Word: absurdities
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...intertwined--is pretty unimportant. What matters most is the cavalcade of bizarre characters that parade through the movie: a wasted, would-be Hemingway, his mysterious wife, a nonchalant killer, and a sadistic Jewish gangster. The gangster--a shadowy, sinister figure in so many films--is laughably absurd in this movie because he's so exaggerated. His idea of getting down to the bare essentials is stripping down to his dark blue jockey-shorts, so he can talk as a man with nothing to hide...
Ionesco is a logician of the absurd. His ironies are cool and geometric, his surrealism couched in subtle refractions of the ordinary. His work benefits from a naturalistic approach that reinforces the absurdity by contrasting it. Instead, O'Horgan clobbers the play with a bladder of tacky tricks, like shaking the camera to represent a rhino's point of view, staging a coy, clumsy dream sequence, and including a score by Gait MacDermot (Hair) suitable for rebroadcast in office elevators...
...says Fyodor, the hero of Nabokov's The Gift, "turned Bedlam back into Bethlehem." Nabokov doesn't like old Fyodor because of his mysticism, his sentimentality, his journalese. There is a difference of type: Dostoevsky was a rough writer, who often scrawled or dictated under the burden of absurd deadlines, and Nabokov is a careful, multiple re-writer. Nabokov's condemnation must also be seen as the answer to a question forced especially on any Russian writer: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It is a question of native sensibility...
Myth in the modern novel is reworked into absurd comedy, and plot retreats upon itself. Characters are puppets whose strings lead you to different parts of the author's pysche. John Gardner reveled in all this chaos in his earlier novels. In Grendel, Beowulf is just another ridiculous hero in front of a bunch of snivelling fools when we get the classic epic from the monster's point of view. And in The Sunlight Dialogues, self-parody pops up in thoughts such as "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot." Veracity...
Kafka: The World of Parable. The Crimson gave it a good review, which I was sure was going to say the world of the play was so absurd it was Kafkaesque. When it didn't say that, I was so relieved I decided the review might be right, but that's not binding on you. If this is obsucre, calk it cup to exams. 8:30 at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, 1151 Mass...