The Small Apartment in the Very Foreign Town

I read just now, in a review just now of Pico Iyer's The Man Within My Head, the following:

"Graham Greene is often taken to be the patron saint of the foreigner alone, drifting between certainties; his territory is the small apartment in the very foreign town, the passion that is temporary, the border crossing that seems the perfect home for the man who prays to a God he's not sure he believes in."

It was the "small apartment in a very foreign town, the passion that is temporary..." that made me think, yes. I am not a traveler like Greene, one of my favorite authors, or Iyer, but I do know what it is to be compelled by a place, and to think, I can write here for a while, the while being "the passion that is temporary"; the foreign town being the place you will make the temporary permanent. When Din and I step off a plane in a place I have never been, I am always thinking, while looking out the window of the cab taking us to wherever we are going, will I be abkle to write here? I seem to always know the answer immediately. Last great spot was Honolulu.

First great spot: Savannah, Georgia, where in 1997, Din and I spent a week. I was on assignment for Bon Appetit magazine, and when we weren't eating and making out in the city's squares, we were drinking in a bar called Pinkie Masters. I decided then, I would someday rent a room across from Pinkie Masters, write during the day, and drink in the bar at night. That time is pretty much at hand.

Not that I put much stock in these things but: Pinkie Brown is the fictional anti-hero of Greene's Brighton Rock, and it was writing about a girl named Pinky, in The Queens of Montague Street, that has set the writing at hand.