Monday, September 13, 2004

Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square has...

filed for reorganization under the auspices of Federal Bankruptcy Protection.
Jeezus I am always the last one to find these things out.
I went down to harvard Square tonight to buy my brother a copy of Chester Himes' "Rage in Harlem" for his birthday and found Wordsworth locked and dark.
Ghod I've been shopping in that store for something like twenty seven years going back to my dim dark days of summer school at Manter Hall.
Harvard Square has finally gone over the hump once a bohemian paradise now a wretched urban mall with all the usual vices included.
Sad....there were once something akin to sixteen book stores in Harvard Square they are now officially down to three and one of those is a Barnes and Noble.
Thanks to that neat-o global economy and it's herald the internet, localism and local-ness are a dying phenomenon all over the nation. We do a great deal of "heritage preservation" which is naught but an adjunct of boosting the tourist trade but we do very little to maintain a particular local mood or lifestyle.
Which is why whole tracts of Fort Myers Beach Florida looks exactly like the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington.
Sooner or later this is gonna bite us in the backside.
Meanwhile my heart goes out to Wordsworth's owner Hillel Stavis he fought the good fight and still ended up with his back to the wall.
I wish I could help but I'm on relief at the moment and make a poor prospective investor.

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