Rock & roll is timeless.  It doesn’t matter how young or how old you are, if it’s in your blood, you never get tired of it.  I say that because I drove 880 miles last Friday and waited in the rain in an open field for 8 hours the next day in order to see a concert that opened with Mudhoney and built, through Queens of the Stone Age and The Strokes, to a 3-hour set with Pearl Jam.  And I didn’t even mind – until Queens took the stage and some bro pushed his way in front of me and then motioned all his friends down to join him, thereby blocking the view I had zealously protected the entire day.  In the rain.
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Sometimes I am just bowled over by a single conversation. Take the other night, for example. Bobbie Ann Mason was in town for a book-signing, and Michael Knight, who lives in Knoxville, came down to Union Ave Books for a joint interview to talk about their recent interest in World War II. After the interview and book-signing, Michael suggested we take Bobbie Ann to dinner. He invited University of Tennessee Visiting Poets William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk to join us.  
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Sometimes, you get lucky. Bobbie Ann Mason arrived in town last week to promote her newest book, The Girl in the Blue Beret, just as I was about to launch this blog. The book, loosely based on the experiences of her father-in-law, a pilot shot down over Belgium during World War II, was something of a departure for a novelist who is better known for stories set in the Walmarts of western Kentucky than the streets of occupied Paris.
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