I'll take it either way. I've lived here (thank God!) for thirty-five years, and I'm a sucker for Knoxville, and live only a few blocks from the spot where you took the photograph--Knoxville is the sort of place that is (in Flannery O'Connorese) a PLACE, with its own scruffily glorious character (when it isn't trying hard to be something that it imagines to be cosmopolitan and "up with the times," as the times it sometimes wants to be "up" with are the times I'm generally trying to get away from). Providentially, that seems to happen in brief spasms only every several years or so, and then things calm back down to the late forties (I could almost swear that there are neighborhoods here that receive NEW broadcasts of "Fibber McGee and Molly").
As a matter of purely subjective aesthetic preference, I like the black-and-white version better than the color, as it seems to provide a little more interpretive wiggle room (those colors tie you down). But that's just me.
I had a bad scare in a Knoxville gas station a few years ago. When it was all over the clerk told us that it really wasn't a good idea to stop at night in the neighborhood we were in. I put the whole thing out of my mind but it comes back whenever someone mentions Knoxville.
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I'll take it either way. I've lived here (thank God!) for thirty-five years, and I'm a sucker for Knoxville, and live only a few blocks from the spot where you took the photograph--Knoxville is the sort of place that is (in Flannery O'Connorese) a PLACE, with its own scruffily glorious character (when it isn't trying hard to be something that it imagines to be cosmopolitan and "up with the times," as the times it sometimes wants to be "up" with are the times I'm generally trying to get away from). Providentially, that seems to happen in brief spasms only every several years or so, and then things calm back down to the late forties (I could almost swear that there are neighborhoods here that receive NEW broadcasts of "Fibber McGee and Molly").
As a matter of purely subjective aesthetic preference, I like the black-and-white version better than the color, as it seems to provide a little more interpretive wiggle room (those colors tie you down). But that's just me.
I had a bad scare in a Knoxville gas station a few years ago. When it was all over the clerk told us that it really wasn't a good idea to stop at night in the neighborhood we were in. I put the whole thing out of my mind but it comes back whenever someone mentions Knoxville.
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