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Topic: McCarthy's Southern Works
Thread: The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street

Total messages for all days: 26

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/14/2004
I had an interesting lunch last Thursday. I managed to obtain access to where The Huddle used to be and to the fourth floor rooms in the old Shannon Hotel (now the LaMarr House) where Joyce and Sut had a room. The Huddle (Suttree p. 72)was located under what is now "Tortilla Mac's" in the Cook Building on Gay Street. It can be accessed through their original door onto Cumberland Avenue or by means of a stairway down from Tortilla Mac's. Unfortunately my hopes for any identifiable remains were dashed. The space is mostly open and all that remains from The Huddle days is some maroon and gold flocked wallpaper so I was told. I honestly don't remember any wallpaper from when I last had a fishbowl there in the 1960's. Plans are to renovate the space somehow, sometime. It looks as though someone could rent the space for an evening and throw a keg party if desired, but, "Dont bring no whiskey in here." The fourth floor of the old hotel is unremodeled (Suttree p. 396). It is hard to call it in its original state because ductwork has been added on the floors to serve the offices on the floor below, all the doors have been removed, etc. Nevertheless, one can still look out the same windows as Suttree. I didn't have time to try and locate the bathroom at the end of the hall as it was difficult to move around and my guide couldn't figure out what the hell I was doing--but was too polite to ask and somewhat impatient. Anyway it was fun.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Thorn	6/14/2004
Nevertheless, one can still look out the same windows as Suttree. Umm, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Wes, but Suttree is a fictional character. Your enthusiasm is not lost, however. Good job.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	odsbodikins	6/15/2004
Wes: Don't worry, I'm sure people are outdoing you in Dublin for Bloomsday 100.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/16/2004
Got to remember, got to remember, got to remember, Cornelius Suttree, Stephen Daedalus, Rufus Follet, Eugene Gant, Lucius Hutchfield are fictional characters. [Repeat] I am trying.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	John F	6/16/2004
In a way, Wes was correct with his first statement. We all know, deep down, that at least some of Sut is Mac himself. Students in creative writing courses are told to write about what they know, write about themselves. It is highly encouraged. The practice at least lends the student some authority as far as subject matter. Might not have the skills, but a keen knowledge of the happenings puts down a foundation to build off of. Anyone who says Suttree the character isn't at least one percent Cormac himself is extremely ignorant. P.S. I started rechuggin' with The Hours by Cunningham. I seem less impressed this time around. Mikey has point of view switching within a sentence. Complex device. Overall, it doesn't seem rich and sumptuous like Mac.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	odsbodikins	6/16/2004
Didn't Faulkner say that there could be a kind of fiction that was truer than fact? I remember rereading Blood Meridian on a greyhound bus from Tucson to El Paso and getting this great feeling of... I don't know. Presence. Hyperreality. Connection. It made the fiction more meaningful. And the best fiction makes life more meaningful. Just give into the madness, Wes. Cross the border and don't look back. I'll see you on the other side.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	dudley	6/16/2004
Don't forget the most famouslly alive fictive character of all SHERLOCK HOLMES.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Thorn	6/16/2004
Since I've always considered Suttree to be somewhat autobiagraphical, it's pretty easy for me to blur the line between fiction and reality while reading it. Wes' post got me to thinking whether McCarthy was actually in the hotel room, or did he create, in his mind, the scene and the view from the window that Suttree looked out? Guess we'll never know...

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/16/2004
Thorn, It is an interesting question about whether McCarthy wrote about the hotel room from first-hand experience or whether he imagined it. "From the hotel window he [Suttree] watched the traffic and he could see through the shelled brickwork of the Cumberland Hotel half razed across the street the rain falling on the dim jungled shacks of the black settlement along First Creek" (Suttree, p. 398). It is hard to determine exactly what this viewing angle might be. One might have been able to see some of the shacks along First Creek from a 4th floor window, but I have trouble figuring out how one could do it through the half razed brickwork of the hotel across Cumberland Avenue. In addition, the Cumberland Hotel was destroyed in an early morning fire on March 8, 1945. The scene in Suttree takes place in the winter of 1952-53. As far as I have been able to determine the Cumberland Hotel was razed almost immediately after the fire because of its potential danger and the property made into a parking lot. So, I don't think McCarthy actually saw the scene he described. However, he could have very well visited the hotel rooms at some later date and combined his real-life perceptions with imaginary ones.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Thorn	6/17/2004
Wes, That's interesting. Since the building was razed in the '40's there must have been some imagination at work. Knowing McCarthy's penchant for visiting the geographic locations of the Western novels, it makes me wonder how much of the Knoxville of Suttree is real and how much is idealized. We're lucky to have such an excellent historian such as yourself onboard. Makes me want to attend the Suttree crawl thing, and long for a fishbowl at the Huddle.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	John F	6/17/2004
Remember when Sut brailboated the French Broad with Reese and family. It rained and rained, and Sut went down the road a piece and found an old box of books and read them cover to cover. Wouldn't surprise me if that scene was specific to a moment in Mac's own life when the lightbulb went on and he realized the universe of books was the world he wished to inhabit. For me, it was Poe's short stories as an undergrad. :) Remember, Mac was a mechanic. That's right. A friggin' mechanic. :)

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	odsbodikins	6/17/2004
His father was a prominent lawyer and his house was probably full of a lot of important-looking books. Prominent lawyer's houses often look like that. Transgression is a main theme in Mac's stories and the judge is his greatest character. Go figure.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/17/2004
I have read that odd collection of books: The Black Brotherhood by R. P Garrold, Mildred at Home by M. Finley, and Tom Swift and his Motor Cycle or Fun and Adventures on the Road by V. Appleton (Suttree, p. 358), and, believe me, although McCarthy may have read them, I doubt they could have been the books that turned him on to the world of literature. I would speculate that they might have been titles that could have been found in his grandparent's home and that his father, aunts or uncles might have read as children.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/17/2004

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	6/17/2004

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	odsbodikins	6/17/2004
Wes: you are a true fan. Kudos. Read madly or not at all.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	9/28/2006
There is a great article in today's Metro Pulse by Jack Neely. "Party at the Huddle" is a two topic story dealing with the German band, "Buddy & The Huddle" and the historic space in the Cook building in Knoxville where The Huddle was located and from which the band derived part of its name. The title of the article comes from cut #10 on the CD, "Music for a still undone move maybe called 'Suttree.'" Nice job, Jack! Thanks.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Bob G.	9/28/2006
Ditto on the nice job, Jack, via Wes. I didn't frequent the Huddle but drank a few fishbowls there in the late 50's. It was sexually eclectic as the article and/or Wes stated. I think I drank beer or "illegal" booze in just about every joint mentioned in "Suttree." I was always glad to leave the places with my head and ass intact. The Huddle and Indian Rock had their regulars and I got the impression the few times I was in them that any stranger who walked in the door, even if he spoke high hillbilly like me, was suspect and a likely candidate for an ass-whupping. My, the world is small. I fondly recall frequent visits and other joyful things in Nurnberg and Neumarkt, where the Buddy Huddle boys now reside, whenever I could get free of Uncle Sammy. As for whores in K-ville during my heyday, they thrived in two hotels on North Gay St. too, around Regas Restaurant. Black bellhops pimped for them and some cops turned a blind eye if they were paid enough. The statement that Knoxville as a whole openly tolerated whoring is misleading at least in my experience of the time and I was never a puritan. At the insistence of some city movers and shakers, cops did raid bawdy houses and threw whores outa town. How often I don't know, but a lot of folks I knew, old and young, were appalled at the sleaze and poverty in parts of Knoxville, particularly in the areas mentioned in "Suttree." That the city did little to improve things is of course a failing. Woefully divided economically and culturally, the city couldn't muster viable consensus for real reform. In the 40's it was busy fighting WW 2 and by the early 50's a lot of us were still trying to climb out of the Great Depression. I'm surprised at the following comment by the Buddy Huddles or Huddle Buddies or whatever they're called and I'd like to hear their music: "In the outer parts of Knoxville, things seem to get dangerous,” observes [name of speaker needed]. “The houses got very tiny and very old. The cars in front of the houses were rusty, and there was a lot of garbage behind the houses. I said, ‘Hey, let’s not get out of the car.’” Where did they go, Wes? McAnally Flats? East Knoxville, my old raising ground? Most of E. Knoxville in my youth was not dangerous, though you could usually find a fight if you wanted one. People kept up their houses, went to work and church, took care of their kids on modest to meager male incomes, and generally got along pretty well. Segregation was the law but at times it was loosely or not enforced. Blacks lived in the E. Knoxville area closer to downtown. I recall black-white football games by guys much older than I (some had fought in WW 2) on the field where Austin-East High, a black school, now stands. I remember players' bloody noses but not any racial fighting. Parts of E. K-ville were upscale then, and at Christmas they usually tipped this needy paperboy pretty well.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Bob G.	10/2/2006
I reread Jack Neely's article and while I still applaud it as a nice piece overall, I think the two Buddy-Huddle band guys from Germany may not have gotten the most accurate impression of Knoxville. The cities, towns and villages of the Germany and Austria I knew as a serviceman and later on two extensive visits in those countries had many of their shops and offices up and running at 7:OO a.m. The downtown Knoxville I knew and saw as late as 2004 opened many of its doors much later. Perhaps our German friends came to K-ville expecting a bustling city at 7 or 8 a.m. Wes, of course, can speak more knowledgeably of business operations in Knoxville than I, and I welcome any correction of any misimpression I may have. And I allow for the possibility that Germany now operates later in the a.m. but probably not as late as 10. Like most American cities, Knoxville no doubt has its dangerous areas. Perhaps the article should have at least suggested, maybe even in a footnote, what area or part of an area by direction (north of downtown? east? etc.) the Germans visited that seemed to them so dangerous. Of course, Neely has to write for Knoxvillians so any more specifics on danger that I would like to see in his article from this distance may violate his discretion as a Knoxville writer, I don't know. Still, I believe some qualification in the article is in order. I'm left with the impression that the Germans' view of the dangers of outer Knoxville extrapolates 2006 Knoxville from 50's underbelly Knoxville in "Suttree." And it may be that some Forumers have extrapolated all of 50's Knoxville from its then worst part. If so, such projection is dead wrong.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Greg S.	10/2/2006
Thanks for that tip, Wes. I just ordered the CD from Glitterhouse. http://www.glitterhouse.com/index.asp?lang=d&mode=artinfo&submode=&id=4660&rid=0&searchfor= &searchmode=0&pos=&wk=&rnd=0%2C9817926&s1=&s2=&incs=false Gotta love the guys for creating songs such as "Fruit Lover". I couldn't get my media player to play that song. These guys obviously come from a small German town, where the baker & butcher open up early on a Saturday. Many German towns also have a weekly market on Saturday that starts pretty early. But in the bigger German cities, the downtown stores also don't open until 9:30 or 10:00. Whatever. Here's a link to their website where more songs can be played: http://www.buddy-and-the-huddle.com/mp3s/default.htm

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Bob G.	10/2/2006
I don't recall Neely's article stating that the Germans visited K-ville on Saturday. If that's when they actually walked around and thought Knoxville a "lost city," the day would explain why they didn't see much of anyone downtown. Again if the article omitted the day, I think Neely should have included it for further qualification.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Greg S.	10/5/2006
I just spent my lunch hour listening to the CD. I like it. 25 songs true to the spirit of the book. There are a lot of blues riffs and jazz-style numbers (even a bit of scat singing) with some nice instrumental touches (short but sweet saxophone & trumpet solos and even a didgeridoo at one point). Add just a splash of country-western/bluegrass sound and some string arrangements and you've got a mix as exotic as the book. A nice “songbook” was included, with black and white photos and a short blurb on each of the songs showing that the artists not only read the book, but that they have a pretty good grasp of what it is about. I would have enjoyed reading the lyrics, even if they are not in every song and not really central to the CD. These guys are not super-professional when it comes to production. I had to grin at some of the errors in the printed text. One of the singers has a pretty noticeable German accent. I had to snort at one point in the song “A Dance at the Indian Rock” as the narrator is describing a dance scene in which the girl presses herself against Suttree to the point where he feels her pubic bone. The word “pubic” is pronounced “pub-ic” as opposed to "pewbic". Oh vell, dats vat you get ven you don’t haf a natif zu help you out.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	1/20/2007
In this week's Metro Pulse there is a follow-up note to their earlier article on "Buddy and the Huddle" mentioned on this thread. The column, "Ear to the Ground" has a two paragraph note with the title, "Ich bin ein Downtowner?"

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wesmorgan	1/25/2007
Rather than start a new thread, I will use this one to call attention to an article by Jack Neely in this week's Metro Pulse. The article is based upon an interview with a retired Knoxville prostitute of the 1960's. In the course of her reminiscences she mentions working at The Gold Sun Cafe (Suttree, pp. 101, 104), going to Floyd Fox's place (p. 409) , and The Huddle (pp. 72, 241, 296, 385, 396, 398, 416-417, 456). Although her experiences were from the 1960's they are not likely all that different from those that might have been described in Suttree, many of which were anachronistic anyway.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	Greg S.	1/28/2007
Read that Ear to the Ground article and double-checked at the Glitterhouse website. They have an english-translation feature linked to US/Brit flags in the upper right of each page. It may not be perfect, but you can certainly get the basic info you need to order. Strange coincidence, Glitterhouse is located just down the road from the ancestral village where my wife's family used to live.

The Huddle and "rat trap" across the street	wes-morgan	7/23/2009
About eighteen months ago the space in the basement of the Cook Building at 219 Cumberland Avenue in Knoxville was renovated and turned into the Deka Bakari Art Gallery. Well, the economy is tough and the space is now up for rent again. It is located near high-rise bank buildings, theatres, condos and municipal buildings. In this football crazy university town it might be a good location for a watering-hole serving frosted fishbowls of beer--maybe called The Huddle.

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