The Grouse Grind as told by Liz Cave and Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

So if this were not a literature blog I could write entries about, for instance, my harrowing experience completing the Grouse Grind with the Livy on Tuesday. She suggested that I could rightfully blog about it if I discussed it as a text. Indeed, I could... for instance, the experience was interrupted by two apparently unreliable narrators... one which marked hikers’ progress up the trail in orange spray paint and the other that communicated through official-looking signs. Other themes included peoples’ apparent jealousy of my jeans, and the Liv character’s tremendous foresight for bringing buns apart from her God-given ones. While this experience may not have been strictly literary, my ultimate justification for posting these observations is that this experience was occasionally litterey, and surely the two being almost homonyms makes them pretty well synonymous. See, no difference, only différance.

To salvage this entry to a topic that is more literally literature, I just finished Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye. I think Liv described the McCullers as “sensitive but not sentimental.” This is evinced in the narrator’s preoccupation with the relational dynamics between characters that seem to inform their actions, over certain gruesome “symptoms” of those relationships (like a character cutting off her nipples with garden shears).

I observed many parallels between this work and the film American Beauty. It contains a male military officer who hates/identifies/loves someone who in many ways seems detached from “The System” and who kills him in a murder suicide. A mysterious and socially unattached young man who becomes enamoured by a woman. A character who contemplates “a scrap of newspaper fluttering in the wind” which seems an awful lot like the plastic bag. A woman who is treated as though she is mad. Most of the characters seem to feel empty, or unfulfilled. I would not be surprised if Alan Ball is a Carson McCullers fan.

Of course, what American beauty lacks is a character like Anacleto who, wile preparing a tray for an inordinate amount of time, “kept up a soft and vivacious chattering to himself. The Major caught something about Mr. Rudolf Serkin and about a cat which was walking around in a candy counter with bits of peanut-brittle stuck to its fur.” Awesome. :)

Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack

Up until last week I thought my local library was only good for borrowing DVD’s, and stocking a non-fiction section that addresses the most cutting-edge issues of the early 1990’s. Imagine my delight when I saw among its new acquisitions a collection edited by Sarah Carter (she wrote The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915—a fascinating account of how fiercely guarded a particular idea of marriage and family [wa/i]s, and how central it was to Canadian nation-building).

The essays collected in this anthology are conscious that, as one such contributor specifically observes of Sara Riel, earlier writers of biography have only acknowledged women when they “[celebrate them] as an event in the life of a great man” (Erickson, 2011, 117). However, these authors take as their objective demonstrating how, “Aboriginal women, instead of fading into the background as traditional narratives of Western settlement suggest, remained at the forefront of their communities’ survival and persistence” (Burnett, 2011, p.158).
Given that traditional historical accounts are silent about the centrality of their female First Nations and Metis subjects, the contributors to this collection use multiple methods and rely on many sources of information. For instance, Susan Berry demonstrates how the information about artisan skill and style that one reads from an artefact might be read alongside HBC invoices and a traveller’s diary to extrapolate who the artist was. In uncovering these identities, Berry also fits these characters, and their stories (gleaned from HBC records, newspaper reports, etc.) into a travelogue that was originally silent about them. Moreover, she traces her subjects’ social location beyond their contact with the author of the diary to showcase the increasing marginalization of these highly skilled Metis women and their families with the progress of the Canadian state.

On the whole, this collection is full of well-written essays with authors whose use of sources is imaginative, innovative, interesting, and compelling. Additionally, several of the authors focus on the connection between first peoples and specifically their relatives who currently live in Scotland. Is this kind of diaspora much considered in the literature (I'm hardly a scholar of First Nations studies)?

The only suggestion I would have is if the reader is not familiar with Canadian history that s/he supplement this with a more traditional history resource. Indeed, it would provide needed context when the authors note an event like the Red River Rebellion but do not elaborate on it in detail.

The Tea Room Trade by Laud Humphreys

Well, for the past month I have fallen off the reading wagon, but I nevertheless can claim the distinction of remaining a Te[a]totaller this month, and in some pretty public places too.

A lot has already been said about the ethics of the research design that informed Laud Humphreys' Tea Room Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (lookit me! citing Wikipedia :S), so I will not say too much about that here. I would just encourage people who think that his method sounds appalling that they should read the book; Humphreys really lays it out, and engages with his critics.

What was most striking to me was how different my impression of the book was relative to another summary I had heard of it. In an undergraduate introduction to research methods, one relatively coarse course instructor described Laud Humphreys as this researcher who spied on gay men when they had sex in washrooms. According to this man, Humphreys then followed them back to their houses and extorted people’s compliance with his research by interviewing them while their wives were at home. However, upon reading the book, what stood out to me was how my instructor re-evaluated its findings when he summarized it. Indeed, in this work, Humphreys distinguished several types of people who would be sexually active at the tea rooms, only one of whom might be called homosexual/gay/etc. However, my instructor apparently felt that he could dismiss this part of the analysis.

Like others many others I think treating sexual acts between men and homosexual identity as metonyms is a feature of the present day. This was underlined by what was not present in this book. Indeed, Humphreys did not take a stand about the logical difficulty of conflating acts with identity. Perhaps this is because this work was born in the 1960’s, before the Gay Liberation Movement suggested that being gay was a choice and presumably depended on the fulfillment of a set of (sexual) acts.

What was more pressing to Humphreys was critiquing the religious beliefs that he thought contributed to men’s experience of frigid relationships, and with which they were well-versed enough to hide behind whilst still engaging in illicit sex. Given his background as a radical Episcopal priest, this critique seems natural.

Sadly, the compelling argument with which Humphreys concludes—in which he refers to his findings that tearoom sex is not exploitative, that sex in private is much more likely to involve violence, and concludes that police harassment of people who engage in such sex does not contribute to public safety—was obscured by the ethical mess of his research design. In any case, the innovative method, and provocative arguments are definitely worth revisiting even forty years later.