Word: effluvia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title suggests an almost puzzling degree of transcendence, particularly for a film so grounded in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day existence and friendship. But we can call this depiction of straightforward humanity transcendent if we consider the implicitly condescending subhumanity of much schlock oh, the heady effluvia of Hollywood's dream factory...
...book's pages positively gush with effluvia. Scents, oils and secretions of the young and the old simultaneously fascinate and repel Turnbull. His obsession with these juices and their accompanying bodily phenomena, his scatological dreams, his fantasies of incontinence and impotence all reflect his growing loss of physical control. His physical disintegration makes all the more real the imminence of death and of obliteration. Watching with wonder the futile efforts of his energetic wife and his former business partners at garden-keeping and money-making respectively, he feels keenly his own life's ineffectuality and transience. "What is wrong with...
...reasons are stirring: the Bible-born compassion Karl has for lonely Frank cannot tolerate the cruelty of the Herod-like Doyle. His inevitable act of violence is, at least in part, a religious mercy mission. Other reasons are less convincing: Does a story arc this simple need back-story effluvia like buried infants, failed bar bands, an attempt by John Ritter (yes, the John Ritter) to play a plausible gay character...
That helps explain the appearance of not one but two books that dip into the seemingly bottomless well of Kennedy effluvia. Despite enough volumes about the clan to line a presidential library, no biographer until now had chosen to focus so explicitly on the relationship between the fun-loving, womanizing John Kennedy and the more aloof Jackie--perhaps no one dared do so until Jackie was safely in her grave. But though both Christopher Andersen's Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage (Morrow; $24) and Edward Klein's All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie...
Alas, she loved notoriety even more than it loved her. The huffy reception being given Vamps & Tramps (Vintage; 532 pages), her paperback volume of new and recent essays, journalism, TV interviews and effluvia, suggests that Paglia is in her 16th minute of fame--like Madonna at her current ebb with an exasperated public. This is a shame, since it discounts Paglia's rangy, roguish intelligence and genius for mischief making...