- Digital Collections

SPRING 2010
PHOENIX
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You've just opened a collection of unfamiliar pieces from a familiar past. For fifty years now
the Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine has published the creative work of students, faculty
and alumni at the University of Tennessee. Curating this past gave our usual selection
process an historical dimension. The reactionary essays of the 1960s, the experimental
photography of the 1970s, the awkward graphic design templates of the 1990s-in each
period the magazine is marked by its historical situation. Likewise, this volume is bound
by our situation in 2010, a time when we are all implicated in a seemingly endless cultural
project to make sense of the not-so-distant past--with nostalgia, irony, and critical
awareness. What follows is an unadorned display of our selections from the archives. We
hope it recalls your relationship to society as a member of University of Tennessee and a
citizen of the world. It certainly had this effect on us.
Enjoy,
Phoenix
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SPRING 2010
PHOENIX
...............)
50 years
Literary Arts Magazine
Spring 2010, Vol. 51, Issue 2
The University of Tennessee
Table of Contents
19 6 0s
4
14
31
8
II
12
20
30
19
29
Fiction
Wake for Susan-C] McCarthy
Gothick Tale-Jan Bakker
A Drowning Incident-C] McCarth
Non- Fiction
Perspective Of A Conscience: A Review of
Conscience ofa Conservative by Barry Goldwater
-Renni Dillard
The story we didn't print
Barbarism, I 964-Marshall Siler
Culture and Autarky-Patrick Thomas
A Molotov Cocktail And A Whit Plastic Sax
-Charles Bebber
Poetry
Old Faces-Stephen Shu-ning Liu
For Another Time-David Lee Rubin
61
63
1990S
74
68
78
67
43
44
54
55
56
Non- Fiction
The New Architecture-John Furlow
Mechanicsville
What Next for the University?
Poet's Corne~Robert "Walker
Film Fantasy-Sandy Sneed & Lewis Goans
Eric Lewald-Ruth E. Garwood
Poetry
No more to build on there-MichaeID. Galligan
Why I Abhor A Lot Of Modern, Pseudo-Deep
Poetry-Richard Laurence Barclay
the fishwife's tale-Marla Puziss
Concrete-Edd Hurt
Spring is Spring if...-John Girard Willis
The Little Faiths-Gary Shockley
Heat lightening-Marla Puziss
45
46
47
Figure 2. I-Robert Reid
Figure 2.2-Kerry Bowden
Figure 2.3-Amalio Monllor
35
38
48
50
51
52
41
42
Fine Art
19 80s
Fiction
The Lette~Alan Gratz
Non- Fiction
10110 gallery-Amy Britnell
Alex Haley: The Legacy-Elizabeth W Goza
Poetry
Leaving Him, Leaving NorthCarolina
-Jennifer C. WOrth
Fine Art
71
72
73
2000s
1970S
Figure 3.4-K.G. Freeman
Figure 3.5-Larry Maloney
82
83
Figure 4.1- Thomas Ducklo
Mickey Stigmata-Greg Bunch
Untitled (Lake City, TN)- wendy Robinson
Poetry
Coal,plant,breathing exercise-Justin Rubenstein
A Summer Praye~Jenny Darden
Fine Art
81
84
85
2010
87
105
93
93
94
94
95
96
A Good Scolding-Trischa Brady
Alierpiece for Lost Innocence-Heather Pace
(De)constructed Landscape-Jes Owings
Fiction
The Coyote-Allison Yilling
Non- Fiction
The Glory of SEC Football-WOods Nash
Poetry
Lyric I-John De Witt
Marissa-LB Gosset
Travels-Caila WOod
Opening Up-Philip Hopkins
Nightmare-Amien Essif
A Timely Foothold-Jonathon Phillips
Fine Art
97
98
Poetry
62
64
65
Special-Jon Parker
Praye~Karen Obnesorge
Champagne Hou~Linda Parsons Burggraf
99
100
Fine Art
58
59
60
Figure 3.I-Jerrie Williams
Figure 3.2-PaulYount
Dangerous Dreams-Beverly Brecht
101
102
10 3
10 4
Reach Out and Touch Face-Sara Miller
Untitled 21 (from "Cerebral Ash" series
-Jonathon Bagby
Drew Dudack
Just to Prove That They Really Existed
-Hannah Patterson
HeiPark
Kelly Hider
Kelly Hider
Tennis CourtslRainbow-- Rachel Clark
Wake for Susan
CJ McCarthy, Jr:
"Who makes the bridal bed,
Birdie, say truly?""The grey headed Sexton
That delves the grave duly."
Sir Walter Scott
FALL 1959
4
IT WAS NINE O'CLOCK on a sparkling Saturday morning in October. The squirrels
had apparently retired for a mid-morning siesta, and Wes arose a little stiffiy from his
position beneath a towering shagbark hickory. An orange sun was climbing the eastern
sky rapidly and drenching the dripping woods with an unseasonable warmth. Wes leaned
his rifle against the tree and unbuttoned his jacket. He felt a little irked at having missed
the squirrel. He had seen four or five, but that had been his only good shot-the one
that came slithering down the tree directly in front of him. At the shot, the squirrel had
jumped from the side of the tree and for a minute Wes thought that it was hit. Then he
heard the squirrel scamper off among the dead leaves.
Wes picked up his rifle and started slowly for home. He still had the yard to mow.
A well worn path led through the cool shade of second growth hardwoods-oaks and
hickories. The damp leafcarpeted woodland floor was punctured haphazardly with mosspadded grey limestone. The path led past the remnants of an abandoned quarry. Wes
paused to chunk a rock into the green algae covered water of the quarry hole. Then he
turned off onto the railroad track. It was longer home this way and harder walking among
the rotting ties and lecherous honeysuckle. The sagging rails were brown and rusty with
disuse. Wes walked along them, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, falling off
every few steps. He followed the path of the old railbed until it turned east across brown
harvested fields. Then he turned into the woods again.
In a rain-washed red clay gulley he stooped and picked up a flattened hog-rifle ball. He
scraped the mud from the oxidized lead and examined it. Well. Wes wondered when it had
been fired, who had fired it, and at what, or whom? Perhaps some early settler or explorer
had aimed it at a menacing Indian. More likely it had been intended for game for a table
of some later date, when the Indians were all gone. Perhaps it had been fired only thirty. or
forty years ago. The old muzzle-loaders were used in
this part of the country until fairly recently, he knew.
As Wes examined the rifle-ball, the woods became
populated with ghosts of lean, rangy frontiersmen
with powder-horns and bullet pouches slung from
their shoulders and carrying long-barreled, brasstrimmed rifles with brown and gold maple stocks.
Wes pocketed the relic and walked quietly through
time-haunted woods.
It was probably the discovery of the rifle-ball that
prompted him to look for the burial plot. He had been
there once before with the Ford boy and thought that
he could find it again.
He increased his pace until he came to the road.
Crossing to the other side, he climbed through a
disreputable looking barbed-wire fence, and struck
out in the direction of the burial ground. The trees
were strung with glistening dew-beaded spider webs,
which Wes occasionally ran into, and the sun was
getting a little warm for his heavy clothing.
The cemetery was not exactly where he
remembered it being, and he stumbled upon it almost
by accident. As he entered this forgotten resting
place, the rich and lonely haunted feeling thickened
in the air.
Here in the graveyard, scrubby pines grew boldly
within a circle of oaks and hickories. The stones
nestled secretively beneath the tangled honeysuckle.
They were moss-mellowed and weather-stained in that
rustic way which charms lovers of old things.
Wes moved about among the stones pushing
back the choking vines and weeds and reading the
inscriptions. So old they were. So forgotten; especially
forgotten. Just a few feet beneath this soil lay the
chalky bones of people who had, in all probability,
walked here even as he did now. The bearded stones
themselves seemed arrested in that transitory state of
decay which still recalls the familiar, which pauses in
the descent into antiquities unrecognizable and barely
guessable as to origin.
1834, for instance, was a year one could remember.
In this year, a stone said, the Source of Life has
reclaimed His own-one Susan Ledbetter. Susan had
lived on the earth a full seventeen years.
From a simple carved stone, the marble turned
to a monument; from a gravestone, to the surviving
integral tie to a once warm-blooded, live person. Wes
pictured Susan:
She was blue-eyed and yellow-haired, soft and
bright in her homespun dress. (r834 was a year one
could remember; not like 1215, or 1066, but a real year.)
Susan sat at the table with her parents and brothers
and eyed with pardonable pride the meal she and her
mother had prepared.
There were stacks of steaming golden cornbread
eager to soak up the fresh churned butter. A bowl
of collard greens and one of pinto beans, each laced
delicately with the flavor of pork scraps. And the
fragrant platter of fried pork tenderloin. Stewed
apples crowded in a chipped blue chinaware bowl,
and an earthen crock of cool buttermilk promised
respite from the heat of the day. As Susan watched
her brothers eat she swelled with womanly pride.
Susan should have a lover, and the lover looked
strangely like Wes. He came courting, a gangling 18
year old, with dark serious eyes and a quick grin.
On warm summer evenings they sat on the
front stoop and talked about the things they knew:
neighbors and folks and crops and childhood and
parents. The boy tried to tell her funny things he
had heard the men say at Josh Moore's store, but
they never had the same ring to them. She laughed,
or smiled, but he felt an empty flatness in their
repetition. And so he told her the things he dreamed
of, bashfully at first, but always dark eyed and serious.
He spoke softly and slowly, looking up from the
ground occasionally to glance at her, or inadvertently
stop her heart with his quick grin.
They discussed death and bass-fishing and square
dances, and the epic of life around them seemed to
unfold. They imparted to each other a great deal
of understanding.
And so they fell in love; he first with her eyes and
hands and then her shoulders and soft rounded hips;
she with his arms and neck and wild brown hair.
Not that they spoke of these things. No words
of love passed between them, and at night when he
kissed her standing there on the stoop and wheeled
around and headed for the gate, it seemed that he
must tell her how he felt. He would turn at the gate
5
wake for Susan
and look back and see her standing luminescent
beneath the autumn stars and he wanted to run back
and crush her in his arms and whisper wild things in
her ear. But he simply raised his hand and she hers,
and he ambled home emptily beneath wind-tortured
trees that spoke in behalf of the silent stars:
You walk here, as so many others have walked. The
ancient oaks have seen them. The lifesap courses through these
twisted limbs as it flows hot through your veins-for awhile.
The branching creek-rooted cottonwood cares not for the trees
that sucked at this damp earth before its birth, but only for
the earth, and the sunwarmth, and the seed. You walk here.
Moonwarmed and wind-kissed, you walk here ... for awhile.
And the boy ambled home and eased wearily into
bed and tossed and rolled so that the bed-ropes had to
be tightened for the second time in two weeks.
In October the first frost glazed this remote valley.
The harvesting was done and preparations were being
made for Winter. Great stores of food were being
laid away in earthy cellars and musty smoke-houses.
The rich smell of wood smoke hung in the valley,
promising the peace and warmth of winter nights
before a friendly fire. The savory aroma of hog-meat
being cooked in great black outdoor kettles spoke
of bountiful tables and festivity within the housewarmth of winter. It was a very good time of year. The
time of year when one reflects with satisfaction on a
well done summer's work.
For Susan it was a very good time of year. She kept
busy with endless household chores and minded them
not in the least. In fact, she was barely conscious of
them and more than once was surprised, upon turning
to some project or other, to discover that she had
already done it.
Had she been superstitious, she might have insisted
that some kind fairy folk had washed the tomatoes
that she left on the sideboard.
Perhaps her thoughts were a little too much taken
with a tall lean and dark-eyed man (to her he was very
much a man, and perhaps he was). As yet there had
been no serious talk between them, but she knew, and
she was willing to permit him to take his time. The
question of her future was settled quite agreeably and
her youth told her all was well. Give him time; all will
be well.
6
The boy himself was likewise busy with chores. It
was a busy time of year, a good time of year. The crisp
mornings got one out of bed almost by force. Fried eggs
and sausage tasted so much better when there was frost
in the air. As he swung out the door swinging the milk
pail the tingling air filled his nostrils with seductive
promises.
Chickens scattered at his approach, clucking
nervously. He swung his pail at them and laughed
as they broke into panic. Passing the wood ricks he
noted with satisfaction that nearly all the logs had
been cut and stacked in martial order between poles
driven into the ground. There was a full cord of shiny
triangular sticks of split yellow pine kindling. The
very air seemed glutinous with rich plenty. Reaching
the barn (it was a small shed of grey weathered
planking), he loosened the leather thong from the nail
and entered with a loud and hearty greeting for the
surprised milch cow.
Diurnal forces carpeted the forest floor with
thick layers of chunchy brown leaves, torn from the
halfnaked trees. Long enough these leaves had shaded
the wooded ridges and slopes. Now they returned to
the earth to decay and so provide life and sustenance
for their unformed successors. Long enough, leaves.
The year was 1834, and a very fine year it was. It
was fall, and that is a good time of year.
In a rocky woodland glen, a minor tragedy
occurred. A fox, a little lean (even foxes walk
noisily in crisp leaves), had managed to cut off a
very frightened striped chipmunk from his home
among the piled stones. The fox sprang full upon the
chipmunk, but before he could get his sharp little
teeth into the furry prize, it had slipped between
his legs. The fox whirled frantically and pounced
again, this time pinning the chipmunk between his
forepaws. Cautiously he lowered his head to complete
the capture. He opened his mouth and released the
pressure of his paws, but the chipmunk was too quick
for him. His teeth clicked with a clear ringing snap in
the frosty air.
The chipmunk was a flash of golden brown
streaking for a crevice in the rocks. Just as it gained
this refuge, the fox, by a combination of agility and
luck, pinned it down with one paw. But the chipmunk
C] McCarthy, Jr.
was inside the crevice and the fox could not get his
sharp pointed snout through the crack far enough to
reach it. Furthermore the chipmunk was worming
forward even under the pressure of the fox's paw, until
it was wedged down into the rocks where the fox could
not dig it out. The fox thrust his face into the crevice
as far as it would go, which left the warm fragrance
of the chipmunk several inches in front of his nose,
and whined like a puppy. He scraped and clawed at
the chipmunk until it was bloody and lifeless, snuffed
loudly, and with one last despairing whine trotted off
through the noisy leaves, leaving the chipmunk for the
smaller carnivores.
The weather had grown too cold for out of door
sparking. (It was October and the valley shone with
white glistening frost beneath the long slanted rays
of the rising sun.) It was good hunting weather and
the woods echoed periodically with the sharp crack
of rifles or the deeper hollow sound of the fowling
piece. But the weather had grown too cold for out of
door sparking. Susan and the boy occasionally sat in
the front room of her house on chilly evenings and
shared conversation with her parents and her brothers.
The brothers were tolerant, but a little amused, and
they made the boy uncomfortable.
Sometimes everyone would go to bed and leave the
two of them alone for a little while before the boy had
to depart. On these occasions the boy was even more
flustered than when the family was in the room.
He would say, "Well Susan, I guess I'd better be
getting along." And she would say, "0 don't go just yet,
it's not so late." And he would say, "Well, I'll have to be
leaving pretty soon," and look darkly at her until she
lowered her head with an embarrassed smile and then
he would reach over a little awkwardly and kiss her on
the cheek. She would look up, just a little, and he would
hold her shoulders and kiss her on the mouth. Nothing
was ever so soft and warm and sweet scented. He
would hold her for awhile, not speaking, but his breath
catching a little in his throat, distrusting his voice
altogether. After awhile she would look up at him,
rather boldly, he thought, and ask him would she see
him tomorrow, or would he be at Arwood's Saturday
night, or what, and he would answer as best he could,
kiss her on the cheek and say he'd better be going and
rise stiffly and s~and there stoically, or maybe even
stretch, and then cross the room, feeling awkward,
and get his coat.
At the door her kiss would be full of meaning and
he would tumble out into the sharp night air and run
most of the way home. The stars promised they would
be back again tomorrow night.
Susan would stand at the door until he was out of
sight, breathing very quietly and imagining him still
there with his arms around her.
Then she would carry the lamp into her room and
look at herself to see what there was about her that
made him think she was such a delicate piece of china.
Undressing quickly in the cold little room, she
would tumble into bed. She would see him again
tomorrow night.
The stars came back; if their luster paled, it was
because a part of beauty was no longer there to receive
them. In his eyes they swam blurred and distorted in a
salt sea. The year was 1834, and it was October.
How had she died? The mute stone left no
testimony. There were so many ways.
A sea of love and pity welled up in Wes. Great
tears pushed one another down his cheek. He threw
his arms around the unyielding stone and wept for
lost Susan, for all the lost Susans, for all the people;
so beautiful, so pathetic, so lost and wasted and
ungrieved.
Later Wes arose from the spot, drained and empty.
He picked up his rifle and started for home. Winds
were about. A little band of dead leaves jumped up
beneath his feet and frolicked and tumbled ahead of
him, then did a disorderly right oblique and scampered
crazily down a sunny woodland corridor, leaping and
dancing before the wind in a travesty of life.
Wes smiled. Leaves tired and dropped sighing from
branches.
Long enough, leaves.
He smiled, and walked home, towering even among
the lean trees.
7
Perspective Of A Conscience:
A Review of Conscience ofa Conservative
by Barry Goldwater
Renni Dillard
FALL 1960
THE
PHOENIX
October 1960
8
SPRING OF 1960 saw the country's eyes focused somewhat fuzzily on the rise ofJohn F.
Kennedy and the collapse of diplomatic relations with Cuba and Moscow. It also saw the
publication of a slender volume in which a relatively obscure Republican Senator aired his
conscience. To suggest that the latter event may have the farthest-reaching consequences of
the three is perhaps less absurd than one might imagine, for Barry Goldwater's conscience
has become that of an ever-growing portion of the population-whose goal is to make it the
conscience of the nation.
Whether or not this goal will be or should be attained is open to debate; the impact
of Conscience ofa Conservative is not. In the few months since its appearance the book has
undergone three hardbound and five paperbound printings and is now in a ninth printing.
It appears to be as firmly entrenched on the best-seller lists as is Mr. Goldwater's seat in the
Senate. This success is particularly notable in view of the oft-repeated "fact" that conservatism
is a dead cause and the notorious unpopularity of the stands this particular conservative
chooses to take. With incomparable bluntness and brevity he discusses States' Rights, the farm
problem, labor, taxes and spending, the Welfare State, and education-using the constitution
as the touchstone for evaluation. The last section of the book is devoted to a candid and
knowledgeable assessment of the Soviet menace and ten proposals for elimination of that
menace-using the question "Does it or will it help defeat Communism?" as the touchstone. His
opinions on every issue stand in glaring opposition to one powerful group or another, as can be
seen by a random sampling:
"... Government has a right to claim an equal percentage of each man's wealth, and no more ...
I do not believe in punishing success ... The graduated tax is a confiscatory tax. Its effect, and to
a large extent its aim, is to bring down all men to a common level... to redistribute the nation's
wealth ... We are all equal in the eyes of God but we are equal in no other respect.
"Welfare programs cannot help but promote
the idea that the government owes the benefits it
confers on the individual, and that the individual is
entitled, by right, to receive them ... If we take from
a man the personal responsibility for caring for his
material needs, we take from him also the will and the
opportunity to be free.
"No powers regarding education were given the
Federal Government ... It so happens that I am in
agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court
as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that it is
both wise and just for Negro children to attend the
same schools as white ... however ... I believe that the
problem of race relations, like all social and cultural
problems, is best handled by the people directly
concerned.
"In the main, the trouble with American education
is that we have put into practice the educational
philosophy expounded by John Dewey... In our desire
to make sure that our children learn to adjust to
their environment, we have given them insufficient
opportunity to acquire the knowledge that will enable
them to master their environment.
"Graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness
that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it.
The cause is the enormous economic andpoliticalpower now
concentrated in the hands ofunion leaders.
"As long as union leaders can force workers to join
their organization, they have no incentive to act
responsibly.
"We have been persuaded that the government has
an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and
that the only pertinent question is what portion of its
claim the government should exercise ... The need for
'economic growth' that we hear so much about these
days will be achieved, not by harnessing the nation's
economic forces, but by emancipating them.
"A tolerable peace ... must follow victory over
Communism ... Peace has never been achieved ... by
rival nations suddenly deciding to turn their swords
into plowshares. No nation in its right mind will give
up the means of defending itself without first making
sure that hostile powers are no longer in a position to
threaten it."
Obviously, Goldwater must for varied reasons
be opposed by progressive educators, Modern
Republicans, Liberal Democrats, and all advocators
of "peaceful co-existence" and disarmament, not to
mention the N.A.A.C.P., the K.K.K., A.F.L.-C.I.O.,
and Walter Reuther-a formidable array to say the
least. He stands as the arch-enemy of Big Labor, Big
Government, Big Business, and all collectivists-be
they Liberals, Socialists, or Communists. And, he
does not hesitate to suggest a kinship between these
last three in ideology:
"The collectivists have not abandoned their
ultimate goal-to subordinate the individual to the
State-but their strategy has changed. They have
learned that Socialism can be achieved through
Welfarism quite as well as through Nationalization.
They understand that private property can
be confiscated as effectively by taxation as by
expropriating it. They understand that the individual
can be put at the mercy of the State-not only by
making the State his employer-but by divesting him
of the means to provide for his personal needs and by
giving the State the responsibility of caring for these
needs from cradle to grave.
"People can understand the consequence of turning
over ownership of the steel industry, say, to the State;
and they can be counted on to oppose such a proposal.
But let the government increase its contribution to
the 'Public Assistance' program and we will, at most,
grumble about excessive government spending.
"The conscience of the Conservative is pricked by
anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual
human being ... therefore, he is at odds with dictators
who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler
collectivists who ask our permission to play God with
the human race."
The expected fate of any politician holding such
views would be total obscurity or swift and effective
repression by opposing power-groups. Such has not
been the case. Goldwater has become the undisputed
leader of the conservative wing of his party; the
undisputed champion of Conservatism everywhere,
regardless of party. His newspaper column is
now carried in 26 papers. Requests for speaking
engagements and letters of support flood the Senator's
office daily. To use Newsweek's well-turned phrase,
9
Perspective ofa Conscience
the Goldwater standard is at an all-time high and still
rising. "Why?" is a question that the powerful but
panicky Goldwater opposition hardly has time to ask.
One reason doubtless lies in the Senator's ability
to make his point. Basic concepts of conservatism are
given unequivocal and highly articulate expression.
But Goldwater does not stop where so many have with
eloquent theory; he uses these concepts to unsparingly
spotlight government policy, showing with irrefutable
logic precisely why the present policy in a given field is
not working-or why it is dangerous. Again, he does
not stop here. Critical assessment of specific issues
is followed by specific proposals whose practicality
cannot be denied if one accepts the premise from
which they logically develop.
But perhaps the rising Goldwater standard can
best be attributed simply to enlightenment. To those
who have never thought of collectivism as destructive,
of labor leaders' power as threatening, or of Soviet
appeasement as suicidal, Goldwater's statements come
as an awakening. To those who have been aware of
the seemingly uncontrollable advance of Socialism
from within and Communism from without, they
come as hope. And to all who have not yet lost
their illusions about a constitutional Republic, the
Goldwater standard comes as invaluable ammunition
against the final replacement of individual freedom by
governmental power. Conscience ofa Conservative makes
one feel that the exchange is rather a poor one.
10
The story we didn't print
We are fairly proud of this issue. It represents the most thoroughly planned one of the year,
and although it has its shortcomings, we feel it can make a real contribution to campus
affairs. One area in which it is not going to contribute is drugs. A quiet effort was made last
quarter to determine how widespread the use of marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide is
here, but due to telephone threats of an arranged raid on a staffer's home-marijuana to be
planted in advance-and threats of violence, we dropped it. As a publication, we are not for
drugs. Their use violates the law. But laws, if ignored by enough people for a long enough
time, get changed. As a publication, we were seeking to document the spread, or lack of
spread, of what has been called "the psychedelic revolution." Maybe next year.
FALL 1967
11
Marshall Siler
FALL 1964
12
DURING THE REIGN of Elizabeth I of England, "bearbaiting," the sport of chaining a
bear to a stake or tree and loosing a pack of dogs upon him, reached its peak. By the time
the American colonies were established, bearbaiting had lost much of its popularity, and
by 1830 the sport was virtually non-existent in America. However, this sport still occurs
occasionally in the remote areas of the East Tennessee mountains-it has merely gone
underground like cockfighting, ratting, and other illegal pastimes.
For some time my first cousin has been employed at a lumber mill in a small town in
upper East Tennessee. When I received an invitation to visit him last spring, I readily
accepted. For some time I had wanted to visit this area and its people. It was among these
simple-living mountain folk that I spent the first two years of my life.
I arrived on Friday night. We spent many hours discussing the paths our separate
lives had followed and somehow our conversation touched upon the subject of bears. My
cousin asked me if I would like to attend a bearbaiting the next night. Though I had no
knowledge of the sport, I agreed to attend. My cousin phoned one of his friends at the mill
and made arrangements.
The next night we were picked up about 7 p.m. and driven for two hours until both of
us were thoroughly lost. Finally we arrived at a small clearing in the forest. Approximately
thirty men were gathered around an area brightly lit by gas lanterns. The dogs were still
caged in the back of trucks. They had picked up the scent of a medium-sized black bear
chained to a tree, and they were creating a clamor that made me wonder how these men
could escape detection. We were the last to arrive and the event began immediately. The
owners of the dogs uncaged them and held the straining beasts on leash for a moment
allowing us to observe and decide which adversary would win-and govern our gambling
accordingly.
The dogs were released in packs of five and
immediately the first five attacked the chained beast.
The bear dealt three of them a death blow instantly,
and the remaining two became wary and stayed just
out of the bear's reach.
During this battle I noticed that a man would call
out his bet and quickly another would match it. The
unusual feature of this system of gambling was the
fact that it depended upon each man's memory and his
word, and no money of the bets was exchanged until
the conclusion of the fight. The amounts of the bets
seemed extremely high for these people, but they were
always accepted. Noone hesitated, no one withdrew.
The two remaining dogs of the first five were
entirely too careful to carry out the engagement, so
ten more dogs were released to continue. Having
observed the fate of the first three, these dogs showed
amazing intelligence in their attack. While seven
dogs engaged the bear from the front, five attacked
from the rear and succeeded in hamstringing him.
This shifted the advantage to the dogs, for it forced
the bear to sit, thus lowering and exposing his vital
throat. At this point the last five of twenty dogs were
released. The ensuing clamor between seventeen dogs
and one outraged bear was deafening. The sight was
sickening. For a while it seemed that the bruin might
survive, but the dogs suddenly tore open his throat
and, bleeding from many vicious wounds and nearly
helpless, he succumbed. Thirteen dogs were killed and
two badly maimed.
My attention quickly moved from the spectacle
to the spectators. The losing gamblers immediately
sought out their winning partner and paid their debts
without a word of protest or argument. These native
backwoodsmen not only possessed the Elizabethan
love of savagery, but also the Elizabethan sense of
honor. The game, the rules, the code of honor-the
sport had been transported across four centuries. The
sport Elizabeth I loved to attend on Sunday-now
outlawed and condemned-I saw it last spring.
13
Gothick Tale
Jan Bakker
Creation (wrote Henry Murdo's widower Papa, Llohreathor, crippled in war, when
Henry was ten) ... Creation implies decay, for to create is to subject the object or concept
created to the inevitable natural or spiritual-intellectual forces-weather, revolution,
constipation-that bring about disintegration through chemical or ideological change
in materials or ideas. Material decay, obviously, and especially since the explosion of the
concept of spontaneous generation, leads to nothing but utter dissolution which, indeed,
gives rise to new creation-creation out of necessity (ahem)-which, in its turn, is only
doomed to the inevitable cyclical process of decay. Intellectual decay, too ... (My Lord,
said the then-not-so-old servant,]ame, to Llohreathor as he sat writing; the carriage
house has just fallen in and Master Henry has smashed the last of the stained glass in
the chapel. What! said Llohreathor, throwing down his pen and blotting his page; that
glass was to be taken out tomorrow and sold to Dunlop. Damn these interruptions.
Llohreathor left his pen and went in pursuit of Henry.)
Murdo, I9I6
WINTER 1965
From Ghoulies and Ghosties,
Preposterous Families,
And Things that go bump in the night,
Dear Lord deliver Murdo.
(Sour serpent horns.)
Henry Murdo at Murdo, I937
GOTHICK TALE
ByJ.. - . .
14
IN A VAULTED LIBRARY where Llohreathor's manuscripts drooped from bookcases,
swelled yellow in drawers, and underwent the cyclical process of material decay he had
written about; in the three, great, gothic-window-twilight that faded over the floor and up
across the panelling and the portrait, faded over the bindings of umber books, disintegrated
finally high on stone masonry and wooden beams above the bookcases shaped to a dark
taper like the gothic windows at night; with a leaking, ancient horn beaker in his hand-a
beaker whose whiskey contents were causing a smelly decomposition of its animal
fiber, dribbling whiskey on wrist, on cuff, on tie; with his eye on a portrait between tall
bookcases stood Henry Real Murdo cum Finian ap Tetley. He was looking at the likeness
of some blackening ancestor Tetley who had puffing eyelids and taut lips. Near-drunk,
sag-tweed Murdo looked to the portrait and thought, with whiskey soaking the edge of
his cuff and a faint, glue-factory smell in the air he breathed: Damn this dribble! And he
drained then threw the beaker into a corner. Sucking at his cuff he walked to the middle
window of the library built by Murdo to look over Keal-the first Keal called Cealc: old,
ribbled glass and a view right below of the roofless, square 'hollow, black, heavy stone with
foliage growing out of decaying stone and wood rotten (high-up green leaves moving in
a sea-breeze): the squat donjon keep built by Cealc
and called Keal. Beyond was the sea with wind and
whitecaps touched with some twilight that made
Henry think of Abyssinia.
I am the last Keal out of Cealc, he thought. The last
Tetley, the last Finian and Murdo. True and proven.
Irrevocably. I am the reductio ad absurdum of the lot.
He looked at the sea with its strange last light, and
then turned back to the room where everything was
fading. Irrevocably. Poor Henry, after he had futilely
tried to play Finian with the First Consul's wife two
weeks before the Italians entered Addis Abba. Ah,
how a successful affair, how a good career with the
Foreign Service would have restored his names and
given him confidence. Now his incapacity, the rebuff,
the scandal, the disgrace gave him the sense of bitter
failure he knew his father had when war cut short his
military career and the fail of the roof of the donjon
had taken his sea-painting wife with it. Unlucky
Llohreathor. His one paternal triumph was that of
seeing his son finish the University with honors and
embark upon a career with the best of references (a
name that went back to the tenth century could do
that for him nowadays if nothing more). He died at
Murdo before Henry came back disgraced.
Reductio, thought Henry. That's what I am.
What's more, I'm fat! "Hear that, Tetley, wandering
ghost," he said 'to the portrait with the lids and lips.
How he relished his agonies. And he drank from an
old glass now and he thought, as it was a ritual with
him to think first of...
Richard Tetley, hardly the first of Henry's line,
but, nonetheless, the rich Lord Boundacre, married
into Keal. Tetley, whose wealth had enabled him to
participate in Irish Absenteeism in the sixteenth
century and still to maintain his manor and his town
house in England. Ah, yes: it was Absenteeism for the
Lord but not for his Lady. She, weak-spirited woman,
simpering, stiff in portrait, he compelled to spend a
great part of the year on the Irish holding. "My Lady
will enjoy the fresh surroundings," Murdo could hear
ruff-fingering Tetley say. "The best of company and
of rustic sport." But in Ireland the second spring
after Boundacre had fingered his ruff to his Lady; in
Ireland, Finian, the Irish Bailiff (he was cheaply hired,
knew the land, had even owned some of it), made
Lady Boundacre his mistress while Tetley, plump and
incompetent, was left free to playa similar though
fruitless game in England. When, humiliated, pulpy,
rebuffed by the Queen herself, family tradition said,
Tetley returned to his wife, he suffered the final
indignity of being inexplicably murdered and hung
to rot in a tree on his estate. At least, murder was the
consensus and Finian had to be the culprit. But the
times were troubled, and what was one disgraced dead
Lord, even if English in Ireland? Poor Boundacre,
whose Lady swore to Finian's innocence and then
married him. (The house of Keal had been strong
though poor and the donjon, with its crenelated
fourteenth century addition, was sound amid the
sedge, trees, and rocks of its island shore. But then
Tetley came, and disgrace, and the marriage of Lady
Boundacre to Finian: decay steps numbers one and
two. "Finian !" screamed Henry Murdo before the
portrait of Tetley.) Ritual to the sound of piccolo and
the increasing tempo of tabor...
Henry drank and was drunk.
Tetley cum Finian, he thought. The Bailiff had
cynically demanded of his Lady and got the right to
append his name to that of the ruff-lord. Tyrone's
rebels burned the plantation from which Tetley's
relatives were about to evict them, and they landed
in England secretly one night. Henry could hear and
see them: Finian with heavy sword swearing, his wife
in farthingdale sighing. Straightway they retired to
the widow's ancestral and for some years neglected
northern castle on Coirechatachan Island. No one
offered solace to the ex-Lady Boundacre and her new
husband. "Let 'em rot at Keal-her and her Irishman,"
Henry heard her Anglophile brother saying, bearded,
cold, and pale in his dimming portrait. We would have
nothing to do with keep or crenels, and he died in
Ireland like Tetley.
But then the lovely Melissa Catherina Tetley cum
Finian-voluptuous, sly-looking portrait-in the
eighteenth century married the Scot's noble, Murdo.
He had money and a fine coachman. The castle was
repaired. A vaulted great hall of pre-Walpole gothic
was added to overlook Keal's keep. And Murdo-gruff,
egocentric portrait-renamed the whole after his
15
Gothick Tale
"You might be interested to know" (hand on doorknob,
family. He also cynically demanded and got the right
a heavy brass lamp lighted on a table near books;
to put his name first, Tetley last in the string of names
Murdo pouring a drink and one for] ame) "that the
his ultimate scion, Henry, bore. Fanfare: percussion
keep is flooding badly. The waves have undermined
and winds.
the foundations, washed away some rocks. I'm afraid
"The oboe's gone flat." Murdo curled his lip at
the salt water's coming in. I doubt if the structure i~
Murdo. "The Forty-five: that was you, hater of the
sound."
English. You and Prince Charlie. King of Scotland!
"So?" Murdo handed him a leaky beaker.
Then your castle was looted by redcoats and you were
"So, My Lord, I think the castle is falling."
shot down in the street of your own village. The rest
"With those words and in that vest you sound and
of us have rotted ever since in all this rot. Too bad
look like Chicken Little. I don't like it."
they didn't level this pile when they took away the
"I beg My Lord to come and see."
lands. But that was it, Murdo: the pile saved because
"Well, you have a torch. Let's go then."
your own son was loyal to the Tetley part of his name
The falling of the donjon was becoming part of life
(it didn't save his skin from the Scots, though), which
at Murdo.
really wasn't part of it anymore since Finian, the boy
] ame drank off the beaker and put it on a table
whom everyone anyway thought wasn't your son but
beside the door, shaking liquor from his fingers as he
the Coachman's, and thank God no one remembered
his name, much less thought to add it to Keal ap Cealc." said in turning: "Follow me, Sir."
Sniffing Murdo brushed his moustache with his
Someday I must stop this nonsense, he thought.
finger. "I know your gothick tricks" (with a sweeping
Murdo turned away from the portrait and sat in a
gesture to his hanging family) "so stay in your frames;
deep chair by the favorite center window overlooking
refrain from bleeding. You're not statues, and I'll have
the sea. The light was very dim now on his face: round
no weeping." With]ame diminishing down the hall
nose, brushed moustache. He drank from a bottle
before him, he closed the library doors behind him
on the little table beside him; picked up an old book
that was scaling. Shudder. There was a shudder in
and started to follow between the standing armor that
the house. As he'd felt it sometimes before, Murdo
had not yet been sold. In the day Murdo could see eyes
moving in the helmets when the beavers reflected light
felt it. Then something overhead seemed to bleat and
from the leaded windows high above.
scamper in the rafters. Mice? Bats? In the darkness
the black portraits could have been winking. There
A fig on you all, he thought, and on this rotten
was a rattle at the library door.
castle.
But the armor didn't hear, and there were no eyes at
"Stop it!" said Murdo. With a gasp he rolled from
night. Murdo's mind went back to the library where, of
his chair. The book fell from his lap and broke. "I
smell dust." Faint strings.
course, to no musical accompaniment whatsoever.
The old servant,]ame, stood in the doorway. His
They left their frames as soon as the door closed.
vest was the one element of brightness in the dimming Old ancestor Tetley, bought at auction in a moment
all around him with the single, iron chandelierof whimsey by Henry's grandfather; Finian, painted
lighted great hall to his back. He wore rubber boots
late in life, and his Lady, who had been Tetley's;
that were wet and dribbled, as Murdo saw when he
three Keals-one great beard, one great wig, and one
turned up a library lamp.
Lady with great-muff and diminutive dog; Melissa
Blinking Murdo said: "You've been wading. A little
Catherina and her Murdo, and four others (including
cold for that, isn't it? I suppose dinner's ready. Damn
Henry's Papa) with their wives. Wigs, hoops, Regency,
the lights. Look at this room. I prefer it dim." Dust.
whiskers, Henry's father with walrus moustache: all
"You might be interested, My Lord," said]ame,
these gathered in a jumble at the gothic windows.
an old man in yellow hunting vest that had been
They were dark, as in their portraits, and they seemed
Llohreathor's. His face betokened infinite patience.
to laugh at rocks and sea, something (Henry imagined)
16
Jan Bakker
over his belt, Murdo struggled with his trousers in
they had never thought to do when they were living.
discomfort.
All in a jumble now together, moving strangely. Dark
"I haven't looked in here for years. Not since
in front of darkening windows. No sound with what
mother fell. Dreary place, I recall. Storage rooms.
appeared to be their laughing.
Murdo caught himself midway down the hall. Arms
Squealing apparitions," Murdo said.
J arne took a large key from a listing medieval
akimbo. Hunting horns. ':Tame! I told 'em to stay
cabinet. Henry grunted. The key was turned. The
back." Jame kept diminishing in wet boots. ':Tame!"
The old man stopped, turned, sighed: "My Lord ?"
door opened and light slanted in and up to the low,
arched ceiling of the small passageway behind it.
"You, you fool! They're making a mockery of me
J arne switched on his torch with Henry breathing
and the keep." He turned and ran with both hands
behind him, bending in the narrow corridor: black.
outspread against the library doors. Cold Wood.
Harpsichord,
doleful. The flashlight beam made a
Ducking his head as he charged: "Look!"
growing circle on another solid wood door as they
The doors burst open, bang rattle. There were the
windows, the three pointed arches with no shadows
approached through stone. J arne put his shoulder to
the wood, pushed it open. A sigh and a tremble came
standing in what was left of the outside light. Just the
portraits black and old books. "Damned cheats," said
up at them out of blackness. Where the flashlight
pointed they could see how the roof had crashed right
Murdo.
through the floors, leaving a few beams and planks
"God A'mighty," saidJame.
intact. Between these and some rotted rafters crossing
Murdo, sweating, hurried up beside his servant.
above and out through the few slit windows, all was
TookJame by the arm. He felt wild. Worse than
drunk. His brain was stuffed, his feet almost too heavy black and empty.
to move. Clump. His cuff was still wet with liquor
"Listen," saidJame.
Far below there was an inside hushing, liquid kind
from a decomposing beaker. "If the castle falls,Jame,
of
sloughing
moving back and forth. A dim wash
where will we go?"
sound. Tremble. Something near the water beneath
Together they walked to the end of the banquet
hall, with its great fireplace, remnants of furniture,
them jarred loose and splashed. Hiss-sigh, tremble.
Dampness welled up at them-standing in the door,
and its iron chandelier hanging down above the floor
where a long table once had been. J arne with flashlight, looking down, seeing nothing-musty, stone dust,
Henry with wild eyes: together they walked down
rotting wood and salt water. Murdo, leaning on the
door jamb, felt a sense of terror. "Pour boiling oil on
stairs built around supporting pillars on which hung
armorial shields painted by Llobreathor's Millicent.
'em," he said.
Down into a dark stone corridor onto which opened
Jame led and Murdo followed in growing terror.
low rooms, some with doors, some without, from one
"Maybe we shouldn't look. Maybe it'll go away, the
of which they could see the corner of an old billiard
sloughing. Maybe the walls will stand until I die."
"I doubt it, Sir," said J arne.
table illuminated by one of the lamps J arne had lighted
in the passageway. Through the hollowness they
Steps cut into rock up against the inside of the
walked, under dining hall and library, to the door to
stone wall of Keal, steps went down, steep down
the donjon sealed off since Millicent fell. Llohreathor
where only light during the day came from the few
hated the keep (Tame had said to Henry), and he didn't arrow-slit windows or from the open, collapsed roof,
want to hear of the seeping.
light distorted through broken timbers where floors
At the end of passage there was a little door deep in once were. Murdo stepped carefully, kept close to
stone that led to another narrow descending corridor
the rough wall.
through the wall that connected the newer parts of
All this waste, he thought.
the castle to Cealc's keep. At the door they stopped.
The beam ofJame's torch pointed on timbers, some
Head spinning, cotton, his gut bulging against and
still whole and stretching from wall to wall, on stone
17
Gothick Tale
abutments, tried to point through ruin down to where
the water "Comes in, Sir, through a hole-Lord knows
how big or how deep it is-broken in the foundation,"
he said, and Murdo breathed. "The water moves with
the breakers outside, and when it subsides, as the
waves do after slapping against the rocks, you can see
the gap."
lame looked up. Suddenly. There was a crack of
wood. Stone ground on stone somewhere below them
as they stood. Something heavy, from part of a ceiling
or a wall, splashed into water. Murdo reached down for
the flashlight] arne held. There was a fumble and the
torch fell. "I wanted to see," said Murdo. And its metal
tinned on wood and stone; its beam shot up, around.
Wood and stone. Then disappeared. There was a
grinding. Tremble. The walls were almost quaking in
rhythm with the waves.
It suddenly and peculiarly occurred to Henry that
he should wheel around and hurl himself running
upwards and go "Ahghhh!" After all, his house was
literally falling and he was still drunk despite his
terror. He spun. Tamborine. But]ame then only had
to help his bleeding Master up from where he fell on
the steps. He had slipped and fallen as he had tried
to wheel even before he had gotten around to saying
"Ahghhh!" Hit his nose and ripped his trousers.
"What happened?" said Murdo, numb. "I can't see.
Help me to bed."
"Easily now, My Lord," said lame.
Silence. Murdo breathing. Damp cold. Then:
kettledrums solo, muted at first.
In the castle after Henry had, as usual, gone early
to bed, there was a single scene of warmth and light.
In the servants' wing, built parallel to the sea at an
angle off Murdo's great hall,]ame sat by a fire in the
kitchen. There were his wife and the gardener, who
leaned forward with his elbows on a small table
between them. On the mantel above the fire a heavy
old clock ticket. Brass and pewter in the room
reflected dull tones of fire light, of lamplight. ] arne,
Ruth, his wife, and Morgan drank from ancient
pewter that had belonged to me Scotsman Murdo,
had been hidden and saved from the looting English,
who buying now would get it anyway. They were
talking of the castle falling, gossiping of Tetley cum
18
Finian. But when they heard it and felt it, the crash
outside accompanied by the sounds of jarred pewter,
brass, and glass inside the room, their musing talking
stopped. They smelled strong dust. "What?" said Ruth.
lame went to the window and looked out to where the
donjon had been. In the water-glow darkness down
below he could see the white ocean moving amid
rubble where there had been no sea visible since the
time when the mysterious Cealc had started the decay
by throwing the first great rocks into the breakers to
build his keep.
And in another room-dark-off the library
overlooking the sea right above the ruining keep,
Murdo, sobering, sleepless, lay silent in bed. Before
they in the kitchen heard it, Murdo sensed a deep
growing rumble and a tearing. All the portraits went
blank. He sat up in bed enclosed in curtains: "Gone.
I knew you'd go at last, foul apparations. Gone." Glass
broke. Then gradually he felt and heard it-jarring
rumble, grinding tear. The swell of kettledrums muted
in heavy stone, heavy stroke, slowly thumping, rolling
faster and increasing in discord up to a final Roar that
at culmination lingered into hollow diminuendo a
long time dying into silence in the damp rooms and
basements of that decaying castle. Murdo gripped
his bed sheets and stared in horror into darkness:
he heard the sound of ancient brick, stone, mortar,
wooden beams ripping loose and tumbling down into
water. He heard those elements break and fall that had
sagged so long on the rocks above the sea. Gripping,
thoughtless but for terror, Murdo smelled the scent
of rotten lumber, ancient stone dust as the noise died
away. Shuddering Henry pulled the covers around
him where he lay enclosed. A fissure opened in the
wall by the bedroom's dead fireplace. Through broken
windows and massive crack darkness poured in upon
darkness where dust rose out of every pore of that old
house. Armor fell, and a baroque mirror in the hall.
Fresh air, cold, came in through the broken wall and
glass of Murdo cum Finian ap amid dust; chilledaye-chilled to the very marrow of his bones.
OLD FACES
Stephen Shu-ning Liu
Banyan trees planted by my grandfather,
Had their long arms and tough muscles.
The inky crows had built their home
On the tree-tops,
And the summer symphony in the leaves
Were performed by a galaxy of cicadas.
Bare-footed, I often found myself
Among a large crowd of farmboys,
In the late evening when the breezes
Brought the blue jays home from the far hills.
Our neighbors would come smoking pipes
Beneath the shade of the banyan trees:
They talked and kept on talking
About men and women in the village;
They argued, and kept on arguing
On things no bigger than green peas.
Their voices were getting louder,
I could see their excited faces
In the flicker of lighted pipes.
"They are going to fight" I thought;
But suddenly they broke into a chorus
Of hearty laughter, that sounded
Like New-Year's Eve firecrackers.
Sometimes a full moon paused in the sky;
And the wind came with the fragrance
Of the blooming cassias and water-lilies.
Cousin Lee, Old Chang, Big Sister Mel
Came near and their faces were seen:
Haggard, races they were, but sere~e.
SPRING 1961
THE PHOENn
april 196
OLD FACES
SrtpllC':ll S1l1Hlins ,Liu
And those old faces still appear to me
In the dead silence or the night:
How strange, how doleful, how hastily they
Fade away before the dawn! oh those faces,
Those old faces beneath the banyan trees!
19
Culture and Autarky
Patrick Thomas
FALL 1967
CULTllRE and AUTARKY
20
DURING MY YEAR at The University of Tennessee (winter, spring & fall quarters, 1966),
I became increasingly curious why no one attempted any detailed criticism on the specific
manifestations of cultural or sociological change within the student body itself. Columnists
of The Daily Beacon or the Hinterlands often voiced opinions on current controversies, but a
distinct lack of retrospect gave one the impression that history was being rewritten every
day (shades of George Orwell) and that if you should miss a half-dozen or so numbers,
it would not matter, since like last week's top forty on WKGN, the significance of the
primary issues was meaningless once the new chart appeared. In all fairness, writers like
Barry McManus have sensed some of the underlying themes in campus affairs, but spatial
limitations of our daily and weekly publications have confined any acknowledgement of
continuity to glaring generalizations embodied in cliches of varying ideological shade.
Another barrier to any sort of delving observation on the current scene has been the
aversion to naming names or even institutions. The unfortunate result has been a barrage
of claptrap on "beatniks," "reactionaries," "intellectuals," "proles," "the Establishment," and
the allied Host of ambiguities and pejorative labels which have served the grand tradition
of American journalism since the days of the Founding Fathers, if not earlier. Such jargon
reaches the NADIR of meaninglessness when applied to a local situation with no specific
point of reference, and campus disputes are often as not a great pageant of verbal shadowboxing. (Letters to the Beacon are the occasional exception.) Perhaps the writers hope, in
the hapless Twentieth Century tradition, to make their subject matter more universal,
or maybe they fear libel suits, in which case they might well take a little more time in
formulating their opinions. At any rate, most of this peripheral pussy-footing is a tedious
waste of type. It is not unlawful to have ideas, if they are really ideas with some factual
basis. Significantly, it IS unpopular.
To even begin to understand the connexions which
give people, institutions and events their most vivid
significance, one must limit himself to a point of
perspective. In this case, I shall make my observations
from an institutional vantage point. The institution is
the campus publication.
The Hinterlands
Reviewing the tedious coffeehouse controversy last
year, specifically that involving the Brandenburg, I
found it difficult to determine which side was more
absurd in the formulation of its case. One thing is
certain: had the Brandenburg been a campus den of
debauchery, a clandestine dispensary for acid, and/or
the central headquarters of a Diabolical Communist
Conspiracy, it would never have closed for lack of
financial support. Equally evident is the fact that
it was not the Dairy Queen for the intellectual set,
Don Morano's testimony notwithstanding. It was
simply a place where Malcontents, such as myself,
could spend an evening and perhaps trade anecdotes
on "cultural" events which had happened five years
ago on New York's Lower East Side. Anyone could
be loud for a few minutes without being bounced,
arrested or suspended in the web of his draft board,
and that in itself lent a certain charm to the setting.
Of course, one could be passionate about Civil Rights
or the Berkeley Revolt or Love (and/or Sex) or just
about anything one can bring oneself to be passionate
about these days. Or anyone could just sit down and
look different for the evening and expect, if not the
warmth of comeraderie, at least indifference.
But the history of the Hinterlands indicates that the
Brandenburg was no hotbed of intellectualism. It was
jointly conceived by George Hurst, the Brandenburg's
proprietor, and Larry Yates, a graduate student in
English. George assumed the role of publisher, which
in this case meant he raised the money, and Larry
became the managing editor. A little later, Barry
McManus became a co-editor. For a short time, I, too,
was on the editorial staff. (So short, indeed, that the
editors will probably read this with surprise.)
From several lengthy discussions with George
Hurst and Larry Yates, I assume that the seed of the
Hinterlands' conception was the fact that the Phoenix
was thrashing about in its ashes at this time and that
the Beacon seemed an unsatisfactory voice for many
issues which seemed extremely important at the
time. (Some still do: Viet Nam, for example.) Hence,
the first page was reserved for a short editorial in
the tacit hope that it might give the campus "the
other side" of an issue, and the rest was given over to
the "creative" people, with which the Brandenburg
purportedly overflowed. The result, as an outside
observer might have suspected from the onset, was
a hodge-podge of fact and fantasy, polemics and
poetasteing. Eventually, the mass of the poetic spirits
became as exhausted with their writing as many of us
had with our reading, and the level of the poetry rose
to the mediocre mark, with a few notable exceptions.
There was a hard core of "creativity" within the ranks
of the Brandenburg's patrons, but it was a small core
and not necessarily one permeated with genius.
The lack of good prose-indeed, of even
grammatical prose-was the most notable failure of
the 1966 Hinterlands. One can hardly condemn the
Hinterlands' editorials on the grounds that they did
not meet up to the standards of a Matthew Arnold
or Dwight Macdonald, but I do not think it is asking
too much of anyone with pretensions toward literacy
to approach the style of an Alsop or a Lipmann.
Below that level, you are unintelligible, and that
was the case in more than one number of the
Hinterlands. I found the fiction to be of only
slightly higher quality.
The source of the problem seems to spring from
the vacillating credo of the editors themselves. At
the outset, they had the choice of publishing either
literary or "controversial" material. They decided to
print both, hence hamstringing both outlets. The
controversial must be "timely"-in this case weekly,
and this meant that the average issue would be
confined to both sides of two pages (single-spaced).
Trying to jam several articles into this tiny space
precluded any serious, detailed social criticism or
anything other than the most diminutative short
story, which most talented college writers, primarily
preoccupied with the problems of controlling
expanding masses of words and ideas, usually refuse
to be bothered with.
21
Culture andAutarky
The Hinterlands is extremely cheap to print.
George Hurst has estimated that it could run quite
comfortably on $100 a quarter. For two or three
hundred dollars a quarter, the Hinterlands might
well have corrected its organic deficiencies. But of
course, the Hinterlands was not for sale since the
staff realized that if they were to limit themselves to
paying readers, they would probably never be read
at all. This meant that publication depended upon
contributions, which came from a group of about ten
people. As these people became rather irritated by
the weekly touch, the burden fell back upon the staff.
These financial difficulties nudged the Hinterlands
into even more serious literary dilemmas. (With
the absurdities of Marxist historians in mind, I
warn the reader to realize that money is merely one
thread in this tapestry') By the middle of spring
quarter, the editorial page was almost entirely given
over to the UT faculty. Or so it seemed. I asked
Larry Yates why he was publishing so many poor
faculty contributions. I felt some of the articles
were not fit for an undergraduate ashcan. To my
dismay, Larry said that almost all of them had been
solicited, the result being that the staff felt stuck
with anything it had asked for. He then explained
to me the need for a "faculty sounding board," etc.
I felt as unconvinced of this need as many of his
contributors proved unconvincing. At the time, I felt
the Hinterlands was making an overt grab at a rather
dubious respectability, and I have not changed my
opinion. I can in restrospect, detect some method in
their machinations. For one thing, Larry was soon
negotiating with the University for official sanction
for the Hinterlands. Every professor who had written
an editorial was another endorsement. As it turned
out, according to my sources, the Hinterlands staff
rejected the strictures of the University publication
rules, under which the Administration would have
been given virtually boundless censorship privileges.
Ed. note: Mr. Yates disavows this motive, and disputes
with Mr. Thomas as to the quality offaculty contributions.
Why did the Hinterlands want official sanction
in the first place? To begin with, the paper could
be legally distributed on campus. Secondly, several
rather serious students were involved in its
22
publication, and after a couple of months, they were
begining to get a bit uneasy about being academic
outlaws. One lousy recommendation and ... the
Hinterlands could not afford to lose the support of
these people. A third point is that with official status,
the Hinterlands could probably have expected more
generous contributions, maybe even a grant from
the University if the faculty felt it was providing an
indispensable service.
Ed. note: Two points here: the faculty does not control
the expenditure offunds involved, and contributions as such
were, as Mr. Thomas states, already insufficient.
When the University deal fell through, the
Hinterlands seemed to plod on like a middle-aged
junior executive who has been passed over for a vice
presidency. After an initial burst of sullen energy
(a couple of six-page issues), summer set in, and
it lapsed into the old motions, mouthed the same
"goals" and produced shoddier work than ever.
During the fall quarter, the editors apparently
felt like it was time to give the old fellow a kick in
the pants to get him back on the ball. I refer to the
publication of Larry Yates' sensationalistic short
story. I know from experience that the writer is
capable of a fair degree of control over the tools of
language, but just as surely, 1 suspect that he is not
a humourist, so I really do not know what sort of
effect he had in mind when he wrote this story. I
can, however, give you a summation of the plot and
tone as I remember it. The story involves a rather
priggish young reader-of-books who has grown up
in a neighborhood of ruffians and low-brows. He
has matured into something of a pedantic romantic
now, and as the story drags along, he is confronted
by a band of toughs who chide him for having spent
his youth in his obsessive lust for knowledge rather
than in the sordid pursuit of pocket billards. The
young man, of course, does not condescend to blow
his serenity at such infantile provocations. However,
when the blackguards besmirch his love (a girl) with
cruel and obscene allegations (no "-," s***'s, or
f-'s to confuse the reader), the youth shows that
the well-read prig of today is at no loss for powerful
pornographic invective. The ruffians, of course,
taunt him all the more, and finally, this seemingly
Patrick Thomas
insoluable situation is cut short with masterful
Jacobean finesse. Someone is killed off, and the
dispute is settled.
The reaction to this story was surprisingly mild. Of
course, it spurred an attack by the local prolectariet,
championed by Poet-Politician E.B. Bowles in his
Smokey Mountain Banner, but no bombs were thrown,
crosses burned or subpoenas served. And more
typically, there was no criticism from the intellectual
community on the disparate proportion
of the story's sensationalism to its aesthetic merit.
This leads us to another facet of a situation I
have mentioned above: that of not naming names.
I feel that an intellectual community which equates
well-founded criticism with personal attacks is a
very primative society indeed. The present case
is a negative illustration. The fact that no one in
my particular circle of friends-which includes
Larry Yates-made any attempt at criticism in one
of the following issues of the Hinterlands typifies
our reluctance to become personally involved. This
comes as result of too close an identification of the
work with the author. The story was important, and
it deserved lengthy discussion. It got none because
our student intelligentsia hasn't the ability or courage
to deal with simple criticism. Campus writers have a
propensity for taking their work much too seriously in
its static (completed) form, and for taking it much too
lightly in its dynamic formulation. It is only through
flexible, enthusiastic and objective criticism that
this campus can hope to generate creative writing
which will be worthy of the name. In this respect, the
Hinterlands has failed.
I want to make it clear at this point that this
failure is by no means conclusive. The Hinterlands
can be a very flexible organ of discourse, if I) the
editors were willing to revaluate the function of
the magazine. It has been not so much ineptness as
inexperience which has caused its organic problems.
I myself have learned from working with the
Hinterlands staff that establishing a magazine is not as
easy as setting up a mimeograph machine. It must set
explicit, realistic goals or it expands energy fruitlessly.
2) Obviously, the intellectual community must
show some enthusiasm.
The Beacon
College newspapers were originally conceived as
bulletin boards, and although most of them have
matured considerably, the resemblance to their
ancestors is remarkable at a distance of about six
feet. The Beacon has the typical appearance of a
new generation of college dailies: a gawking youth,
confined in clothing years too small and marked
by a hodge-podge of journalistic carbuncles hastily
made up. I would feel faintly embarrassed at my
first confrontation of a new quarter with myoid
acquaintance, who somehow seemed doomed to
some adolescent limbo.
It was back in March, 1966, I believe, that I
began looking at the Beacon with renewed interest.
A series of engrossing articles appeared on issues
which were of at least momentary significance to any
academic community. The God-Is-Dead controversy
was not only admirably admitted, but to some
extent discussed. A Time essay, which commented
upon the Rand Corporation's prediction of 90%
unemployment by the year 2000, was reprinted
(in part) as an editorial. Later, a column by Paul
Goodman on the silent revolution at San Francisco
State College was given a quarter-page. If indeed
The University of Tennessee ever hopes to join the
American academic community, it should at least
know that there are national academic issues. Outside
of national periodicals, the student is at the mercy of
the Knoxville dailies which, undoubtedly in the spirit
of good taste, shield their readers from the confusion
which would result from adequate reports on events,
which after all, happen outside of Tennessee anyhow.
During this short period last year to which I refer,
the Beacon soared above the average college daily's
attempts at being informative.
Perhaps jumped would be a more accurate
description. I really do not know what happened
behind the scenes, but apparently, the inexorable
forces of administrative gravity dragged the
Beacon back to earth. Commerce and Agriculture
are mundane pursuits, and in keeping with the
University's down-to-earth goals (to turn out literate
farmers and shopkeepers?), more earthy subject
matter became the norm.
23
Culture andAutarky
In the place of external cerebral stimulation, the
Beacon filled the space with hometown boys. The
precedent had been set by Mr. Paige, who had already
proved to be the most enduring ( if I may use the
word ironically) writer on campus. Sage, poet, wit and
many-faceted politician, Mr. Paige "kept the campus
in stitches" for quarter after quarter as our very
ownJack Paar of the Pepsi Generation. His style is
essentially imitation ersatz. Its engaging simplicity is
all the more amazing when one realizes the complex
levels of American humour through which Mr. Paige
has descended. His accumulated work appears to be
a laboriouslywritten travesty on the burlesque of a
parody of some subject which might well have been
thought insipid at the outset. His splendid effects
are compounded by an underlying tone of pristine
ignorance, which he utilizes generously.
At the time of transition, the Beacon took on Mr.
Topchik, whose sporadic columns have probably
caused more comment than any of his peers.
Incapable of pompous rhetoric and endowed with a
fair degree of intelligence, I consider him to be the
happy medium between his peers, Messers, McManus
& Paige. Although I disagree with ninety per cent of
what he advocates, I admire his courage in trying to
articulate the passions of the murmuring mass of the
University without descending to polemical style. A
good example of what I mean is the dispute last fall
over his column which argued against the fraternities
since the assumption upon which the whole system
is based is that fraternity brothers want to live with
one another in a closely knit community. In short,
a fraternity is not just a dormitory with exorbitant
dues. (Theoretically, at any rate.) It is certainly not
an absurd question to ask anyone why he would want
to live in a place where he would not be wanted in
the first place. And after all, fraternities pay for their
privileges, etc.
This is certainly not a bad argument on Mr.
Topchik's part. Indeed, it was good enough that some
dozen or so impassioned writers rose out of the student
body to assail not Mr. Topchik's logic, but his basic
assumptions. The primary attack turned out to be
not one saturated with liberalistic claptrap, but one
very solid indeed: do the fraternities pay their way?
24
Eventually, the liberal argument evolved into the
dispute over the specifics, such as discriminatory
seating at football games and bloated economic
support for fraternity housing projects. Much of
this can be traced to Mr. Topchik's rather rational
approach to the original question, which forced his
critics to fight him on his own terms.
During the summer session, the purposes of
the Beacon and Barry McManus intersected, the
latter could not satisfy his urge to be read as well as
published; the former could turn its attention away
from its scouting campaign for an intellectual-inresidence. Mr. McManus has a somewhat compelling,
if not endearing, obsession for grand rhetoric.
Reading his "from the interior," I am often reminded
of the style ofJoseph Conrad. Indeed, Mr. McManus
shows evidence of having mastered a language he
cannot speak. I am hesitant to venture any opinion
on his columns, for frankly, I have found them
unreadable. The few opinions that I have found
decipherable have seemed unduly condescending in
their tone, but since his style precludes camaraderie
(except in the Hinterlands agree/disagree sense), I
suppose this is a rather harsh indictment.
The Beacon format this fall was ghastly.
Indiscriminate excerpts from New York Times
dispatches are poor excuses for engaging writing,
or for that matter, even interesting journalism. A
new column on campus attire-a bow to the New
Banality-the nadir was reached in the last issue of
the fall which ran a headline (page 10 or so) reading
approximately: "McManus Reviews New Bellow
Nove1." Excitedly, I began reading the article, to find
to my dismay that it was a critique of The Adventures
ofAugie March. Is it conceivable that McManus has
been around all this time and that the printers simply
mislaid the copy?
After following the Beacon from pinnacle to pitfall
for a year, I often wonder what the function of a
college daily should be. The primary reason for its
existence has never changed. It is a bulletin board (No
Parking on Cumberland; Bob Richards Here Tonight!;
Vols Slaughter Boars to Cheering Thousands; etc.)
Abstractly speaking, one might say its function is to
be informative. But how informative? The spatial
Patrick Thomas
limitations of the paper itself suggest that it must
limit itself to some circumscribed area. Should that
be the Knoxville campus? Knoxville itself interacts
with the college community, so of course, it too
deserves some acknowledgement. How about the rest
of the state then? Or the country, for that matter?
Obviously, this is a rhetorical question. Any action
of direct consequence to a significant number of
the student body should be included in the paper's
coverage, e. g., a pronouncement by General Hershey
on draft deferment examinations.
So far you might say the cases are of a stimulus
response nature. This is "direct information." You
get it; you print it. Obviously. But very few editors
or readers could be content with a perpetual fare of
this sort. Who wants to live exclusively on hogback
and potatoes in America? After all, the presses are
running and the Administration is affable. So now
you are confronted with two other areas: "indirect
information" (information on events or ideas which
affects some segment of the student body from afar
by molding their attitudes or their postacademic life,
e. g., articles on Viet Nam, the Berkeley Revolt, etc.)
and entertainment. These two areas overlap in many
cases. They have another aspect in common which is
even more significant: they often generate their own
kind or even stimulate direct issues. The Topchik
column on fraternity discrimination is an excellent
example. Linked to it were a long chain of letters,
counter-editorials and eventually new issues.
Where does an editor begin in sorting out his
material? I would suggest that he begin by giving
space to some of the more significant happenings
on other campuses. And I might add that
intellectualism need not be an obscenity in a college
newspaper. I do not advocate that the Beacon become
some sort of collegiate Reader's Digest. If it could
just give some perspective to the UT community on
some notable disputes on other campuses that would
be adequate. The University of Tennessee is simply
too damned provincial, and one of the reasons is
that its students seem to think of other campuses
in relation to their own, rather than the co,...verse.
(Provincial: "having the ways, speech, attitudes, etc.
of people in a province ... countrified; rustic; local; ...
narrow; limited: as a provincial outlook."-Webster's.
A good word to be familiar with, if you plan on living
in any metropolis outside the Deep South.)
With such a frame of reference, someone like
Barry McManus might well become intelligible to
those who take the trouble to read him. After all, like
Topchik and myself, he is a fledgling social critic. I
think he deserves a careful hearing, but as it is, he is
preoccupied with introducing his readers to topics
and ideas which have long since grown tedious for
him to explain in elementary terms. He cannot
assume for a moment that his readers have any
sociological sophistication whatsoever, and as a
result, his columns are often filled with appalling
overgeneralizations. Professors who are forced to
teach elementary math courses for long periods of
time often show the same propensity for vagueness,
condescendsion and tediousness which mars
McManus' columns.
Is some contemporary frame of reference for
ideas really an integral part of a good university? I
can see from the way in which I have constructed
the question that I leave the reader little alternative
in his answer. I frankly have my doubts about the
simplicity of the solution. I get the feeling that in
many metropolitan uniyersities, specifically Northwestern, where I now reside, that the national
contemporary frame of reference is given far
more attention than it merits, since Nationalism
is another manifestation of provincialism. You
often get the feeling you are living in the year o.
Or perhaps 13 when you are discussing civil rights
or Viet N am. But this is decidedly not the case at
UT. Everything is strictly 1937 a.d. in context and
approach: New Criticism, chastened Marxists, the
whole syndrome. If Knoxville and Chattanooga, the
two Tennessee towns in which I have lived for four
years, are representative of the State's society,
I should say that the people of Tennessee are
in a state of shock. Exploding urbanism is an
excruciating experience for any community, and if
you have sometimes wondered why the citizens of
Knoxville are somwhat less than euphoric in their
enthusiasm for college students, you ought to face
up to a few facts.
25
Culture andAutarky
In my year at UT, the student body increased
by 2000. Last fall the worst traffic jam I have ever
been involved in-excluding one at the Lincoln
Tunnel-was at Cumberland and Henley in Knoxville.
(Chicago's rush hour holds no terror for the Knoxville
motorist.) A month later, the parking area on
Cumberland in front of the student center was closed.
Whether it was the Administration or City Hall which
initiated the action is of no importance. It is simply
a typical, and quite logical, reaction to growing pains
in a small city: more room on the street and fewer
commuters. The burgeoning University is a strain
upon the physical limitations of the city.
While the students are big business to small
businessmen, contractors and the like, they are also
a very real nuisance. They will eventually crowd the
employment market as well as the streets. There are
thousands of small things about the student body
which are irritating to Knoxville, many of which are
simply reflections of municipal expansion. I feel that
in the next few years, the University will come under
increasing fire from the surrounding citizens since it
is by far the largest target in town and also the most
defenseless. Many attacks (e.g., against liberals) will
be for indirect reasons or as a result of resentment
against urbanization in general. I cannot help but feel
some compassion for the enthusiastic reader of The
Smokey Mountain Banner whose life is being disjointed
by forces over which he has no control.
But brute compassion is not enough. Unless you
are willing to decimate the general population,smash
all the machines in town and turn the freeways into
farmland, the "good old days"-which were terrible
enough in their own way-are gone for good. The role
of the University is becoming increasingly evident.
It cannot allow its great stream of students to be
channeled into a sociological vortex. Tennessee and
Knoxville in particular will not be a rural society (as
we think of one) by the time I am fifty, and we have
much to learn from the experiences of other distended
urban centers. The first step in this direction is the
confrontation of our generation with the fact that it
is a part of a national community. The Beacon can deemphasize the student tendancy toward self-centered
provincialism by exposing to its readers the flux of
26
ideas which surround them. Autarky is no longer a
solution, and the Beacon must make the student body
aware of the crisis around it.
The Phoenix
The Beacon and the Hinterlands are structurally shallow
containers. The Phoenix, however, has much more
room for depth and consequently, has the greatest
obligation toward the intellectual community.
The winter 1966 number was ghastly. The waste
of space and money was appalling; the lack of love
and imagination was frightening; and the Philistine
snobbery of tone-let them eat crap-was disgusting.
The fiction editor explained to one writer that his
work was "simply too 'in'." Of course, I think I
understand what you're getting at, but I don't think
it would go over." When one is the fiction editor of
the highest quality periodical in the community, it is
his job to pass judgement not upon the intelligence of
audience, but upon the work of the author. If the style
is ponderous, the subject banal, the effect insipid, the
work should be rejected. If the editor does not know
why he does not like it, he should find someone who
has some critical ability to help him formulate a fair
appraisel of the work. Better yet, he should resign.
After all, a literary magazine which is not a
commercial enterprise has a tremendous advantage
in that it has no duty to be "liked." But it should be
respected. For example, I not only disliked but also
sneered at the winter '66 Phoenix. Poverty of talent
is hardly a commendable virtue. But the following
Phoenix-Pat Riordan's first issue really excited me. I
cannot say that I "liked" Henry Herlong's "Sangreal."
The concept of a "classical" framework for a
backwoods tale strikes me as a rather tedious
academic device. But then, I don't "like" the work
ofT. S. Eliot either.
On the other hand, I do admire Mr. Herlong's
craftmanship. The tone of the prose is smooth
and he has a sense of structural rythm. (There is
an occasional slip, such as "lit out for the woods
licketysplit," which conjures up shades of Disney's
Brer Rabbit rather than aural images of rustic
fluency, or "oh she was a tough one alright," which
is as inappropriate in the dialogue of a middle-aged
Patrick Thomas
country boy as "cool," "boss," "gear," "groovey" or any
number of the "pimply hyperboles" which erupt in the
contemporary adolescent vocabulary') The prefactory
excerpt from Wordsworth's "Ode: etc." is an
appropriate if somewhat hackneyed touch, although
I am not convinced that the poet would be flattered.
As a matter of fact, Herlong encounters much of the
same difficulty in his prose as did Wordsworth in
his poetry: how can one be "common" without being
commonplace? "folk" without becoming folksy?
This is a tremulous balance indeed, and the fact
that Herlong manages to maintain it as consistently
as he does gives the story its most powerful source
of energy. Actually, it was not the content but the
tension between the writer and his material which .
fascinated me. Herlong has control over his material,
and whether you like the way he utilizes it or not, you
at least have the opportunity to give the piece some
serious thought on its own terms.
"More and more," writes Matthew Arnold, "I feel
bent against the modern English habit (too much
encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a
channel for thinking out loud, instead of making
anything." The more I read of Arnold, the more I
wish that he were publishing today. Or at least read.
Collegiate authors seem to lose sight of the fact that
art is something more than fitting some odious line
of cant into a plot. America abounds with sociologists,
psychologists and demogogues disguised as novelists,
playwrights and poets. An artist is not one who merely
pieces together prefabricated ideological pieces into
a literary jigsaw puzzle; he makes things, he fashions
his work. In Herlong's story, you can see both forces
at work. It is encouraging to note that the "making"
survives the "thinking out loud."
If this article were not being published in the
Phoenix, I would devote a paragraph or two to Pat
Riordan's review of Richard Farina's "Been Down Do
Long It Looks Like Up to Me." Within the scope of
this discussion, I feel it was probably the best piece
of prose I read last year. Since Riordan still edits the
Phoenix, it would undoubtedly be embarrassing to
him if he were to publish what I would like to write.
However, a quotation from Dwight Macdonald's
essay on "Amateur]ournalism" should suggest what
I should like to say to you, indeed what I have implied
throughout this essay:
"In writing, the cult of the amateur has much to
recommend it. Americans write as professionals, either
as scholars concerned with academic advancement
(whence the barbarous jargon, the cramped, cautious
specialization of the academic quarterlies) or as
professional journalists-and, more important, editorsconcerned with attracting as wide and profitable
an audience as possible (whence the hard, sleek
superficiality of the nonacademic press). But the book
reviews, the drama and art criticism, and the articles
in the London weeklies seem to me to be written
with that pleasurable spontaneity, that recklessness
(oddly combined, for an American, with a most
impressive expertise) which comes when the writer
is not trying to educate his readers or to overawe
them or to appease them or to flatter them, but is
treating them as equals, fellow members of a clearly
defined group of people who share certain common
interests and certain common knowledge. Since he
is not writing to impress his academic colleagues, he
can write simple, informally, personally, sticking his
neck as far out as he likes. Since he is not writing for
a mixed audience whose lowest common denominator
he must always keep in mind, he doesn't have to go in
for elaborate explanations of the obvious, nor does he
have to capture the reader's attention with a startling
journalistic "lead" and try to keep it with debased
rhetorical devices and common appeals
to the L.C.D.
"Oddly enough, considering the informality of
American manners, our writing is much stiffer than
English writing, more artificial, removed to a greater
distance from the reader, since an easy, personal style
is risky with an amorphous audience."
Dwight Macdonald has written social, literary
and political criticism for over thirty years. From
1960 until about three months ago, he was Esquire's
film critic. He now writes a column on politics.
This quotation is from his ''Against the American
Grain," pp. 339-40. Those of you who have gotten
this far through my essay might found it instructive
to read one of my sources of prejudice. (Incidentally,
it is rumoured that Macdonald almost formed an
27
Culture andAutarky
Anarchists for William F. Buckley, Jr. club during the
1965 campaign for Mayor of New York. But of course,
an anarchist club would be a contradiction in terms,
wouldn't it?)
Riordan's review manifests many of the qualities
which make up the best Amateur Journalist. This
is the style which I, for one, should like to see more
than once a year.
Summation
I have a distinct distrust of writers who lead one to
"conclusions" on matters of even the most primative
complexity. "Conclusions," after all, assume that the
matter is static. (Concludere-to shut up closely, to
enclose.) Our lives are not hermetically sealed and
the events which surround us are not plastic bubbles
which bounce in the night. The corklined world is the
realm of the artist. The critic lives in the jungle, and
if he insists upon rigid conceptions of the world about
him, chances are he will be devoured by some rising
species of flora or fauna he has previously refused to
recognize in his scheme for survival. In this respect,
we all have a touch of the critic within us.
The publications I have attempted to describe
are certainly not static. They still flow from the
presses, and being in flux, they can be given direction.
As I have indicated, much of this energy is being
squandered. Opportunities for resourceful thinking
run unchanneled, undammed past the campus.
The Hinterlands has been much maligned by
many students, and I sincerely dislike heaping more
criticism upon it. However, most of the previous
criticism has been rather irrational in tone and has
offered no alternative to its problems other than
that of outright suppression. The editors have never
shied away from constructive criticism, so far as I
know, and the reader should be aware that Larry
Yates, whose work I questioned rather sharply above,
was, while this article was under consideration also
one of the editors of the Phoenix. He could have
vetoed the publication of my criticism, but did not.
The Hinterlands staff would do well to reevaluate the
function of the publication in the light of its incipient
limitations. Faculty contributions should meet up
to some criterion of quality. As it is, many seem to
28
feel that banality is the only thing a UT student can
comprehend. All the contributors have been wellmeaning, but the road to unconcious condescension
is paved with misguided sympathy and benevolent
overgeneralization. A sincere credo of democratic
journalism has prompted the editors to reject any
arbitrary standards. To a certain degree, such as in the
case of ideological standards, I can sympathize with
their sentiments. But when one has no standards, one
must expect the bitterest fruits of a vulgarized harvest
as regular, monotonous fare.
The Beacon was not conceived as an intellectual
journal, and there is no reason to believe that it should
be. Its purpose is to be primarily informative and
incidentally entertaining. The columns and the letters
can be valuable critical tools in meeting current crises
with constructive proposals. The editorials, which
I did not bother to mention above should fall along
these lines, too, but for the most part, their anonymity
in the guise of cryptic initials has given most
pronouncements a sacrosanct ring, and as someone
replied to Franklin's bromide: "yes, and godliness
is next to tediousness." The real problem that the
Beacon's editors should face is that which confronts all
Tennessee: moving Tennesseans from the low ground
of provincialism as the flood-tide of urbanism rises.
As an official UT publication, the Phoenix bears
the greatest responsibility of the three publications.
There is only one justification for its existence: the
publication of the best writing from or of significance
to the campus. The two fall issues indicate that the
Phoenix staff intends to strive for considerably higher
goals than it has in the past, but I would remind
everyone who is concerned with the quality of writing
in campus publications that the winter 1966 Phoenix
was published only a little more than one year ago.
It should be rather obvious to the reader that while
I have concentrated primarily upon the state of the
campus publications for the past year, I think of them
as being the voice of the cultural situation at UT.
Many of my observations may appear to be elaborate
explanations of the obvious to most of you, and I must
apologize accordingly. On the other hand, no one has
provided a solid basis for discussion of certain cultural
manifestations on this campus which form the base
Patrick Thomas
of the vocal intellectual community. The original scope
The most important question which is implicit in
of this essay included a lengthy discussion on the
this essay is that of the role of the University itself. Is
Brandenburg (ten percent of which was incorporarted
an anti-intellectual university a contradiction in terms?
into the Hinterlands section), McClung Film Series, the
In the face of reality, one must murmur "no." Many
University lecture series, and a number of other subjects, "universities" have been highly successful trade schools
for decades, and in our society, one can deplore, but
such as the state of architecture on the west campus,
not refute the necessity of such a situation. The real
the work of Richard Walters and the importance of the
hope, however, lies in the fact that the generation of
"new left," which I found too complex to reduce to note
an energetic intellectual climate is within the power
form. These are topics which deserve serious (but not
necessarily tedious) discussion.
of the student body and faculty itself.
For Another Time
David Lee Rubin
This dusty sheeted chair was once the seatMatched with stand and planter-owned by a fine
Lady to whom I'd chanted Vergil. But
She would reply with eclogues of her ownIn-folded irises and sunlight were
Her rime that scolded scholiasts and wished
Dead tongues away. "Latin, I fear,
Is for another time," she said and dashed
My darkest dreams to bluest irises
Inviolate by questionings of mind
Too proud to die, she wryly called the kiss
Of age effete; but then, more nearly bland;
"I'll be your eclogue, this planter will house my sad,
Though shrouds may grey with scansions of my
blood!"
WINTER 1960
I Drowned
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Chicago Review, Winter I9Sr8.
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29
A Molotov Cocktail And
A White Plastic Sax
Charles Bebber
WINTER 1967
PBOUiIX
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In the late '50S a new sound appeared on the jazz scene which shocked, dismayed, amused
or excited listeners, depending on their individual biases. The center of the storm was
a young musician named Ornette Coleman, who played a white plastic alto saxophone.
The instrument was ridiculed by many as a gimmick, and the sounds which it produced
were dismissed as sonic anarchy, lacking both form and substance. But the deep pain and
violence of this music which slashed down traditional chord structures and conventional
rhythms soon overwhelmed the ridicule, and an entire generation of young Negro
musicians followed in the wake of "the new thing."
The fury in the music had been foreshadowed by older musicians such as Art Blakey,
Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, but the break with the past was as evident in Coleman's
music as it was in LeroiJones' break from the poetry of Langston Hughes, orJames
Baldwin's prose from Richard Wright's. The new music formed a counterpoint to the
words of the young Negro authors; by the middle '60S, the sound of gunfire and shattering
glass in the streets of Watts produced a triple counterpoint.
Those familiar with the work of these young artists who were creating in media of hurt,
frustration, and anger were as saddened by the conflict in ghetto streets as were other
Americans, but not nearly as surprised. The composers and poets had been speaking of a
real world which they knew and of its consequences. Many of the listeners, such as critic
Nat Hentoff, warned that a new mood was arising and being explicitly communicated, but
because of general apathy found themselves forewarned but not forearmed with preventive
measures. To most citizens and public officials the first recognition of the crisis came with
the explosion of the first molotov cocktails.
If the foregoing sounds like a lead-in to yet another Plea for the Recognition of At Least
Some Small Measure of Utility in Art, it is. One function of art is to communicate, in a
highly condensed form, complex ideas and feelings. Insight into this complexity can thus
be immediate and whole, even though the conditions out of which the creative work arose
were temporalqy long and fragmented in nature.
Most of us in the University are involved in disciplines which prepare us for coping
with only a minute area of contemporary knowledge; later, in our vocations, we will be
even more limited in our view of a complex society. And as communication becomes
more socially vital, the inadequacy of our orthodox media of communication becomes
more evident. The sensitivity of creative artists to contemporary social trends and the
immediacy with which they communicate with us can help to provide an integrated view
of a world which is, as Louis MacNeice wrote, "incorrigibly plura1." The creative artist
doesn't provide specific answers to problems, but tells us where we have been, where we
are, and where we are going. It is the latter of these, the announcement of new directions,
which is most crucial to young people. If we had listened carefully enough, yesterday, the
sound of a white plastic sax might have served as a flourish of clarions.
A Drowning Incident
CJ McCarthy.
AS SOON AS THE SCREEN DOOR SLAMMED he rounded the corner of the house
so as to be out of sight, then ran for the woodshed and put it between himself and the
house. The baby was taking its nap. He was not to go far away. Standing there in the
shade of the locust tree he looked about. Some wasps were lilting to and fro in the shade
under the eaves. Crossing behind the shed and through the gate that divided the huge
untended hedges he came through the lot to the old outhouse. He swung the rotted door
back carefully; the planks were warped and soft and velveted with a pale green patina.
One board was gone from the rear and a thin shaft of light leaned in. On the floor was
still the old coat that he had carried down here to Suzy, after he had followed her, the first
day she turned up looking thin and wagging her tail, her dugs no longer dragging to the
ground. The coat was matted with a crosshatching of white hairs and the faint sourmilk
odor of the pups still lingered. They had gone to a new home last week. He stepped in and
peered down into the hole and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom below he could see faintly
the two tiny red triangles touching at their vertices. In the corner at his heel there was a
chcket resting in the mold, its, antennae swaying in random arcs. He saw it and reached
for it, but it sprang, bumping against the facing of the seat and falling to the floor again.
He stepped on it quickly, then picked it up. It was still kicking one leg in slow lethargic
rhythm; a thick white liquid was oozing from it. He dropped it down the hole and bent to
watch. He could see it swaying gently in the elastic web. The black widow came threading
her way toward it, and when she reached it she began a weaving motion over it with her
legs as if performing some last rite. Soon the cricket's leg stopped. Then he leaned forward
slightly, shot from his tongue a huge drop of spittle; it passed the fonns below, receding
from white to gray in the graduated darkness. The spider froze. He corrected his aim, and
the second ball of spittle fell true, engulfing the figures. The spider fled her victim to the
SPRING 1960
THE
PHOENIX
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A Drowning Incident
CJ. me.,;!..,
31
A Drowning Incident
dark recesses of the musty shaft trailing a thin string
of spittle which hung in mucous loops among the
strands of the web.
He went out then, and carefully pushed the ruined
door to. The sun was well up in the oaks on the far
side of the house. Some blue jays flashed among
the leaves. He hesitated for a moment, then turned
down the path toward the corner of the lot. Here he
crossed a sag in the honeysuckled fence and started off
through the woods. Shortly he came to an old wagon
road winding dappled and serene in the morning
light through the dripping trees. He took the road
downhill, shuffling through the leaves, turning up
their damp undersides. He stopped once, stripped
off a handful of rabbit tobacco, stuffed it in his
mouth and shuffled down the road, spitting, his thin
shoulders rolling jauntily.
The road angled and switchbacked down the
hill until it came to the edge of the woods where
it straightened briefly before losing itself in the
humming field beyond which stretched the line of
willows and cottonwoods that marked the course
of the creek. He could still feel the ruts beneath his
feet as he waded through the knee high grasses or
threaded among the sporadic blackberry brambles.
Then he was parting the screen of willows, lime and
golden as they turned in the sun with his passage. He
could hear the faint liquid purling even then, even
before he emerged from the willows where the bridge
crosses, glimpsed through the green lacework the fan
of water beyond where the sun broke and danced on
the stippled surface like silver bees.
He walked out onto the little bridge, stepping
carefully. The curling planks were cracked and
weathered, bleached an almost metallic grey. The
whole affair bellied dangerously in the middle,
like a well used mule. He sat down on the warm
boards, then stretched out on his stomach and
peered over the edge into the water below. The
creek was shallow and clear. The floor of the pool was
mottled brown and gold as a leopard's hide where the
sun seeped through the leaves and branches overhead.
Minnows drifted obliquely across the slow current.
Through the water-glass he watched the tiny shadows
traverse the leopard's back silent and undulant as a
32
bird's flight. He found some small white pebbles at
his elbows and dropped them to the minnows; they
twisted and shimlnered slowly to the bottom trailing
miniuscule bubbles that stood in brief tendrils before
rising and disappearing. The minnows rushed to
inspect. He folded his arms beneath his chin. The
sun was warm and good on his back through the
flannel shirt.
Then with the gentle current drifted from beneath
the bridge a small puppy, rolling and bumping along
the bottom of the creek, turning weightlessly in the
slow water. He watched uncomprehendingly. It spun
slowly to stare at him with sightless eyes, turning its
white belly to the softly diffused sunlight, its legs stiff
and straight in an attitude of perpetual resistance.
It drifted on, hid momentarily in a band of shadow,
emerged, then slid beneath the hammered silver of
the water surface and was gone.
He sat up quickly, shook his head and stared
into the water. Minnows drifted in the current like
suspended projectiles; a water-spider skated.
They were black and white, they were black and ...
except for the one black all over. He crossed the
bridge and started after it, then stopped. When he
turned his eyes were wide and white. He came back
and started up the creek along the path that curved
above the low cutbanks. He studied the water as
he went. Small riffles ran through aisles of watercress awash and flowing in the stream, aluong rocks
where periwinkles crowded. A crawfish shot beneath
the looped bole of a cottonwood. In one pool an
inexplicable shoe sat solemnly.
At the bend in the creek just below where it passed
beneath the pike bridge the current swirled faster and
the following pool was deep. Because of the turn the
creek made, the sun was now in his eyes and he could
not see into the water. He hurried to the pike, crossed
the small concrete bridge, and worked his way down
the other side, through a stand of cane. When he
reached the creek he was on a high bank; below him
the current rocked in a swift flume, the water curling
and fluted. Below this, in the amber depths of the
pool, he could make out a dark burlap sack. He sat
down slowly, numb and stricken. As he stared, a small
head appeared through a rent in the bag. It ebbed:
C.J McCarthy
softly for a moment, then, tugged by a corner of the
current, a small black and white figure, curled fetally,
emerged. It was like witnessing the underwater birth
of some fantastic subaqueous organism. It swayed
hesitantly for a moment before turning to slide from
sight in the faster water.
He had no tears, only a great hollow feeling which
even as he sat there gave way to a slow mounting
sense of outrage. He stood up then, and pulled down
a long willow limb and worked it back and forth
across his knee trying to worry it in two, but it was
tough and resilient and after a while he gave it up.
He made his way back through the canes to the road
and to the other side where there was a fence. He
followed it until he found a loose strand in the wire.
This he pulled out, and with a few bendings the rusty
latter end came free. He went back to the creek and
with the wire hooked at the end tried to fish up the
sack from the bottom of the creek. The wire was
too long to control, and the current would sweep it
away; it was nearly half an hour before he hooked the
sack. He twisted the wire in his hand, and when he
pulled it the sack followed, heavy and sluggish. He
worked it to the bank and lifted it gingerly to shore.
It was rotten and foul. When he opened it there was
only one puppy inside, the black one, curled between
two bricks with a large crawfish tunneled half
through the soft wet belly. He hooked his wire into
the crawfish and pulled it out, stringing behind it a
tube of putrid green entrails. He tried to push them
back inside with the toe of his shoe. He went to the
road again and scouted the ditches alongside until he
found a paper bag, which he brought back and into
which with squeamish fingers he deposited the tiny
corpse. Then he pushed through the heavy brush until
he came to the field, crossed at a diagonal, and entered
the woods just a few yards short of the wagon road.
He turned up the road swinging the dirty little bag
alongside. His steps were trance-like and mechanical,
his eyes barren.
When he reached the house Suzy came trotting
across the yard to meet him. He avoided her and
went in by the back door, closing it carefully behind
him. In the kitchen he stopped and listened. The
house was silent; he could hear his heart thumping.
A warmthless light filled the panes of glass above
the sink. Then he heard her cought-she was always
coughing-and listened closer. She was in the
bedroom. He listened at the door, then quietly eased
it open. The shades were drawn, and where the sun
beat against them they were suffused with a pale
orange glow which permeated the air, air infested
with the faint urinous odor of the baby, the odor of
the blankets, sensuously fetid and intimate.
He stood in the doorway for an intenuinable
minute. What prompted his next action was the
culmination of all the schemes half formed not only
walking from the creek but from the moment the
baby arrived. Countless rejected, revised, or denied
thoughts moiling somewhere in the inner recesses of
his mind struggled and merged. He lifted the stinking
bag and looked at it. It was soggy and through
a feathered split in the bottom little black hairs
protruded like spiderfeet. Afterward, thinking about
it, it did not seem him that crossed the room to the
crib in the corner, lifted back the soft blue blanket,
and alongside the sleeping figure, small and wrinkled,
dumped the puppy and then folded the blanket over
them. He remembered vaguely seeing the green
entrails oozing onto the sheet as the blanket fell.
He is waiting for him to come home now; it is
almost dinner time. He is sitting on his bed, his
mind a dimensionless wall against which only a grey
pattern, whorled as a huge thumbprint, oscillates
slowly. His mother went once to the room quietly,
but the baby did not wake. He is waiting for him
to come home.
33
The New Architecture
John Furlow
"TODAY'S ARCHITECT cannot be just a designer," says Dr. Don Hanson, Dean of the
UT School of Architecture. "He can't just go out and win ribbons for his design and then
go home and forget about it. Architecture is devastatingly real. People have to live with
the results for generations, and many buildings in existence today are erosive or at least
detrimental to those who inhabit them. The sponsors and architects responsible for bad
architecture should be held accountable."
Historically, architecture has served the rich and the powerful, but Hanson believes
architecture must move toward functional, socially-oriented buildings in an attempt to
better serve the wants and needs of people. UT's architecture program is an emerging one,
but it is heading in the direction Hanson outlined in his comments. The program is based
upon values that will hopefully incite its students to contribute to the society they will
serve. Both traditional instruction and experiential learning are emphasized so students
will be prepared for the future architectural needs of society.
The direction of the UT architecture program is apparent in some of the projects
underway now. One of the more interesting and innovative projects involves behavioral
studies employing a scale-model (I" = 1-0") of the new Art and Architecture Building. Dr.
Alton J. DeLong, who has degrees in psychology, linguistics and man-environment relations
as well as an extensive background in architecture, is the instructor for the classes in
man-environment studies working with the model. DeLong has developed a variety of
techniques for working with scale-model environments. He has conducted a series of
behavioral studies which show that the correspondence between behavior in scale-model
and full-size environments is significant enough to warrant the use and study of scalemodel environments by architects and social scientists dealing with the man-environment
interface. The Art & Architecture Building scale-model, includes furniture and human
FALL 1976
THE NEW
ARCHITECTURE
35
The New Archtecture
figures and represents over 4,000 manhours of work
by nineteen students in DeLong's class. It will be used
to study how various spaces within the building will be
used and how they structure behavior.
In studying behavioral patterns in the scaleenvironment, DeLong says one works with people in
much the same way linguists work in the field when
analyzing languages: you set a context and ask people
to articulate behavior which is then carefully recorded
and analyzed.
"The analogy to language," according to Dr.
DeLong, "is not fortuitous. Language is the verbal
code people employ to make their transactions
with one another intelligible. What we are after, as
designers and researchers, is the code people employ
which make their transactions with the spatial
environment intelligible."
These spatial codes, like languages, often vary
from one cultural group to another. This places the
designer in a difficult position. To effectively use the
environment as a medium of communication, he must
be fluent in the code employed by the cultural group
for whom he is designing. The situation is made even
more pernicious because until only a few decades ago
no one was even remotely aware that such spatial
codes, or spatial languages existed. People themselves
are generally unaware of their spatial codes because,
according to DeLong, social communication involving
such codes occurs almost entirely out-of-awareness.
As a consequence of these factors "spatial grammars"
have not yet been analyzed, let alone written and
made available to designers.
These problems are manageable, however.
DeLong feels that the development of scale-model
environment research methods permits the designer
and the researcher to examine a wide variety of
contexts much more swiftly.
"Scale-model environments speed-up the
perception of time and the execution of behavior.
Our current studies suggest that two hours of real
time is experienced in a mere ten minutes in the 1/I2
scale environment. Of course, such a compression
of time precludes certain aspects of behavior from
analysis, but the structural features of behavioral
sequences do emerge rather distinctly," he explained.
36
Reactions to the scale-model methods DeLong has
developed for research and design vary considerably,
ranging from enthusiasm over the practical and
theoretical implications to skepticism and even
antagonism by those who view it as a threat to the
creative role of the designer.
"Those who are concerned with a restriction on
the designer's creativity are typically products of
the old, traditional form of design education which
views the designer as a sort of super-creative intellect,"
DeLong added.
DeLong likens the designer to the poet, arguing
that the poet cannot be creative and an effective
communicator unless he is fluent in the language of
his audience-his 'users.' The difference between
the babbling infant and the poet is that the former
creates nonsense and the latter creates new forms
of meaning. Requiring designers to be fluent in the
spatial 'languages' of their users is not a burden on
creativity, but rather enhances the creative potential.
The role of design, according to DeLong, is the
creation of meaning: It must have social relevance to
have value.
"Working with users in scale environments,"
DeLong added, "is a unique experience for students
in this regard, because they can immediately discover
from the users' reactions whether their manipulation
of space is nonsensical or intelligible and meaningful."
An equally important aspect of the Art & Architecture Building project is to correlate and calibrate
the behavioral findings in scale environments with
those in full-size environments. The actual results of
usage patterns in the building will be compared to
the results obtained in the scale-model. If results are
at all compatible, this study would indicate that the
adequacy of a designed environment can be specified
prior to having to make irretrievable financial
commitments.
As Kevin Lloyd, one of the students in DeLong's
class stated, "There are nine million dollars invested in
this building alone. In the future, before you commit
that much money to a building it ought to be possible
to know how people will react to it."
One floor up and just a few rooms down the hall
from the Architecture Building model in Estabrook
John Furlow
Hall lies the Housing Research and Development
Center, established in r975. The HRDC is the research
and development arm for housing programs at UT.
The philosophy of HRDC (quoting an HRDC
newsletter) "is that housing is the symptom of all
that is good and bad in America. When we speak
of child abuse, homicides within the home, assault
and battery within the home, social conditions of
the neighborhood, primary and secondary markets
for business, busing, local tax base, and deteriorated
neighborhoods, we are talking about housing. The
house is also a status symbol, a place for entertaining
friends, the largest financial investment made by
the average individual in his life time, and the last
symbol of territoriality in our society. It is because
of this philosophy that the Housing Research and
Development Center is interested in the revitalization
and stablization of neighborhoods."
One of the main concerns of the HRDC is the
development of good, efficient housing that is
relatively inexpensive. Various approaches have been
taken towards the realization of this goal. Recently
the HRDC designed and built two houses in East
Knoxville that utilize solar energy for water and air
heating systems. The houses will be sold for $r6,800,
and the use of solar energy should cut utility bills in
half. These houses are built at standard FHA housing
specifications at the lowest possible expense, so more
families will be able to afford such housing. The
HRDC works in conjunction with local minority
contractors, enabling them to get the experience
Top left: Stairways and partial
view of lounge in the new UT Art
and Architecture Building model;
photo by Mike Ruppert. Above:
Lenthwise view into building
model from ground floor; photo
by Bob Blanton. Left: View
into the library of architecture
building model; photo by
Bob Blanton.
needed for making more accurate and efficient
judgments.
The HRDC has established programs in Building
Management and Building Inspection for people in
the community. Educating those in the community to
work within the system is a goal of the HRDC. Those
involved with the HRDC believe-as staff member
Ann Blanton said-that "housing is more than just
putting up buildings for people to live in. It entails
wise urban planning, economic development, and
neighborhood-user education."
The HRDC's involvement with housing, the
behavioral studies being conducted in DeLong's
class and other programs-such as the shelter building
projects going on in earthquake-prone Managua,
Nicaragua, all deal with people. As Dean Hanson
said, "Buildings should be built for people, and
unless buildings reflect the real values and needs of
people they no longer fulfill the definition of what
architecture should be."
37
Mechanicsville
FALL 1979
38
Introduction
IN THE FALL and Winter Quarters during 1977-1978, students in the Historic Preservation
Laboratory at UT's School of Architecture designated a twenty-four block area of
Mechanicsville as the subject of a case study in historic preservation. Historic preservation
is a relatively new concept in Knoxville, and the large, area-wide scale of preservation of a
district such as Mechanicsville had never been attempted. Mechanicsville thus became the
test case.
The area was chosen because its boundaries contained many of the major issues that face
preservation activity today. It is an historic area with highly significant architecture, yet its
continued existence as a residential neighborhood is threatened by the increasing rate of
deterioration of its structures.
The problem of deterioration is aggravated by the problems that come with an
economically disadvantaged area, absentee landlords, and a constantly changing disposition
on the future of the area by city planning authorities. Without timely intervention, the
end result would be displacement of its residents; the process of deterioration would have
reached a point of irreversibility, paving the way for demolition and the speculation of new
commercial development.
Left alone, this neighborhood rich in memories of the past would be eradicated and its
residents would most likely be relocated to public housing projects. The solution to these
problems is still being studied and will be the subject of a future publication.
The applications of the study extend beyond the boundaries of Mechanicsville. One of the
biggest problems that must be overcome in the preservation of Mechanicsville and other older
sections of Knoxville, is a general lack of awareness among the public of historic preservation
as an alternative to new development. Typically, there is a total inability to perceive the
potential of rehabilitating structures for continued
use. Part of this stems from the lack of knowledge
and exposure to the technology of preservation and
rehabilitation. Through case studies of selected
structures this project has attempted to demonstrate
the potential of properly rehabilitated structures.
The following material is a selected sampling of
student projects. The entire project was undertaken
in two phases, each constituting half the geographical
area considered. In each phase, intensive research
and surveys were conducted on planning statistics,
existing conditions and architectural significance
of the structures. After the surveys, students were
encouraged to select problems of special interest
which would contribute to the preservation of
Mechanicsville.
History
McGhee's Addition, later to become known as
Mechanicsville, was a thriving suburb of Knoxville
in 1868 when the University of Tennessee consisted
only of half a dozen buildings with little residential
development around it. This suburb was named for
Charles McClung McGhee, a wealthy landowner
from Monroe County who had moved to Knoxville in
1860 to take advantage of the business opportunities
provided by the city's busy industrial activity.
McGhee's Addition, located on the northwestern
fringe of the city, was a residential and industrial
community inhabited by the new working and middle
classes. Most of Knoxville's heavy industry was
located near this area.
The Knoxville Iron Works was founded in the
vicinity of Mechanicsville by Hiram S. Chamberlain,
a Union Army Captain from Ohio and Chief
Quartermaster of Knoxville at the close of the Civil
War. Chamberlain furnished the business expertise,
Welsh iron masters furnished the technical knowledge
and skill, and blacks were employed as the mechanics
and laborers. Bar iron, nails, railroad spikes as well as
ornamental fences were manufactured. Many of these
fences still line the streets of Mechanicsville. From
1850-1890 people in this area were largely employed
by the railroads, the Iron Company, and various mills
throughout the area.
Mechanicsville's 2,000 citizens were annexed
to the city in 1883. A local newspaper reported:
"Mechanicsville keeps time to the musical hum of the
machinery within her borders. Every residence and
cottage bore evidence of thrift and contentment."
Welsh technicians and wealthy merchants built
large grandiose structures in the area, adjoined by
small cottages built by skilled workers. Even smaller
"shotgun" houses were built in McAnnally Flats, now
also known as Mechanicsville, by black mechanics
and workers.
In 1875, Col. John L. Moses deeded a tract ofland
in Mechanicsville for the use and benefit of the black
people. Fairview School was built on this land by
black citizens for this purpose. Knoxville College
was also founded in 1875 by the United Presbyterian
Church as a grade and a normal school for blacks.
The site chosen for the college was Longstreet's Hill,
that ridge from which the main batteries of Lt. Gen.
James Longstreet's forces shelled the Federal Fort
Sanders. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had moved his
Federal Forces from Cincinnati to Knoxville in 1862.
Blacks, both slave and free, fled to Knoxville at that
time to be under the protection of Burnside and the
Union troops, and settled among the blacks already
established in Mechanicsville.
Many streets in Mechanicsville are named after
39
Mechanicsville
leading black citizens. Cansler Street is named for
Professor Charles W. Cansler, a respected lawyer,
author, and educator. Cansler was responsible,
through Sen. E.E. Patton, a member of the Tennessee
State Senate, for a bill which provided for playgrounds
and parks for blacks in Knoxville. He was also
responsible for passage of an act by the Tennessee
legislature enabling descendants of ex-slaves to inherit
real estate in the same manner as whites. Finally, it
was Cansler who was responsible for the erection of
a public library for blacks in Knoxville, with funds
provided by the Carnegie Corporation. Other streets
such as "Dora" were named for the children of Col.
] ohn L. Moses, a great black benefactor.
In 1883 Mechanicsville, the Ninth Ward of
Knoxville, contained six grocery and general stores,
(the largest being]ames J. Concon's on McGhee
Street). There was also a greenhouse, a Methodist,
Christian, and a Welsh Congretational Church, and a
new high school.
By the turn of the century, the population of this
portion of the city had increased greatly, resulting in
an increased demand for service facilities. Fire Station
NO.5 was built to service the area in 1909. It was built
in the Neo-Classical style, which was typical of the
period. Its design fulfilled all functional requirements
of an efficient fire station. The tower rising from the
center of the front facade was designed for quick
drying fire hoses. Three brass fire poles allowed for
quick descent from the upstairs to the ground floor.
Fire Station NO.5 is now the oldest remaining
fire station in the city. It was designed for horsedrawn fire equipment. A fire company at the time
comprised of two pieces of equipment manned by five
to seven men and drawn by four horses. Motorized
fire equipment appeared in 1917 and Fire Station
NO.5 became a center for repair for motorized fire
engines for many years. Located at the intersection
of Deaderick, Arthur, and McGhee Streets, it is now
included in the National Register of Historic Sites.
Mechanicsville began to decline shortly after
the turn of the century. The more afHuent families
moved to newer suburbs that had begun to spring
up throughout the city. Blacks were not permitted
to join the labor unions which controlled to some
40
extent skilled occupations in most of the industries
in Knoxville. In a social study done on the
Mechanicsville area in 1925, J.H. Danes observed
that the physical surroundings of the Negro family
were for the most part poor and lacked ordinary
conveniences such as bathrooms and electricity.
Heating was usually with wood or coal stoves. The
living conditions were typical of "the Negroes whose
economic standing is low and who cannot afford more
than minimum living expenses."
From the turn of the century to the present, the
process of deterioration, both socially and physically,
has continued at an increasing pace. In the 1950's,
construction of Interstate 40 demolished a large
portion of the finest homes in Mechanicsville. Present
highway expansion and commercial encroachment
further threaten the existence of this area as a
residential neighborhood. However, despite the forces
of rapid deterioration, the historic and architectural
integrity of the area still comes through.
No more to build on there
Michael D. Galligan
A woman's wet yellow hair
Can straggle across her steamy face
As she rests against the stairs
Leading to the kitchen inside, and says:
How time lies heavy
With today and yesterday
Wearing me the same,
And tomorrow carrying no change.
A man in workpants and shirt
Can leave to work
With solid face and eyes firmly set
On time at hand, an hour ahead, no more:
We have the home, and yard fenced;
I've no time for time to lay heavy,
With work and garage I commenced
To build today.
Spring 1970
And firmly set off to work.
A woman's moist face can grow firm
On the day a fence is built
And without a tear can learn
Of a garage and slowly accept:
There's not much love in a fence
That I can find
And hope in a garage
Is as lost
As my child's last dance
Down the kitchen steps.
And slowly step inside and close
The kitchen door.
41
Why I Abhor A Lot Of
Modern, Pseudo-Deep Poetry
Richard Laurence Barclay
Spring 1971
PHOENIX
42
-sprlng'?1-
I abhor a lot of modern, Pseudo-deep poetry because
In most of such poems
the words are
arranged
On
The page
In such
pattern
a
that,
In order to read the poem,
one's
must
eyes
often be
Jostled
and bounced
about
Like the breasts
Of a well endowed girl
prancing
down
a
flight
of
stairs.
the fishwife's tale
Marla Puziss
there are tiles on the bathroom floor
the color of oceans,
and in the bathtub
small waves crest and break.
I float, huge as a whale
amid the ice
of white porcelain,
rocking]onah in my belly.
who needs ocean voyages?
I want to stay home and
write poems, hear your quiet
breathing in the night.
I will be old Noah
with seaweed hair,
with hands smelling of zebras,
setting foot on land.
FALL 1976
-_
_
........-.
1 _.. _ _ -
::=:::..: . . .
.. _-"'.......
43
Concrete
EddHurt
"Lithe," an adjective
not applied to bogs,
is not applicable
here. Boglike, rolls
down in slow lava
expectancy, an asylum's oatmeal. Then turning, folds
coming out, edge upon edge,
an obese woman sitting.
To versify is useless: its
subtly "lithe" motion, felt,
is the minds of men working
without sound.
FALL 1976
-----
--------
_
....
-"'
.............. --~--.
...... ..-..
44
45
fig
2.2
Kerry Bowden
46
fig. 2·3
Amalio Monllor
47
from:
What Next for the University?
"What developments or changes would you most like
to see on this campus within the next five years?"
Jack Clark, Harold Glass, c& Russell Fletcher, Knoxville Gay Caucus
FALL 1976
What Next
for the University?
"Wt!oIt~.~......,.-..u"",,,_I10.0._
... tNo~""'rM".",...r
48
HEREWITH ARE A FEW GOALS that we shall strive to attain in Knoxville and on
the university campus:
I) A relaxing of social attitudes toward gay people. In a recent incident, an apartment
owner was showing a prospective renter through an apartment that was occupied by a gay
person. Spying a "Gay is Good" poster and a Playgirl magazine, the apartment owner not
only tore down the poster, but also stole the magazine. Confronted with a potential theft
law suit, the apartment owner begrudgingly returned the magazine.
2) A relaxing of official attitudes (both city and university) toward gay people. The
university has refused for years to allow gay people to form a recognized organization on
campus on the grounds that homosexual acts are illegal in the State of Tennessee. May it
hereby be known by the University of Tennessee administration that we, the gay people of
Knoxville, are not asking for a place to perform sexual acts. The near sightedness of the
university administration is what has kept them blind to the fact that being gay is a way of
life and an expression of our very own being.
If the attitudes of the city of Knoxville toward gay people were known outside our own
realm, the public would easily recognize the injustice involved. Recently a gay individual
was literally kidnapped, driven to a secluded spot, and robbed at knife point. When a city
detective arrived, surveyed the scene, and interrogated our friend, he reflected that the
only people who are out at 1:00 a.m. are black people and homosexuals, using somewhat
more colorful words. No fingerprints were taken; no further action was taken. As a matter
of fact nothing was taken except our friend's car, his watch, his money, and several stitches
in his face during the two weeks he spent in the hospital. American justice triumphs!
3) The beginning of a gay studies class on campus comparable to currently offered
black and women's studies. This study course would cover such aspects as the historic
significance in philosophical, politico/military,
and artistic fields. Current aspects of gay society
would also be treated, including peer pressure and
the impact of gays on contemporary politics and in
artistic areas.
4) The establishment of a gay counselling,
recreation, and social center, run by and for gay
people, where we will meet, discuss and work with
our peer problems, and celebrate our attitudes.
This idea is still in the formative stages; we will
work toward and through this center to bring about
changes in social and official attitudes. A gay person
in need would be able to come to other gay people for
professional referral and empathetic help. This center
is no longer just a dream-it is an attainable goal.
by making these homes available for residences (not
usurping them for office space) for faculty members
and by encouraging faculty members to live there, so
that the faculty home can be again, as it once was, a
part of the university community.
Allen Carroll, Associate Professor, English
I HAVE LITTLE TO SAY about what changes the
University ought to make over the next five years. It's
not easy to come up with suggestions which aren't so
large as to be vapid (our teaching ought to be better),
so small as to be frivolous (the elevators in McClung
Tower ought to be made to work), so complicated
(having to do with, for example, the emphasis in
the English department), or so obvious (we ought
to switch to a semester system), but perhaps the
following suggestions are worth consideration.
First, the University should by all means hold
enrollment at its current level, which means we will
want to begin (again) discriminating in our admissions
policy and presumably paying more attention to
the quality of students and instruction than to the
quantity of either.
Second, the University ought to control the present
proliferation of special offices and minor departments
and thus control the administration and supporting
staff which at present threatens to overwhelm the
proper functions (teaching and research) of the
university.
Thirdly, the University ought to make an effort to
preserve the neighborhood quality of the community,
especially what remains of it this side of Cumberland,
49
Poet's Corner
Robert Walker
SPRING 1974
Phoenix
of Tennessee
Sf:wlng.974
Uni~ty
• Editors
50
NEARLY EVERY STUDENT AT UT has written a poem at sometime in their life-or
at least it seems they have, judging by the hundreds of poems submitted to the Phoenix
each quarter. These poems are written by people whose academic interests are highly
diverse. Only a small minority of submitted work comes from English or Journalism majors.
Most of the poetry we receive is obviously untutored, poetry being an art which is almost
invariably ignored in most high school and college curriculums. Part of the dignity of
poetry has always been its inaccessability as a craft, its tenets and aesthetics. Being so
subjective and ephemeral, poetry has never really lent itself to structured pedagogy. You
cannot tell someone how to write a poem. Poetry is not a world of strict do's and don't's;
its only absolutes are talent and conviction. Still, the thought is troubling that many of
the poets' work examined by the Phoenix could be greatly improved in quality and greater
satisfaction gained if more attention was given to those aspects of the poet's craft which
can be taught.
A poetry writing class does exist at UT. It is taught by Dr. Richard Kelly, is scheduled
once a year, and cannot be repeated for credit. However, one quarter is too little time for
the professor to establish the close interpersonal relationships with his students which
are so necessary in a poetry class. Also, so little class time does not allow students to
develop their work together, experience a sense of community, or assimilate the ideas of
their comrades. The atmosphere of a poetry class should be as informal and unstructured
as possible, something similar to an encounter group. The reason this sort of creative
learning experience is not presently available is largely due not only to lack of time but the
grade consciousness of both students and the University.
We are calling for an expansion of the present program, making it possible for students
to take a sequence of poetry courses as one could take a series of courses in a comparable
graphic arts program. We also ask that these courses be given pass/fail, with the only
requirement being regular attendance.
This is a pipe dream. The University is not ready for it; the funding is not available;
Dr. Kelly couldn't do it alone. But it seems a shame that the interests of so many students
should be ignored and such a reservoir of creative talent be allowed to go untapped. Until
this dream comes true, hopefully the Phoenix can increasingly become a focal point of
communication between those of us who try to put the sunset into a sentence.
Film Fantasy
Sandy Sneed c& Lewis Goans
IN RECENT YEARS, there has been a movement from print media to visual
communication, predominantly the film media. We have laid our books down and
turned to television and films for a good portion of information as well as enjoyment.
Unlike other phases of communication which date back to ancient times, film is less
than 100 years old. It has originated and expanded before us; it has changed our modern
age just as the age has developed it. Filmic communication is the growth of industries,
the birth of a new art form, an expansion of the communication process, a massive
entertainment outlet, an aid in technical advancement-it is all these and more.
In the wake of this tidal wave of visual communication, colleges and universities
all over the country have begun to incorporate film history and film making in their
curriculums. The film programs are located in departments of cinema communications,
theatre, art, and broadcasting, among others.
Here at the University of Tennessee, the film history and theory courses are in the
department of Speech and Theatre, while the courses involving film making and film
editing are in the departments of Art and Broadcasting. In the history and theory classes,
emphasis is placed on the analytical viewing of films and familiarizing the student with
various technical aspects of the industry. The film making courses allow the students to
try their own hands at the art.
Film is also present in many other places on campus. Education has a media division;
libraries have a non-print section; there is a Photographic and Film Service in the
University Extension Division; many other departments have full series of films relating
to their respective subjects.
However, at present, UT offers no opportunity for a major in the area of filmic
communications, with the exception of the College Scholars Program. Three students are
enrolled as "film majors" through this program, but many more students have expressed an
interest in a film major. Growing interest is reflected in the crowded film classes, especially
in the film making area where classrooms are often overflowing and the availability of
equipment is limited.
Last year, a University Committee on Film Studies was formed under the leadership of
Dr. Ralph Norman to study the extent of film interest and film possibilities on campus.
At the conclusion of its research, the committee will present its recommendations for the
direction of film study at UT. The decision will be based on the needs of our school and a
study of the programs which have been tried at other schools.
To have an effective film program, a University must be prepared to cover all phases
of film history, production, criticism, and uses. Without such an integrated program, film
studies would be inconclusive.
We are calling for such a film curriculum at UT. In the past, it was possible for film
studies to be limited. But now, film making and film studies can hardly be ignored. Film is
the medium of the future, and we are shaping the future today.
FALL 1974
Film Fantasy
by S<:lnd!:J St!eed Clnd l~ls GooM
51
Eric Lewald
Ruth E. Garwood
SPRING 1976
52
MOST OF THE PEOPLE in Eric Lewald's film class don't know that he's an undergraduate.
It might not make any difference except that Lewald teaches the class.
Titled "Film as an Art Form," the course is taught in the Honors Department. Lewald
is teaching the class to fulfill a requirement of the College Scholars Program, in the
College of Liberal Arts, which allows students to design their own curricula. The program
requires a senior project, and to culminate his film curriculum, Lewald thought it would be
appropriate to teach a class on film.
The class meets for two hours twice a week. On Tuesday the class watches the film
Lewald has chosen for that week; on Thursday, they discuss the film in light of what they
have learned about technique from their textbooks and from earlier discussions.
The students watch films such as Citizen Kane, The Silence, Nanook ofthe North and Ivan
the Terrible and write their reactions. "I try to say nothing before the students write their
reactions," Lewald says, "but after I've read their papers I try to say a good solid chunk."
To analyze film, Lewald suggests that students use techniques that they have learned
from analysis of literature. "I only use literature because it's something 99 out of 100
people do. The experience of freshman composition gives people some exposure to literary
criticism, but film is a lot more like music than anything else." He compares the elements of
film to melodic lines or sections of the orchestra, all of which combine to produce the
final piece.
"The whole point of the class is that the form and content are inseparable," says Lewald.
"The story is only a bare starting point for my film, one out of twenty things to look at
along with elements like sound, lighting, camerawork, acting style, transitions, and
editing rhythm."
Lewald believes that films can be based on plays
and novels, but he says, "You have to remember that
what makes the story is the relation of the author's
style to the plot. The last thing you're supposed to
worry about is transferring it specifically."
Lewald makes films himself. Earlier this year
he worked at the Community Video Center at St.
John's Episcopal Church. One of his projects there
was making an hour-long music show with his friend
Glenn Morgan.
Last fall Lewald studied at New York University
and made some short films there. His current project
is writing the screenplay for a feature length film he
and Glenn Morgan are planning.
Lewald recognized his interest in film about four
years ago, when his family was spending the summer
in Cambridge, England. On several trips into London,
Lewald did nothing but go to movies. "I realized that
was the only thing I was interested in," he says.
Lewald's teaching methods are derived from his
experience as a student. "I'm doing things in the way
teachers I liked did them," he explains, and reflecting
on the class he adds, "but the real reason behind the
course is that I got to see ten of my favorite films."
53
Spring is Spring if ..
John Girard Willis
WINTER 1977
...------_
_..............-
.........,........
_..__
....
t-.. ..... _ _ _ .........
......
-..
-....,-~-~
~~~==-..
_..-.....·DofttO
.......
... _Io< ...-..
_L....
-""'"-
_~
~--
54
Spring ain't spring unless(t)
i git my boiled eggs & greens
i love t best/
N spring ain't spring until
wysteria sprouts beneath our
windowsill/
Spring is Spring if...
rain drench the branch
N the waters run deep
beneath my toes if
swimming near the river flows/
the cane near the creek
gits thick & the air smites
yous like sweaty fingers upon
the brow of dawn/
Spring is spring, if N when
Winter seems as though it'll
never come again/
The Little Fai ths
Gary Shockley
We have mastered the little faiths,
All the harmless sophistries that
Our scheduled leisure will allow.
Yet, a taste remains for something golden.
The lines grow long, waiting again,
Waiting for Spring, for the third dawn's
Final heresy against all
We call real, all we call silver.
Spring sings the mad prophet's promise,
Dances with Lazarus, reborn
To remind an easy people
Just how easily silver turns to gray.
WINTER 1978
......
-~v.... _ _ ... -...........
55
Heat lightning
Marla Puziss
A rumor of heat lightning
moves in the night air
heavy with ozone, and
fireflies pulse in the long grass.
I am learning the ways of fireflies:
a brief light, a mating
and a quiet dying.
Like the Indian women I will
wind them in my hair for jewelry.
FALL 1976
Under my cheekbones
an old woman is taking form
in slow metamorphosis.
I will sit on a dark porch,
wearing my grandmother's hands
and watch the children hunting fireflies ,
their low calls sounding
in the sticky air.
=-:..":..~
_--.......
----..-
=-~-::..~.-
--. ...........--
._"'...
~-- ....
....
-
"'" ..... .......
r~==
56
fig. 3. 1
Jerrie Williams
58
jig. 3.2
Paul Yount
59
fig. 33
Dangerous Dreams
60
Beverly Brecht
jig. 3·4
K. G. Freeman
61
Special
Jon Parker
I drive a bus downtown.
Tonight there's some black singer
on the radio-a bass as deep
as the sky above the buildings.
I turn him down.
SPRING1988
"Vandalism
campus art is
of
--62
......
!:f':-::.~::
::::::
...............
"
---.....,.,....
.......,...._-.......
.
-........
....-
:.-=.""'"
..........
_MI _ _ •
=:::--==
::::,.=...~:::J"_
_
..
........._,. .........
=---....
:..:t.....
. . .-. ..
.,.....
,..... ,......
......
,.....
....,..."". .....
.............
--~-,.,""'~-"':
.,
~=
Some random voice breaks in
over the two-way radio,
says
"The people in the chapel are cold."
That's all, and it repeats,
not even speaking to me:
"The people
in the chapel
are cold."
No voice could sing like this little city.
No voice could sing
what I hear now in my glass bus:
nothing
but the breath through my nose,
imagine I can hear the cold electricity
of the bank clock
flashing
a hundred feet high,
giving me the real blues.
How late,
how cold
I am.
The radio announcer tells me
that our great radio telescopes
are listening
to the stars,
trying to find a station,
but the stars sound like static.
I roll down my window,
and I think I hear the stars
as the cold air pours into the bus
above the steady backbeat of the bank clock:
0
33
9:0 1
320
9: 0 2
But what I really hear is the light rain
falling, beginning to freeze.
The J.F.G. sign
across the river
blinks:
"specia1."
jig. 3·5
Larry Maloney
63
Prayer
Karen Ohnesorge
Sunday the car
swished over the twigs and leaves
the wind threw down.
You went to church for comfort.
But the man with brass teeth
spoke only of tithes,
for he believes what the Bible says,
despite the decay of wombs,
the appeal of quick death.
SPRING 1983
Outside
the leaves
click up and down in the grey wind
like code-senders
in a submarine.
The morning breathes at my window
sucking and blowing.
On cool days
the sun is bright,
and the sky is blue
even when it smells grey.
Look closely. I see
the earthworms
and the doves of the columbine.
Poetry by
Karen Ohnesorge
64
Champagne Hour
Linda Parsons Burggraf
Lawrence Welk
strikes up his thirty pieces.
Around the chair's left side,
Harley opens his fifth Black Label
since supper. His wife never counts
on saturday night and he can slip
a few empties behind the chair.
The bubble machine
takes him back.
Sometimes he'll talk
better days
to his granddaughter.
The Pelican Line:
creased table damask
Crab Louie on Spode
grasshopper pie
movement so effortless
you pulled into Bristol
all the way from Atlanta
in the space of a dog's pant.
She knows the caboose
is watermelon red
and follows piggybacks
on the tail end.
But what she loves
about this house
is the bathtub.
Porcelain
crouches on clawed feet
like a female Congo cat.
Though the suds and plastic cups
her toes shoot budlike
from the waterline.
She calls to be dried.
Myron Floren
finishes on the accordion.
Her grandmother
leaves before the old women
polka together on camera.
Past the bathroom door
her arms clink
with three, maybe four, bottles.
SPRING 1988
--
--...........
.......-..-......
......
.........
..,..-.
65
Leaving Him,
Leaving North Carolina
Jennifer C. Worth
In Black Mountain, the air smelled like winter,
not cold, but sharp and moist, with the mountains in it.
That was the latest change, the move out of autumn,
here at the first shoulder of the mountains that
divide my home from his. I paused there, out of my car,
and I watched the horizon darken
until I couldn't distinguish the foothills
from the flat sky. Then I drove on west,
knuckles white on the steering wheel.
FALL 1996
n·
..........
..._oxM,
--~"~
....,. ..................
n._......
.......
___
~
.. c.
~
I111 _ _
. . . . . "",.. ...... 111 . . _
...
.... .., ..... __ ,., .,......, ...... _IIIIIIt_.
...........,..
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__ ........ l'IIM' __ .rI-'
~
......... --.. .......
I----------------~~
67
IolIo gallery
Amy Britnell
SPRING 1990
68
UT ART STUDENTS are discovering some of the realities of the professional art world
through Gallery 1010, a space run by the University of Tennessee's Student Art League
that will provide talented artists with long overdue exposure.
Until recently, many student artists have been frustrated with UT's lack of viable
gallery space for the exhibition of their work. Although the Ewing Gallery in the Art and
Architecture building has provided them a minimal amount of exposure, with shows like
the art department's annual student competition, it gradually has evolved into a showcase
for professional artists. While students have been able to walk through Ewing and take
a look at what's happening in the art world beyond the university, they weren't able to
experience a part of that real world until the advent of Gallery 1010.
"It's a totally new perspective on what the students are accomplishing," said Don
Kurka, head of the art department. "It's a wonderful format for them to display their
abilities, skills, talents. I think that is the real payoff on having a gallery. There's a
showcase for the talent that exists.
"The gallery gives students the opportunity to do everything that it takes to put a show
together - all those details behind the scenes," Kurka said. "That's a thing that you need to
know how to do if you're going to be an artist. So it's a learning experience in itself."
Gallery 1010, located on the third floor of the Candy Factory, is a small, intimate space
with stark white walls, hardwood floors, and windows overlooking downtown Knoxville
and the Knoxville Museum of Art. The gallery opened in January with a group show
featuring the work of 30 artists in various mediums.
Bev Brecht, gallery committee president, said, "This is a real turning point, I think, for
the art students to really learn something.
"Making something is one dimension of the creative process, and it's still you-it's very
personal," Brecht said. "Then the next step is when
the class critiques it-other students, faculty. This
gallery is another step, getting your work out there
where people don't know you. Not your friends, but
strangers looking at your work.
"It's a weird kind of experience because you feel
very vulnerable and naked in a way. There are some
very intimate thoughts and feelings that are just
out there to be evaluated, judged, approved of by
a complete and total stranger. It's good objective
feedback the students get that they just can't get any
other way," she said.
That objective feedback, while valuable, also can
be painful for a young artist unaccustomed to the
sometimes blatant criticism found outside a university
environment. Gallery 1010 presents one of the most
unnerving realities of being an artist - public rejection
or approval.
"In a university setting, you get caught up in this
microcosm that has nothing to do with the real world,
really," Brecht said. "It's just so unique in that closed
kind of environment. You need to learn the process,
but you have no way to learn the practical reality of
what it's really like. You might not realize something
about yourself unless you have a chance to experience
this, and it's nice because it's not the real world.
"It's sort of what it's like, but it's not like you have
the rent to pay and if this stuff doesn't sell, you're out
on the street. You don't have your whole survival on
the line," she said. "Maybe it isn't even what you want
to do, and you haven't realized that yet because it's
just so much fun to make art."
Remo Melton, a graduate student in ceramics, said,
"You just have to think that it (criticism) is just one
person's opinion. I guess that's the best way to cope
with it." His work was part of the gallery's first show.
"Any time we make our art, we're open to
criticism," Melton said. "It's a very scary thing to put
your work up on a wall. I think it takes a lot of guts to
take something you've made, good or bad, and put it
out for people to view."
Melton's studio is filled with what he describes
as non-functional teapots, fashioned in three-legged
animal forms. The ceramic creatures are perpetually
in mid-step, which Melton calls representative of the
transitory nature oflife.
"I make art for self-satisfaction," Melton said. "I'm
making it to get it right. That's a quote from a guy out
69
IOho Gallery
West-somebody said, 'What's your goal?' and he
said, 'To make it to get it right.' There is no perfect
piece. Not for the artist, there isn't."
Ideally, Gallery 1010 will instill "make it to get
it right" standards among more student artists. The
gallery and a viewing public give students a tangible
reason to work for perfection that goes beyond the
good' grades that are given so much emphasis in an
academic environment.
"The gallery demands that students finish their
work in a professional manner," ·Melton said. "If
you look at the art in the gallery, you'll see that it is
very much student work. It's very naive, very young
art. Very green. It's extremely good that we have the
gallery and the chance to get out there and show."
For William Franks, a senior in painting, the
gallery's biggest advantage is the expanded sense of
identity that can result from seeing one's artwork as
part of a show.
Franks said, "1010 offers a chance for students
to see their things on the wall, so that their work
becomes more real to them. It helps people to begin
to believe in themselves as artists."
No classroom critiques, portfolio reviews, or
menacing pass/fail standards come attached to
the work shown in Gallery 1010. In fact, Brecht
emphasized that two-week gallery sti nts are open
to anyone affiliated with the university, from artists
to engineers. This indulgent atmosphere encourages
creative growth and experimentation, another of
Gallery 1010'S advantages.
Franks said, "It's the only place you can make a
statement. It might be a wad of bread in the middle of
the floor, but to you it means something, and it's okay
there. It's like a safe place."
Unfortunately, the opportunities that accompany
Gallery 1010 will mean very little without time and
interest from the students, and financial support
from the community. The problems are cropping up
alongside the advantages.
Students are responsible for finding the time to
staff their own shows, which means balancing the
gallery against classes and projects. Although hiring a
graduate teaching assistant would relieve that problem,
70
Kurka asserts that sending someone from the art
department to hel p out would be antithetical to the
original concept of Gallery 1010: an effort run for the
students by the students.
Kurka is adamant that the students who will
benefit from Gallery 1010 are the ones who will keep
the gallery alive. Although Kurka agreed to nurse the
fledgling venture through the first six months, he will
leave Gallery 1010 to sink or swim from that point
onward. It's the student's responsibility, he said, to
hang shows, staff the gallery, rally community support
and make sure the $200 monthly rent is paid.
"I'm highly optimistic about the students' ability to
put together exciting and outstanding exhibits," Kurka
said. "I'm very uncertain about whether they can find
money to finance them."
It's a worthwhile effort. Aside from the fact that
the gallery is a valuable hands-on learning experience
for the students, it allows the community outside the
university to tap into the diverse range of talent and
creative resources found here. In the four months
since its opening, Gallery 1010 has hung worthwhile
shows 'with fresh attitudes and perspectives that are
hard to find in a stagnant university environment.
Thomas Ducklo
71
fig. 4.2
Mickey Stigmata
72
Greg Bunch
fig. 4-3
Untitled (Lake City, TN)
mndy Robinson
73
The Letter
Alan Gratz
SPRING 1993
74
THE LETTER SEEMED harmless enough. Maybe it was a practical joke. Maybe it was
sincere. If it were a joke, then it was probably the guys at work who were behind it. But if it
wasn't a joke ...
The envelope had no return address. The letter was unsigned. The author had used
a fountain pen with a small, flat tip. The ink was a light black on the yellow paper.
Expensive paper. When Michael held it up to the light he could read the watermark:
"Crane's."
The text was compact, simple. Less than half the page was filled with words, all
scrunched up near the top of the paper. The handwriting was neat manuscript, with gentle
curves and tall letters. Michael remembered hearing once that tall letters meant the writer
was confident.
All the spelling was correct. The grammar was complex, yet accurate. The style was
poetic, imaginative, honest. The meaning was ambiguous. The spacing between lines was
uniform, though there were no lines on the paper. The only flaw, if it could be called such,
in the letter's design was the left margin. Each line started just a little farther to the right
than the last, leaving a slight diagonal bend to the text. Unintentional, Michael reasoned.
Probably a left-handed writer.
One hundred years from now, the letter began, we'll both be shadowy ghosts. With
this in mind, I've determined that I have nothing to lose in writing you this letter.
Michael picked up the envelope once more. The post-mark was local. The letter had
arrived one day after it had been mailed. He looked closely at the way his name was
written on the envelope. Tall, thin letters. No mistakes. No hesitation. Michael wondered
if someday he might be able to write his own name that way.
You've been on my mind for some time now,
the letter continued. In the seventh grade two of
Michael's friends found out he had a crush on Marilou
Ellis, and they wrote him an anonymous note from a
secret admirer. He examined the letter carefully, as
his friends knew he would. The letters were short and
round, bubbly. Feminine. The ink was pink and the
stationary was bordered with flowers.
There were subtle hints that it was supposed to be
from Marilou: I watch you in social studies, the letter
said. Marilou was in his social studies class.
You're a good artist, the letter complimented him.
Marilou was in his art class.
I've noticed how you sit near me at lunch. Michael
sat near her at lunch.
He wanted to believe the letter, so he did.
Michael wrote Marilou a letter in return. He told
her he had a crush on her. He told her he wanted to go
steady with her. He told her he loved her.
Michael slid his note into Marilou's book bag in
social studies class. Class, the teacher said, open your
books to chapter fourteen-Agriculture of the World.
Marilou pulled her book out of her bag. She found the
note. She blushed as she read it and scribbled out a
quick response.
I didn't write you a letter, she wrote. Sorry.
Hope is a lover's staff, this letter's envelope quoted.
Walk hence with that, and manage it against
despairing thoughts.-Shakespeare.
And then there was the heart of the letter.
From observing you in class, the letter explained, I
haven't been able to determine your sexual preference.
That had to be the joke. The guys at work would
be waiting for him to mention the letter just so they
could laugh at him.
Regardless, you appear to be open-minded, the
letter reminded him, so I'm sure you can appreciate
my feelings without prejudice. I don't usually like
anonymity but this is an instance where I feel it's
appropriate.
Michael took the letter to his roommate.
"Did you write this?"
Darren took the letter and skimmed it.
"No. Where'd you get this?"
"It came in the mail."
Darren looked silently at the letter for a long time,
reading it and rereading it.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"What do you think?" Darren handed the letter
back to Michael. "Some guys like you."
"Do you think this is real?" Darren turned his eyes
back to the television. "Why not?"
"Why not? because I'm not gay, that's why not. You
yourself told me once that I couldn't even pretend to
be a homosexual."
'Just because you're a horse doesn't mean a zebra
won't find you attractive."
Michael paused thoughtfully.
"I still think it's a joke," he said.
The next day in class Michael felt like everyone
was watching him. He felt eyes on him from all sides,
but every time he turned, hoping to catch the admirer
in the act, he found no one looking at him. All four
classes that day went the same way-the burning
stares of the class on him, yet no one returning his
glances.
Michael peered up and down the rows looking for
likely candidates. In each class he picked out one or
two men he thought might be the originator of the
letter. His choices were all very similar. They tended
to be tall. Very thin boned, almost lanky. Their faces
had a thin, gaunt look to them, and two of them
had rather high pitched voices. They had interesting
haircuts-hair in the eyes, bowl cuts, long, straight
hair that curled slightly inward toward the neck.
Out of the few he had singled out, Michael mentally
selected the two or three he would rather the author
of the letter turn out to be.
That night at work Michael felt guarded. He worried
about how he should act-confident and unaffected?
open-minded and receptive? honest and jovial?
Terrified that the note was the brainchild of friends at
work, he watched his mannerisms carefully. Nothing
75
The Letter
he did or said could let his friends know he had
received the letter.
The evening progressed and his friends made
no sign of authorship. They acted as if nothing had
happened. Michael wondered how long they could
keep their silence. soon one of them would ask if he
had gotten any strange mail. Or perhaps even more
subtly, one of them would ask him if he noticed a
certain guy looking at him in class. Yes, that would be
it. They would ask him if he liked Marilou Ellis.
His friends never said a word. If it was a joke and
the fun was not to be had tonight, thought Michael,
then there would certainly be a letter in the mail box
tomorrow. That had to be the plan-a slow, tortuous
practical joke meant to break him.
No letter arrived the next day, nor the next day,
nor the next. A week passed, and whoever had penned
the letter had decided not to send another.
Michael sat at his desk rereading the letter. The
letter was becoming worn from the number of times
he had folded it and unfolded it. He wished that his
admirer would write again. Another letter would shed
so much more light on the situation. Another letter
might reveal the author's name.
I said something wrong in class, Michael thought.
I made a fool out of myself. He doesn't like me
anymore. He wracked his brain trying to think of
anything too conservative or too close-minded he
might have said during the week. There was no
telling.
That night as he lay in bed Michael stared at the
ceiling and tried to fall asleep. Where was his admirer
now? he wondered. Was he too lying in bed, thinking
about him? Michael hoped so.
If there were only some way to identify the writer
from the letter, he thought again. Fantastic plans
came into his mind as he straddled the line between
the consciousness and the unconsciousness-having
the envelope fingerprinted, tracing the letter's path
through the post office, analyzing the handwriting.
As sleep engulfed him he saw the careful, confident
letters from the letter. The handwriting was so
deliberate, so unique.
76
Perhaps there is a way, Michael thought, and he
turned over and fell asleep.
A petition for the betterment of public education
seemed harmless enough. Michael couldn't think of
anyone who would necessarily oppose the petition.
Besides, if this man truly loved him he would sign it
anyway.
Michael worked up an official looking cover sheet
and forged a few names to make the petition look real.
In every class he made a short speech, claiming that
the petition would be sent to the governor, and that he
would appreciate it if everyone could sign their name.
At home that afternoon Michael read through all
the names he had collected. He read through two
classes of names and found only a couple of names
that were close to resembling the anonymous writer's
handwriting. It occured to him that the author might
have changed styles or had someone else write the
letter to preserve his anonymity. If that were the case
then this whole scheme was a fiasco. He hoped that
the writer secretly wanted to be discovered and went
back to his list.
On the fourth page he found a match. He could
hardly contain himself as he lined the letter up beside
the name on the list to be sure. Michael was sure it
was the same handwriting.
He wanted to believe he had found his admirer, so
he did.
Michael decided to write him a letter. He wrote
the letter anonymously.
You've been on my mind for some time now, he
wrote in the letter, and it was true. Michael had
recognized the name, and he remembered some of
the poems his admirer had read in class. He told him
in the letter how much he had enjoyed his poems. He
admitted in the letter that he had not been able to
tell his sexual preference. The name attached to the
matching handwriting had not been one of the men
Michael had picked as a likely candidate, but he did
not put that it in the letter.
Michael signed the letter Fondly Yours and left
Alan Gratz
his name off. The student directory provided his
admirer's address, and a stamp later the envelope
was in the post box.
Kurt picked up the envelope again and studied
the handwriting. When that revealed nothing, he
picked up the letter and read it for the fifth time that
morning. He wished the writer had put his name on
the letter. It was probably a joke though. Yes, that
was it-Jill had written it as a joke.
Kurt found Jill sitting outside the building where
they both had class that morning.
"Did you write this?"
Jill took the letter and read it carefully.
"Some joke. Just because I can't get a date doesn't
mean I'm gay."
"Who said you were? I know you're not gay, it's
whoever wrote this letter that thinks you're gay."
"So you didn't write it?"
Jill handed the letter back to Kurt. "Of course not."
"Well if you didn't write it, who did?"
"Some guy who likes you, I guess."
"You don't think I'm gay, do you?"
Jill gave Kurt a sigh. "Look, I wouldn't have set you
up with my roommate if I thought you were gay. Just
forget about the letter. If it's real, whoever wrote it
wasn't confident enough to put his name on it, so why
worry?"
But Kurt was not worried. He was intrigued. It had
been a long time since anyone had been interested in
him. Kurt decided not to tellJill he was intrigued.
"It's probably a joke," he said.
That day in class Kurt felt paranoid. He felt like
everyone in the room knew that he had gotten a
love letter from another man. He watched himself
carefully, trying to see if he did things that might
suggest to someone else he wasn't straight. He made
sure his legs were well spread, that he slumped in his
chair just enough, that his attentions were turned
toward females and not males.
Kurt searched his first two classes, looking for
anyone he thought might have written the letter. He
glanced around, hoping to catch the writer looking
at him, but he never caught anyone. Until his fourth
class.
He was looking up and down the rows, making a
mental list of prospects, when he locked stares with a
man across the room. Blood rose to Kurt's face and he
felt stifled. He was sure it was him.
Michael held his stare. So he has my letter, he
thought. His heart raced as he realized that he had
truly found his secret admirer. He was half-filled with
pride from his detective work and half-filled with
interest in this man who was looking in his eyes, and
beyond.
The two sat there, staring at each other, each sure
that the other was in love with him. And they
believed it, because they wanted to.
77
from:
Alex Haley:
The Legacy Lives on
Exerpt From Roots Manuscript
Elizabeth W Goza
000014
8- 7- 7/
been lett far behind alone.
They had not walked an hour more
when Lamin made a tight, choked scream.
Spinning, Kunta saw him frozenly staring
upward~'then
he
t-Z;t ~aY~he r--'---
~flattened big panther on the limb they
few seconds, whereupon the panther went
SPRING 1993
~, then~~iif~·.,~~~"·~7~j~~eemed almost
lazily to flow into the tree behind and
was gone from sight.
Kunta, shaken,
alarmed and angry £-.1.. .......d.......--
resumed walking,......
at himself.
---r
Why had he not
--* detected
that panther?
would not have it
~
i i
• sprung down upon
r;w.
"'---
~ ...~.,
~y;i£i:~~£5~
.....-=-:
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Still,6", picture flashed through his mind of a
~t e x '
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iron nQR'As~ heard)\~~tangols
IF
41
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~
panther-mangled
nannygoa t. f't.
• on] d flee 1:0;0 to bo 0
~. He shuddered~~~
.tern voice, "The hunter's senses must be
fine.
He must hear what
,
smell what others
--------~,
Ha M'HK
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cannot,
cannot,~
He must see through the darkness."
b
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But
LarninF- - had seen the panthe,r.--
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78
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A~8 -;t;ft'srAua "'0011~i1
,
NOT LONG AGO Tennessee lost one of its most
talented residents. On February 10, I992, author and
lecturer Alex Haley died at age seventy in a Seattle
hospital. Haley is most remembered for his bestselling book entitled Roots, which traces Haley's
ancestors to their original home in Africa.
In I99I, Alex Haley donated a gift to the
University of Tennessee's special collections
department which was comprised of pictures, notes,
interviews, manuscripts and letters, most of which
are connected to the Roots project. After Haley'S
death in I992, the University supplemented the
collection with items purchased during the auction
at the Haley farm in Norris. Curtis Lyons, who is
in charge of the manuscripts held in the special
collections department of the Hoskins Library,
points out that the Alex Haley collection is open
to the public, and all items have been divided into
seven series in order to make them more accessible.
The origin of the idea for Roots began in London,
England, where Haley viewed the Rosetta Stone
display. Haley believed that if several words could
help decipher an entire language, as with the Rosetta
Stone, then perhaps unknown words from his
childhood might be the key to unlocking his past.
During Haley's childhood, his grandmother
Cynthia and great-aunt Elizabeth told him stories
about his ancestors whose origins were in Africa.
In these stories there were several words which
were unfamiliar to Haley, including Kuntah Kinte,
the primary character in Roots. Haley contacted
a linguist from the University of Wisconsin, who
helped him trace the African words to the village
ofJuffure in Gambia. While in Gambia, Haley
met with a griot, or an oral historian. InJuffure, a
griot named Fofana was able to retell the history
of the Kinte clan to Haley. The author then used
that information as the basis for Roots. Haley also
discovered that he could trace the ancestors on
his mother's side to the member of the Kinte clan
named Kuntah.
Much of the Alex Haley collection contains
pictures of his visit to Gambia and his meeting with
Fofana. Also in the collection is a draft manuscript
of Roots, which shows the amount of work Haley put
into the novel.
The most noticeable aspect of the Roots
manuscript is the number of green pen marks which
dominate the pages. Haley considered himself a
"chronic rewriter" and often edited a page of copy
until none of the original prose remained. The
process by which Haley wrote involved several steps
before reaching a finished page. He first dictated
a section or a whole chapter of the book on tape,
which he gave to his secretary to type.
After Haley received the typed copy, he used
a green pen to make corrections or change whole
sections of the material. The secretary then typed
another copy for Haley who, if not satisfied, again
used the green pen to make changes. This process
demonstrates the great amount of care Haley took
to make Roots an outstanding work of literature.
Roots won the I977 Pulitzer Prize and the twelve
hour television series was viewed by an estimated I30
million viewers. Alex Haley will long be remembered
for his valuable contributions to the literary world.
79
fig. fI
A Good Scolding
Trisha Brady
81
coal,plant,breathing exercise
Justin Rubenstein
FALL 2005
coal,plant,breathing exercise
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82
take breathing for example
one
swollen interlude
between coughed-up syllogisms
sifting through a soup of coal debris
where the human element, bastard
child of hydrogen and oxygen
kneeling on its hams in silhouette silence
its dusty tickertape express packaging
marked fragile for the media hype but
kicked too often in the time
crunch.
you could and may lift a finger,
prod a bright idea into arcing flight
flip off another shivering silence
left stranded on the membranes of
context, definition. Watching
half
ling words scribble blank-facedly by
wishing away their orphan origins
dragging limbs like a thirsty tongue,
battered mule. Or take morals.
how you relish a deep a breath
and how it breaks like a tre,mend,dous wave
halving itself at each rib, how it
tickles as it washes back, fizzing and
popping towards your spine
heave and damn the toxins! in the TechnicolorTM
sunset
shit, breathe it all in anyway
and pretending you're me now
or better, you, take money
ask it about morals
inhale it, it's carbon like you,
try to exhale: you'll choke
A Summer Prayer
Jenny Darden
Last week I saw a man blessing people outside Wal-Mart.
A middle-aged couple wore lottery
ticket eyes,
their over-stuffed shopping cart
abandoned on the sidewalk.
The man knelt with them in dress
slacks on cracked pavement,
prayed with them beneath cool neon
lights in summerdamp heat, his voice trembling from
his chest like birdsong.
I'm not sure what they prayed for.
I'd like to say that they prayed for
the humid summer nights,
for the spigot we drink cold, sweet
water from in August,
for the honeysuckle that crawls up
the barbed wire fence,
for the tongues that taste the honey
and the fireflies that dot the tender
blue twilight.
I'd like to say, for the crescent
slash of moon that heals the dark.
I tried not to stare as I crossed
the littered parking lot,
turning my eyes instead to the crystalline shards of glass,
shrapnel of stars that broke when
they fell.
I let his high, reedy voice fade
into the jangle of keys,
the brutal tin sound of metal shopping carts crashing together.
Parking space lines are the chalk
outlines of cars;
shadows are giant bar codes stamped
onto the ground.
Nearby, a teenage couple fights
inside a car with down windows.
farther away, two engines rev and
whine at a red light.
As I passed the customers going in
with money
and out with sheer blue plastic bags
biting into their hands,
I tried to guess which people pay
with nickels,
which people write lists and talk to
themselves in the aisles.
I wonder if anyone ever prayed for
this,
the nighttime retail monotony, the
neon ghosts
that haunt the eyes. I wonder if
anyone noticed the rainbows
in the puddles of spilled motor oil,
or the dirty breeze
bending the spindly Bradford pears on
the median.
I wonder if anyone prayed for the
man with bloodhound eyes
sitting on the bench beside a giant,
plastic Ronald McDonald,
or the woman working the door,
checking receipts,
greeting customers with a colorless
voice
and tired eyes that dwell somewhere
far away.
My own blue plastic bag feels heavy
and empty at the same time, and I am
awake
to the miracles in the litter of
cigarette butts and soda cans
and the bubblegum stuck to my shoe.
FALL 2004
...
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E~83
fig. 5- 2
Alterpiece for Lost Innocence
84
Heather Pace
fig. 5-]
(De)constructed Landscape
JesOwings
85
The Coyote
Allison Yilling
THE COYOTES HAD taken three calves by March.
adjusted the shotgun case like a coat over my
The occasional dead cow wasn't a problem on larger
shoulder and turned to the two daughters, who
had stopped their work. We said hello, and I asked
farms, but John had only seventy acres or so, from
one ridgeline to the other, and not enough cows to
politely how their children were doing. They talked
about ballet recitals, and softball games, and school
cover his losses. Besides, there were grandchildren
projects. When they asked about my work in the
who played in those woods and loyal dogs who slept
on that porch. He phoned my husband, Dan, and told city, I told them it was going well, and we ended our
him to bring a shotgun and an extra blanket. As always, conversation.
I was invited to join them. Dan was glad I agreed to
"Well, John and Phil are on the back porch,"
Margie said. "I'll be out with some coffee in a minute."
go. He said it would be a nice distraction.
There was still an hour of light left when we pulled
I nodded goodbye to the daughters and followed
Dan out of the kitchen. Margie's family photos lined
into John's gravel driveway. The small ranch house
was covered by the shadows of the ridgeline, but light
the hallway to the back door, where John leaned
against a deck post under the yellowed porch light.
from the windows still spilled over flowerboxes that
were filled with camellias. Margie,John's wife, gave us Though he was nearly sixty-seven, John's white
hugs that left white flour handprints on our coats. Her hair and leathered hands were the only features that
apron barely fit around her bust and hips. Her two
gave any indication of his age. He claimed it was
grown daughters were at the kitchen table cracking
his quarter Cherokee blood that kept him young.
eggs and filling a pie tin with ripe strawberries.
John attributed all his positive traits to his Native
"The girls came over to keep me company while
ancestors: his skill with animals, his flawless sense
y'all are out," Margie said. "Those coyotes will scare a
of direction, and his ability to always know just what
woman to death."
was wrong. Phil, John's closest neighbor, lounged on
Dan assured her that we'd take care of the problem the other side of the porch in a stained lawn chair,
and that there was no reason to be frightened. I
drinking something other than coffee out of his
87
The Coyote
thermos. Phil had been honorably discharged from
Vietnam with a Purple Heart and lifetime disability
(though no one was exactly sure what his disability
was). He'd come down ten years ago and bought a plot
of land large enough for him to collect junky cars and
shoot geese from the roof of his shed.
The three dogs on the porch began to bark and
whine at the creak of the screen door, curling up
around themselves with excitement. Hannah, my
favorite, rolled onto her back, her lips settling into a
smile. I rubbed her stomach, feeling the fine, white
hai,rs, the stubs of her nipples, and the line of the scar
near her hips.
John shook both of our hands. "Rachel, Danny,
thanks for coming."
"No problem," I said. "Is it just the four of us?"
"Afraid so. The rest of the neighbors have kids
to get up in the morning. I would have waited until
Friday, but I can't afford to lose any more calves."
"Have the others had any problems with them yet?"
Dan asked.
"They've been down to my place a few times," Phil
said, taking another drink. "I can hear 'em at night.
Drives Elmo up the wall. They send the bitches out
to taunt him, but as soon as they get a dog over the
ridgeline, the rest are waiting, ready for supper."
"That wouldn't happen if you'd have your dogs cut
like I do." John scratched a young mutt behind the
ear. "There's one husky fellow that comes down from
the hills to bother Hannah at night, but she holds her
own. The bitches gave up on the boys after the first
few tries."
"I just can't do that to Elmo, the poor old bastard,"
Phil said as Margie came out with the coffee. "I
wouldn't want anyone cutting my balls off. One slip
and your dick's gone too."
"Please don't get used to talking like that over
here," Margie said. "You never know when the
grandbabies are listening." She turned to her husband.
"Heading out?"
John nodded. "We'll be back in the morning."
"Well, be careful, boys." She handed her husband
the thermos and gave him a kiss. Then she patted
Dan and Phil on their backs before turning to me.
"Rachel, are you sure you don't want to stay here with
88
us? The girls and I would love to have you."
I smiled but declined her offer. I'd already brought
the shotgun, and another shot meant another
dead coyote. Margie accepted the answer without
argument because she hated the coyotes and because
she knew we would have nothing to talk about
anyway. The four of us walked away from the house
and towards the cow barn, the three dogs running
circles around us, their breath coming in clouds.
"Same method as always?" Dan said.
"Yup," John said. "I've already picked out the calf."
Phil smiled. ''A real screamer, I hope?"
"Yeah, the coyotes will hear him for miles."
John had chosen the youngest of the calves, a
liver-spotted boy who cried when the men pulled him
from his mother. He struggled all the way down the
tractor road and began to moan when we approached
the weathered barn. The leaning structure had
become so warped with age that the roof was shifting
towards the ground: on one end of the barn you were
a giant, on the other just a man. John told me that his
grandfather built the structure out of chestnut before
the blight killed its seeds.
The men dragged the calf to the center of the barn.
John went to fetch the tarp as I stood back, unsure of
how to help. Dan and I had a vegetable garden, not a
cattle ranch. My husband tried to hold the animal still,
but he kept losing his grip, and twice the calf almost
kicked free.
"Damn it." Phil grabbed the calf around the neck
and began to force him to the ground. The animal
moaned and coughed before collapsing under Phil's
weight. I stepped forward, but Dan was already
pushing Phil off. The calf tried to stand, but my
husband eased him back down and lay on top of his
chest, rubbing the animal's side to calm him. Phil
took the calf's back end, pinning the cow's legs to the
floor as the animal cried for his mother.
I felt a knot in my chest and asked if there was
anything we needed from the house.
"Naw," John said, as he finished tying the tarp to
the pulley ropes. "Margie and the girls already took
care of it." He brought the tarp to the other men who
dragged the calf across the sling. The calf squealed
and struggled when the tarp tightened around his
Allison Yilling
warm belly. Hannah stuck close to my side as 1 busied
myself with clearing the barn's isle of debris, ignoring
the cries of the calf as the men hoisted him into the
air.
"Not too high now or he'll fall," John said, "but
put him too low, and the coyotes will pull him down.
Just make sure he keeps crying. I'm going to go pen
the dogs." John whistled, and the two mutts came
running. Hannah hesitated by my side, but a second
whistle sent her trotting after her master.
Phil pulled back tight and secured the rope. The
calf hung in the evening light, a strange mobile
suspended above the dusty floor. 1 stood beneath him,
watching. The calf's hooves flailed at first, as though
he thought he could run in the air. The sling rocked
back and forth, and with each swing, the calf grew
louder and more frantic. The rafters creaked, and dirt
wedged between the cracks sprinkled to the floor. It
took a good ten minutes for the calf to wear himself
out with fear. He finally hung still, crying softly.
Dan waited for me on the bottom rung of the 10ft
ladder. "You okay?" 1 nodded and, after a last look,
followed him up.
The four of us settled in the 10ft, the moans of the
calf at our backs. My head easily brushed the sloping
ceiling, and the taller men were forced to duck. The
smell of gasoline rose from the farm equipment below
us. 1 could taste it in my mouth, but after 1 grew used
to it, 1 detected the subtler scents of leather and hay.
We opened the thermos of coffee and poured cups for
everyone except Phil, who was content with his own
drink.
"Say John," Phil said, "how many do you usually get
on these things? Ten? Fifteen?"
John laughed. "If coyotes were dumb enough to
let you kill fifteen of them, they wouldn't be such
a problem. Five was the most we ever killed in one
night, but a lot of that was luck. With most of the
rental cabins closed down for winter, they don't have
any pets to eat so we might be lucky enough to get
three or four."
"That's only about one for each us."
"This isn't goose hunting, Phil. You can't just shoot
a shell into a pack of coyotes and watch them wander
back ten minutes later. Coyotes are like us; they
think."
"That's bullshit. Animals don't think. They've just
got instinct. Eat, sleep, shit, fuck." Phil took a deep
drink from his thermos. "Hell, people aren't that
complicated either. We've all done everything those
damn animals do." He laughed. "Though Danny and
Rachel here don't have much to show for it yet." He
elbowed my husband and took another swig from his
thermos. Dan laughed quietly. 1 didn't say anything.
John drained his cup and held it out.
"Spread some of that coffee around, Phil. You're
taking a little too much for yourself."
Phil poured some liquor into John's cup and
offered the thermos to my husband and me. Dan
declined, but 1 poured a small drink, just enough to
keep me warm.
John leaned back against the 10ft wall. "Danny, do
you remember the first time we went coyote hunting?"
"I remember." Dan took a sip of his coffee and
turned towards John. "It was in the winter, right after
Christmas."
"It was also the coldest damn night of the year,"
John said. "We waited for hours, and by the time they
showed up, our hands were too cold to get a good shot
in. 1 think we only hit one."
"I'm not even sure we hit that many."
"When the hell did you do this?" Phil said.
"Oh, this was before you and Rachel. Danny was
just a little fellow. You were a bit older the second
time around though, weren't you?"
"Twelve, 1 think."
"Well, shit," Phil said to me. "If they're going to
have a private conversation, we might as well have
one too." He moved his blanket closer to me, away
from Dan and John. "How have you been, girly? That
worthless husband treating you good?" He asked the
same question every time we saw each other.
"We're still hanging on. What about yourself?"
"Oh, can't complain. Just me and the dog these days."
1 shouldn't have been surprised to hear it. For the
last month, the members of the Wednesday night
church dinners could talk of nothing but Phil's curvy,
blond roommate, the latest in a string of ladies from
town. It seemed his newest squeeze had taken the
same route as all the others.
89
The Coyote
I leaned back in the hay. "Well, now you can come
back to polite society."
"I'll pass. Elmo and you folks are better company."
He gave a section of blanket to me. "Though I'm sure
'polite society' has its moments."
"They've got some stories if nothing else." I tucked
the blanket over my stomach.
Phil grinned. "I'm sure they do." He leaned in.
"Hell, I know what they say about me, about the
women and all those kids."
I turned to him, our faces close. "So how many
kids do you really have, Phil?"
"Three boys," he said. "Three boys by three
worthless women. And I even pay my dues. Each one
of those gals gets just what she wants at the end of
every month: a new pair of shoes courtesy of Uncle
Sam's strong-arming."
I laughed. "So that's how you feel about it? God
help the next woman you find."
Phil smiled. "I've never had to go looking for a
woman in my life. They find me."
The calf cried behind us, the rafters creaking as his
legs kicked. Dust settled on our hair and coats.
'Jesus. If we didn't want the little son of a bitch to
be so loud, I would've shut him up already. Shame we
don't have anything to throw." Phil drank from his
thermos then held it out to me. The smell of alcohol
lingered on his breath, in his hair, between his fingers.
"More?"
"No thanks." The liquor in my system was making
me sweat. I took off the blanket and sat up. Dan and
John had just finished their conversation.
"What are y'all going on about?" John said.
Phil laughed and stretched in the hay. "Private
business." Dan glanced at Phil and returned to my
side as I brushed my coat off. I leaned back against my
husband's shoulder. We circled up again, John across
from me, Dan on my right, Phil on my left. John and
Phil continued the conversation with a few stories
that I had heard enough times to know when to laugh
without actually listening. I was thinking about work,
appointments, and the coyotes somewhere in the hills,
but mostly about the calf, whose cries punctuated the
men's laughter and became louder as the night went
on.
90
John had just finished his story about a cow and her
calves that were burned alive when the wind picked
up, and the temperature dropped. Conversation died
down, and we moved to our separate beds of hay. Phil
fell asleep first. John poured himself another cup of
coffee. Dan lay next to me, looking up at the rafters,
looking anywhere except the calf. I was busy shining
the shotgun in my lap.
"Did you end up making the appointment?" Dan
said beneath his breath.
I loaded two rounds into the barrels. "I did." I
clicked the chamber closed. Dan shifted in the hay.
"What day?"
"Monday."
"What about work?"
"I'll take the day off." I knew Dan didn't want to
go. He'd cancelled all the other appointments, and
when I asked him to schedule it himself, he'd never
called. I was forced to schedule it during his vacation
when he couldn't use work as an excuse. I kept
cleaning. Dan turned to me.
"Is it really that important?"
"Yes."
I wanted to add that it was the most important
thing, but I just polished the gun harder. I knew
his family history made him nervous; mine was no
better. I also knew that a thousand appointments
wouldn't change anything. It didn't matter to me
who was responsible, but I couldn't accept it until
I knew where the problem lay. Dan rolled over, his
back towards me. I squeezed his arm, but he hesitated
before taking my hand. The rafters creaked as the calf
began to struggle again. I looked up from our bed.
Phil was still asleep, but John was sitting by the loft
window, looking off towards his house. I followed his
eyes to the lighted windows of the kitchen. Behind
the glass, shadows moved back and forth. I strained
to see what they were doing or saying, but I was too
far away. John turned to me. I met his eyes then set
my gun aside and began to rummage for my extra
blanket. John stood up and moved back to his bed.
As he passed, he said goodnight to Dan and squeezed
my shoulder.
For the first half of the night, I heard only the
creak of old wood and the hum of the house. The
Allison Yilling
calf drifted between crying and sleeping as the
men shifted in the hay. If I slept, I didn't dream.
Sometime after the moon had risen above the
ridgeline, as I lay against my husband, a small yip
carried up into the 10ft. I opened my eyes and was
about to settle back down when I heard the noise
again in a lower pitch. I shook Dan, but he was
already awake, listening. John and Phil both sat up
and looked out the 10ft window, towards the top
of the hills. The voices came again, rippling off the
ridgelines. For a few minutes, they fell silent, and
when I began to suspect I was hearing things, there
was a chuckle from the valley floor. They were on
John's flatland, near the cattle barn and the ranch
house. From the side yard out of our view, the dogs
began to bark and whine. The commotion woke the
calf, who cried and swayed in the sling. We pulled
our shotguns from their wool-lined cases and turned
off the safeties. I wanted to check the barrels of my
20 gauge again, but coyotes hear too well to ignore
the click of an opening chamber.
It didn't take long for them to reach the barn.
What moonlight remained shone through the barn's
cracks and illuminated the eyes of the pack as they
entered. I couldn't see how many there were and only
knew their position if their eyes caught the light,
but the calf smelled them and was flailing in the air.
The dogs outside were frantic. The men and I took
position. As the moonlight grew brighter, I saw dark
bodies at the base of the eyes. Five of them, all adults,
I guessed by their size. They watched the calf, their
frustrated cries filling the barn.
Suddenly, from outside, Hannah yelped. The two
other mutts snarled, rattling the chicken wire, but
Hannah's voice had dropped off. I felt nauseous. A
sixth coyote appeared at the barn door. It was huge,
as large as a young lab and with a full winter coat.
Its eyes were wide and bright, and it was the only
one of the coyotes I could see fully. The rest were
just wraiths, barely real, but the one in the door, the
lookout who never stepped into the barn's shadow,
was flesh and blood. I knew this was the coyote that
came from the hills to harass Hannah night after
night. I tried to steady my breathing, but anger made
my heart rush.
One of the coyotes yipped and jumped at the
calf. It almost caught the leg, but the calf was hung
just out of reach. Another tried and then another.
Soon all of the animals except for the lookout were
snapping at the baby's ankles. I raised my sight and
moved from the head to the shoulder to the stomach,
head, shoulder, stomach until the coyote looked away,
and I settled on the chest. It was the farthest target
but the only shot worth taking. My sight remained
steady, and when John tapped my shoulder, the signal
to begin, I pulled the trigger. The lookout dropped,
and the last coyote to jump died in midair. One of the
coyotes cackled to the others, and they scattered. Dan
picked off one more, and Phil nicked the slowest of
the group as it scampered out.
We whooped and shouted as the pack disappeared
into the woods. While the uninjured calf wailed in
the darkness, we climbed down to the barn floor. Phil
nearly slipped off the ladder he was so anxious to see
the damage.
"Two dead," John said. "Not bad at al1."
"Three dead," I said. "I killed one by the door."
I pointed to where the scout had fallen, halfway between in and out. The shot pattern was at
the shoulder, making death instantaneous. Its eyes
were open and glassy, and its body still radiated heat,
especially its bloated stomach where round, pink
nipples hung down.
Phil grinned and hollered. "A pregnant bitch. Hell,
that's four, maybe five right there."
"Thank God you killed her before she had the
pups," John said, patting me on the back.
The blood was already drying on her fur. In death,
the coyote looked more like a dog than a wild anima1.
I knelt and placed a hand on the soft folds of flesh
around her middle, my fingers small against the swell
of her stomach. It was nothing like the tight drum of
a human mother's belly, but that same jealous secret I
had never understood was curled up inside the coyote
as wel1. There were no lumps or kicking paws, like I
expected, just warmth and quiet as the pups lived on
inside. The men had already moved on.
"I piled up the bonfire behind the shed last night,"
John said. 'Just drag the bodies over there. A little
gasoline and a good flame will warn the rest of them."
91
The Coyote
Dan and Phil searched the barn for some rope.
John lowered the frightened calf and led the shaking
animal back to his mother in the cattle barn, where
I heard the soft sounds of their reunion.
Phil found an old knotted coil and tied the first
coyote's legs. Then he dragged the first over to the
second and roped them together like prizes at a fair.
"Let me get that for you, Rachel," Dan said,
moving towards the mother, but I stood up on
my own and pulled the coyote into my arms. Dan
hesitated between me and the door but eventually
retreated back to Phil.
As the men dragged the other coyotes towards the
bonfire, I carried the mother out into the yard, past
the chicken wire kennel. The two mutts in the pen
made a fuss as the dead animals were brought past.
I looked for Hannah. She was alive, sitting in the
corner with dried blood on her muzzle. She tucked
her tail between her legs and hid when I passed.
The men heaved their two coyotes onto a pile of
yard trash and torn up pine saplings. I laid the mother
on top, smoothing the bloody, matted fur near the
wound and arranging the green wood around her. Phil
doused the pile with gasoline, humming as he added
92
the extra fuel.
Finally, John pulled out a match. We stepped back
and, in an instant, the pile disappeared in a tower of
flame. Even the evergreen boughs withered and curled
in the heat, bubbling sap and water. Once the gasoline
burned off, the bonfire calmed, and the debris
charred slowly. The spectacle soon lost its charm.
John went in first and then Phil. Dan stayed the
longest, lingering outside the light of the fire. A few
times he almost spoke, but he always caught himself.
He went inside right before dawn. I stood back near
the dog pen, where I could barely feel the warmth
from the flames. The mutts were already asleep, but
Hannah was still in the far corner. I called to her, but
she wouldn't come. She just laid still, her belly tucked
up under her, and her eyes watching the flames.
Lyric
I
John DeWitt
The committee represents side-effect menopausal prudes.
and nothing swelters any more,
from heliocentric decline (fleeing so soon ?)
to honor a friend's slip in last wishes
my father's fathers' fathers' fathers
sent shrinking back sputtering in their primal thought
search??= git issue or die off boy {sid.
I will do your self-examination for you,
a service to posterity. mine orbits blood since
we are roused a senile race to droop
my remorse over overpopulation.
believe you me host
the young child fastened to my back.
Recovery by outsourced witches
folding sweatpants in the maid's room
and my love and me in one another's custody/arms
subsisting on theoretical taxidermy.
Marissa
LB Gossett
I'll wash your dishes
and clean your sheets
once I have sewn my lips shut,
rinsed the blood from my mouth,
and the bathroom sink
will you tell me you love me
93
94
Travels
Opening Up
Caila WOod
Philip Hopkins
I stamped myself with youth
In a place my mother couldn't see
Tucked away safely in Germany.
Her, out playing in her garden
With the sunshine and the bees.
And you.
You never likedJews.
Or anyone different than you
My curly hair and eyes outlines in blue.
They never suited you.
You who reached into your bag of kisses
And pulled one out just for me
And told me not to worry about the sting
Or bitter taste it leaves.
Or worries about losing you
Because it was never meant to be.
These eyes were never meant to see.
Those hands were made to
stand alone.
But I can't seem to be able to make them
Forget their home.
When I stabbed that guy
with my steak knife,
I couldn't help thinking of Dad.
When I was little, he would hold
a lit cigarette between yellow
thumb and forefinger, ready to flick.
Say Ahh. Opening his mouth to show
how he wanted it done. Last time
he made that face his heart
was giving out on him. The sound
was horrible, a roar escaping a tunnel
of gristle and meat. But this guy
I cut, he didn't make a noise,
just stood there gaping. I dream
of his mouth, of crawling
into that nothing and climbing
down the throat, past the ribs
and nestling next to his heart
just to feel what he was feeling,
whatever it was.
Nightmare
AmienEssif
Last night I dreamt in windows ...
Last night I dreamt in Windows 7.
A nightmare as a virus
flashed screens with no meaning,
Feverish thoughts dropped into scroll bars
exempt from a third dimension,
Pre-solved concepts, solutions unknown-graphic pollution
scattered on a dreamscape,
A fleshy mind bound by rules of binary code,
Information given personhood
commanding my natural synapses with softwaretoo soft like a brain melting under the heat
of hardware, no fan to cool it off.
But still a facade of calm:
A desktop deep with mountains had no depth.
Icons-doors to infinite realms-laid flat
against Alaska, pixilated:
A tricolored circle perched on a snowy cap,
A blue E cast on a frozen lake.
And I, trapped like a cursor in two dimensions,
became an hourglass with no sand
no real time sifting through its waist
no real space ...
95
A Timely Foothold for an Expatriate
Jonathan Phillips
The ecstatic capitalist stretching his legs abroad
in flat massive Riyadh. Oh my God, he says, Riyadh.
Let me tell you, he starts, but he never finishes,
there is too much to tell, separate doors, his mansion
among mansions - think about it, he stammers,
but he leaves it there.
He puts his forefinger into
a glass bowl of buttered mashed potatoes
and then into his mouth.
The Bangladeshi man clips the garden, the woman
puts flowers in vases and boils the potatoes.
Hasan and Tamanna know one another well
but they are not lovers.
The noon to nine forefinger is extended, Hasan
and Tamanna are separated. He moonlights
at a diner, she stays right
in the homeowner's small hands,
in his home, his seven rooms.
In the kitchen he speaks to her,
Considering a plane ticket for you, a little vacation
(mashed potatoes)
send you back to Bangladesh for a little holiday.
(mashed potatoes)
96
And a final interlude of mashed potatoes
before he unveils her caramel skin.
He thinks of her skin as a Parisian pantsuit.
She obliges in religious horror,
western sports are re-capped on the TV,
he sees that fluid tone of skin, neck to thigh.
Licking up dust-motes at the drape bottom,
holding her limp body that has no idea
of how to be held like this. She is moved,
her volition paused - her body limp.
A pale hand darkens the brown
skin where he depresses it. His stray
hand searches for the remote
to shut the TV off, but he cannot reach it
so it stays on. Little sounds
come too low to understand,
and besides they are dubbed over
in Arabic that neither of them understand.
Reach Out and Touch Face
Sara Miller
97
98
99
Just to Prove That They Really Existed
100
Hannah Patterson
HeiPark
101
Kelly Hider
102
Kelly Hider
103
Tennis CourtslRainbow
104
Rachel Clark
The Glory of SEC Football:
A Yankee Conspiracy?
W00dsNash
When Vanderbilt squared off against a daunting,
undefeated Michigan team in 1922, Vandy Coach
Dan McGugin rallied his troops by pointing to a
military burial site near the Nashville campus. "In
that cemetery sleep your grandfathers," McGugin
reminded his players, "and down on that field are the
grandsons of the damn Yankees who put them there."
That was enough. Vanderbilt fought to a draw. Coach
McGugin failed to mention that he had played football
and earned a law degree at Michigan. And his father
had been a Union officer.
You might not guess it today, but American
football originated in the North. When the game
finally crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, its train, as
we shall see, was freighted with ill intention. Still, in
1880, things began with an air of innocence. That
spring, two Kentucky schools, Centre College and
Transylvania, played the first game below the Ohio
River. Football wasn't witnessed south of Raleigh,
I
I.
For this anecdote, I am indebted to Richard Scott's SEC
Football- 7S Years ofPride and Passion.
North Carolina, until the Georgia-Auburn debut in
1882, over which two thousand people kept watch
in Atlanta's Piedmont Park. Less known is this: the
coaches on that day, Dr. Petrie and Dr. Herty, were
already familiar with one another from their graduate
student stints at Johns Hopkins-the particular New
England incubator in which their plan for the contest
was surely hatched. Suddenly, in a Southern city still
smoldering from Sherman's ruthless march, "football
had become serious business indeed."2 This was no
happy accident.
Friends, my contention is not popular: the
cultivation of football in the South, and our eventual
rise to national dominance, were not entirely of our
own devising. Indeed, the strength of SEC football is
rooted in a Yankee ruse! It is well known that, in the
decades following the War of Northern Aggression,
morale in the South was at the barrel's bottom. Once
a people fond of honor and independence, our identity
z. Unfortunately, Scott appears not to share my conspiracy-bent
suspicions. Scott, 15.
105
The Glory of SEC Football
was in tatters. The Yanks saw this, of course. But
more subtly, they noticed our restless energy and our
reverence for dead soldiers-a sure recipe for further
insurrection. Thus it came to pass that, in the volatile
climate of "Reconstruction," the Yankee conspirators
made a gamble: Southern reverence and angst could
be transferred to football-a game uniquely tailored
to nurture military nostalgia. If carefully introduced,
football could absorb Rebel rancor and turn it inward.
On old fields of battle, former Confederate States
could be pitted against one another. A South deeply
invested in the pigskin could not rise again.
Purchasing its own security was not the only
federal motive for sending the game south. Vengeance
also had a role. When Lincoln was shot, rumor had it
that Booth was a hired gun, his thirty pieces of silver
minted by the CSA. That story was never confirmed,
of course, but a seed was sown, a plot took shape: a
handful of Union veterans, low-rung politicians, and
university presidents conspired in search of an apt
weapon of retribution. In football, that weapon was
found. Even if the sport should fall short of inducing
Southern self-destruction-as the conspirators
dreamed it might-football would, at least, keep the
South thoroughly occupied for generations to come.
In outline, that was the conspiracy, and those
were its motives. Now, before exposing the malicious
methods by which the North carried out this further
crime upon Southern soil, an aside is in order. The
peculiar potency of this scheme was derived from
football's martial character, which the conspirators
knew well. Consider this clipping from the era in
question: in 1887, a Century magazine writer expressed
"satisfaction" that "this outdoor game is doing for
our college-bred men, in a more peaceful way, what
the experiences of war did for so many of their
predecessors in 1861-65 ... " 3 Around the same time,
after the publication of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge
of Courage, Crane remarked: "They all insist that I
am a veteran of the civil war...Of course, I have never
been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of
the rage of conflict on the football field.'\ Even today,
though we often don't notice it, much of football's
idiom remains the vernacular of battle. The linesfight
in the trenches, we say. To gain ground, our offense must
get a push. But the defense might break through, or blitz,
and sack our quarterback like the holy city. Still, if
our guards stand strong, we'll go to the air attack. Take
heart, coach is in command; with strategy in hand, he'll
call the shots.
With these cloaked evocations, football
could absorb the Southern young man's lingering
enthusiasm for battle. The conspirators also bet
that, as a bonus, the game would be cathartic for
the rest of Southern citizenry. Throughout the War,
Yankee soldiers took note of the South's special
affection for the spectacle of combat. From hillside
cabins in Appalachia to plantation porches in the
Delta, we watched in awe as the bloody deeds were
done. (To be sure, the North was equally voyeuristic.
Washington's elite held the first tailgate party at
the Battle of Manassas in the summer of 1861, only
to have their picnic carriages overrun when federal
troops retreated in chaos.) Duly informed of our
fondness for onlooking, the conspirators saw it
clearly: if the sport spread across Dixie, eventually
every Southerner would support a team and could,
from time to time, brandish a benign victory. As
MIT president-and Union veteran-Francis A.
Walker put it in 1893, "the blood of the whole
community is stirred by physical contests among
the picked youth of the land, as once it was only
stirred by tales of battle."5More than all others, we
Southerners have been stirred ever since. When
Alabama defeated the University of Washington in
the 1926 Rose Bowl, one Colonel Nelson in Memphis
remarked: "I feel just as proud today as if General
Lee had been given General Grant's sword that day
at Appomattox Court House ... Stonewall]ackson and
Jeff Davis ought to be living today."6
3. James Weeks, "Football as a Metaphor for War," American
5. Weeks, "Football."
Heritage 39(6): II3·
6. Wes Borucki, '''You're Dixie's Football Pride': American College
4. Weeks, "Football."
Football and the Resurgence of Southern Identity;" Identities OctDec
106
20 0 3,
Vol.
10
Issue 4, 47T494.
WOods Nash
Football as battle and the Southerner as
spectator-there is the conceptual ground from
which the vine of conspiracy sprang to ensnare
us. Still, for this Yankee ruse to succeed, two
important questions remained: where should the
South be infiltrated, and how? The answer to the first
question was simple: to capture the feisty ambitions
of Southern young men-especially emerging
statesmen, writers, and leaders in commerceuniversities must be targeted. The North had learned
this lesson well: in April of 1865, the War nearly
finished, Union troops set the campus in Tuscaloosa
ablaze, fearing that it would become too fertile a
training ground for future military officers. But that
maneuver served only to incite further ire against
the North, as the conspirators would later recall.
Under their scheme, colleges must become cauldrons
of a more covert kind. But how? The North's answer
was inexplicably brilliant: they would deliver to us
their best coaches, exploiting our admiration for
the gallant General. In this way, our football would
grow in grandeur, the North could rest easy, and our
region's nagging sense of inferiority would be cheaply
assuaged. And all of this would begin in earnest with
the University of the South, of course.
From the North, the University of the South-also
known as Sewanee-appeared to embody everything
that the larger Southern schools would wish to
emulate. Crowning a mountain in rural Tennessee,
Sewanee was remote, pious, wealthy, and scholarly.
The only problem was that, for most of the 1890s, the
Sewanee football program lacked clout. Enter Billy
Suter-a recent Princeton graduate. When Coach
Suter arrived from the North for the 1899 season,
he transformed the tepid Tigers into the Sewanee
"Iron Men." That year, Sewanee went undefeated,
outscoring their opponents by a mind-boggling
margin of 322-10. Perhaps most impressive, the Iron
Men undertook a 2,500-mile train trip during which
they defeated five teams in six days. Led by Henry
"Diddy" Seibels, their victims included Texas, LSU,
and Ole Miss. Also falling to the Iron Men that
season were Georgia, Georgia Tech, Tennessee,
and Auburn. By season's end, with the North's sly
assistance, Sewanee had telegraphed a clear message
across the South: "If you want to be like us, you'll have
to match us on the field." The state schools soon took
up the challenge.
Dr. Petrie, Dr. Harvey, and Coach Suter were not
the only Yankee emissaries to Southern teams during
those years. After playing football at Brown and Penn
and coaching briefly in the North, John Heisman
came south in 1895 to lead Auburn for five seasons
and Clemson for four. Moving next to a beleaguered
Georgia Tech squad, Coach Heisman guided Tech to
102 victories in 16 seasons, including an infamous 222o squashing of Cumberland College, my alma mater.1
When Tech went 9-0 under Heisman in 1916, more
than half a century had passed since the War endedyet, in all that time, no person had restored pride to
the Southland as did the Yankee John Heisman. In
1919, he left Tech's program intact and made a speedy
retreat for the North.
In today's environment of integration and
nationwide recruiting, it's easy to forget that the
Southern state teams in those early years were
all-white and nearly all-Southern. In fact, between
1880 and the SEC's birth in 1933, quite a few of
the players were the sons, grandsons, or otherwise
descendants of Confederate veterans. Given this
demographic, Alabamians in the 1920S and '30s, for
example, "could truly look at their team as their
own, going to battle just as Confederate soldiers had
done over sixty years previously."8 As Bob Phillips,
sportswriter for the Birmingham Age-Herald wrote
when Alabama prepared to meet Washington State
in the 1931 Rose Bowl, his Crimson Tide had "the
spirit of the soldiers of Lee who fought and almost
7. To be fair, Cumberland had cancelled its football program before
8. Borucki, "'You're Dixie's Football Pride'"
the season began. But Cumberland was still under contract to
playTech, and Heisman insisted on the game. Thus it happened that
a ragtag team of students from Williamsburg, Kentucky, made a
painful journey to Atlanta. See Scott.
107
The Glory of SEC Football
won the War Between the States in the face of the
greatest handicaps and hardships known in the
history of wars."9 Hyperbole aside, one might wonder
who led the valiant Tide to battle in those days.
Again, the compass needle swings north. In 1923,
Coach McGugin-Vandy's Michigander-sent his
assistant, Wallace Wade, to Tuscaloosa. Though born
in Tennessee, Coach Wade learned the game during
his years in Rhode Island. Between 1923 and 1930, he
took Alabama to the Rose Bowl five times. Wade's
fine successor, Frank Thomas, was born in Illinois
and played football at Notre Dame. Thus, like other
Southern coaches of their era, Wade and Thomas
were used unwittingly by the Northern conspirators.
By the time the SEC formed in 1933, its thirteen
original members had gained the national stage.
With the teams to beat and the confidence to match,
Dixie's honor had been sufficiently reinstated.
Alas, my argument has ended, and evidence for
this scheme is more scant than I had imagined.
Perhaps what I have called conspiracy was, after all,
just uncanny coincidence.IO Yet, convicting evidence
or not, the acid effects of our narrow success are
indisputable. Our football glory has been a weak
appeasement. Am I mistaken, or does our way of life
thrive only on autumn Saturdays, fumbling along the
rest of the year? By the 1960s, our weakened knees
were thoroughly entrenched; enamored with N amath
and Tarkenton, we missed the chance for serious
Centennial talks. Now, disoriented, we wander our
once-fertile land. What's worse, our dogged devotions
have torn us asunder. For decades, supply lines
have been severed between Lexington and Athens,
and communications are cut from Baton Rouge to
Starkville. Pining Rebels are confined to Oxford. In
Knoxville, while the Vol Navy gushes to Neyland,
Fort Sanders is left vulnerable, defended by mere
neckties and empty bottles of Old NO.7. These days,
Peyton alone is our dashingJeb Stuart, Saban our only
Stonewall Jackson. In all of this, where is our union?
We are even estranged from our former sturdy sisters,
Virginia and Carolina, who limp aimlessly through a
barren ACC exile.
A century and a half have passed, but we who are
the sons and daughters cannot forget. Our bleeding
is internal. Our honor stands as fragile as ever. From
The Swamp to Fayetteville, our Conference is at war,
whoring the Confederacy. We must resist to the death
so distilled an identity! Alternatives are at handthere is our forfeited Agrarian heritage, for example,
and its revived sense of CSA. We've been duped,
but the final act remains to be played. Still, as we test
our visions of a South resurrected-of communities
that resonate as inward and inclusive-let us refuse to
surrender our gridiron greatness.
I2
II
9. Borucki, "'You're Dixie's Football Pride'"
IO.
Or was the plot just that well-disguised? One wonders, for
example, about Teddy Roosevelt's secretive meetings with Harvard,
Princeton, and Yale in 1905, which led to rules that made the game
less brutal. Though dirty tactics were rampant, had Southern teams
become even more aggressive than the conspirators intended?
108
II.
Not all were so enamored. See Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and
The Last Gentleman.
n. Community supported agriculture.
Art & Photograph Appendix
fig.
2.I
I970 - Y979
FALL 1978
fig. 2.2
WINTER 1979
fig.
2.]
WINTER 1979
fig 3. 1
PHOENIX
WINTER 1985
LITERARY-ART MACAZINE
fig 3. 2
~.
~?HOENIX
WINTER 1984
LITEMRY ARTS MAGAZINE
Volume 25, Number 2
Winter 1984
fig 3·3
'I
I
~ .~
~'fJHC:;~]:'Jl X
SPRING 1989
LITERARY ART MACAZINE
fig 3·4
FALL 1980
figJ.5
FALL 1981
PHOTO 1997
I99 0 - I 999
fig 4.2
WINTER 1984
fig 4,]
FALL 1999
fig. 5-I
SPRING 2004
fig. 5. 2
SPRING 2002
fig. 53
FALL 2002
Phoenix Staff
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Acknowledgements
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