April 24, 2006

• MONDAY READING
  
  
  
  Close Range – Wyoming Stories
  
  by Annie Proulx

  After being on the waiting list for weeks, I finally picked up this
  book from the library, containing the story, Brokeback Mountain. 
  The movie made from it was a shocker in a lot of ways, subject matter not everybody
  was ready to take in.  But it did remarkably well because it
  treated the story with taste, beauty, and exquisite
  interpretation.  The story itself was worth the wait.  I
  wanted to see if there was something definite about Jack Twist’s death,
  and what I found was that Ennis del Mar believed it was murder with a
  tire iron but the act itself is not described.  Here though is the
  wonderful scene with the shirt  at the end of the film, in 
  the author’s words:

  “The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod
  braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from
  the rest of the room.  In the closet hung two pairs of jeans
  crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair
  of worn packer boots he thought he remembered.  At the north end
  of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and
  here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt.  He
  lifted it off the nail.  Jack’s old shirt from Brokeback
  days.  The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing
  nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their
  contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard
  with his knee.  He had staunched the blood which was everywhere,
  all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t
  held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the
  ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.

  The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another
  shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s
  sleeves.  It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago
  in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons
  missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the
  pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.  He pressed
  his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through  his mouth
  and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty
  sweet stink of Jack but there was no scent, only the memory of it, the
  imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what
  he held in his hands.”

  Annie
  Proulx has a great history of her own.  You can read her bio here.  She is 71
  years old now and didn’t start writing until she was in her 50′s. 
  She published these stories when she was already 64.  Oh, and she
  just happened to win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, The Shipping
  News, when she was 59.  She grew up in New England and went to
  school there, majoring in history and working as a journalist before
  she finally began to write fiction.  She only moved to Wyoming
  last year after three marriages and four children.  I went after
  this book because of the one story and found an amazing gathering of
  incredible tales written as though she has lived there all her
  life.  Marvelous.
  

  ---

  
  Deep Thought:  “The king
  threw back his head and laughed. He enjoyed a good laugh, and so did
  his wife, the queen. When she saw the king laughing she let out a big
  laugh too. In fact, she laughed so hard she broke her throne. This made
  them both laugh harder. Then they got serious when they remembered they
  had the plague. “The plague,” said the king, but the way he said it
  made them both burst out laughing again.”
  Today I am grateful for:  Indexes (or indices depending on how picky you are).
  Guess the Movie:  “They
  turned me loose from the nervous hospital. ‘Said I was well. I got
  hired on by a Mr. Bill Cox fixing lawnmowers and whatnot. That grass
  out there in the yard has grown up quite a bit. I reckon I might cut it
  for you.”  Answer:  Slingblade, 1996.  Winner: STRESSEDwriter
  Six ‘Green Nobels’ to be Awarded Today
  
  by Douglas Fischer
  SAN FRANCISCO — Craig Williams’ son was a year old when he learned the
  U.S. government planned to incinerate 523 tons of chemical weapons 8
  miles from his home in rural Berea, Ky.
  Worried about the risk, Williams, a Vietnam veteran, pulled out his typewriter and started writing. He is still writing.
  Today his son is 23. The weapons — nerve and mustard gas — have not
  moved, but the Army has agreed to a safer, water-based process to
  destroy the stockpiles there and at three other sites throughout the
  country.
  For his efforts, Williams today is one of six winners of the 2006
  Goldman Environmental Prize, a $125,000 award that is the highest honor
  of its kind for grass-roots environmentalists and is often called the
  “Green Nobel.”   (Rest of article here.)

  • 10:27 pm
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