Word: skeeters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most topically amusing short is one by Bruno Bozzeta called "Self-Service," a parable of industrialization, energy consumption, and insatiable greed. Mosquitos in search of a square meal keep trying to attach their snouts to a human's skin despite inevitable smushing. When the human falls asleep, skeeter entrepreneurs erect oil wells and canning factories to the gruntlement (that's the opposite of disgruntlement) of skeeters everywhere. But the human wakes up, and the gibbering insects flee to the sanctuary of a church, where the Great Fickle Finger of the Lord juts down and promises impending doom to the prostrate...
...point in Redux, Rabbit looks over the books that Skeeter, the black radical carries--Marx, Fanon--and they disgust him, remind him of plumbing. Is that more or less your feeling also...
...point in Redux, Rabbit looks over the books that Skeeter, the black radical carries--Marx, Fanon --and they disgust him, remind him of plumbing. Is that more or less your feeling also...
...Skeeter's problems are not Rabbit's: Angstrom can accept neither his nihilistic analysis of American history, nor the irrational fire of his revolutionary solutions. Skeeter tells him what was lurking in the plumbing of America; Angstrom does not believe the sewer's backed up all that far. "Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general," says Rabbit. Which does not imply that Rabbit returns to a passive acceptance of what's laid out for him. He comes to grips with his life. He accepts guilt for his own domestic mess, and (with his father) recognizes...
Perhaps because Updike so meticulously spelled out his philosophy in Couples, he here leaves it in only where (as with the Skeeter-Rabbit talks) it matters. Redux makes concrete a cyclical vision of human interaction. Rabbit goes through a free fall which Janice endured, on her own scale, in Run; and as Janice then caused the death of a child, Rabbit's sodden neglect causes Jill's violent end in a blazing house. Updike's characters change and grow with each other, spinning globes in solar systems of an inexplicable universe. Is there no justice to these systems...