Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...however absurd carnivorous hair-dryers may sound, horror movies have used equally absurd monsters for years-with the important difference that a considerable amount of energy was expended to demonstrate how these monsters were created, usually through the excesses of modern science. The new freak comics work with a new kind of causality. A beautiful girl is transformed into a princess phone through the psychic projections of rejected lovers. Retributive justice is a persistent theme, but it is never confronted and articulated. Rather the new causality operates as an instantaneous wish-fulfillment never clearly associated with specific characters...
Armed with a picket bearing the heading "Help Soviet Jewry," Hanna said, "It is absurd to hijack a plane from America but from Russia it's sometimes the only way to get out." Hanna characterized herself as an "ultimate anarchist...
...they are keeping in close touch with Peru's generals in an effort to make ready for anything. One military man in Buenos Aires predicts that clashes will break out on the Argentine-Chilean border within 15 months. A former Argentine foreign minister says that it is "absurd" to think that Allende will not attempt to "stir up subversion and revolution outside Chile." The near-panic in the Argentine junta is such that the generals are preparing a special amnesty which would allow Dictator Juan Perón to end his 15-year Madrid exile and return to Argentina...
...Elliott and Ray Goulding were absurdists before the theater of the absurd received its name tag. Their basic comic building block was, and still is, the radio or TV interview. In one of these, the president of S.T.O.A., for Slow Talkers of America, is being interviewed. The deliberately spaced speech of the S.T.O.A. man gradually rattles and irritates the interviewer. He begins trying to speed things up by finishing the S.T.O.A. man's sentences. It doesn't work. The S.T.O.A. man continues to munch each sentence 32 times, and the interviewer drops off to sleep as the interviewee...
...Wallop's relief does not last long. Her own son Osgood, a struggling writer in New York, publishes a novella entitled The Duchess of Obloquy. Sandwiched in its entirety between Emma's own narrative, it moans the familiar tale of the castrated son. Through its absurd parodic details, however, De Vries engineers a nimble satire of contemporary attitudes on sex, race and Women...