Coffee Pot and filter
by ribtickleuk 22 hours ago (Tue Dec 4 2007 15:06:05)
UPDATED Tue Dec 4 2007 15:07:54
Near the end of the short story there's two references to the contents of a coffee pot being filtered clean/or thrown out. Do you think their juxtaposition is significant so near the conclusion of such a well-crafted short story, and if so what meaning can be drawn from it? Just a terminus to the story, or something else?
Ennis takes his horse's blankets to the jetwash to hose them down (Coffee Pot appears to be a horse's name, which is previously mentioned by Ennis in his "All the travellin I ever done is goin around the coffeepot lookin for the handle" response to Jack's first mention of Mexico), and then the postcard seller is said to be throwing away a dripping wet coffee filter (which would be from her coffee pot).
from the story:
A few weeks later, on the Saturday, he threw all the Coffeepot's dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins' gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.
"Ennis, what are you lookin for, rootin through them postcards?" said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.
Re: Coffee Pot and filter
by watergarden 14 hours ago (Tue Dec 4 2007 23:25:33)
ribtickleuk, this seems like too good a connection NOT to have extra meaning to it. However, there is a problem; Annie Proulx removed the Coffee Pot from her update of the short story. Your line reads:
"A few weeks later, on the Saturday, he threw all the Coffeepot's dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins' gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack."
It comes from the original short story published in The New Yorker; that story had no prologue and a few ranch and rancher names were different. That story is available online.
However, in the short story printed in Story to Screenplay, the same line reads:
"A few weeks later, on the Saturday, he threw all Stoutamire's dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins' gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack."
In this version of the story which was updated after The New Yorker publication, she added the prologue and changed some ranch and rancher names. Everything is the same in the passage except Coffeepot; unfortunately Annie took the symbol away. There might be a mention of Coffeepot some place else in the context of the newer version, but I can not find it.
Re: Coffee Pot and filter
by ribtickleuk 10 hours ago (Wed Dec 5 2007 02:32:10)
UPDATED Wed Dec 5 2007 02:46:47
Thanks for that explanation watergarden, and yes, I am using an online version. Have yet to buy the book, though I'd probably have continued to paste excerpts from the online version into threads had you not told me of the differences.
I don't know what to make of the original Coffee Pot/coffee filter. Maybe at its most simple it was intended to link to the horses theme: 'there ain't no reins on this one'. The journey is over, there will be no more riding horses up on Brokeback, so the horse blankets are washed, filtered clean, stowed away, and to reinforce this somehow, a coffee (pot) filter is thrown away by the very woman who sells Ennis a postcard of the terrain he took his horses over 17 years.
Or on the other hand, Annie may have been sat there writing in front of a big steaming pot of coffee, got writer's block, and decided to call the horse 'Coffee Pot' until Stoutamire was born.
Re: Coffee Pot and filter
by GeorgeObliqueStrokeXR40 6 hours ago (Wed Dec 5 2007 07:09:50)
UPDATED Wed Dec 5 2007 07:29:51
Whatever the reason for including "Coffeepot", the addition of the name Stoutamire seems more in keeping with Proulx's stated ideas about the importance of specificity of language and location. The language of her writing is very densely packed. The small details are important.
As she put it:
"People may doubt that young men fall in love up on the snowy heights, but no one disbelieves the speckled coffeepot, and if the coffeepot is true, so is the other"
Perhaps the coffeepot becomes a stand-in for a detail that "grounds" the scene in reality. Perhaps she felt she overused it once, and found a different detail to replace it - the name "Stoutamire".
Re: Coffee Pot and filter
by chowhound 3 hours ago (Wed Dec 5 2007 10:15:15)
So, Watergarden, any implications in this new name for the horse - "Stoutamire"? It's so unusual that I think there must be.
Re: Coffee Pot and filter
by watergarden 2 hours ago (Wed Dec 5 2007 10:41:28)
UPDATED Wed Dec 5 2007 10:56:37
Stoutamire refers to the ranch owner I think. There is a reference to him being Ennis' boss somewhere in the story. I think the Coffeepot was the name of a ranch as well. Great name for a horse though, just like Cigar Butt
