Word: lurking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Those days are long gone. Last week's panics over poisoned grapes and tainted apples were merely the latest in a relentless series of food scares. Anyone who reads newspapers or watches TV knows that invisible dangers lurk in every aisle of the grocery store. Shoppers have been told that the produce is peppered with pesticides, the boxes and cans packed with treacherous additives, the meat stuffed with powerful drugs, the chickens spattered with bacteria, and the fish steeped in chemical wastes. Even the cool, clear water that comes out of every kitchen tap is suspected of being a witch...
...Nazis and a plumbing-supply merchant with sidelines in piety and jealous rage lurk there, along with a mastermind whose ends may justify his means but not his perpetual sneer. Youth gangs, corrupt cops, drug smugglers and, yes, some late-model toilet bowls also have their places in a tale whose complexities would devour most actors...
...detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...found through what he called his "critical-paranoiac" method. In essence, it meant looking at one thing and seeing another -- an extended version of the face seen in the fire. Heads turn into a distant city, a landscape resolves itself as a still life, inexplicable combinations are seen to lurk magically beneath the skin of the world...
Fagin, Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Jellaby -- so many of Charles Dickens' great grotesques lurk in memory with the clarity of caricatures. They seem made not just for the page but for the stage and screen. As the great popular novelist of his or any age, Dickens has always been filched by other media. And as a social reformer who, as George Orwell wrote, "succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody," Dickens ^ invented outsize villains and situations applicable to almost any taste or decade. The endless Broadway and movie adaptations of Dickens stories testify to the vitality...