Word: swamp
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...make-believe world Trudeau has organized in Doonesbury is as accurate a microcosm of the universe as Nemo's dreamland-or Dogpatch or the Okefenokee Swamp. But unlike these earlier locales, the backgrounds of Doonesbury are not metaphors. They are instantly recognizable as the White House, Viet Nam-or outer space, where three Sky lab astronauts discover that the nation is so bored with the space program that their congratulations are being telephoned not by the President, not by the Vice President, but . . . Stand by for "the Lieutenant Governor of Iowa!" Trudeau does not anthropomorphize his characters into Shmoos...
...tell you're near the Gulf of Mexico when the cumulus clouds start to pile up on horizon. The Gulf Coast is part desolate and soulless tourist strip, cheap motels and nightclubs where groups like Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts play, and part fishing villages and marsh and swamp. The swamps give way to Lake Pont-chartrain presently, and the Louisiana Superdome starts to loom on the horizon. Beyond the Mississipi and the alluvial silt of the Coast, Houston beckons...
...have tried for years to prevent, or at least reduce, the ravages of St. Louis and other forms of insect-borne encephalitis. But the disease is difficult to treat or eradicate. No effective way has been developed to immunize people against it. Health officials are concentrating on spraying and swamp-drainage programs aimed at cutting down the number of mosquitoes, for the only known way to prevent encephalitis is to eliminate the pesky insects that transmit...
...allegories. Everywhere one looks, there flicker the shadows of primordial struggles; the perpetual tension between the dark and the light; the wrestling match between Christ and Satan; and finally, the complex allegories of sex: sex in all its unimaginable innocence, or sex reeking with the full perfume of the swamp. And all these urgencies are seen or sensed through a hot wash of blood which, deny it though we will, fascinates us nearly to the point of shame...
Full perfume of the swamp, indeed. Whether a scholar who writes in so deep a shade of purple can even comprehend shame is uncertain. Yet Wolfs conclusion has some merit. Stoker, who was secretary to the actor Sir Henry Irving, shrewdly swotted Transylvanian geography and vampire lore at the British Museum reading room. His gleanings provided a European psychohistory before the term was coined, covering half-remembered terrors with gothic cobwebs. Stoker wrote several other romances of no particular power, but in Dracula he managed to create a classic, forever stalking his readers when their moral and rational defenses...