Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > All Things Brokeback: Books, Interviews and More
New book on Brokeback Mountain
Front-Ranger:
Thanks for your review, Chow! I also found the book interesting, although I was somewhat taken aback at the author's painting of Annie Proulx as a calculated brand manager. Somehow I don't equate that image with the privacy-loving scholarly, gentle woman I met several times!
chowhound:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on December 27, 2009, 12:07:06 am ---Thanks for your review, Chow! I also found the book interesting, although I was somewhat taken aback at the author's painting of Annie Proulx as a calculated brand manager. Somehow I don't equate that image with the privacy-loving scholarly, gentle woman I met several times!
--- End quote ---
Wow! So you've actually met Annie Proulx on more than one occasion. Any way I could persuade you to tell us more?
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: chowhound on December 27, 2009, 05:08:00 am ---Wow! So you've actually met Annie Proulx on more than one occasion. Any way I could persuade you to tell us more?
--- End quote ---
Sure! Quite a few of us have met her, especially those fortunate enuff to live in or near NYC! Here are some links to where I've discussed this:
At the Literary Festival in Casper, WY, October 20, 2006 and at the University of Boulder in late November 2006 when she talked about a book she was writing an essay for on the Red Desert. Also, check out My Year of Heaven in my blog where I discuss these meetings and the subsequent things I did between October 2006 and November 2007.
Front-Ranger:
I just reread this book by Mark Asquith this morning. I flagged about a dozen interesting points that I'll discuss at more length in other posts. I have a few quibbles with this book; first, that it's way too short. Of the 117 pages of text, only about 40 are devoted to Brokeback Mountain; the rest are about Proulx's novel Postcards. And of those 40 pages, a chapter is devoted to the movie, so the result is that the author merely scrapes the surface of the story (with a few exceptions that I flagged). Secondly, Asquith keeps talking about a narrator, a "he" who is calling the shots in the story. Occasionally he refers to Proulx but most of the time it's this "narrator" who gets all the credit. Asquith is obviously British, so maybe that's a Brit thing, along with his sometimes unusual punctuation and capitalization.
There seem to be a few errors in the critique. The most glaring one was when he discussed Jack and Ennis' tryst at the Phoenix motel. Phoenix? I thought it was the Siesta Motel! Hello!! Calling it the Phoenix motel does make some symbolic sense but the Siesta Motel works better because it was a respite from the world for Jack and Ennis, it foreshadowed Jack's "visits to Mexico" and besides, there IS a Siesta Motel in Kaycee, Wyoming that fits the bill very well!!!
Front-Ranger:
One of the themes explored in this book by Mark Asquith is the tradition of male love that blossoms in the natural environment. The author cites many instances of this theme going all the way back to ancient Greece, to the myth of Hercules and Hylas. Its further development takes place among the British Romantics with Shelley and Keats in Adonais and Walt Whitman expressed it in American fashion in the Calamus poems. When the tradition moved into the American West, it grew stronger but was also sanitized into a "blood brother" or male bonding type of story, beginning with the Virginian by Owen Wister (the author mistakenly calls him Wistler) and extending through the art of Catlin and Remington and the novels of Buffalo Bill all the way to John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. But it was not until Proulx's Brokeback Mountain that the myth comes full circle back to the notion of the expression of male love in the natural environment. This notion is a bit shocking as nowadays we're used to seeing male couples in the cities and even Jack said that people in his situation "go to Denver" (the nearest large city to Wyoming). Does the natural environment really inspire young gays to express themselves more freely? Why don't we see more gay hiking groups and other outdoors clubs then? Stories of gay women in nature are even rarer...I can't think of a one off the top of my head. Would like to know your thoughts!
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