Pajamas & Pages

[ink_ling]

After reading Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain", a sad Edith Wharton story last night, and the sharply drawn story of a friend this past week, I have found myself recently curious about the short story.

I wonder if it has a natural propensity to build both the lyric intensity of poetry and the narrative trajectory of the novel simultaneously. I am

Comments

[sunsmogseahorse]

Oh, man. Move over. Brandy?

[ink_ling]

Better stick to the tea, got an early day tomorrow. What'll you be reading?

[sunsmogseahorse]

The New Yorker. With a brandy.

[paulintoronto]

I am interested in this, because I have found that Americans tend to pronounce their names according to English phonetics, whereas Canadians tend to pronounce names according to the language of origin. Here, people would normally pronounce Proulx as "prew." Do you happen to know how she pronounces it herself? Or how your countrymen and countrywomen would pronounce it?

[dodgingwndshlds]

As far as I have heard, it is pronounced exactly that way... "Prew".. I heard an interviewer say it like that with her sitting right there and she neither corrected him or sighed in exacerbation... So.. Well... I took it as a good sign.

[ink_ling]

But she's a fairly frugal writer, no? ;)

[paulintoronto]

We always hear here that Alice Munro is universally acknowledged as the greatest living writer of short stories. Do you know her work? I've enjoyed what I've read, but I often wonder whether we are exaggerating her fame and her talent because she is Canadian.

[ink_ling]

I read a story collection of hers years ago. I remember very much liking it for its spareness, its psychological observation, and its thorough valuing of the everyday. I usually look for an added experimentation or innovation of form as my own personal yardstick of greatness -- and I don't remember much of that in Munro -- but I, like you, have heard so much esteem for her as a contemporary master of the form that I wanted to go back and read her again.

I had actually gotten her last big collection of stories on my desk, too, but forgot to bring it home with me!

[gryphons_hole]

I should say this post reminds me of 'Afternoons & Coffeespoons"
by the Crashtest Dummies...
Its all about the tea and pajamas and authors...

[ink_ling]

Ahhh: A good soundtrack for my most incredible odd & gray afternoons off! Hit exactly bull's eye!

[gryphons_hole]

Even though many of the tracks
seem very similar in content and mood,
that album really resonates within me.

[ink_ling]

Especially that deep voice! :)

[dodgingwndshlds]

Did you read Brokeback Mountian ALONE or in the context of the full collection, Close Range?? I am curious how it stands without the the other stories...

I want inside your head, to experience it without the taint of my own readings and paradigms.... To know you through your knowing of what you read. I bet it's an utterly festive place to be, to boot.

[ink_ling]

I had intended to read the whole collection -- after reading your post -- but it was, of course, already checked out in anticipation of the movie. In fact, I'd prefer to read the whole collection.

I have a suspicion that Proulx was linking geography, love, nature, and class in her stories, stepping back for a much bigger panoramic view that just happened to include a "queer" love story in one instance. That changes the context of the work. At least for me. As a result, it's not the banner of "naturalness" of gay love against the malevolence of the prejudiced society as the movie seems (without my having seen it) to pitch the issue within the current political climate.

The story alone? No consideration of whole collection or movie? It was very good: the pared language, the landscape, the dialogue, the angled psychological portraiture won me over, made me feel in league with what I saw as a pretty fair and familiar presentation of class and geography with a very developed aesthetic technique. Maybe not the greatest thing I've