Hillbilly country! My granny's home since 1945, until she moved in with my mother a few months ago, her tough mountain health fading fast at 95 years of age. The clocks had moved forward the night before. Asheville was as I remembered it: slow and friendly and trendy and beautiful, the town of Thomas Wolfe, the Carolina genius, sits on rolling hills beneath Bocatcher Mountain. Here I was again. The previous two trips had been as memorable as they were something to forget, dealing abjectly with my father's debilitating dementia and granny, who suddenly stopped remembering where she was and who people were last July. If you had told me this would be a good place for working I wouldve laughed. But the little empty house has been just fine. The house my granny built sits in Beverly Hills near the Municipal Golf Course and was at one time back in the twenties supposed to live up to its name and be the Beverly Hills of the east. The Depression put an end to that. I had to run errands, get the plumber in, talk to her banker, fetch state tax forms and box mountains of memorabilia and financial records some of them dating back to the forties themselves. And when that was done I set about the book again which for the last ten days has been going well finally-- the slings and arrows of the last nine months have passed and Im waking up I can only surmise. You can get used to anything if you try hard enough. . . HvK called from Montreal and envied the weather in Raleigh. Im not in Raleigh I said. Im in Asheville, which to him, being a Europhile Canadian means nothing despite the legendary Grove Park Inn, the Wolfe legend of Look Homeward Angel and Biltmore House, the largest house in America, built by that intrepid CNN guy's (Anderson Cooper's ) relatives. None of that mattered to Harry, bless him. It was in the forties in Montreal and he was sitting outside a cafe. That's warm for them. And then I went back to work editing, re-writing, endnotes and errata on my magnum opus which is kind of Blaise Cendrars meets Captain Blood, an adventure story, cruising through the last forty years, starting in the Crisis of Vietnam an following the central character, a wild man entreprenuer and adventurer, through Central and South America and Nigeria and Greece and Poland as he makes and loses fortunes, ending in the present Crisis when his life comes full circle, he returns to the jungle, which made him, because well there is nothing in the present to lose but our brains. . . I bought a Velvet Underground t-shirt in a cool little used record shop. The shirt has a huge banana on it. It reads The Velvet Underground and Nico . . . Last night I talked to RG in LA and he invited me to his birthday at the end of the month in Oakland where he was born and used to hang out with the young OJ and their gang. He's in fine form. He's got a cool business venture and a regular part in a major sitcom coming up in the Fall. He's my brother. An excellent chap is RG. So it was good to hear his basso profundo and catch up on the news. We'd not seen each other since the American Film Market in LA last November. More calls to make. I need to call JW and get the skinny on our meeting in New York this weekend to talk about our film venture, another adventure story, this time about a teenager a hundred years ago who escapes like Oliver Twist from oppression into a series of adventures, the first of which begins by escaping Poland and voyaging with his mysterious mentor (who smells like the jungle: always the jungle with me) to Australia to collect animals for the world's first naturalist zoo in Germany. That's our film: Harry Potter meets young Indiana Jones. We have a lot of interest. The story is based on a book you've never heard of (famous in a foreign land): in fact there are nine books, all bestsellers, the biggest sellers in that particular part of the world since WWII. . . (more later) The sun is out. Time to attend to business. Time to write. Talk soon.
