Word: miasma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years watch mournfully as they learn how to unroll a condom on a wooden penis. Lamenting Eros' death at Harvard is like watching the State of the Union address; it's not at all revealing, but still important enough to ruin a night of TV. In truth, the weighty miasma of chastity that hangs over Harvard merely clouds a deeper problem that no one wants to address: Harvard students are afraid of intimacy...
...orange or hunter green--the plan for a spree in Paris, transformed into a haiku of loss. And somewhere lost in the waters too is an unuttered promise, a diamond ring to accompany a proposal to a lover who must now long for the rest of her life. The miasma off the beaches of New York was the cruelest of elements, mixing the memory and desires of the dead with the terror and fears of the living...
...that was the wrong God, merely the creator of this world. Jesus was the Son of an unknown and greater God, who out of completely unreasonable kindness and love sent his Son to deliver humankind from the legalistic master of creation. To buttress his beliefs, Marcion purged the miasma of texts Christians used as Scripture to form a "new" testament. In his eyes, it would be composed of the Gospel of Luke--the only account he trusted--and parts of 10 Epistles of Paul. No Prophets, no Genesis...
...most remarkable save comes when, standing alone in front of the giant word "Loneliness," Ryan McKittrick dissects the blindness and isolation of urban life with startling delicacy and emotion. Bravely resistant to the oppressive miasma of cheekiness that permeates his scene, he sets the lines "The Eskimos have 26 different words for snow--such a fine alertness to what variously presses down" aflame with sincerity. Somehow, mysteriously, the playwright's pretension is transmuted into poetry...
...first reported to have been murdered, and then to have disappeared into the coils of a vast financial and political scandal. This involves the murder of the Baron Jacques de Reinach, an officer of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocaanique, whose Panama Canal project had failed in a miasma of debt and thousands of yellow fever deaths. Fully half of the French Chamber of Deputies had accepted bribes in the form of checks, which they had foolishly signed. They became known to delighted journalists as "chequards...