I was in the third grade when I got introduced to the children’s section of the small public library in Greensboro, Alabama.  That’s it in the photo above, the pale yellow building with City Hall and the County Courthouse behind. The books I found there were definitely an improvement over the school readers where “See Jack run” seemed to pass for excitement. At the library I found the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, animal stories, and books about the childhoods of such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that tended to be filled with lessons suitable for the young. And then I stumbled across a book called The Biography of a Grizzly by Ernest Thompson Seton. It was serious. It was sad. It didn’t speak down to the young reader. For the first time I found myself totally involved in what I was reading. Transported to another realm.
          But as much as the individual books I encountered there and devoured before moving surprisingly quickly to the adult section up front, it was the fact that there were a whole bunch of books arranged in a manner that you could use to find more of what you liked. On top of that, you could find check them out and take them home. I immediately started my own library at home. All my comic books, Superman in one stack, Captain Marvel in another, Donald Duck in his own stack, each stack then ordered by date of publication. Big Little Books had their own shelf. (Remember them? Sort of a bridge between comic books and the later graphic novels, in a way.) Hard-cover books, the few I had, didn’t need much in the way of arrangement since you could see all 3 or 4 of them at a glance.
          I even set up a way to sign out books or issues and showed my library to friends in the community. They looked and marveled but never actually signed out anything.

​We who read widely have our great loves over our lifetimes, writers and books that somehow form the basis of our lives. Mine would include the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Biography of a Grizzly,” “The Little Prince,” “The Once and Future King,” “The Lord of the Rings,” Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” and “Star Maker,” the writings of William Faulkner, Emily Bronte, J.D. Salinger, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Patrick White, Iris Murdoch, Ross Macdonald, Neal Stephenson, Michael Wehunt, Adam Nevill, John Langan, and oh so many more. Some of these may be merely childhood romances, if such love affairs can be considered mere. Some are lifelong friends who have sustained me and continue to do so. Some are new loves, and as with all such one doesn’t yet know exactly how time will sort them out and how they will fit into one’s life, which is of course one reason they are so exciting.
          And then there are those few works that stand apart, whose magnificence break through the canopy of greatness and soar to amazing heights, works that ravish me, amaze me, terrify me, thrill me to the depths of my soul. You probably have a few like that as well. For me they would be “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville, “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner, “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. The first two grew out of my high school and college years, and the latter two I encountered as a somewhat mature adult. Each one could be considered the Great American Novel, as long as we let that label embrace the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern.
          It is no accident, I think, that all are American.

In a recent first gush of excitement I listed Adam Nevill’s “The Reddening” along with John Langan’s “The Fisherman” and Michael Wehunt’s “Greener Pastures” as what I consider the finest achievements in the field of horror in at least the last decade. Now that I have slept on the matter a few days I have not changed my opinion. The two novels and Wehunt’s collection of shorter pieces are fine indeed. In fact, if I toss out the label horror I consider them among the finest new fiction.

​mention as I move along, and some of it is implied. He is an artist, and he creates works of art. For me, art first must entertain, interest, engage me. In that Fincher succeeds to a degree matched by only a few of his peers. As you will see, in some cases it took me more than one viewing to recognize the brilliance within a particular work. But loving his work as I do, that was an easy and always rewarding undertaking.

​I had been vaguely aware of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker but I had never experienced any of her dance work. Until last night, that is. I put on my new Blu-ray of her remarkable piece “Rain” and I was transported. Ten dancers, 3 of them men, the other 7 women. Music by Steve Reich, “Music for 18 Musicians,” some 70 minutes of it. Non-stop dancing

(Photograph Copyright 2009 by Andrew Moore)

The photograph we are looking at is Plate 20 in Andrew Moore’s “Blue Alabama.” When I first look at it I see a simple photo taken from a hallway through open double-doors onto a porch where four people are seated in conversation. On the floor is a golden retriever, possibly keeping an eye on the photographer in the hallway. It must be summertime, for the people are wearing shorts. Beyond the porch is the green of the yard, echoing the bit of green I see from a plant on the porch. An attractive portrayal of a peaceful moment.

But every time I return to the picture I find myself moved more deeply by the photograph. It seems more complicated than I first thought. Carefully composed and filled with stillness, it seems to contain movement and life.