Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Much of this issue was absurd and distasteful, especially from a woman's point of view. Faludi and Devall's articles, about playwright Arthur Miller and feminist Garry Trudeau respectively, relegated to the back of the Arts Supplement, did something to antidote the miasmal matter of the first half. Their writing and those about whom they chose to write reassured me that indeed, unlike most of this week's Crimson Arts Supplement, some art does serve the end of social liberation. Sincerely, Mary Holland...
...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...refuses to talk with the PLO until it recognizes Israel's right to exist. But we never required that Israel recognize the right of the Palestinians to have a homeland. Moreover, it is absurd to expect the leaders of the PLO to call a surprise press conference and announce their decision that Israel does indeed have a right to exist...
...includes a number of useful recommendations, especially on student economics. Edelhart talks money without a trace of the bland B.S. that he dribbles in the later sections on social life. Some of his dorm decorating hints prove useful, too, (where to get free posters), for instance, though others are absurd, like decking your door with a "personal symbol...
...Wodehouse's absurd caricatures always made sense in their own addle-pated terms, and underlying each of the master's farces was the coherent comic statement that blithering idiocy was the finest bulwark of the Empire. Donleavy's figures are too slackly drawn to be believable as caricatures and the only statement made by the novel is not comic but forlorn: the author has nothing to say. He seems to have few thoughts about the theater and none about London, or about an aristocracy that refuses to notice that it has been extinct since...