Uko, who is not sleeping like a horse, or even a dog, log or a baby for that matter
I am unable to sleep this evening, which might be the result of me kipping when I was supposed to be studying linkage analysis (check the Wikipedia article before you judge me), so I decided I needed something to read and opted for the Brokeback Mountain novella. The online copy that I originally read when the film came out has long since departed from this here internets, but with a bit of searching it's still easy enough to rustle up, if you just know what you're looking for.
I'd forgotten how beautiful it was. The sparsity of the writing, the taciturn characters, the luscious descriptions of landscapes; I want to be able to write like that. More to the point, I want to be able to write men like that. It's a very masculine story, in the descriptions of scents and suchlike, and the way the emotions are never laid out or spoken about, but there is no less a certain tumescence about it. It's one of those stories where I can see everything; the landscapes, characters, the dirt and the grime and the sweaty-stickiness of it. Like Technicolor of the brain. A few of my favourite quotes:
"A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin."
- I like this one so much I've placed it, for the time being, on my Facebook quotes. It's that little darlin that makes it for me; so banal, and yet, coming from Ennis, it means everything in the world.
"What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness."
- And again this, for its quiet intimacy. The detail about 'sleepin on your feet like a horse' I find particularly touching, though I couldn't explain why.
"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 real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands."
- Again, the love expressed not in words but in the smallest actions. I think that is why it comes alive for me; it's not wordy or expressive, but it is sensual and tactile and unaffected. And I need to stop now before my ordinary artlessness with sentence structure gets even worse.
---
Kind-of-but-not-really related to the above subject; I've been reading a fair bit of scans_daily recently, as it's the sort of website that can keep one entertained for hours with a single tag, and it's reminded of a pet peeve of mine about the slash fandom, and that is their refusal to understand that just because someone is being penetrated doesn't mean that they are submissive. For a start, the vast majority of healthy relationships have some sort of equality, and while there is commonly some sort of power balance going on in the bedroom, I'd imagine that in most relationships that dynamic alters according to the mood of the people involved: sometimes one initiates sex, sometimes the other, sometimes one takes the reigns, sometimes the other, and so on. But that isn't the point. The point that I'm trying to make is that being the one on the receiving end, whatever the orifice involved, doesn't mean at that moment in time the person is being submissive. It's perfectly possible to have a cock up your arse and still be the one in control of the situation. People seem to have this same pre-formed idea about blowjobs; again, just because you've got a dick in your face-hole and perhaps you're on your knees doesn't make you the submissive. In fact, if I personally make an assumption, it's that the person doing the sucking is the one in control. After all, if I was the proud owner of a Bright and Shiny Prick, the last thing I'd want to do is upset the person with their teeth round it. It irritates me. If one takes that assumption for granted, one can assume that all heterosexually-inclined woman - unless armed with a strap-on and a battalion of sex-toys - is never anything but a submissive. And, speaking as such a Heterosexualist, I have this to say: fuck that.
(The comic that sparked this reaction was... interesting, as one might imagine. Kind of gave me D= face though.)
I am now going to stop listening to school days dance music (I love this song; whenever it comes on in a bar I've got to have a dance and a sing, and a moment of nostalgic melancholy) and try once again to sleep.
I'd forgotten how beautiful it was. The sparsity of the writing, the taciturn characters, the luscious descriptions of landscapes; I want to be able to write like that. More to the point, I want to be able to write men like that. It's a very masculine story, in the descriptions of scents and suchlike, and the way the emotions are never laid out or spoken about, but there is no less a certain tumescence about it. It's one of those stories where I can see everything; the landscapes, characters, the dirt and the grime and the sweaty-stickiness of it. Like Technicolor of the brain. A few of my favourite quotes:
"A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin."
- I like this one so much I've placed it, for the time being, on my Facebook quotes. It's that little darlin that makes it for me; so banal, and yet, coming from Ennis, it means everything in the world.
"What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness."
- And again this, for its quiet intimacy. The detail about 'sleepin on your feet like a horse' I find particularly touching, though I couldn't explain why.
"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 real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands."
- Again, the love expressed not in words but in the smallest actions. I think that is why it comes alive for me; it's not wordy or expressive, but it is sensual and tactile and unaffected. And I need to stop now before my ordinary artlessness with sentence structure gets even worse.
---
Kind-of-but-not-really related to the above subject; I've been reading a fair bit of scans_daily recently, as it's the sort of website that can keep one entertained for hours with a single tag, and it's reminded of a pet peeve of mine about the slash fandom, and that is their refusal to understand that just because someone is being penetrated doesn't mean that they are submissive. For a start, the vast majority of healthy relationships have some sort of equality, and while there is commonly some sort of power balance going on in the bedroom, I'd imagine that in most relationships that dynamic alters according to the mood of the people involved: sometimes one initiates sex, sometimes the other, sometimes one takes the reigns, sometimes the other, and so on. But that isn't the point. The point that I'm trying to make is that being the one on the receiving end, whatever the orifice involved, doesn't mean at that moment in time the person is being submissive. It's perfectly possible to have a cock up your arse and still be the one in control of the situation. People seem to have this same pre-formed idea about blowjobs; again, just because you've got a dick in your face-hole and perhaps you're on your knees doesn't make you the submissive. In fact, if I personally make an assumption, it's that the person doing the sucking is the one in control. After all, if I was the proud owner of a Bright and Shiny Prick, the last thing I'd want to do is upset the person with their teeth round it. It irritates me. If one takes that assumption for granted, one can assume that all heterosexually-inclined woman - unless armed with a strap-on and a battalion of sex-toys - is never anything but a submissive. And, speaking as such a Heterosexualist, I have this to say: fuck that.
(The comic that sparked this reaction was... interesting, as one might imagine. Kind of gave me D= face though.)
I am now going to stop listening to school days dance music (I love this song; whenever it comes on in a bar I've got to have a dance and a sing, and a moment of nostalgic melancholy) and try once again to sleep.