Word: absurdity
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...lying if I said my victory hasn’t gone to my head. It sounds absurd, but the title does carry with it ambassadorial responsibilities. Attaching the word “Harvard” to anything suddenly makes it important to the outside world. After conducting a low-key interview with The Crimson, I found a link to the article on the Wall Street Journal’s Online Opinion Journal. The heading? “What does this say about Harvard Women?” Soon after, I got a call from the Chronicle of Higher Education...
...always had a way with women characters in particular, somehow indulging in every imaginable fetishist "type" (included here: the voluptuous dwarf, the anorexic yet unaturally buxom stripper, and the usual amazons) while managing to give them some of the most credible and sympathetic voices in any medium. The absurd violence likewise plays with the old scenarios. Issue three begins with a daring horseback rescue that quickly ends with an explosion, raining horse and man over the desert...
...pool of suicide bombers is not large. To pretend that it is universal is absurd. Airport security is not permitted to "racially" profile, but every passenger--white or black, male or female, Muslim or Christian--does. We scan the waiting room, scrutinizing other passengers not just for nervousness and shiftiness but also for the demographic characteristics of al-Qaeda. We do it privately. We do it quietly. But we do it. Airport officials, however, may not. This is crazy. So crazy that it is only a matter of time before the public finally demands that our first priority be real...
There was plenty of room for humor in his work, and none for deadly seriousness or pretension. The little personages of Klee's imagination are now absurd and bathetic, now goblin-like, now intrusive, but never really menacing; they interact beautifully with their titles. (One of many possible favorites was Hero with a Wing, a deliciously self-deflating proposition, since no such hero could be expected to fly as heroes should.) Klee found authority absurd; he didn't viscerally hate it, like the Dadaists, but he poked fun at it, as in The Great Emperor Rides...
Under the sway of Klee's probing, wobbling, sinuous line, everything stable seems to be coming apart, and we are brought into a world that is simultaneously lyrical and absurd. There was something prophetic about this disintegration, but perhaps it was just as well for Klee that he died in 1940, on the edge of the worst war in human history. Could he have been happy in the atrocious second half of the 20th century? One doubts...