[A few years back I had posted something like this on my blog. I later took it down after I had revised it and published it as a chapter in my "Rants, Raves, Ruminations, and Ramblifications" collection. Now I am posting that chapter here again on my blog.]

I’ll start by calling your attention to Michael Kreyling’s 2005 work The Novels of Ross Macdonald.
     It was reading Professor Kreyling in the fall of 2013 that prompted me to start reassembling a collection of Macdonald. Once upon a time I had a complete collection, and in a great flurry of dispossessing myself of works that I thought I would not be returning to again I had gotten rid of all of them (after all, I had read each two or three times). Now I see that was a mistake. And now I am embarking on a major project of reading him again. He repays additional readings.

A couple of years back I made a small attempt at autobiography in an humble volume called “Telling Stories.” I had this to say in my introduction:
 
          “In my own writing of essays and commentary I find that it limits me too much if my topic is too big: “Jonathan’s Entire Life, Times, Thoughts Both Serious and Otherwise, Opinions, Philosophy, Gossip, and Miscellaneous Musings,” say. “The Theory of Everything Jonathan.” I cannot lasso a horse that big. While I was preparing material for my earlier attempt at essays that involved me to some degree, “Rants, Raves, Ruminations, and Ramblifications: Musings from a Hamlet,” I found that I worked better if I tackled only a small part of the beast. Write about two dogs, Huckleberry and Roscoe, and with them in focus let Tom and Jonathan be sort of glimpsed in the background. And why not write something about what Sawyerville was like when I was a child, or temporary deafness, or Sadie Roberson, or the deaths of two uncles. Write about specific movies and books and writers and directors, and Jonathan can’t help but peek through at times.”
 
          “Telling Tales” was divided into 4 sections: “Country Life” dealt with growing up in a small Black Belt community in the 1940s and 1950s. “City Life” had chapters about my work life and my personal life in New York 1962 – 1989. “Family Lives” described my fascination with 2 families in art, Faulkner’s Sutpens and the Sokurov families (depicted in “Mother and Son” and “Father and Son,” in part as a way to indicate how much literature and movies had meant in my life, and in part as a sort of segue into and preface to the last section, “Family Life,” in which I wrote about my father, my mother, and me.
 
          “Absalom, Absalom!” has been much on my mind lately, and I have elected to pull that chapter from the work and post it on the blog on my Hollow Square Press website. So without further ado: