Word: squalore
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Down Into Squalor...
Anthony next meets Christine in a bar, 18 years later; he has "lowered myself, as by a rope" into squalor--the cobwebs and cracked plaster of bohemia, to find "reality." He is betrothed by a mixture of lust, masochism, and jealousy, to a teen-age chambermaid who occupies as many beds as she makes...
...Riviera. Life has been rough. The adult Anthony is now a "writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool," and more importantly, has become an "onlooker at his own ruin." Cursed with a slim annuity adequate for subsistence but not for pleasure, he has slowly lowered himself into squalor "as by a rope." Christiane's failures have paced his own: two unsuccessful marriages (one to a South American millionaire, the other to a German industrialist) and a scandal of a perversity startling even to Paris...
...slum with a third of its families on relief. At Fort Greene some residents prefer to use the stairs rather than face the "stench of stale urine that pervades the elevators." "Nowhere this side of Moscow," writes Salisbury, "are you likely to find public housing so closely duplicating the squalor it was designed to supplant." A heavy portion of the 300,000 Puerto Ricans and many of the 300,000 Negroes who have arrived in the city in the past seven years have settled in such projects and in older tenement slums...
Eight in a Bed. Dolci spared the reader no detail, however sordid, of life in Palermo's notorious Cascino Courtyard. There, 200 yards from the city's splendid cathedral, 260 families live in squalor in 210 rooms. Only one family has a toilet, he reported; the rest run the risk of being fined $4 for relieving themselves on nearby railroad tracks. To keep alive, boys resort to stealing, girls to prostitution. "We sleep four at the top of a bed and four at the bottom," said one inhabitant. "My uncle, my husband, my sister, myself and four children...