Word: cockroaches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sure our land is under us. Ten feet away, no one hears us. But wherever there's even a half-conversation, we remember the Kremlin s mountaineer. His thick fingers are fat as worms, his words reliable as ten pound weights. His boot tops shine, his cockroach mustache is laughing. About him, the great, his thin-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian. One after another, his sentences like horseshoes! He pounds them out. He always hits the nail...
...nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman, or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl." By contrast, he added: "The social, political, economic and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach . . . proper food for a chimpanzee...
...have been told that the cockroach is of all insects the most repellant; as I have never seen one, I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this judgement. It creates, however, horrible problems in dealing with Don Marquis's archy. Most readers resolve these by regarding him as a type of masculine lady bug, and a director would probably gain little by probing the entomological implications of the creature's identity. But still, the interpretation of archy determines how much dramatic mileage can be gotten from archy and mehitabel...
...somewhere in the staging the good lines, the nice phrases, and the archy's-eye point-of-view are lost. In book form, all archy's prose is in lower case (the cockroach typed out his copy by jumping onto the keys, but was not heavy enough to depress the shift lock). Unbroken by capital letters and sparsely punctuated, it reads like a kind of slow, dead-pan monotone and provides the perfect backdrop for the good phrase, the turned cliche, the well-dropped contradiction...
...Boss (Belden Crane Johnson), the journalist who keeps archy supplied with typing paper and apple peelings. He delivers his story not in the style of the unperturbed old hack, calling 'em as he sees 'em, but with dramatic pauses and grimaces of amazement. He most clearly regards a literate cockroach as a big deal; an obvious, flat point of view...