Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...witless complain that humor is impossible to write in an age when headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over...
...stopped in one of the shops along the square to buy film with which to take souvenir photographs of the Pope. One of Antonov's lawyers later said that for Agca to have been thinking of taking photographs at the moment he was planning the assassination "is absurd," and casts further doubt on his story...
Chandra's then astonishing answer: the collapse would continue, creating even stranger objects whose interiors contained matter unlike anything on earth. Absurd, sniffed Sir Arthur Eddington, Britain's most eminent astronomer, who mockingly said that Chandra's equations pointed to a star whose surface gravity would be so powerful as to preclude even the escape of light. Today the study of black holes, as such invisible stars are now called, along with kindred neutron stars, is one of the liveliest topics in astrophysics. Chandra, who came to the U.S. in 1936, says wryly of the belated recognition...
...repeated her dream "at breakfast. He was moved, beholding his daughter launched into another dimension of life, like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery." Throughout, Brook is keenly aware of the terror and distress that reside in dreams: his categories include Nightmare, Violence, the Absurd and Frustrations. Together they should engender enough insomnia for a lifetime. Instead, precisely the opposite occurs. For in the vastness of sleep, all countries are contiguous and all generations contemporary, their nightly symbols-animals, the sensation of flight, erotic pursuits-varying little from the pre-Christian epoch to the present. That...
...have created a standing set: a streamlined, frame-and-window contraption that can look like a temple, a skyscraper or the wall of a conservatory. It neatly frames an all but impeccable The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw's affectionate satire of medical theories, artistic pretensions and the absurd complexities brought on by love. The plot, a wittily constructed but logically dubious foofaraw, about a physician who must decide whether to save the life of a mediocre yet decent colleague or that of a gifted yet wicked artist, is taken just seriously enough to display the talents...