​Note that I don’t say “Best.” That way I don’t have to justify my choices, some of which are not mainstream indeed. I could justify them, but I don’t have to.
 
TWO THAT STAND OUT
 The greatest moviegoing experiences of my life, movies that shook me immediately and grew even more on repeated viewings. In order of release.

2001, A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
The Tree of Life (Malick).
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They soar above any listing I might make. Now that that’s off my chest let me try for a Top 10 Favorites:

Reading it again after all these years . . .

Dear Filippo Ulivieri,
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First and foremost, let me express my gratitude for the research you have done on Kubrick and the clarity with which you have presented it. It is the best thing have read in some time on Kubrick and something that helps me see the man in a clearer, if not newer, light. Somewhen within you seemed apologetic about your struggles with the English language, not the langue you were brought up with. You write clearly. To write a simple and clear sentence is one of the great challenges of any writer. You do that in a second language. I am impressed

​On the anniversary of my mother’s birth I binge-watched the first 8 episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Appropriate somehow because of the importance of Úrsula, the main mother in the book and Netflix series. Sadly, I will have to wait a year before getting to see the last 8 episodes. Only then will I make a final judgment on the adaptation, but my initial impressionist that it is fine indeed. I love it that the series opening, even before we get to the novel’s great first sentence about General Aureliano Buendía standing before the firing squad and remembering seeing ice for the first time, is cribs from the end of the novel but presented in such a way that the person who has not read the novel will not quite understand what is going on.

'Twas the knight before Christmas

​It is a truism of sorts that David Fincher’s movie The Social Network has parallels with the Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane. Easy to see. Both have multiple narrators. Both involve megalomaniacal media giants. Both have their Rosebuds at the end. Fincher has even directed a movie involving Citizen Kane and the media giant who inspired that movie.

[No, that is not his cabin, and that is not Mr. Frank. This HABS photo was taken maybe a ear before Mr. Frank arrived at Umbria. But I like to think that the cabin he occupied there looked like this one.]

I was only 4 when Mr. Frank died in 1943, but I do have a strong memory of him. He would come to my father’s post office in Sawyerville, Alabama to pick up any mail for the people living or staying at Umbria Plantation just to the east. Tall. Skinny. Old. I’ll stick with those last 2, but tall? To a 4-year-old all adults are tall. I knew that he had been a hobo who showed up in Sawyerville one day going from house to house asking to sharpen knives for a bit of food, and when he got to Umbria the folks there took him in and provided a home for him.

On May 9, 2024 I gave a book talk at the Hale County Library in Greensboro, Alabama about my 2 most recently-published books, White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community and Remembering My Forebears: The Turbervilles of Greensboro and the Mays of Hollow Square and Sawyerville, Hale County, Alabama. I threw in mention of my forthcoming book Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence, for I view each of these books as part of a trilogy.
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          The title for my talk was Why I Write. I had composed a neat outline of what I wanted to say and printed it out in large type to keep me on course. And guess what, that train leapt off the tracks shortly after I began. I don’t think I embarrassed myself and I do think the audience was entertained. Or so I hope.

In December 1971 when the plantation house buned it was still owned by Mrs. George Spigener, who with her late husband had restored both hohse and grounds to a state of beauty. The house was empty when it burned, Mrs. Spigener having remained in her Tuscaloosa home for the holidays. The Spigeners had hired my first  cousin Stephen May, Jr. to oversee house and ground, and at the time of the fire he and his wife were on a trip to New Orleans. Ther son Billy (Steve III) called them as soo;n as he heard about the disaster and they rushed back to see ruins.

In the spring of that year Steve had asked his brother Albert Y. May, a local photographer, to take pictures of the house and grounds. At some point the slides were given to me, and I had thenm digitized. Here they are for you to see.

Smaller photographs may be enlarged with a clidk.
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