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. :)