Word: valeria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...here, and potentially the big problem, is that Big Top simultaneously defines Pee-wee as a child and an adult. He has a fiancee, the sweet, prissy Winnie (Penelope Ann Miller). And when a traveling circus parks on his farm, he falls in lust with an aerialist named Gina (Valeria Golino). Pee-wee's first sexy screen kiss, with the voracious-mouthed Gina, will surely raise temperatures -- though, as Winnie notes sadly, it was inevitable. "You're a man. She's Italian." But what are we to make of Pee-wee's deflowering, symbolized by shots of fireworks, trains zooming...
Then in 1968, one of Warhol's hangers-on -- a crazed actress named Valeria Solanis -- shot and wounded him with a .32. Neither his health nor his talent would fully recover. There had been one Warhol before the shooting; another would emerge after it. The former had been the onlooker, both fascinated and wounded by media culture and its power to dictate desire and nostalgia. You could not look at early Warhol (Marilyn-as-virgin, in full drag-queeny apotheosis on a gold ground; Golgotha, envisioned in repeated views of an $ execution chamber with its electric chair and its sign...
Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only...
...these disparate people are thrown, indeed, bonded together over huge distances and years. Even in this his "dark" book. Bellow shows a strong instinct for seeking out and lauding the crumbs of humanity he finds in the interstices of an inhuman world. The appearance of crowds of Valeria's friends at her funeral dressed in the threadbare finery they saved from the pre-way years is an occasion for quiet joy. And in the give-and-take between Corde and his wife. Bellow demonstrates his acute sense of the way emotional exchanges are made in the world...