Friday, January 12, 2007

So....Mabel, huh?

Mhmmm. Maybe I should explain.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, there is point at a party when Gatsby meets two women that are already in conversation. The reader is priviledged to this segment of their gossip:

"So I says to Mabel, I says... I'll continue this later."

Gatsby and one woman have a quick back and forth and Gatsby leaves. As he leaves, the ladies' conversation starts up where it left off:

"So I says to Mabel, I says..."

But that's all that is known.

Then, not much of consequence happened for seventy years. But then...in a Simpson's Episode, the same dialogue is shared by Bart and Lisa, where Homer sits in for Gatsby.

Then somewhere along a long and twisted road, Mabel was born.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stop perpetuating this myth. A search of the fulltext of The Great Gatsby (available via the Gutenberg project) turns up NO reference to Mabel or even "so I says to ____".

Do your homework and stop reciting other people's falsehoods as facts

Anonymous said...

I think they're referring to the movie. I don't know if it's really true, but it's not out of the question.