Word: insects
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...single night's sleep." He is a pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate...
Furthermore, in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, "we have the hump of sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect." To the straightforward reader, it may appear that the explanation only compounds the problem, especially when Burgess points out that the French for "earwig" is perce-oreille, which "can be Hibernicized into Persse O'Reilly," a name appropriate to H. C. Earwicker's dream career as an Irish patriot. His initials also mean "Here Comes Everybody" (turning the sleeper into Everyman...
...Insect. Some of Wertham's most provocative fire is directed at the clinical cult in literature and drama, in which human suffering is viewed with such detachment that it becomes trivial. The tone of John Mersey's Hiroshima and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood reduces violence almost to the level of natural catastrophes and impersonal acts, he says. The film The Collector, n which a young lepidopterist kidnaps a girl and keeps her locked up until she dies, is more than simply a sick parody of entomology: it adds to what Werham feels is the pervasive...
...mixers, juicers and garbage grinders, babbling radios and television sets, humming refrigerators and air conditioners. The air conditioner's metallic threnody, in fact, is one of the important new sounds of America. It hangs in the air above close-nestled, rich communities like the thrum of some giant insect infestation, and it is setting neighbor against neighbor, township against contractor, and contractor against manufacturer...
...least one species of mosquito carries the WEE virus from infected animal to man or from infected man to man. He also knew that some birds, notably swallows, harbor the virus. But in the Rockies and on the high plains the carrier mosquitoes die off as winter begins and insect-eating birds fly south. Where did the virus spend the winter...