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

[Fran]

An excerpt from a customer review at Amazon:

Through all too brief and sporadic encounters disguised as fishing trips, Annie Proulx takes us on a lifelong journey between these two extraordinary men as they continue to be drawn to one another through two decades of passion, turmoil, and confusion. Nothing is ever easy in this tale and Proulx never allows her two heroes to come right out and declare their love for the other, and yet she permits us to know the unspoken truth that lies deep within them. Slowly, with heartbreaking honesty, we become painfully aware that these two men are trapped in a world where their doomed desires for a life together cannot and must not ever be. The story is a contradiction of emotions, for it is at times both tender and gentle and then devastatingly wrenching in its finality.

[southendmd]

Another excerpt from the aforementioned Planet Jackson Hole interview with Annie Proulx:

PJH:  I think it's clear to anyone who reads "Brokeback Mountain" that above all it's a wrenching, starcrossed love story. It is about two cowboys, but it seems inaccurate to call it gay literature. How do you feel about the film being assailed as gay agitprop emerging from liberal Hollywood? Did you ever intend for the story to be controversial?

AP: Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about "two cowboys." It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand, nor can manage. The only work they find is herding sheep for a summer -- some cowboys! Yet both are beguiled by the cowboy myth, as are most people who live in the state, and Ennis tries to be one but never gets beyond ranch-hand work; Jack settles on rodeo as an expression of the Western ideal. It more or less works for him until he becomes a tractor salesman. Their relationship endures for 20 years, never resolved, never faced up to, always haunted by fear and confusion. How different readers take the story is a reflection of their own personal values, attitudes, hang-ups. It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts. Far from being "liberal," Hollywood was afraid of the script as were many actors and agents. Of course, I knew the story would be seen as controversial. I doubted it would even be published and was pleased when The New Yorker very quickly accepted it. In the years since the story was published in 1997, I have received many letters from gay and straight men, not a few Wyoming-born. Some said, "You told my story," some said, "That is why I left Wyoming," and a number, from fathers, said, "Now I understand the hell my son went through." I still get these heartbreaking letters.

=aside= Sandy
Thanks.

[memento]

And still another excerpt from the aforementioned Planet Jackson Hole interview with Annie Proulx:

PJH: Have you seen the film? How much does it resemble your original vision of the story,­ its landscapes and characters, themes and dramatic moments? Do you feel it accurately represents Wyoming?

AP: I have seen the film. It resembles the written story very closely, and the McMurtry-Ossana enlargement is seamless. I do feel it accurately represents Wyoming some decades in the past. It is not clear ­ to me, at least ­ what the current character of the state is. Some think Wyoming is changing, becoming more aware and tolerant of diversity and differences in people, and there is evidence to support this view. Some think it will not ever change.

[Fran]

And still another excerpt from the aforementioned Planet Jackson Hole interview with Annie Proulx:

PJH:  Have you seen the film? How much does it resemble your original vision of the story,­ its landscapes and characters, themes and dramatic moments? Do you feel it accurately represents Wyoming?

AP:  I have seen the film. It resembles the written story very closely, and the McMurtry-Ossana enlargement is seamless. I do feel it accurately represents Wyoming some decades in the past. It is not clear to me, at least ­ what the current character of the state is. Some think Wyoming is changing, becoming more aware and tolerant of diversity and differences in people, and there is evidence to support this view. Some think it will not ever change.

=aside= Sandy
Thanks again.

[southendmd]

One of the more colorful lines in the short story includes the nose-curling phrase "smells like cat piss or worse".

=thanks= Fran
 

[memento]

And still another excerpt from the aforementioned Planet Jackson Hole interview with Annie Proulx:

PJH:  I understand that some Wyoming folks have criticized you for being a relative newcomer to the state, someone not "local" enough to write about the West. Does this kind of talk faze you at all? Is it always the role of the writer to be something of an outsider, an observer, anyway?

AP: The innocent belief that only people who have been born and brought up in a place can know it well enough to write about it is more folklore than fact. It might seem logical, but it is not the way literature works. Certainly there have been many outstanding regional American writers, but the outsider's eye is invaluable in writing and art, and most American literature has been written by outsiders, including much Western material: Walter Van Tilburg Clark ("The Ox-Bow Incident," "Track of the Cat") came from Maine, Owen Wister ("The Virginian") came from Pennsylvania, Theodore Roosevelt ("The Winning of the West") from New York, Jack Schaeffer ("Shane") had never been west of Toledo when he wrote his novel of the Johnson County war. There is room for both kinds of writers ­ local people and "outsiders." Outsiders certainly do not stop local people from writing whatever they wish. There's a little thing called "freedom of speech" which applies to writing.

[Fran]

"This heartbreaking love story is as profound as it is relentlessly unsentimental. Life brings two young drifters together, sets them apart and their long agony begins. The genius of the story lies in its edgy dialogue and Proulx's depiction of a simple truth -- powerlessness. It is her best work and also one of the finest American short stories yet written."

-- Eileen Battersby, Irish Times   

[southendmd]

"This heartbreaking love story is as profound as it is relentlessly unsentimental. Life brings two young drifters together, sets them apart and their long agony begins. The genius of the story lies in its edgy dialogue and Proulx's depiction of a simple truth -- powerlessness. It is her best work and also one of the finest American short stories yet written."

-- Eileen Battersby, Irish Times   

=thanks= Fran
 

[memento]

So now he knew it had been the tire iron. He stood up, said, you bet he'd like to see Jack's room, recalled one of Jack's stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage. "Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, 'You want a know what it's like with piss all over the place? I'll learn you,' and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I'm bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they'd cut me different like you'd crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that.

[story]

[Fran]

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain't goin a be that way. We can't. I'm stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it. Jack, I don't want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don't want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich -- Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."

[story]