Word: absurdly
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...revolution in Latin America. They are full of jotted references to distances, heights, menus, petty quarrels and his own physical ailments?flatulence, a foot sore and his ever-bothersome asthma?much of which makes little sense in its relatively unedited form. There is also quite a bit of the absurd in the day-by-day notations: at the height of the campaign, Che commanded fewer than 50 men, and his skirmishes with the Bolivian army were so indecisive that he carefully counted horses and dogs among the enemy casualties...
...THEATER OF THE ABSURD. A beautiful girl gets into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce,takes off her clothes and climbs into a bathtub brimming with Calgon bath oil. The Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense...
Robert Lowell, D.LET., poet. In your plays and poems, you teach us that we are all actors in a single drama, where it is as urgent to be heroic as it is easy to be absurd...
...dead long enough to find a place in the hagiography of hip. As of now, few young poets feel the need to justify their work with critical commentary. George Amabile's response is typical: "I can't think of anything that wouldn't sound pompous or absurd." Such an attitude may not prove healthy for poetics, but it is good for poetry...
Wakefield is an incurable essayist. He takes the sting out of his reporting chapters with neatly balanced explanations of the self-evident. An absurdity is either absurd or it is not; a horror brings on the gag reflex or it does not. What reporting there is seems true enough, though Wakefield's modest conclusions will startle few ordinarily demanding readers. But a competently drawn nostril, ear lobe and eyebrow do not add up even to a sketchy portrait; the well-fed, worried face of supernation deserves a better effort...