Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anyone familiar with the decorous rituals of the courtroom and the unchallenged omniscience of the judge, the scene in New York's Criminal Courts Building last week was shocking and absurd. At one end of the dingy courtroom, silver-haired State Supreme Court Justice John M. Murtagh, 58, sat under the inscription "In God We Trust," sternly trying to keep order. Near by, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Phillips, a tough, hard-working prosecutor, doggedly tried to follow the guideposts of long-established court procedure...
Poignant Atrocity. The morbid embrace is but one flash in a carnival of images on the single Lenten theme with which lonesco and Director Karl Heinz Stroux hold the audience alternately uneasy and tittering for two unbroken hours. Death, along with madness, is the heartland of the absurd today, recalling how, three and four centuries ago, the dance of death, along with the ship of fools, was the obsession of so much European painting and writing. For The Triumph of Death, lonesco reaches not only to Albert Camus, but also back to the Bruegel painting that bears the same title...
lonesco is eloquent in his own defense, asserting in a program note that while Camus went to the plague to give moral and even political meaning to the absurd, he himself has the diametrical aim of taking meaning away. "Death is the ultimate threat . . . but in fact even those who think they know this, know it not." The Triumph of Death is a gaudy, funny feast of cynicism and imagery. It is unforgettable, but it is oddly without consequence. At its prodding, terror, mortal terror, twitches and rolls over but will not wake...
...Goldhaber also asserts that "it is no secret" that Mr. Wil Stevens being a black student was ultimately a deciding plus" in the Publication Board's decision to award his group the current HARBUS franchise. This statement is absurd. As a member of the Publications Board during the period when the current franchise was let and one who participated in all board discussions concerning that decision. I will swear under oath that Mr. Stevens' color had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter...
GENET, unable to adopt an unambivalent revolutionary stance, renders absurd the strident fury which grips the rebels, led by the vociferous Archibald Absalom Wellington. James Spruill, dynamicas Wellington, herds and coerces his wards like recalcitrant children. Only the black women, free from sexual ambivalence in their attitude toward the white Queen, can maintain a consistent level of vituperation and hatred. The ruling classes, perversely enough, are ennobled by their tenacious role consistency; directionless rage and degrading imitation is, in Genet's crypto-conservative vision, the lot of revolutionaries...