Word: cataclysmical
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...semiotician's practiced eye, society's every phenomenon and event is a text inviting interpretation, an opportunity for writing oneself into the margins of the scene as reader-critic-author. Not that the margins are without their privileges. Blonsky observes--as no less than a cataclysm--the recent deaths of Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, whose posthumous presence in the collection reflects how the "death of the authors" has ironically inaugurated a backward-looking era for cultural literacy. At the same time, Blonsky's exclusive salon is also visited by still-vital voices such as Umberto...
Wandering these eerie late-20th century ruins, a visitor becomes a kind of archaeologist of the present. In one window, the paper Santa Claus dates the cataclysm that drove everyone away: just before Christmas 1982, the people of Times Beach discovered that their town had been drenched in dioxin, a poison so potent that one drop in 10,000 gal. is considered a dangerous concentration. Under political pressure, the EPA agreed to pay off all property owners; homeowners got between $8,800 and $98,900 apiece. And the town died. On one street remains an ex-resident's bright white...
...five great dyings--and numerous smaller events--have occurred in the past 600 million years. Among the more significant: the Cambrian disasters some 500 million years ago, when many species of segmented creatures called trilobites disappeared from the seas they once dominated; the biggest of the extinctions, the Permian cataclysm of 248 million years ago, when up to 90% of all marine species died; and the late-Cretaceous event 65 million years ago, which saw the destruction of the dinosaurs and many other groups of species, including the microscopic organisms responsible for creation of the white cliffs of Dover...
...grow calmly into a happiness that is, inevitably, cut short by war and its aftermath, "the Lent that was to endure all our lives." One measure of West's skill is her ability to make private suffering seem moving and memorable, even when set against a background of public cataclysm...
...case, the Soviets left no doubt that killing Star Wars remains their prime objective. Shultz last week devoted many of his 14 hours of talks with Gromyko to explaining the U.S. position that successful development of a defensive system would enhance nuclear stability and lessen the danger of a cataclysm. He got nowhere. Gromyko once grumbled, "I have heard six explanations of SDI and I still do not understand your point." In his departure statement, which he read to reporters in English, Moscow's Foreign Minister took care to note that "the Soviet side particularly stressed the importance of preventing...