Word: modeling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who in 1945 was the first to suggest a band of geosynchronous satellites, dubbed "extra-terrestrial relays," hovering 22,000 miles above the equator and bouncing signals back to the ground. Until recently, most communications satellites have imitated that high-cost-and-high-altitude model, drifting in what scientists call the Clarke orbit...
...title novella in McInerney's new book, Model Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What...
McInerney's taste has also, amazingly, remained focused on the dazzle of glamour. This is a guy who's been married to a model and has lived with two others, and it still isn't out of his system. "I think for the moment I've exhausted my observations of it," he admits. "But the day I overcome my spectator's interest in beauty, I think I'd better take my pulse...
...models he lived with was Marla Hanson, who in 1986 was slashed so violently across the face by thugs hired by her angry landlord that she required 50 stitches. The model who lives with the main character in Model Behavior is persistently threatened by a woman with a boxcutter. McInerney says he hasn't shown Hanson the book yet and doesn't know if she read the New Yorker short story it grew out of, because they don't speak that often. "I don't think she'd dislike the book," he says. "But it's not something...
...Americans, one hopes, are astute. They should want the resignation or removal of this man. The missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, if not contrived, were convenient. Americans must be alert to the dangers that arise from indifference. They could be spawning a common Clinton species as an acceptable model for future Presidents. JINI DHANRAJGIR Bombay...