In "The
Gold Bug," as elsewhere in Poe's work, there is no question of imitating nature.
He was speaking as a true
gold bug -- not in the dark days after Lehman Brothers' demise in 2008, nor in the depths of last year's euro zone debt crisis, nor after Standard & Poor's recent downgrade of the United States' top-notch credit rating.
Joseph's critique does overlap with the arguments offered by
gold bugs, and if you download the study guide he offers online you'll find them among the rainbow coalition of sources that he cites: libertarians, leftists, Birchers, even a cameo by Lyndon LaRouche.
In novels such as The
Gold Bug Variations and The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers has proven himself to be a novelist of ideas, from artificial intelligence to corporate greed and classical music (see our Powers profile in the Sept/Oct 2006 issue).
As a preface to The
Gold Bug Variations, this codon-like string of letters not only mirrors the genetic sequencing found throughout the narrative; it also troubles the unsuspecting reader who engages Powers's novel for the first time.
The metal detector we used was a Fisher
Gold Bug (12) with the detector head (13) mounted on the cart as already shown in Fig.
People seemed to be looking at me differently, probably because I was the only one on the street wearing such an electric color, and I felt a bit like the
gold bug character from the Richard Scarrey children's books.
In this excellent introduction to the work of Richard Powers, Joseph Dewey resolutely describes the author of The
Gold Bug Variations and seven other "big novels of ideas" as being torn between two all-American impulses, "Emersonian engagement and Dickinsonesque withdrawal." In what at first sight looks like a reductive effort to neatly structure the novels under scrutiny, Dewey assigns the odd-numbered books--Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), The
Gold Bug Variations (1991), and Galatea 2.2 (1995)--to engagement, and the even-numbered ones--Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), and Gain (1998)--to withdrawal.
In "The
Gold Bug," for example, the tale is built around a device for "transmitting information from one individual to another in such a manner as to avoid general comprehension," and Legrand, the code breaker, uses mental skills not available to the masses to solve the puzzle (221).
"This is a great chance to gather under one roof with all those involved in the juvenile-products industry for a unique networking opportunity," said Katherine Gold of
Gold Bug Inc., chairman of the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, which sponsors the show.
1969: Bo Widerberg makes his first film for SF, "Adalen 31," and receives a Swedish Guldbagge (
Gold Bug) for best director and also Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
As
gold bug and economist Ludwig von Mises noted, "Only government can take commodities like paper and ink and make them worthless."
