Word: absurdism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bust in oil prices will pass in time like the seven-year drought of the '50s. But for all the usual Texas exuberance, one hears sometimes an elegiac note. Ranches are being broken up into "ranchettes," absurd little parcels of land in the middle of nowhere. The owner thereby becomes a small parody of the land-holder, the cattle baron. Some ranchers are turning their land over to "exotic game safaris," importing African animals (gazelles or eland or Cape buffalo) and parading them over the range to be shot, for a handsome price, by city boys dressed up like Jeremiah...
Harry had long raised eyebrows with endearing eccentricities, including an aversion to doors that impelled him to remove many of them from his home. He also, according to his children, was in the habit of wearing several pairs of trousers at once in winter. (Harry calls this "absurd.") But in 1983, according to his adversaries, Harry John began to behave oddly in far more significant ways, funneling $3 million into underwater treasure hunts, paying employees $100,000 salaries and spending $100 million to launch a still inconsequential television company known as Santa Fe Communications to spread the Catholic word worldwide...
...everyone who enters the dense, diffracted world of Expensive Habits. What Margaret Flood calls "the unflattering double vision of time" renders nearly everything that passes under her scrutiny as fused contradictions. With the best will in the world, people fail each other. Careful planning gives way to absurd accidents. There is a shocking death in this book, but the circumstances that lead up to it seem as fanciful and inevitable as the consequences that follow...
...between South Africa and Nazi Germany are ridiculous. Until South Africa begins to round up entire Black families and villages and cart them off to gas chambers and ovens--and gets the crazy idea of trying to do the same in the rest of the world--such analogies are absurd and can only confuse those not yet among the ranks of the committed...
...clever, literate, elliptical writing is the best in comics today. The art is a departure from the flat, lurid drawing associated with comics ever since Roy Lichtenstein made his fortune with it; Miller uses shadows and suggestions to conceal the absurd aspects of his medium--we all saw how silly a man really looks in a Batman suit--and inventive panel arrangement to exploit its strengths. Klaus Janson's inking adds depth to the art, and the coloring, by Lynn Varley, is subtle and effective...