The Sources:
Belle Boyd
Notorious Confederate spy
Bill Bryson
Popular travel writer/humorist
Patricia Cornwell
Mystery novelist
George
Featherston-
haugh
British playwright
John Gunther
Best-selling travel writer
Phillip Hamburger
Longtime New Yorker essayist
Odette Keun
Novelist
Liu Zongren
Chinese journalist
Louis Phillippe
Citizen-King of France
Cormac McCarthy
Novelist
John Mitchel
Irish revolutionary and escaped convict
Rex Reed
Celebrity film critic
Wallace Stevens
Poet
Tom Wolfe
Journalist-
turned-
novelist
The Answers!
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Look Who’s Talking
by Jack Neely
Knoxville has always been a challenging place to describe in any sort of coherent fashion. Following are a few once-well-known quotes about Knoxville from a several esteemed visitors and one local. Match each one with its source:
1. “[Knoxville] is one of the least orderly cities in the South. Knoxville leads every other town in Tennessee in homicides, automobile thefts, and larceny....”
2. “A lovely little city, a sober, reasonable little city, Knoxville....”
3. “So we rode to Knoxville with our comical cabdriver, acquired a rental car at the airport, and found ourselves, shortly after midday, heading north out of Knoxville through a half-remembered world of busy roads, dangling traffic signals, vast intersections, huge signs, and acre upon acre of shopping malls, gas stations, discount stores, muffler clinics, car lots, and all the rest. Even after a day in Gatlinburg, the transition was dazzling..... Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin’ Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.”
4. “I was able to explore Knoxville, a medium-sized city built on low hills and covered with lush, green trees and grass. The Tennessee River runs under highway bridges and its banks are hardly touched by man. It is a beautiful city, but what I liked most about it was its quietness.”
5. “[Knoxville] would be quite picturesque, if not for the wearying regularity of streets in American towns.... Nashville is much smaller than Knoxville, but infinitely better situated.”
6. “Knoxville, a poor neglected-looking place, which notwithstanding makes a great feature on the map. I saw some tolerable dwelling houses...but we only stayed an hour, just long enough to let the passengers dine at the tavern.... There is steamboat navigation from Knoxville when the water is high enough, but judging by the inactivity of the place, there is very little commerce going on.”
7. “The Tennessee River makes a great bend through woods and cliffs and hills and on the horizon run the blue ridges of the mountains. I saw no end of irises in people’s gardens.... And, of course, I saw many boys and girls, both black and white, loafing in pleasant places. I feel quite sure that I rather like Knoxville.... The town is now what Reading [Pa.] was 20 or more years ago.”
8. “We came to Tennessee for a country and forest life. Now Knoxville is neither town nor country.... Most of the men here...are mere money-making machines, and of society there is very little. The ladies very seldom come out except to church. There is a gloomy clerical incubus weighing them down.... Perhaps the most agreeable ingredient of the population consists of some Swiss families from the Canton of Vaud. Some of these people are highly accomplished, and preserve their customs in a great measure.”
9. “Pleasant indeed was my visit to Knoxville. The city at this period was gay and animated beyond description. Party succeeded party, ball followed ball, concert came upon concert, and I took no thought of time.”
10. “I...spent a scorching, blistering, sweltering Southern summer in one of the ugliest, dirtiest, stuffiest, most unsanitary towns in the United States. I speak with feeling, for the summer and the town combined have turned me into a haggard, desiccated old woman before my time.... I seize this occasion to tell the medieval municipality of Knoxville what I think, and despairingly to ask all the deadly small towns with which this country is spotted, why they must convert themselves into eyesores of tin frameworks, advertisements and dump heaps. American genius has performed miracles, but a beautiful modern city and a pleasant modern village are still tragically out of its range.”
11. “Knoxville survives. It...is the home of the world’s largest maker of illuminated outdoor plastic signs, and is said to be the biggest dry city in the nation. The bootleggers in Knoxville have two-way radios in their cars, and orders are promptly filled in any neighborhood. Whenever public officials throw a cocktail party, they ceremoniously station officers of the law outside the room where the party is taking place.”
12. Knoxville...used to be a quiet, lazy sort of place with winding dogwood trails, impervious Victorian buildings, and dreamy-eyed kids strolling hand in hand along the University of Tennessee’s campus that slopes toward the Tennessee River’s banks.... Don’t go there expecting to find the town James Agee wrote about in his Pulitzer-Prize A Death In the Family. And don’t look for the railroad tracks behind the house where they filmed All the Way Home, the film version of the book. Today, if they tried to shoot that movie in Knoxville, all you’d see in the background would be a 74-foot energy-efficient glass globe inlaid with 24-carat gold dust called the Sunsphere, sitting atop a 192-foot tower of steel....”
13. “Blaze orange burned like small fires around me, and...I thought of the horrible creatures housed in Attica.... By the time I asked the waiter to call for my cab, Knoxville seemed as scary as any city I had ever been in....”
14. “This city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad.”
December 30, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 53
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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Look Who’s Talking