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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Brokeback Mountain, How It All Began

(image source: reel ginger movie fan)
no copyright infringement intended

... so I was in one of the state's most delightful bars where big men meet and share there one night and some guys for playing pool and I noticed that leaning against the wall was this old guy who was an old cowboy with its scuffed up boots and its stained hat, obviously still working at the trade and he was looking at the guys playing pool with an expression that was different: very unusual expression; it was kind of longing and sad and odd, and I couldn't quite figure it out, and then after a while I began to wonder if maybe he was gay, and then I thought, well, what would it be like to be in his mid-sixties or so, I said, what would it be like to be an old cowboy who was gay and who lived in a place where to be gay was asking to be really seriously hurt, so I began thinking about it and I thought about it for months and months and months and months and as I thought about it the story began to take some shape and so I wrote it ...

(Annie Proulx)

(video by WheelerCentre)

Annie Proulx

(Click here for the Romanian version)
Ennis del Mar wakes before five, wind broking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminium door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft.
Annie Proulx started to publish in her fifties, to become immediately a distinct and powerful voice in contemporary American literature. Her world is rural North America. Her language is the one that countrymen speak, in Newfoundland (The Shipping News), in Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2).
He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the glass burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue.

Annie Proulx's vision is far from romantic - it's as rough as countrymen are. There is no place for illusions in her approach. There is a traditional milieu, and these rough guys are very conservative and very stubborn, only life is rough and stubborn too and claims its rights against the whole world.

He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on.

And still, there is kind of warmth, kind of sympathy, in her rough stories - for these poor guys who are forced by their own nature to live their own real, against all odds.

He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

Today it's her birthday.