the tent city scene
01 Jan 2010So, I don’t read the Nashville Scene’s actual paper much, so it’s no surprise that I missed this article from 2008 on Tent City.. But I ran into it recently via Stone Stoup Station, who fairly accurately describes it as a “wildly inaccurate, lie-filled smear”. So, I gave it a quick read. This sentence almost completely encapsulates its shittiness:
This at-times violent, besotted collection of cast-offs, criminals, working stiffs and would-be prophets seems ripped from the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s vagabond epic, Suttree.
Beyond the fact that it’s a bunch of bullshit, it’s a flamboyantly pretentious sentence, which just annoys me on an entirely different level. Ripped from the pages of Cormac McCarthy, eh? You must be, like, one of those guys that reads.. Coooooool. Also, is it only “at-times” violent, or is it at-times a violent, besotted collection? It’s an ambiguous construction, and I’m SO CONFUSED!
Maybe this is a fluke, and maybe his bit of writing on the guns-in-bars thing was also a fluke, but this is some pretty terrible writing by Mister Hargrove ..
Yes, I just made my opening salvo in 2010 a critique of a 2-year old article in the scene. Hi!