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Text of the page (random words):
at black rock red river broken arrow shane which like billy the kid features a dance to goodbye old paint and hud which is where we ve been aiming for horseman pass by which would become translated into hud a couple of years later was the debut novel of larry mcmurtry and the first of three novels later anthologised as thalia a texas trilogy and set in and around the town of that name the western films i named above are mostly set in the old west but mcmurtry s thalia novels are set in the present day in the case of horseman pass by in july 1954 the imagined fighty cowboys and indians good and bad black and whiteness of the wild west was one thing that put me off as a child if i d realised what an ache you could get into a western story i d have seen the point of them far earlier and mcmurtry is all about the ache the acher in chief of horseman pass by is its narrator lonnie bannon 17 years old and living on his 82 year old grandfather homer s cattle ranch lonnie s a sensitive thoughtful boy who helps his grandfather and does a bit of performative chasing after girls his own age but is more drawn to their black housekeeper halmea who functions as both a substitute for his dead mother and a sexual fantasy increasingly he thinks of escape i wouldn t have minded going with hermy s cousin to see what it was like in oklahoma city at least it would be a change thalia was okay i really liked it but i just didn t want it for all the time the old cows bawling in the horse pasture kept me awake till nearly morning and i lay in bed with my eyes open thinking about all the girls i knew in thalia and those in oklahoma city i didn t know all of them with nightgowns on asleep somewhere and breathing in the night ache the grit in this situation comes from the unexplained death of a heifer in homer s herd which suggests the possibility of hoof and mouth disease and from the volatile presence of hud homer s 35 year old stepson thirty five s an awkward age i dimly recall if it s not friends saying it s much better living it than looking at it robert then it s usually a ranch you feel like you ve been waiting your whole adult life to inherit and a herd of mexican cows that should never have been bought in the first place i guess they had to rename it because the audience for a film called horseman pass by would be close to zero but from the title of the film you d think hud was the central character that s the draw of paul newman though in fact it was melvyn douglas and patricia neal who won the oscars lonnie is played by soulful brandon dewilde ten years on from his turn as joey starrett in shane it couldn t be any other way you may suspect something similar as you read the book hud s slow to be introduced and the force of his personality when he does eventually appear contrasts sharply with lonnie s meekness the grandeur of the landscape often lends itself to grand stories and i kept thinking of shakespeare s henry iv plays envisaging hud as a prince hal type a tearaway waiting for a taste of responsibility to let him blossom this isn t that book though with his 1985 masterpiece lonesome dove and its sequels mcmurtry would create expansive epic tales of the west but this book s scope is smaller a snapshot essentially of lonnie s coming of age halmea quits hud s dropped and lonnie goes away there s a powerfully nostalgic streak in everything i ve read by mcmurtry not sentimental for a moment and this book contains a couple of brutal scenes of slaughter and assault but the brutality complements a constant awareness of the changing of the seasons the ends of eras the fragility of life the old west seems to have been dying since its birth the old ways falling off and in this book lonnie is mcmurtry s proxy to observe it all most of the chapters seeming to end in this sweet wistful strain i went in the church and laid the songbook on a seat then i went back outside and stood on the walk in front of the church house looking at the grass at the skim milk clouds at those blue church house windows thinking of the horseman that had passed has larry mcmurtry ever been given his due because i think he s a very great writer he s not published by library of america at the time of writing but that will presumably be remedied pretty soon for myself i need to read the second thalia book leaving cheyenne a quotation from goodbye old paint everything connects and reread the third the last picture show probably this year before saddling up for the lonesome dove sequels tags aaron copland billy the kid geoff love goodbye old paint horseman pass by hud larry mcmurtry laurel hardy lonesome dove old west paul newman thalia the 1961 club the last picture show way out west westerns wild west posted in books comedy film music 2 comments the 1961 club my sad captains thom gunn april 18 2026 whenever i post about poetry i come down with impostor syndrome sir i don t always understand poetry i m not wholly ignorant but my knowledge is patchy i can tell an iamb from a trochee recognise a triolet and a villanelle know nothing of terza rima or heroic couplets and if you put a poem in front of me i couldn t tell you if it was keats or byron or shelley or coleridge unless i knew it already but i looked at some of the other things bloggers have posted about thom gunn and ignorance hasn t inhibited them so i decided he s fair game i ve written about gunn before do you have poets you probably do anyway he s one of mine a not infrequent companion of student days back then i dipped into his collected poems frequently but i don t think i d read a single collection cover to cover until this one 1961 s my sad captains and other poems the title comes from antony and cleopatra come let s have one other gaudy night call to me all my sad captains fill our bowls once more let s mock the midnight bell another blogger reckons the title poem one by one they appear in the darkness a few friends and a few with historical names is alluding to elvis or james dean though i m not sure why it might just as easily be the voice of mark antony but the poems in this book are not easy to interpret i read most of them over again when i d finished them in the hope of an epiphany that often didn t come i also read most of them aloud which certainly helped i loved the crispness and precision of the early poems the classicism of their discipline even when their point was lost on me i struggled to identify themes but gunn s range is wide a painting by caravaggio a meditation on claus von stauffenberg would be assassin of hitler his voice is usually serious but there s a page of comic verses labelled readings in french that might have come from time spent in france teaching though edgar poë writes a lucid prose just and rhetorical without exertion it loses all lucidity god knows in the single poorly rendered english version this made me smile recalling as it did nabokov s pnin a recent reread whose title character laments that the library of his new england college only has hamlet in the original not the russian translation of his youth with its beautiful noble sonorous lines the easiest poems to love or at any rate to comprehend are the ones treating the outside world the gorgeous lights among redwood and the irresistible considering the snail which imagines a snail moving through a wood of desire and asks what is a snail s fury two poems titled modes of pleasure both dealing with sightings of men in bars one a middle aged fallen rake another a potential one night stand point the way to gunn s later more overtly gay poetry which is what i found exciting in my early twenties not many poets have captured so vividly the sensual potential of the male body gunn was in his early thirties when this book came out and a couple of his poems are tender treatments of teenage boys finding their feet in a gay or gay adjacent world blackie the electric rembrandt has a teenage boy having his arm tattooed with stars now he is starlike while black jackets is about a young member of a biker gang leaning to fit in he stretched out like a cat and rolled the bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue and listened to a joke being told the present was the things he stayed among the thing that most evokes the subject s youth here may be the bitterness of the beer a thing that you notice when you start drinking for the first time and come presently to take for granted the night i read this poem i d just rewatched basil dearden s film victim another gay artefact of 1961 and the hangout where this poem takes place might be the transport caff boy barrett flees to in kelworth the last stop on his farewell tour before the police take him in though it s not clear if the gunn of this poem is british or american gunn was british born the modest claim to fame of his newspaper editor father bert was the invention of the phrase it s that man again to describe hitler but made his home in san francisco from the mid 1950s and seems to have put on americanness like one of his black jackets he was a great poet of the city and i ll finish with this one a moving inviting piece of writing it almost makes me wish i d been there but the reality is that in san francisco i d be the guy with his windows shut reading poetry a map of the city i stand upon a hill and see a luminous country under me through which at two the drunk must weave the transient s pause the sailor s leave i notice looking down the hill arms braced upon a window sill and on the web of fire escapes move the potential the grey shapes i hold the city here complete and every shape defined by light is mine or corresponds to mine some flickering or some steady shine this map is ground of my delight between the limits night by night i watch a malady s advance i recognize my love of chance by the recurrent lights i see endless potentiality the crowded broken and unfinished i would not have the risk diminished tags antony and cleopatra basil dearden homosexuality my sad captains poetry san francisco the 1961 club thom gunn victim posted in books film 3 comments the 1961 club household ghosts james kennaway april 17 2026 the scottish writer james kennaway 1928 1968 is best remembered for his 1956 novel tunes of glory the bleak story of a power struggle in a scottish army barracks i ve long meant to read it and it was this and the knowledge that the volume also contained his 1961 novel household ghosts that prompted me to ask for a canongate omnibus of three kennaway novels for christmas with the release of ronald neame s brilliant film adaptation of tunes of glory the year before scripted by kennaway the author s stock must have been high at the time household ghosts came out it s sad to report what a dreary time i had with it then the novel opens in medias res at a country dance full of young conservatives so far so good at dow s academy a school somewhere in perthshire gradually you piece together the personnel there s charles ferguson known as pink his sister mary her farmer husband stephen a man apparently pursuing her david the feeling is oppressive and made all the more so by the private language shared by pink and mary he poured her an enormous whisky and sliding some sandwiches on to a dundee cake that looked like a fighter he put the tumbler on the plate and carried it across to her speaking once again in their curious code a language drawn from anecdote and limerick from family jokes and nursery rhyme from a lifetime spent together from a myth they had had to weave for themselves i know all about private languages it comes from having two younger brothers who spent most of their childhoods watching television with me so that we have now reached the point at which if required we would be capable of maintaining a conversation on any subject solely via the medium of chucklevision quotations it s probably not an exaggeration to say that there are thousands of phrases from hundreds of obscure sources that function as communication devices between the three of us when i say made in newport gwent or cheeseburgers were a penny then or leave from my store firstly they know exactly what i m on about and secondly everyone else is automatically shut out the number of girlfriends or potential girlfriends alienated from my family over the years must be incalculable anyway it meant i could sympathise with the excluded stephen and david while also understanding the almost too close relationship of pink and mary as the novel progresses details are filled in of pink and mary s mother s impoverished childhood and descent into drink of their father s card cheating shame and alleged queerness of their own resultant hang ups you can see why the two of them have such a close if queasy bond when all else around you crumbles at least you ve got your beloved sibling it just isn t much fun to read i ve passed the stage of not liking books because they ve got unsympathetic protagonists when i was a teenager that was my problem with holden caulfield then i grew up and found holden was plenty sympathetic the problem had been me all along but i couldn t shake the grubbiness of this book i ve spent the past couple of months working through various bbc ibsen adaptations currently on iplayer which include a brilliant scottish set enemy of the people by the way which demonstrate that you can tell any number of stories about dissatisfied desperate people without the telling being dissatisfying in fact you can do it and make it exhilarating tunes of glory does this it really makes you care household ghosts does not that s a shame because there are passages that show kennaway s storytelling skill if more of the book had been written in the amused slightly sardonic strain of this passage introducing pink and mary s father i d have had a better time there is a story told in edinburgh of an old lawyer who never leaves his house and sleeps for only an hour or so at night sitting in a chair and he has lived like this for forty years during which he has devoted his waking time to preparing a brief for an appeal he is his own client when he was only thirty action was taken against him for fraud and it was brought by his colleagues he has apparently inexhaustible energy in the preparation of the case which will exonerate him but although he never takes more or less sleep in the winter he grows a little tired and it is said that around the end of february or the beginning of march he will drink a bottle of bad port and confess with a bitter laugh to his housekeeper that he was guilty in the first instance on the following morning sober by 4 a m he starts work again colonel sir henry ferguson appeared to be a great deal more sane and slept eight hours every night but behind the blank stare and the occasional charming smile there lay hidden a not unsimilar obsession broken only from time to time by the appearance of his daughter whose spectacular beauty appealed so much to his vanity a couple of oddities some chapters take th...