Word: ubermensch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...national day of thanks, my Delta Shuttle taxis around LaGuardia Airport like a cat without a home. I can't help but overhear the conversation that a few college girls are having behind me. There is endless chatter about who had sex with the totally plastered 6'5" ubermensch last weekend. The utter joys of one of the busiest travel days in the United States...
...finally board the plane. I reach down to pick up A Passage to India, but I hear the girls behind me begin to talk and I capitulate. They gossip with fervor as if everyone should and wants to hear anything and everything they say. I learn about ubermensch #4 as I eat my dry carrots and meditate on the moist turkey of a few days...
Around the turn of the last century, Friedrich Nietzsche killed God and replaced him with the Ubermensch, or superman. In the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon; 380 pages; $27.50), Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware goes Nietzsche one better. He replaces God with Superman, the caped hero, who becomes a God/father metaphor to the emotionally crippled title character. Then Ware kills Superman too--or at least a man in a Superman suit, who, in a single bound, leaps to his death from a tall building in a scene, witnessed by Jimmy, that sets the tale's poignant...
...Manliness motivates not only Braveheart, but the terrorists of Northern Ireland. And Wolfe, without any concern for the excess for his extreme stance, ends up spewing a kind of cheap Nietzsche, worshipping his own ubermensch, the stoic philosopher. One such character, a la Charlie Croker, the hero of A Man in Full, may be colorful, but a society of such rambunctious souls is anarchy...