Word: cockroaches
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...Cockroach and Crucifix. Typically, a Fahlstrom work is made of units: tiny cutout images of anything from a banana to Richard Nixon's head, from a bamboo stockade to a pile of feces, drawn with tightly focused and quite deliberate clumsiness and fixed to the base by magnets. The profusion and inventiveness of these units is dazzling. To scan Firing Squad (1968), is like spinning the selector of a TV set past images that suggest disaster but can barely be read in time-cockroaches, a panther, a G.I. doll on skis, a Bobby Kennedy headline, a crucified Lyndon Johnson...
...archy, a lowly lower-case friend, archy never had the strength to depress the upper-case key, and his punctuation was atonal in any key. It was understandable; though he had been a "vers libre bard" before his death, his soul had transmigrated into the body of an ambitious cockroach. It was assumed that archy died again along with his creator...
...went on to describe the dictator in images redolent of death, decay and sickness. Stalin's "fingers are fat as grubs," his "cockroach whiskers leer," his laws are like horseshoes to fling "at the head, the eye or the groin." One version of the poem ended with Stalin savoring every execution like a raspberry...
...days, the watchman would see a cockroach running down the corridor, and he'd spray the whole place with DDT," Williams complained. "Of course I went right out through the ceiling. They can put you out of business overnight...
John Cheever's title, in the most obvious way, is intended to suggest that it is possible to die just as dead and be as swiftly damned among movers and cocktail shakers as ever it has been among the cockroach-infested retreats of the materially disadvantaged...