Word: dankness
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Jennifer Bartlett, born in Long Beach, Calif., in 1941 and a New Yorker for most of her working life, had never been there, and in 1979 she decided to get away from America for the winter by renting a villa in Nice. It turned out to be a dank monster, out of town but nowhere near the sea, with camphorated neighbors. The view consisted of a rectangular, tiled pool hedged with silvery artemisia bushes; at one end stood a garden-gnome lump of a reproduction putto, coyly peeing into the water. Beyond that, some straggly shrubs, a screen of cypresses...
...vanished past of a Raymond Chandler novel: the Palms-Wilshire, the Californian, the Barbizon. But in the once tony Wilshire-Alvarado district of Los Angeles, a swath of wide streets and pink stucco apartment buildings five minutes from downtown, the elegance is gone. There, amid broken glass, dank, urine-stained hallways, and discount shops, live more than 1,000 Marielitos, many sporting the telltale tattoos that mark them as former prisoners in Cuban jails. Squalid $8 rooms serve as base camps for drug dealers, prostitutes and holdup gangs. Nearby MacArthur Park, once a palm-lined site for shuffleboard and paddleboats...
...seen, only a succession of angles that, when the eye pushes through them, disclose more tangles beyond. The light is murky. Such color as is there is local-a flurry of pink, a sudden network of vermilion slashes. Otherwise it is all bog color, glazed browns reflecting other browns, dank mossy greens, thick in tone...
...murderers are kept in holding pens. Arriving in the custody of FBI agents around 7:30 p.m., too late for Tuesday night's dinner, he disdained the tray of eggs, hash browns and sausage that was eventually offered. Throughout the night, he rarely slept; he just stared at the dank walls of the six-bed cell, which he occupied alone, and at the thick windowpanes flanking the barred door. This was not the Ritz in London, one of his favorite jet-set stops, nor his art-rilled office high above Manhattan's Park Avenue. John Zachary De Lorean's dream...
...years-as only competing authors can-over implied slights and suggested injuries. But this feud also disintegrated in conciliatory mutters and a handshake. So it goes too often. Even the Hatfields and the McCoys are said to be on cordial terms these days. Who knows but that in the dank, unhealthy future lies the collective rapprochement of Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer-all hugging wildly or nodding demurely in disgusting displays of propriety? One can hardly rely on anything...