Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Matter" is the title of the last chapter; the reader is tempted to apply the phrase to the book. If life is utterly without meaning, if all action is absurd, why bother to talk about it? The answer is that the author does not necessarily believe this himself. He leaves us to assume that, although he has found no clue to life, he allows us, and occasionally himself to hope that there may nevertheless be some answer to the riddle...
...whole is the subordination of narrative. Until a short time ago, all college papers used to serve a regular repast of warmed over O. Henry, composed, at first largely, and at last entirely, of the condiment of Surprise. It is pleasant to remark that the influence of this absurd literary mountebank has finally waned, if not vanished. The two stories in the present Advocate, which I take as typical, are transitional; the old short-story formula is gone; the new is still in the making. Both pieces of work suffer from this lack of a guiding convention; the fancy...
...oneself. This kind of humor is found in several of Mr. Herbert's contemporaries and compatriots; notably Hilaire Belloc and H. M. Bateman's drawings. But Mr. Herbert is alone in his remarkable simplicity of style and his difficult--almost apologetic--manner which as he sets forth the most absurd and ridiculous of matter are in themselves entrancing...
...word about rules. I sometimes get an absurd letter from some man, who fails to grasp what seems a simple point, and apparently thinks that rules are set up to suit the whim of the Librarian, and therefore it is a fair game to circumvent them; that fines or other charges are designed to enrich the institution or its employees, and therefore that one is at liberty to keep any book as long as he likes if only he pays the fines that accrue. What foolishness! Fines and charges are for the purpose of getting books back at the proper...
...person drunk enough. It is fairly easy to be foolish, but it is the hardest thing in the world to be a clever Fool. Both wit and humor require intelligence, wit chiefly in the manner of presenting an idea, humor in the sympathetic study of life's absurdities. Satire, another form of art that makes its points by emphasis on the absurd, depends also for its force chiefly on the intelligence behind the ridicule. For satire is a form of criticism and as criticism gives opportunity for the highest critical ability, the most logical thought to discover and emphasize...