Word: whose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Richard Buckle shows in this exhaustive new biography that he was also a historical necessity. Almost alone, he bridged the old and new centuries. He was at home in the twilight romanticism of the 1890s. But he was also one of the first to recognize the vigorous new iconoclasts, whose art and music would soon sweep away the lingering shades...
...tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose; and a woman whose feet were reversed, her toes pointing back wards. More turbans and tarbooshes now, more Arabs, as well as the eggplant-black Dinkas, and purple Nuer with carved stripes that circled their foreheads under the hairline, and Shilluk with beadlike cicatrices stretching from...
...world, any more than were those of Sir Richard Burton, the demonic Victorian explorer and scholar of the forbid den who infiltrated hostile cities dressed in native robes and speaking fluent Arabic. By contrast, Hoagland drifts in and out of stagnant backwaters, a rumpled, skinny fugitive from L.L. Bean whose spoken English is hampered by a bad stutter. He is as puzzling and exotic to his hosts as they are to him, one of a long line of white hunters and note takers whom the wags of Juba on the White Nile call pink spiders. Only this one writes...
Perhaps it is part of the famous narcissism of the '70s, but Americans forget how violent and depraved other cultures have been. There is something hilarious, in a grisly way, about George Augustus Selwyn, the late 18th century London society figure and algolagnic whose morbid interest in human suffering sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled. Americans may have displayed an unwholesome interest in the departure of Gary Gilmore two years ago, but that was nothing compared with the macabre fascinations, the public hangings, the Schadenfreud of other centuries. In the 17th century, Londoners...
...civilization as the Renaissance. Ultimately, the process of decadence remains a mystery: Why has the tribe of Jews endured for so many centuries after the sophisticated culture of the Hittites disappeared? Richard Gilman can be granted his central point: "that 'decadence' is an unstable word and concept whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social, and cultural attitudes, and even technology." But the protean term is still tempting. It seems the one word that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society...