Word: milieu
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Poesy indeed. The "arthritic milieu" he encountered was not what this energy-packed, short-tempered, culture-hungry provincial had in mind at all. But Pound also found Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, who befriended him at once. To Yeats he explained his conviction that verse must be concrete and contain no superfluous words. The older poet was astonished at how many abstractions he had been using, and began to cut down. The streamlined effect on his writing was immediate...
Culp, who is directing his first feature film, disdains coherence in favor of establishing a seedy L.A. milieu, which he does so well that the frenzied illogic of the narrative is almost forgotten. Chili-dog stands, musty apartments atrophied since the 1920s, labyrinthine ranch houses perched on the edge of cracking cliffs, all give Hickey and Boggs a fine, evocative sense of a seamy city rotting in the sunshine...
Yorkin and Lear grew up in such a milieu-poor but not depressing-and both reach back to early days for authentic touches to bring their shows home to viewers. Lear's salesman father, though a second-generation Russian Jew, was almost as much of a source for Archie as Alf Garnett was. He used to call Norman "the laziest white kid I ever saw" and order his wife to "stifle"-both expressions that were to become Archie's. The family shifted restlessly from New Haven, Conn., where Norman was born, to nearby Hartford, then to Boston...
...French bring a new language to international crime; the army of ordinary racketeers, for instance, is known simply as the "milieu." The Corsican gang boss ordinarily carries his identification in plain sight-a watch-fob medallion bearing the Moor's-head crest of Corsica. Like the Mafia, the Union Corse has a code of honor, the word of a gangster is supposed to be his bond. The difference is that Mafiosi are forever doublecrossing each other-hence the present gang war in New York-while the Corsicans usually keep their word. Members of the Mafia usually submit internal disputes...
...Corsicans and later turned up in Ecuador to check out a cocaine network in which he had been offered a partnership. The Union Corse also supplied and financed the new gangs of South Americans, Puerto Ricans and blacks, who moved into the vacant territories. All members of the milieu were instructed to avoid disturbing those Mafiosi who still continued to deal in narcotics-chiefly the capos and soldiers of the Bonanno and Gambino families...