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erupture no.7 music reviews media reviews mel's rant he's big! he's huge! current issue the dusty archives write me, baby |
At one point, the lovely and talented David Foster Wallace began ranting about how authors get no props in this visual-media driven society, and as an example he used Richard Powers, who had been at the New School auditorium the night previous and no one remembered to show up. The clever and skillful David Foster Wallace then went on to call Richard Powers "the most underrated author of my generation." I'm like whoa. I've heard of this guy, sure, he's gotten discussed on Wallace-l (but then again, what and who haven't? Even Tsunami and Marilyn Manson have been mentioned. Even Cerebus f'cris'sake!), but no one ever said to me, "yo, check out this Powers guy, yo..." But here was my hero, the lead in my play if you will, singing this guy's praises up the proverbial wazoo, practically bestowing upon him the accolade of butt-puckering. So I ran out (well, I waited until the next day) and got myself a copy of The Gold Bug Variations. And I was floored. Blown away. Flabbergasted? Shocked, stunned? It sucked. It's a damn romance, like on a grand Titanic scale. Yeah yeah, it's got everyone sitting on this couch of molecular biology and hacking and insurance fraud and art history, but it's basically a romance. With an ending so cheap and fraudulent that I almost threw the book across the room. I saw what was about to happen about 20 pages before it did and I was literally sitting there with the book, saying out loud, oh. no. oh. no! This can't happen. This is too dumb. It's like when you're first learning to ride your bike and you see you're going to crash into that chain link fence but you're too slow and dumb to stop it. It's also like Melrose Place, and I know some of you know what I mean (although my MR was Dondi, a comic strip about a stupid kid with big black dot eyes that I was compelled to read no matter how horrified and disgusted it made me. Ask my brother. This was our secret shame as children). Making matters worse, I found several factual errors in the book, which drives me crazy. If I found some, there must be tons. To be fair, I didn't read Gallatea 2.2, or any other Powers' opi, but I get the impression that they're all romances about science and/or academic geeks. If you want to read a good fiction book about science, try The Cambridge Quintet by John L. Casti. |