’Who is Harvey Pekar?’ asks comic-book icon Harvey Pekar in ’The Harvey Pekar Name Story,’ a 48-panel monologue devoted to the enduring mysteries of his unusual handle. Born in Cleveland in 1939, he is, or has been: a file clerk at the VA hospital there, a job he held for 37 years until retirement; a juvenile delinquent, college dropout, and failed army recruit; a jazz aficionado, critic, and record hustler; a Rust Belt anthropologist and antisocial shut-in; a ’driven, compulsive mad Jew’ (as friend and frequent collaborator R. Crumb calls him); an expansive talker, with a voice both sandpapered and musical; the son of immigrants from Bialystock; a cantankerous guest on Letterman; a book reviewer of zero pretense and maximum stamina who has braved seas of prose unleashed by the most daunting authors this side of Thomas Bernhard; a cancer survivor; a husband three times over; a guardian of a teenage girl; a loser; a mensch.

cantankerous (adj) 1: (British) stubbornly obstructive and unwilling to cooperate [syn: bloody-minded] 2: having a difficult and contrary disposition [syn: crotchety, ornery] – source: Losing His Voice

Ideology breeds nonsense and, in the second and third generation, pernicious nonsense.

pernicious (adj) 1: exceedingly harmful [syn: baneful, deadly, pestilent] 2: working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way [syn: insidious, subtle] – source: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, p. 127

Often, as I came up through the ranks of SF professionals, I had the instructive experience of meeting the SF equivalent of Norma Desmond–once-idolized writers no longer productive but still haunting SF conventions for the sake of the recognition to be wrung from those who could remember reading their books. The late Alfred Bester was the most minatory example.

minatory (adj) : threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments [syn: baleful, forbidding, menacing, minacious, ominous, sinister, threatening, ugly] – source: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, p. 4