Word: sicilianism
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Born in Baltimore, Zappa was the son of a Sicilian-born meteorologist and metallurgist who worked for a poison-gas manufacturer -- the inspiration, perhaps, for his later Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask. The family moved to California when he was 10, and young Frank grew up in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles. "I developed an affinity to creeps," he recalled, "and I've surrounded myself with them ever since." At 15 he read a magazine article that referred to Varese's audacious compositions as "the ugliest music in the world," and he knew...
...Italy whose people have named their plagued government Tangentopoli, or "Pay-Off City," many are implicated in the corporation, and everyone is suspect. Not unlike the Sicilian tradition of the family so potent in the mafiosi, an implicit code of honor in Italy puts those who have broken the trust of the people permanently out of trust. The recent deaths may only express a more distasteful realization of this tradition...
Once the grand old man of Italy's Christian Democrats, 74-year old Giulio Andreotti has become the party's gray old man. Last Tuesday a parliamentary inquiry concluded that Andreotti's Sicilian protege had links to the Mafia. The next day Andreotti turned up at an army barracks to be interrogated in the Operation Clean Hands probe. Another ex-Prime Minister, Arnaldo Forlani, was ! also placed under investigation for allegedly illegal party financing. Both men insist they are innocent...
...along well enough -- "at times," Leo says, "their lunacies harmonized" -- but he is an outsider, an orphan. These people think he is theirs. Leo knows better: "Because I dream, I'm not." He is half Italian: Leolo Lozone, conceived during his mother's fruitful collision with a sperm-soaked Sicilian tomato. A bright, lonely boy could not be the spawn of this horrid clan. Surely he is not destined to replicate their mean lives and dead-end careers or the madness to which they are all heir. And so, in this slum of bruised humanity that never seems quite human...
...lust, since Leo is 12 and increasingly preoccupied with "the tail that swelled between my legs." The two scents, sweet and acrid, mingle whenever he sees his dream girl, Bianca (Giuditta Del Vecchio), a dark- haired waif who lives nearby. He has visions of Bianca standing in a Sicilian glade, singing Italian love songs in her thin, pure voice. Through the bathroom keyhole he has other views of Bianca. He watches her adjust her underclothes, then sees she is not alone. Grandfather is in the tub, naked, handing her money. "Sex," Leo writes, "I discovered between ignorance and horror...