O Lost

I know that I said I would post the rest of my Asheville pics, but I had some severe problems with Blogger this weekend. For some reason it wasn't uploading images or publishing my post. I'm hoping it was just a problem with the laptop I was using, so I'm sending this one out from work to test everything out.

Anyway, I typed out a long post with the rest of my pictures only to lose it completely when I tried to publish, which was thoroughly disheartening. Anyone who's typed out a long email and had their webmail session time out before they could send it knows the reluctance I feel in reconstructing my lost missive.

But anyway, the title of this post is the original title to Thomas Wolfe's awesome novel "Look Homeward, Angel." The great Max Perkins allegedly edited down a huge and unweildy manuscript into a masterpiece, but more recently the original manuscript was published and seems to give evidence that Perkins wasn't as necessary as the stories would lead you to believe.

LHA was one of my favorite books when I read it in high school, and it is appropos to my blog post because not only is Thomas Wolfe from Asheville, but the town of Altamont in which the novel takes place is unmistakably the Asheville of Wolfe's youth. You can even walk around town and find the boarding house his mom owned and his dad's cemetery monument shop, both of which feature prominently in the book. Just another thing that I love about Asheville but which didn't make it into my once and future post with the rest of my vacation pics.

Also, I've always loved Wolfe's "O Lost," which is scattered through LHA and was his original title for the book. Another title I love is "All Shook Down," an album by the Replacements that features on it's cover a wet dog on deserted street.