Storyological 1.26 - ZERO HUGS

Storyological

In which we discuss,

1. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx, The New Yorker

2. "The Lake" by Tananarive Due, Tor.com

along with, among other things...

Anthony Lane, writing about the film, Brokeback Mountain

“Brokeback Mountain,” which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow, because the love between Ennis and Jack is most credible not in the making but in the thwarting.

That one episode of our podcast where we discussed “Ponies” by Kij Johnson

A kind of Scott McCloud diagram
In Understanding Comics, one can find this classification of different types of artists:

Christopher Cox interviewing Annie Proulx in The Paris Review

They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis. It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation; it’s about a place and a particular mindset and morality. They just don’t get it. I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, Oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way. And they all begin the same way—I’m not gay, but . . . The implication is that because they’re men they understand much better than I how these people would have behaved. And maybe they do. But that’s not the story I wrote. Those are not their characters. The characters belong to me by law.

Tanarive Due’s collection, Ghost Summer, reviewed by Paul Di Filippo in Locus

In “The Lake,” a teacher named Abbie LaFleur arrives in town and naively proceeds to mess with old powers that end up transforming her. But the transformation assumes an allegorical cast, as it brings out the hidden vices of her original flawed nature. Things do not end well.

Winners of the British Fantasy Awards 2016

That one episode of our podcast where we discussed “The Infamous Bengal Ming”

That one book Lolita

• “Gender and Power in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”
• “50 Years on, Lolita Still Has the Power to Unnerve”
• “The Deceptive Veil of Language in Lolita”