Around Here

I looked out the window, and seeing no wind, decided it was a good day for  biking. The county library was my destination, some four miles away. I wanted  to return my two Thomas McGuanes and pick up a couple more. I had read a  story of his in an old New Yorker and was now reading his books. He writes of  the West, the Northwest, ranching and fishing, the Florida Keys, but he’s gritty  and urbane. Saul Bellow called him a magician. He’ll write a paragraph, a  sentence, that you go back and reread for sheer delight. “The spring sunshine  boomed off the car colors.”     I tipped my bike against the building. “Nice bike,” said Pete, as I loaded the  books into the spring jaw of the carrier behind the seat. “You look like another  Lance Armstrong.”     “Lance Armstrong has his problems,” I said.     “He sure does,” said Pete. “A lot of problems.”   ...

Until it was confronted by the cruel realities of its time and place, the relationship between Jack and Ennis in "Brokeback Mountain" existed in a kind of utopian innocence, isolated and undefined. And being isolated, both topographically and culturally, from the contamination of bigotry and gay culture (which has oppressive features of its own) alike, their love was unnamed and therefore free, not only to speak, but to say nothing. Tom Ford’s striking screen rendition of Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man” has the same air of reticence, suspension, of a world apart. But although both stories take place in roughly the same time frame, they’re vastly different in context, culture, and mood. Insulated from the crudities of overt bigotry by the diffidence of an upscale milieu instead of by the natural fortress of a mountain range, and from the pressures of an as yet marginal gay culture, George Falconer’s grief is as free to play out on terms common to the human condition as ...