The Book Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories
By Annie Proulx

A nice image from the book:

“His thoughts clogged as if a comb working through his mind had stuck against a snarl.”

And another nice description of a girl daydreaming:

“What was there for Ottaline when the work slacked off? Stare at indigo slants of hail forty miles east, regard the tumbled clouds like merchants’ rags, count out he loves me, he loves me not, in nervous lightning crooked as branchwood through all quarters of the sky.”

A nice spot where she talks about a snow-storm in reverse …

“Thompson, the bar owner, displayed his collection of spurs, coils of rope, worn boots, a couple of saddles, some old woolly chaps so full of moths they looked like snow-storm in reverse in spring, other junk inside the window.”

In another place, she talks about being “wired”, which I think is probably American English for being “tense,” or “wound-up.”

“Around mid-afternoon I’d left them in the calving barn with a bad heifer, gone up to the house to grab an hour of sleep, but I was too tired, way beyond sleep, wired, and after ten minutes I got up and put the coffeepot on, got some cookie dough from the freezer and in a little while there was steaming coffee and hot almond sandies. I put three cups in a cardboard box, the cookies in an insulated sack, and went back out to the calving barn.”

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Reading

Some notes on a book I read recently.

A book by Paul Auster - "The Book of Illusions"

This is an excellent book. Auster refers a lot to the French writer Chateaubriand.
Chateaubriand wrote Mémoires d'outre-tombe which was published in 1848. It has two thousand pages, and is said (in Auster's book) to be the best autobiography ever written.

A suggestion in the book for the translation of Mémoires d'outre-tombe is Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, but it was felt that Memoirs of a dead man might be more like it.

Reference is made to a two-volume edition of Chateaubriand's Mémoires by Pléiade compiled by Levaillant and Moulinier.

Quote from the Mémoires: "Ce lieu me plaît; il a remplacé pou moi les champs paternels"

Other writers, singers, composers, etc. mentioned by Auster: Dashiell Hammett and André Breton; Pergolesi and Mingus; Verdi, Wittgenstein, Villon; Rimbaud, Laura Riding

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Philip Roth – in his book "The Plot Against America" – mentions on Page 92 that it was common in the US in the 1940s to refer to meals on menus in restaurants by their French title, e. g. "roast beef au jus" and "pecan pie á la mode."

There are some nice touches in the book "Bad Dirt" by Annie Proulx.

Page 66

He was addicted to what he called "hammer coffee," strong enough to dissolve the handle, float the head.

or on Page 73:

"Them rich pricks are lower than a snake's ass in a wagon track."

and on Page 121:

An elderly widow rancher in Wyoming is talking to a newcomer to Wyoming country from New York, she says to him:

"How's your teeth?" "Pretty sharp?"

"I don't know," says he, nonplussed by the odd question. "Why?"

"Always lookin for somebody help us castrate lambs."

On Page 152 she has a great description of a man with a very large gray beard:

"Here was a man who cared about his beard. Its luteous glow, its fluffed fullness, the mild fragrance of rose petals that wafted from it all declared a pogonophile-meister as Reginald Reynolds might have said."

luteous a deep orange yellow or greenish yellow
pogonophile one who loves beards

Describing the face of a cowboy she writes:

"He bore the traces of acne so severe that his sallow skin, resembled sand drilled by a fast-moving cloudburst."

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