Word: squalor
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...forgotten. Left behind to squabble among the ashes are Cosey's former child-bride Heed and his granddaughter Christine, now old women, dwelling together in Faulknerian squalor. Why do they hate each other so much? What brought on the fall of the House of Cosey? And who (if anyone) killed Bill? Be forewarned: the story comes with some assembly required. We piece it together through the remembered narratives of the various members of the household, including Heed, Christine, L and Junior, a lusty, scheming teenage vixen "with a skirt short as underpants and no underpants at all," whom Heed hires...
...officials in Moscow talk of wiping out the last 3,000 guerrillas--something they were promising to do to the last 2,000 fighters three years ago--the rebels have retained control of large swaths of territory. And all the while, Chechen civilians continue to live in fear and squalor, many of them without running water, sanitation, electricity or jobs...
...leaders have made scant effort to address the gap between the impoverished many and the privileged few. A Hindu god-king ruled Nepal as an absolute monarch until 1989. Under the current system?constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy?revolutionary ideology has taken hold. In a population living mostly in squalor, the most popular political parties are old-style communist, with a combined support of 44%, according to a June survey...
...take no drugs/ But Christ she's hit the bottle/ Like there's no tomorrow." And while Hefner ballads usually chronicled a brief infatuation, many French songs are about something like commitment. In The Stars, the Moon, the Sun and the Clouds, the singer chastises his girlfriend's scholarly squalor: "It's all very well/ Learning poetry by heart/ But it doesn't mean/ We have to live like poets." As with so much electronica, there's a soulless quality to this record, not helped by Hayman's insistence on recording with a drum machine. His DIY aesthetic...
Nobody does abjection like Michel Houellebecq. He's French, after all, so he has the exemplary squalor of Sartre, Celine and Genet to live up to. It was the state-of-the-art estrangement, plus the sex, that made his second novel, The Elementary Particles, a huge best seller in Europe and made Houellebecq (pronounced Well-beck) a heavily contested literary star. Last year he was acquitted by a French court of inciting racial hatred after he called Islam "the most stupid religion." (Does it help to know that his mother left him in childhood for an Arab and converted...