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erupture no.7 music reviews media reviews mel's rant lancelot links he's big! he's huge! current issue the dusty archives write me, baby |
So, I spent 2 days at jury duty pouring over The Gold Bug Variations and what I
discovered was this: DFW'ss short story Order and Flux in
Northampton is a funnier (and shorter) version of the same story. Right towards the
beginning of TGBV the main character (I think) is described as having features caused
my a Myrna Loy allele (here is it, page 93: "Her Myrna Loy allele might hide a matched
half that codes for Irish pug: a half-breed, heterozygous.") The Myrna Loy reference woke me
up. I'd been ruminating for a while as to why Wallace chose to name the object of Barry
Dingle's affection Myrnaloy Trask. In 1992, when both stories were published, Loy was still
very much alive, so it's not as if she'd been in the news recently for kicking. The obvious
initial connotations for me was Myrna Loy as the object of any man's desires. I think Jimmy
Stewart once said that there ought to be a law against any man not wanting to have Myrna Loy
for his wife. That was her function in American mythology at the time she was making
movies--the perfect wife. Of course, the passage in TGBV brought me no closer to the
truth.
The pivotal scene towards the end of TGBV is also very similar to the scene where Myrnaloy stumbles in on Don Megala trying to extract a lost contact lens from a graduate student. Sadly, the scene in the Powers' book isn't funny. Or tragic. Or anything. It just made me really annoyed at everyone, especially myself for wasting this amount of time on a book that is so predictable and boring. Wallace also copped some of Powers' descriptions of the flat geometry that circumscribes Illinois for his essay Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley. But for some reason when Wallace writes it, it sounds so sexy. |