Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, Oct. 6 • The News Sentinel reports on ways to solve the problem of chronic homelessness in Knoxville. We believe a good first step would be identifying a potential shelter—a large, mostly empty building that serves no other useful purpose. For some reason, that idea never goes over well with employees at the Knoxville Convention Center. Thursday, Oct. 7 • More of the same: Local mayors Mike Ragsdale and Bill Haslam have announced they will formulate a 10-year plan for ending homelessness in the area. Maybe we’re too cynical, but isn’t 10 years almost enough time for every homeless person in Knox County to build their @#$% double-wide out of gum wrappers and used popsicle sticks? Friday, Oct. 8 • Austin Peay University officials are embarrassed following an incident where an instructor forced a student to remove an anti-Bush campaign button for the duration of his class. They should be embarrassed; it doesn’t take a college professor to figure out that there’s no “W” in Peay. Saturday, Oct. 9 • According to reports, area voters have been plagued by telephone “push polls”, wherein callers who claim to be taking non-partisan surveys are in reality proselytizing for a candidate. The tactic utilizes a principle long known to men who frequent singles bars: Even when it’s only a stump, we always pretend it’s a pole. Sunday, Oct. 10 • The day after UT’s 19-14 football victory over the University of Georgia: Expecting peach cobbler for Sunday supper, UGA fans instead find the dinner table laden with Humble Pie. Monday, Oct. 11 • Moved by ecological concerns, biologists discuss plans to populate the Pigeon River with lampreys—squirming little parasites with no backbones. In the interest of improving our own environment, we at MP suggest they forego the lampreys and use a select group of downtown attorneys who fit that same description. Tuesday, Oct. 12 • Knoxville-based Army reservists of the 489th Civil Affairs Battalion return to the U.S. after spending several months in Baghdad. They weren’t needed there. There are no civil affairs in Iraq. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo

Frustration at Campus Pointe
Students kept waiting and waiting...

After weeks of anticipation and frustration, the worst of the wait is finally over. The second building of the Campus Pointe student-apartment complex at the corner of 22nd Street and Grand Avenue in Fort Sanders received its certificate of occupancy Sept. 24. All of the eager residents, UT students who have lived out of suitcases for the past couple of months, wandering like nomads from hotel to hotel, have now moved into their apartments.

Still, there is more waiting to come. The special features of Campus Pointe, which include a movie theater, clubhouse with cafe and lounge, pool and gym, were projected to be completed Oct. 27. According to Barry Smith, Campus Pointe’s Leasing Manager, that date has been pushed back. “I haven’t received an updated construction schedule, so I’m not sure when those facilities are supposed to be ready,” Smith says. He says rent was reduced $50 monthly across the board for the 81 current residents to compensate for the unfinished facilities. This will reduce rent for one bedroom apartment to $590 per month, two-bedroom apartment rent to $505 per person per month and three-bedroom apartment rent to $425 per month. March rent will be free.

The delays have been frustrating for all parties involved with this project. “It sucks really bad here right now. I hate it more and more every day,” one resident of Campus Pointe says. “We have been here for three weeks, and we still don’t have cable or Internet, which is supposed to be included. My roommate is taking an online class, and she has missed three quizzes because we haven’t had the Internet. The reason I moved in here is because everything was supposed to be included. We were supposed to have a pool, a tanning bed, a gym, a cafe and store, and so many other things. None of it is ready, and we still have to pay for it,” she says. “I told them that if there was any doubt in their minds that we wouldn’t be able to move in on Aug. 14, if there was even a chance that it wouldn’t be ready, I didn’t want to sign the lease. They said it would be guaranteed to open on time, and it didn’t.”

The original move-in date for the 88 people who signed leases with the Pointe was projected to be Aug. 16. Forty-one of the 81 would-be residents who opted to keep their leases moved in in September, approximately a month later than the original move-in date they were promised. While they were awaiting completion of their new apartments, they lived in various hotels including the Radisson on Summit Hill, the Hilton and Extended Stay America in Cedar Bluff. All expenses were paid by Bostic Construction.

Several factors contributed to the late move-in. Nine Campus Pointe complexes were being constructed at the same time, which resulted in a thin spread of manpower for this project. “Poor weather conditions and bad soil were a couple of things that set us back,” Nick Heinzelmann of Bostic says. “We had to bring in fill dirt, which was not anticipated. Also, this is the first urban development that we’ve done, and just working under the requirements of Fort Sanders, the utilities board and the city of Knoxville resulted in delays. We also had to consider the environmental hazards and demolition involved in this project. The vertical construction didn’t begin until June. Ideally, I wish we had started 60 days earlier.”

Inspections of the buildings caused delays for Bostic. “We failed an electrical inspection because we had installed two-phase electrical units into the apartments, and the inspector required a three-phase unit,” Heinzelmann says. The volume of the fire alarms in each unit also had to be raised from a 70-decibel level to a 75-decibel level.

Despite the frustration with move-in delays, that resident says she feels she was treated well by the employees of Campus Pointe and Bostic. “I don’t know of anyone else who would have gone to the trouble that they have gone through for us. They did a good job of making sure everyone was taken care of,” she says.

“The residents have been really great throughout this whole process,” Smith says, “As soon as we found anything out, we called the residents to let them know what was going on. The residents would be irritated by the delay, which is completely understandable, and then they would tell their parents, and then we would get calls from the parents, and it turned into a huge bitching fest. The last time when we were pretty sure they were going to move in [week of Sept. 13], it was really hard to tell them the news. I’ve never felt so bad in my life. We were all teary-eyed by the end of it. We were all at our wit’s end and totally drained.

“We really feel bad about what our students have gone through, and we’re trying to make up for that. We’re doing everything in our power to make up for it,” Heinzelmann says.

All of the residential buildings of Campus Pointe are scheduled to be complete in August 2005 with a total capacity of 694 occupants.

—Melissa Elkins

A Spiritual Homecoming
Cormac McCarthy Society’s first Knoxville conference

Like it our not, many literate people around the globe know Knoxville best as the setting for one darkly funny novel called Suttree. Written by Cormac McCarthy and originally published in 1979, Suttree reached a larger audience after the author’s acclaim for later books like All the Pretty Horses. Some fans of McCarthy’s westerns discovered they liked Suttree, set in a gritty underworld mid-20th-century Knoxville, best of all.

To celebrate the silver anniversary of Suttree’s publication, about 60 fans from all over America, Canada, and Europe, are in town for a series of Suttreeish lectures and events. The robust leader of this party is University of Miami English Professor Richard Wallach.

The secretary-treasurer of the Cormac McCarthy Society discovered Suttree relatively late. “I first read Suttree in 1992,” he says. “It was out of print, but I’d fallen in love with McCarthy’s work when an Australian friend recommended Blood Meridian when I was on a research trip in Australia. When I got home, I found that almost nothing of McCarthy’s was in print here, as opposed to Europe and Australia. I found a beat-up old copy of Suttree in an antiquarian bookshop in Woodstock, New York. I was reading the book at the American Airlines lounge at LaGuardia while waiting for a flight when I hit the watermelon scene. I was laughing so hysterically that the desk attendant thought I was having a seizure.”

Those attending will be a fraction of the membership of the Cormac McCarthy Society, which has several hundred members.

“The Society has members on every continent except Antarctica, and that’s only because penguins spread disease.”

Scholars from a dozen colleges from here to the University of Wales, Swansea, and the University of British Columbia, will discuss subjects like “The River in Suttree,” “The Art of Slumming in Suttree,” “Suttree’s Unknowable Self,” “Abject Maternity in Suttree,” “Suttree, Huck Finn, and Tragic Humanism,” and “A Kierkegaardian Reading of Suttree’s Existentialism.” They’ll also discuss other McCarthy novels, like Outer Dark and Child of God, which are also set in the Knoxville area, but Suttree is clearly the star.

Wallach mentions a couple of speakers in particular: Noel Polk, well-known Faulkner scholar, will give the opening address Thursday night. Peter Josyph, the guest speaker on Friday, is a New York playwright, author, artist and actor. “He’s probably the society’s most popular and requested speaker,” Wallach says. A seemingly unlikely McCarthy scholar is Lt. Col. Christopher Campbell, teacher at U.S. Air Force Academy, who will speak on Friday afternoon on the subject of McCarthy’s little-known dramatic work. Campbell recently returned from combat duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Wallach remarks, “If I catch anybody letting that guy buy his own drinks, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Most of the conference will be held at the Radisson downtown.

Of Suttree, Wallach says, “I believe that it is truly one of a handful of truly great American novels, and that critical posterity, with all its fetishistic tendencies, will eventually confirm it so.”

Australians may enjoy Suttree for its own merits, but it’s by far the most Knoxvillian of novels, with hundreds of references to real people and places as they were in the early 1950s.

The Cormac McCarthy Society has been meeting yearly or more often since 1993, usually out west. This is their first conference in the author’s hometown.

“Knoxville is a spiritual homecoming for Cormackians, of course,” says Wallach. “A direct immersion in the terrain of the first four novels and two early short stories. Although McCarthy’s worlds are always primarily terrains of the imagination, they’re engendered by the real East Tennessee of his youth.”

A couple of tours of McCarthy’s Knoxville will wrap up the conference on Saturday; a 9 a.m. bus tour, conducted by UT psychology professor Wes Morgan, will visit outlying sites mentioned in various novels. It will return downtown by 11 a.m. in time for the Suttree Stagger, a literary pub crawl mounted by a shadowy local group known as the White Mule Preservation Society, which has conducted the Stagger once before. Free and open to the public, the walking/drinking expedition will visit several downtown sites described in Suttree, with dramatic readings and obligatory stops in pubs along the way. Dubbed the Silver Stagger in honor of this occasion, it starts at Volunteer Landing at 11 a.m., and will last for about six hours, with a stop at the Bistro for catfish brunch.

McCarthy, who’s now 71, spent most of his youth in South Knoxville, but left his hometown in middle age, not long after the publication of Suttree. The famously publicity-shy author lives in New Mexico and is not expected to attend.

For more information, visit the website of the Cormac McCarthy Society at www.cormacmccarthy.com. Though events will be dominated by the membership of the Cormac McCarthy Society, the conference is also open to the public. Individual sessions are $6 each, or $50 for all 10. To register for the entire conference, including dinners, is $190, or $175 for students and the military.

—Jack Neely

Send in the Hounds
Painting the town with artful blue ticks

Nobody ever claimed hounds were the most punctual of nature’s creatures. Except when squirrels or treats are at stake, they’ve gotten quite a reputation as being lazy—you’ve heard the one about the quick brown fox, right? In the case of the city’s most recent public art project, we’re not sure if sloth is an issue, but a handful of hounds are late for their debut, no doubt with their tails between their legs.

Ruthie Kuhlman of the Dogwood Arts Festival reports that Hounds on the Town, the new public art project of painted blue tick hounds (following in the pawprints of Bearfoot in the City) was scheduled to first appear in September. But setbacks in the production of the bases—the structures that anchor the canines to the ground and keep them from wandering away—have postponed the inauguration. Dogwood Arts executive director Ed Pasley returned from Illinois around midnight on Sunday with multiple bases, which must first be painted before they’re installed individually.

Kuhlman says the hounds’ handlers are meeting with city officials to arrange for the placement of the dogs, starting with the first litter of eight around the downtown area.

“We’re hoping to get them out by the end of this week,” says Kuhlman, who is confident that locals and visitors alike will embrace the hounds with as much loyalty and affection as the bears, five of which are still on public display.

While the number of bears reached 34, the hounds are a smaller pack so far, Kuhlman says. Some artists are still working on theirs, and the Dogwood Arts Festival continues to accept artists’ proposals for hound designs.

The next stage of the art project will provide smaller hound dogs to students at Knox County schools. These puppies will be decorated, displayed and auctioned off in May 2005, with funds benefiting arts education.

After a year of public adoration, the larger hounds will be rounded up and auctioned, those funds going to the Dogwood Arts Festival and scholarships for UT athletics.

Kuhlman says she’d have painted some of those bases herself if it meant speeding up the hounds’ debut. She’s not the only one who’s been eager for the unveiling.

“Everyone’s anxious,” she says. “I’ve had calls from all over the country from people who have relatives visiting, wanting to know when their [artists friend’s] hound is going to be ready.”

—Paige M. Travis

October 14, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 42 © 2004 Metro Pulse