Word: simulacrum
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...costumes indicate the 19th century, but there are references to the 1930s, and at one time Mozart can be seen working at a hammerklavier. Ida, the oldest girl, is given charge of her baby sister. When she grows inattentive, faceless creatures steal in and exchange the child for a simulacrum made of ice. Frantic, Ida climbs backward out her window and into the sky, tumbling through worlds of arbors and harbors, moonlight and lamplight, irrevocable loss and paradise regained. In the end the villainous goblins are revealed as babies, but in the author's view this makes them...
...such stars when, finally, the team steps onstage in Vegas to a melange of light and laughter: "This is love, my friends, and the hell with the rest." Novelist Carpenter knows better; the comedians' implicit longing for normality and humanity proves that. But Carpenter also knows that the simulacrum of love with which his comics are re warded is more than most people, leading their ad hoc, late 20th century lives, ever get. There is bite here, but no bitterness. The overall, and lasting, effect makes A Couple of Comedians an unusually literate and oddly touching novel about performers...
...about these seeds that drift through outer space, take root on earth and grow into large pods, each of which contains a simulacrum of a human being. When fully ripened, the pod is capable of replacing, with no one the wiser, the individual it perfectly replicates physically. The trouble is that the pod people are the living dead, incapable of emotion or strong belief. In the old movie, a smalltown doctor and his lady bravely, exhaustingly and with no assistance tried to resist the takeover. In its day, Invasion made a moving, and exciting film. Among other things...
Aristocratic Lesbian. Theroux manages to make this simulacrum of a nuclear family both chilling and pathetic. Hood clandestinely murders a neighborhood hoodlum, then takes on the support of the victim's unwitting wife and child. He feels responsible for his.own "family" as well and finds himself playing a stern Victorian father when Brodie is seduced by an aristocratic lesbian. Meanwhile, the threatened I.R.A. London offensive remains stalled, and a host of coconspirators barges into the complicated story. On this surface, The Family Arsenal glitters. American-born, Theroux has nonetheless acquired an ear for varieties of British speech. His book...
Most parents regard TV's Sesame Street as a benevolent baby sitter, but Viewer Edward Hoagland, 43, has noticed something more. Animals, he suggests, are now an endangered species in the realm of make-believe. The Muppets are perky humanoids or cuddly monsters; Big Bird is barely the simulacrum of an ostrich. For that matter, Hoagland notes, Bugs Bunny was less obviously a member of the genus Lepus than were such precursors as Peter and Br'er Rabbit...