Word: milieu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Steps Going Down (Countryman Press; 307 pages; $14.95) omits Author Joseph Hansen's recurring sleuth, Insurance Investigator Dave Brandstetter, but unfolds in his usual seedy gay Southern California milieu. The central character, Darryl Cutler, is a rogue undone by his few fleeting moments of trust and devotion. A former male prostitute, he becomes infatuated with a blond boy as pretty and venal as he used to be. Cutler knows that he is being used. Even so, his sexual itch drives him to theft, fraud and murder. Each crime makes him more subject to blackmail. The tale moves toward its climax...
...single out Harvard for lambasting? It certainly isn’t the only school with lazy students and lax grading, random hook-ups and social cliques. And college isn’t the only milieu in which a culture of unscrupulous ambition is endemic...
...sweeping historical epic that centers on the legendary nineteenth century Korean painter Jang Seung-up. Seung-up’s personal drama—his alcoholism, womanizing, and bitter struggle against the conservative academy that scorned his humble birth and unschooled talent—takes place in the milieu of the political and social upheaval resulting from and feeding into the Sino-Japanese...
Though the short stories take place exclusively in the all-white, middle-class milieu that was typical of such entertainments at the time, Lulu's stories feel timeless rather than dated. If anything the success of "Little Lulu" derives from its minimized universe. John Stanley excels at creating absurdly funny situations out of the simplest devices. One silly story involves the repeated swapping of a stuffed, mounted fish back and forth in exchange for a present for Lulu's pop, a genuine civil war cannonball, a present he has no interest in anyway. The sharp writing often takes...
Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of English, who also helped moderate the discussion, brought up another category of border-crossing elements: those of Benegal’s “working milieu.” Benegal listed a prodigious number of influences, ranging from American directors like Billy Wilder and John Ford to the French nouvelle vague and Italian Neo-Realists, from the works of Tarkofsky, Eisenstein and other Russian filmmakers—which were easiest to come by in his youth, he explained—to Kurosawa and, perhaps most importantly, Satyajit Ray, the director credited with founding...