Beginning of the End

In May I move on to the next section of my life. The past five years have been fantastic. I have experienced so much personal growth in Knoxville. I have made friends that I will have for the rest of my life and have gotten to enjoy how great this city is. I leave this place, in many ways, different from when I came. The city has changed so much over the last few years. Looking back on my journey through school, or even just at my introduction/bio post for the wigshop I can see more clearly how the little quirks make Knoxville (at least the areas that I lived/enjoyed/listened) great. Originally I looked and saw tall(ish) buildings and assumed that something cool happened "down there". I was delighted to find the Pilot Light and Old City Java quickly in my first year here and have since spent countless hours in both fantastic establishments.

Recently I decided to read Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. It wasn't that I was unwilling to read it, I just wanted to save it for something special. That something special has become the end of my sojourn in Knoxville. I leave very soon and having taken an entire class on the works of James Agee it had to be Suttree and it could only end this way. Most of the places that have been formative for me in Knoxville have been places that I can read, talk to friends, or just relax. I decided that I wanted to read the book in a few of my favorite Knoxville spots and that my reading would be a good way to say farewell. Intermittently over the next few weeks (graduation for me is on May 11 and I plan on biking to campus in my robes and finishing it before I walk across the stage and move away) I will be posting my favorite places. Nothing overwhelming, just places that are important to me and why.

The first place is Old City Java. Old City Java has been my second home. B wrote a love letter in an earlier post. Now it is my turn. As a college student is apt to do, I moved a whole lot in the last five years. I never had an office (except for my favorite graduate carrell in Hodges Library, and that was frequently taken) so when I need(ed) to work Old City Java was the place. It was where I went to actually get work done and drink really great coffee while doing it. Meg and Shaun bought Old City Java a few years ago and brought about really great changes. The building is brighter and more welcoming. The alley (pictured above) has been a nice, recent development. They started serving Counter Culture Coffee which can be read about here. They also happen to be fantastic people who are passionate about coffee. They go on trips to learn about coffee. They are proud coffee nerds. It is refreshing to see people that are really passionate about something. Note: Being disaffected or too cool is lame. I love it there because you can tell that they are passionate about what they do. If you have never been, please go and check it out. It is far and away the best coffee shop in town. Enjoy the day, maybe go grab some coffee at Old City Java (109 S. Central Ave. Knoxville, TN 37902) and soak in the recent bout of great weather we have been having.

knoxville from afar

"Now is the night one blue dew..."

In the world of literature, Knoxville is represented admirably by two works: Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and James Agee's Pulitzer-winning A Death in the Family. Agee's work (and Agee himself) has been much celebrated our town in recent years- he now has a street and a park dedicated to him in his old neighborhood. Few Knoxvillians, however, have taken the time to read the book that made him such a notable native son.

It's a good book, particularly compelling if you've ever experienced the loss a family member. I know many of you don't have the time or desire to read the whole thing, but I think that everyone that loves this city should read the prologue "Knoxville: Summer, 1915". Not forced to in a high school classroom (which has made far too many people hate literature in general), but on their front porch in the early evening, listening to crickets. Because, that's exactly what the passage is about.


I was recently out of the country sitting in a bizarre tropical airport with a copy of A Death in the Family. I reread the prologue thinking about coming home. I doubt many other scruffy little cities have been so lovingly described. Sitting in the tropical heat, I was suddenly homesick for my porch swing. I wanted cool breezes and tall maple trees.

It occurred to me that the hundredth anniversary of that immortalized summer is coming up in a few years. The first time I read that passage a while back I was mainly stuck by what Knoxville had lost. Somewhere in the eighty years after 1915 our town had lost its charm, its pleasant character, its "Knoxvilleness". I think it's noteworthy that the passage was written in 1935 in New York City by a man who had left here. For a long time you had to leave Knoxville to love it.

Rereading "Knoxville: Summer, 1915" now, I realize that we have gained back something. I realize that my little house could have been one of those described by Agee. Market Square is filled with people again. One could walk through one of a half dozen neighborhoods this evening and see near the same scene as 1915 presented. I realize that Knoxville: Summer, 2015 might be the most like Agee's 1915 than it has been in a century. It makes me glad to be home.

i heart cormac mccarthy

[I originally posted this on my design blog yesterday, but I thought I'd share it here, with some added thoughts]
Oh man, I love his books. I'm reading All The Pretty Horses right now and I can't put it down. It's a nice change of pace in my reading of his novels- not as dense as Suttree and not as bleak as The Road. He has made it into the top pantheon of writers in my mind, most of which are dead- so who knows how many more great book he'll write?

The New York Review of Books review of The Road made an interesting observation:

That book [Blood Meridian] is usually viewed... ...as representing a kind of fulcrum, a borderland between the early quartet of Tennessee novels written in the 1960s and 1970s (The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree) that left McCarthy in obscurity and the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) that brought him fame. In Blood Meridian lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting; digression and indirection have not yet ceded the narrative to the dictates of the trilogy's archetypical western plots; and the Gothic impulse vies fiercely with the call to adventure. Setting aside the halfhearted No Country for Old Men, as charitably even the lover of McCarthy must, The Road seems to work its way back to the rich storytelling borderland of horror and the epic.

In short, we're entering the third stage of Cormac McCarthy's writing. Who's excited now?! For now, I'm plowing through his catalog of books- right now The Border Trilogy. 2008 seems destined to be the Year of Cormac.

Now that No Country for Old Men has gotten so much attention, many people are starting to get into McCarthy. But many Knoxvillians don't realize that McCarthy was once a Knoxvillian himself, and that his first four lesser-known books largely feature East Tennessee and Knoxville. Suttree, in particular, draws a vivid picture of mid-century Knoxville with descriptions of Market Square, the River, and all the old slums that used to hug the riverside. Click on "Searching for Suttree" on our sidebar and see if you recognize any places. Along with A Death in the Family, Suttree is THE classic Knoxville novel. There's no horses or bloody shoot outs-it's a complex character study in a complex context. Sorta like Hemingway. If you're living in Knoxville and like to read literature, Suttree is a must read.

I won't repeat what has been written down elsewhere about McCarthy. He's long gone from Knoxville, though he may visit it in his books- just as the father and son did in The Road. I'll end this with an aside: we're missing an opportunity here. By we, I mean Knoxville. Just as we haven't harnessed Bluegrass as part of our identity, the scruffy places that make Suttree so pithy are still here, but just barely. And we're neglecting them. Case in point: The Corner Lounge. A past favorite of McCarthy himself, this unique bar is currently closed after establishing itself as a center of music in Knoxville. Yesterday it was announced that Emory Place is getting new blood pumped into it. The Courtland Group is renovating just up the street. But let's make sure we don't gentrify out the scruffiness that is part of Knoxville's charm. Let's get the Corner Lounge back open in case McCarthy is back in town and needs a beer at a familiar place.

And a suggestion- we need a bar somewhere, on a back alley preferably, called Suttree's. It would be purposely a dive bar that could be a drinking shrine to one of Knoxville's most famous sons. A place that Sut would feel comfortable in, with fishbowls of beer. I think that would be more appropriate for McCarthy than the park was for Agee.

long lost knoxville

I just read a great story by Jack Neely in the Metro Pulse archives. He interviewed Patricia Cash, a former Dolly Parton look-alike prostitute who had "dated" men in the gritty Knoxville of the 1960s.

Many of us here at the Wigshop are big fans of Suttree, Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece placed in the same era of Knoxville that Cash knew. The stuff she describes sound very familiar to anyone who has read the book. Knoxville was a very bizarre place forty years ago. Neely points out:

"Like many other places Patricia knew, it figures in Cormac McCarthy's well-known novel, Suttree, which is on one level a portrait of mid-century Knoxville's underworld so rich and dark that most readers assume its details are fictional."

It's fascinating to read a firsthand account of those times from someone else who knew them. Cash's story sounds like a good outline for a unwritten McCarthy novel. The desperation and sometimes glamor of mid century Knoxville. I'm always amazed when I find out new things about our city's strange history. So seemly pedestrian these days, Knoxville has a vivid world just below the surface, these days and in its past, that requires a little digging. Kudos to Neely for researching and keeping the memories alive in print of Cormac and Patricia's scruffy city.

hat tip: KnoxvilleTalks

wig shop at the movies : no country for old men

Well, time for some blog filler. Since no one else seems inspired to write, I thought I'd share a few first impressions on a movie I saw tonight:
No Country for Old Men.
Awesome. Violent. Creepy. Memorable. Tense. Bones sticking out of arms.
I haven't read the book, but I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. I'm making my way through his Appalachian novels, which he wrote before the "Border Trilogy" that No Country is a part of. And I also love many of the Coen brothers' movies. So I had high expectations...
The verdict? I'm happy to say that it lived up to the current hype. If you don't like "slice of life" character study type movies (like my wife) you may not be so taken with it. It doesn't resolve itself neatly, so don't go expecting a tidy story. No Country is not a plot driven movie. It does, however, give you characters that will stay in your mind for a long time to come. It has scenes that you will replay in your mind over and over. It has subtlety that will keep you thinking things out after you leave the theater. It has the best villain of any movie since Silence of the Lambs.
Go see it.
Rating: 9/10 wigs on the Wigometer