for conversation, to make a purchase or use the bathroom. Some walk-ins browsed the store that night for their first and last time. Friends came in and paid their final respects. And a kind of death hung over everything.
* *
I am a twelfth-grade English teacher, and for the first few minutes of class every Friday, my students write about whatever they want. Topics range widely. Several Fridays ago, one of my students wrote this:
“I went to Greencup Books for the first time yesterday. I’m usually a Barnes and Noble kind of guy,” the student admitted, “but I was hanging out with my friends and we needed someplace to go. It was really exactly like I expected, except that it smelled like smoke instead of used books. I used to read books from the same series at the library and the person who read them last always wore really strong perfume. But I digress.
“The thing I noticed about the bookstore: at surface level, it’s really not as good as a megachain. I could only find one of the books I looked for (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and the place was hardly organized at all. So I’ve been trying to figure the appeal of these used books stores, and all I can chalk it up to at this point is that reading must not be as much of an individual event as I thought it was. I think books need to be passed hand to hand. That’s why I like to find used books instead of buying them new, and that’s why people who love to read love libraries.”
While it lasted, Greencup hosted rock shows, art shows, writing workshops and readings, and it offered local writers design and publishing services for their own work—but the followings that resulted never established enough of a steady momentum to keep things running in the face of great odds. Russell Helms opened the store in February of 2008; Helms moved to Kentucky and Tesney took ownership in July of the same year. From its inception, Greencup was an anti-capitalist venture—a concept, Tesney says, which most people had trouble swallowing. (“I got tired of explaining it,” he says, adding that the idea of an anti-capitalist bookstore caused some visitors to laugh outright.) But Greencup’s thing all along was about fostering creativity and community, about facilitating good reads and conversation, and doing so within a framework that defiantly rejected the machinery of money-making. Books were cheap. Workers volunteered their time and were paid in food and maybe gas money. More than a store—the word “store,” in fact, is almost entirely misleading—Greencup existed above all to offer a community space rooted in art and music and books. It boasted comfortable old couches and a wide selection of politically radical zines. Performers came from all over the U.S., even from outside the country, to perform in the upstairs space; the standing cover was “about five bucks” for any show. Last year, Greencup hosted an alternative media fair for zinesters, do-it-yourself bookmakers, and indy record labels across the Southeast. When Cave 9, the all-ages punk venue, closed its own doors earlier this year, its operations moved briefly into Greencup. The founding ideal, Tesney says, was to be “an open space for everybody.” The design was aggressively anti-establishment, and there was in the whole thing a particular spirit of youth.
“I’m disappointed that more people didn’t take advantage of this place,” says Devon Thagard, the store’s most loyal volunteer/worker, currently a student at the University of Alabama. “Overall I am grateful for the experience and all the things I got to learn while working there. I only wish that more people could have had the same experience.”
One of the last scheduled events at Greencup was a return performance by Insurgent Theatre, a radical theatre troupe from Milwaukee. A description of their show, “Ulyssess’ Crewmen,” ran on Greencup’s website: “We join the struggle against the imperial economy arranged by bureaucratic trade regimes that make us all complicit in the exploitation and destruction of others. We question and investigate the psychosexual underpinnings of both this bureaucracy and those of us attempting to rebel against it. We use Homer’s Odyssey as a framework to stage these struggles in a single claustrophobic scene between two people, one of whom is bound and gagged.”
Also on the ticket that night: Mangos with Chili, “The Bay Area’s only cabaret show for transgenders of color.”
In Birmingham, a line-up like that could only happen at Greencup.
Nobody came.
* *
The box-store chains and internet booksellers have, for some time now, made it easy to quickly obtain any book you may want; but a few months back a friend commented that he still preferred to let the tricks of serendipity dictate his reading life—to let, in other words, his reads find him. I tend to agree with that philosophy. The best of the books that I have accidentally discovered hold a certain kind of power in my memory; there is the sense that book and reader stumbled upon each other unsuspectingly, through some turn of fate, forging something unique in the encounter. At McKay’s in Chattanooga I discovered Appreciation by Leo Stein, Gertrude’s brother, and the book became, for me, an unexpected personal classic; at the Alabama Booksmith I came across Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! and Charles Portis’ The Dog of the South, two of the funniest books I have ever read; I left a store in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock, a 1940s noir title I never would have sought out, but a read which now hangs heavily over my memory of a favorite road trip; and once I found, deep in the recesses of a Chapel Hill bookstore, a well-worn copy of Woody Guthrie’s Born to Win, a book I had sought since I was sixteen and, having finally forgotten it, found by mistake a decade later. Bought and read by accident, these books carry a particular kind of weight and mystery in my reading experience. Though serendipity can do its work in a Barnes & Noble too, the really meaningful accidents seem to occur in smaller, less predictable environments.
This was one Greencup’s greatest assets: it was the best place in town for the unexpected find.
* *
Some titles I’ve acquired from Greencup over the last couple of years:
• The Life of Black Hawk
• A book of conversations with Eudora Welty
• Jerry Kozinski’s Being There
• The second issue of “8 Letters,” a zine on knuckle tattoos
• A copy of Beowulf
• The first issue of Cumulus
• “Klaudt Family Specials,” a bio-songbook from the gospel-singing “Klaudt Indian Family” of Doraville, Georgia
• “Well Glory!” – another paper-bound songbook from the Willcutt family, the “sunrise devotional group” at Birmingham’s WBRC radio
• John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction
• Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280
• Scratchy 45s of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” and (in its original sleeve, no less) the Mick Jagger/Jackson 5 “State of Shock”
• The Alabama Wurlitzer at its Best, a long-playing record from 1986 featuring “Big Bertha,” the Alabama Theater’s signature organ
• From 1980, a Japanese handbook of “handy” English phrases (“I’m getting out of this crummy business”; “My wife goes through my pockets”; “He becomes a victim of Demon Rum”; “I hear you’re some pianist”; “It’s a job with sexual flavor”; “Some typewriter I got”; “Somebody framed you!”)
Some of these I bought with money. Most I got as trades.
As I write this, I am listening to the Alabama Wurlitzer.
* *
The Saturday after its official closing, Greencup hosted a final, cash-only, friends-only sale, everything 50% off to Greencup supporters. “This is a thank-you sale,” Tesney announced, “not a let’s make more money thing.” Visitors were encouraged to bring flashlights in case the power had already been cut off.
I was not there, and I do not know if there was electricity or not. But it does make for an effective image of how Greencup finally ended: quietly, stubbornly, its most faithful followers rummaging with flashlights through stacks of old books.
* *
Pavo’s theme this month is “gratitude”: a good fit, I think, for this eulogy.
Much could be said about the ups and downs of Greencup Books—the trials, the successes, the frustrations—but let’s leave it for now at a simple “thanks.” For offering, for a little while, an important community space; for encouraging good reads and the exchange of ideas; for providing a wide-open venue for music and experiment; for reminding us that, perhaps, reading is not as much of an individual event as we might think.
Mike Tesney is moving to Tuscaloosa, where he plans to try it again with a similar bookspace; besides the books, the Tuscaloosa outfit will be equipped with a recording studio, and Tesney is already working with connections at the University of Alabama to build a collaborative base. Up in Kentucky, Greencup founder Russell Helms works towards an MFA and writes. Birmingham, meanwhile, is left with a hole that wants filling.
And so, I say, a toast:
Here’s to further Birmingham endeavors as impossible, as maddening, and as necessary as our late store.
Long live Greencup Books.
Amen.