Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time employees and about 30 part-time agents and accumulated some 13,000 files, including 7,200 on American citizens and organizations. Drawing from those files and related documents, officials developed an index of 300,000 names, which were stored in a CIA computer. Some of its entries were absurd as well as illegal (because the operation exceeded the CIA's statutory authority). For example, CHAOS analysts opened a file on Grove Press after the firm published a book by British Double Agent Kim Philby. The file was so unduly complete that it even contained reviews of the sexually...
...suggestion by Mr. Cramer that President Bok is being sheltered by his staff and overseers is absurd. Mr. Cramer and company just haven't listened carefully to what apparently is the University's position...
RICHARD ADAMS IS currently at work on his third novel, between interviews and book-signings. He calls it "an anthropomorphic fantasy like Watership Down; it's about two dogs who escape from an experimental station-sort of an animals' Catch-22, really-a black comedy with elements of the absurd, in which the heroes and the victims are animals." He says that for some years he has been upset and disgusted by the enormous number of experiments carried out on animals, many of which seem quite unnecessary to him. "If you experiment to cure a specific disease, say work with...
This tradition is best represented by the work of two authors writing at Prague at the end of World War I: Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik). The tradition could be called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph...
...that soon become the center of the family life. Our clerk works in a weird bank; enigmatic employees of the bank walkd out everyday with some of the bank notes in their pockets. Sometimes the money is confiscated by the guards at the exit, but the whole thing seems absurd since the guards don't return it all to the bank. What an economist would diagnose simply as a supplementary cause of inflation under socialism, deeply puzzles our clerk, who hopelessly tries to understand the whereabouts of this clandestine circulation of currency. The more he tries, the less he knows...