Word: bohemias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...headed west, out of the high country and its fir-covered slopes, the snow changed to a cold rain, and soon clouds obscured the hills to the north, toward the German border. Northern Bohemia is a place some Czechs describe as having no face, a reflection of the fact that most present inhabitants have no deep roots in the region, having settled there after the expulsion-officially known by Czechs as the "transfer"-of 3 million Germans after the war, in 1945 and 1946. Another reason is that industrialization, avidly pursued during the years of communist rule in Prague...
Perversely, music played an important role in the Nazi concentration camps. Loudspeakers blared Schubert, Wagner and march music, while, less officially, prisoners smuggled in instruments and put on private musicales. In "model" camps such as Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Bohemia, the inmates were even encouraged to perform for visiting Red Cross workers to show that they were being treated humanely. The late French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote one of this century's most illuminating chamber works, the Quartet for the End of Time, while incarcerated in a Silesian camp. Messiaen survived. But for most victims time was something that indeed came...
Gioia points to the widespread incorporation of creative writing into the academy as a key source of public indifference. Where poets once scraped by in bohemia, brooding over coffee in French cafes, today many teach writing at the secondary or post-secondary school level. Where celebrated poets like Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams earned livings as corporate insurance lawyer, banker and physician, respectively, today "the poet...has reluctantly become an educational specialist...
Gioia presents the academy as a comfortable, clubby home to poets, and poetry as a "modestly upwardly mobile, middle class profession--not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology, but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia." With lines like these, is it any wonder the title essay caused such a stir...
...Franco-German border, Charlemagne's bones rest in the gilded tomb of Aachen's cathedral. The community's 12-star flag flutters from public buildings in a town that was briefly, in the 9th century, the capital of a Holy Roman Empire that united Europe from Brittany to Bohemia. But today, as Germans' once overwhelming support for Maastricht ebbs, flower seller Barbel Krutt speaks for Aachen's townspeople: "You can send all the politicians to the moon: this treaty does not mean a thing to folks like...