Josephine
my real point was about perspectives, take for instance the registers of
language: 'genocide' is quite rightly an abhorrent concept, whereas
'insecticide' is a useful domestic or garden or farm appliance.
We humans are killing-machines, answers to it all I do not have.
Perhaps cockroaches weren't intended to be drinks, whether clean or not.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Printmaker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 11:19 PM
Subject: Re: In Praise of Cockroaches
Sam Brenton wrote:
>
> And there's a great cockroach scene in David Foster Wallace's Infinite
> Jest, where a character, stoned and slothful, places little glasses over
> cockroaches that enter his bathroom, and lets them over a period of days
> breath all the oxygen in the glass and then slowly asphyxiate, so he ends
> up living dancing round little misted up glasses, each a
cockroach-sarcophagus.
>
> An animal people love to kill slowly.
Have you seen Sydney cockroaches? I lived near the
harbourfront many years ago and we caught one that was so
big it nearly covered the bottom the bucket it was in.
Disgusting things.
They breathe by moving air through their bodies with little
hairs. If you want to kill one without using pesticide,
spray it with ironing starch. It works.
A know-it-all science teacher (a taughtology?) I once knew
told us a story about how he made a cockroach milkshake in
class and drank it to demonstrate to his students how clean
they were. He was sick for days.
Josephine
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