The "ABCs of BBM": Round 965! (Rules in first post)

[Fran]

     Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back.  A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him.  Jack took the stairs two and two.  They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin.

[story]

=aside= Toast
Thanks.

[southendmd]

In one of Annie's many invectives in prose, a mother scolds her son:  "You're no more a cowboy than you are a little leather-winged bat."  (Close Range)

=congrats= Fran
Fran Loves Brokeback Mountain 4000 times!

[memento]

One of Annie's colorful characters is named Jerky Baum.

=aside= Toast
Thanks. Ribeye Cluke had some Jerky Baum with a Tater Crouch and drank some Fiesta Punch and then had to have a Bromo Redpoll afterwards.

[Fran]

     "How much is once in a while?" said Jack.  "Once in a while ever four fuckin years?"
     "No," said Ennis, forbearing to ask whose fault that was.  "I goddamn hate it that you're goin a drive away in the mornin and I'm goin back to work.  But if you can't fix it you got a stand it," he said.  "Shit.  I been lookin at people on the street.  This happen a other people?  What the hell do they do?"
     "It don't happen in Wyomin and if it does I don't know what they do, maybe go to Denver," said Jack, sitting up, turning away from him, "and I don't give a flyin fuck.  Son of a bitch, Ennis, take a couple days off.  Right now.  Get us out a here.  Throw your stuff in the back a my truck and let's get up in the mountains.  Couple a days.  Call Alma up and tell her you're goin.  Come on, Ennis, you just shot my airplane out a the sky -- give me somethin a go on.  This ain't no little thing that's happenin here."
     The hollow ringing began again in the next room, and as if he were answering it, Ennis picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialed his own number.

[story]

=aside= Paul
And I think Fran loves the ABCs game 3,500 times, give or take.

[southendmd]

Annie may have created Habakuk van Melkebeek, but I think I'd rather have a beer with Rilla Nooncaster.

[Toast]

Annie Proulx describes Alma's motivation as she nulls her marriage with Ennis Del Mar:

[Alma's] resentment opened out a little every year: the embrace she had glimpsed, Ennis's fishing trips once or twice a year with Jack Twist and never a vacation with her and the girls, his disinclination to step out and have any fun, his yearning for low paid, long-houred ranch work, his propensity to roll to the wall and sleep as soon as he hit the bed, his failure to look for a decent permanent job with the county or the power company, put her in a long, slow dive and when Alma Jr. was nine and Francine seven she said, what am I doin hangin around with him, divorced Ennis and married the Riverton grocer.

[Fran]

An excerpt from an Associated Press telephone interview with Annie Proulx in which she says she received no response from gay organizations regarding Brokeback Mountain:

AP:  Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?

Proulx:  I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world.  I'm really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through discussions about the film.  People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine.  It is a love story.  It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that's true.  It's an old, old story.  We've heard this story a million times; we just haven't heard it quite with this cast.

AP:  Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?

Proulx:  No.  When the story was first published eight years ago, I did expect that.  But there was a deafening silence.  What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking.  And over the years, those letters have continued and certainly are continuing now.  Some of them are extremely fine, people who write and say, "This is my story.  This is why I left Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa."  Perhaps the most touching ones are from fathers, who say, "Now I understand the kind of hell my son went through."  It's enormously wonderful to know that you've touched people, that you've truly moved them.

AP:  Is that why you write?

Proulx:  It's not why I write.  I had no idea I was going to get any response of this sort.  I wrote it from my long-term stance of trying to describe sections of rural life, individuals in particular rural situations and places, well, first the places.  That it came out this way — it just happened to touch certain nerves in people.  I think this country is hungry for this story.

AP:  Why?

Proulx:  Because it's a love story and there's hardly much love around these days.  I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss; and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone.

[Meryl]

Annie Proulx's prose fits the dictionary's definition of "straightforward discourse," yet is never prosaic (dull or unimaginative).

=aside=Fran, Sandy, Toast, Paul and Clarissa
Glad to be back at last.  Only had 20 pages to catch up on! 
Great work, as always. 

Congrats, Fran, on hitting 4000! 

[Toast]

Proulx's novel [The Shipping News] is about a third-rate journalist, Quoyle, his elderly aunt and two daughters, all of whom move to an ancestral seaside home after Quoyle's wife sells her kids to a pedophile and commits suicide.  And right at the words "ancestral seaside home," I suspect the more prescient readers out there are thinking: deep dark family secrets, reconciliation with the past, emotional healing in exotic surroundings.  And you'd be right.  And you'd have saved yourself slogging through 337 pages of Proulx's dark-and-stormy-night prose to boot.  The Shipping News is redolent with such turns of phrase as "The bay crawled with whitecaps like maggots seething in a broad wound" and "fingernails like bowls of souvenir spoons" (huh?).  In one of Proulx's short stories, her oafishly complicated prose probably comes off a lot better, but stretched out to book length it's interminable.  "Forrest Gump for snobs," was the way one Amazon.com reader tagged it, and the label fits.

Earnest Trash

=aside= Meryl
Looks like you had a good time in Canada!
Welcome back to the game.

[memento]

"For 19 years E. (for Edna) Annie Proulx, whose fine, rambunctious second novel The Shipping News won the National Book Award last week, supported herself by writing for small to middling outdoor magazines. This is very close to being impossible. The caloric content of the checks that drift in months late is only marginally greater than that of rejection slips burned in the wood stove."

John Skow, True (As in Proulx) Grit Wins

=aside= Meryl
Welcome back. We missed your posts which are never prosaic.