Word: reductios
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This Ring is the artistic descendant of past parodies--notably Anna Russell's 20-minute reductio ad absurdum--but it is less a parody than a tease. At times it also seems not so much an operatic tetralogy as a four-ring circus, with Sellars as ringmaster, urging his audience to applaud, drawing its attention from one spectacle to the next...
Surely, replied the illustrious British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, nature would forbid such a reductio ad absurdum as a star so compressed that sit does not shine. But two other astronomers, Mount Wilson Observatory's Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade, were more intellectually adventurous...
...BIZARRENESS in Come and Go is of another sort. The three women are film positives. Elaborately costumed, they walk and sit and whisper as if they were snapshots from 1910, the play could be an existential joke, a reductio ad absurdam of both comedy and farce. As the three characters, Kathy Bybee, Immy Humes, and Ilana DeBare seem ready to play their parts for laughs. One is haughty, another childlike, the third cute. But all aspects of the five-minute-long play are commendably understated, from the grey lighting to the long poses. It is understandable that a serious minded...
...long, inexorable process of writing himself into a corner of silence. From the start, he was profoundly uninterested in the standard material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss. That has been Beckett's destination all along. The wonder is not simply that he has persisted so obsessively at such a self-defeating task. Nor that...
...Galley trial as in the Water gate trials, publicity alone does not seem compelling reason to abort the jury sys tem. By reductio ad absurdum, that would establish a principle that fame, not the truth, shall make you free. All a defendant's constitutional guarantees remain, but the basis of the jury system is still a faith that in the end, jurors are rationally capable of rendering judgment, as if they were kicking Dr. Johnson's rock. ∙Lance Morrow