Word: fetid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Parade. The big cities quickly went into opposition. Socialists, trade unions and students railed against unemployment, grinding poverty, and the government's inability to provide decent housing in place of the fetid bidonvilles (shanty towns) surrounding Rabat, Casablanca and Port Lyautey. Hassan was accused of using the army for strike breaking, of being pro-French...
Author Koestler, born a Jew but now a "seeker after truth" without religious affiliation, reports: "I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European." He descended from his plane into the fetid air of Bombay-"I had the sensation that a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head"-and picked his way through a series of visits with what he calls "contemporary saints." There was white-bearded Vinoba Bhave, marching through India in tennis shoes, seven days a week, year after year, persuading the rich to give their land...
...Fetid Mysteries. To middle-class residents of Rio and São Paulo, the fetid favelas are cities apart, mysteriously alive but best not entered. In her book, Carolina tells them what life there is like. She recalls that for her daughter Vera Eunice's birthday, she dug a pair of shoes out of the garbage. "I washed them and gave them to her." Of the death of a two month-old boy in the favela, Carolina notes: "If he had lived he would have gone hungry." She says, "How horrible it is to see your children...
...murk and manifesto. One meets a menagerie of physical and spiritual cripples-Tarquin, a homosexual; Lobo, a whoremonger; Clare, a gigolo; Gregory, a poet whose feelings chafe against a talent one size too small. These tortured grotesques are insignificant, but they prefigure the Alexandria novels. So does the fetid brilliance of the passages in which
...mihi dulce sub urbe est," sang the Roman epigrammatist Martial in the ist century A.D. "To me, the country on the outskirts of the city is sweet." And small wonder, for the towns and walled cities of Europe, from ancient times through the Middle Ages and beyond, were airless, fetid places choking with humanity. The big crisis of the cities came with the Industrial Revolution. In England lonely voices cried out against the grime and stench of the cities. "Hell is a city much like London," wrote Shelley, "a populous and smoky city...