’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

Nicholls’s bile is surely provoked not just by those elements of Star Trek that are, indeed, meretricious but by the series’ subsequent, virtually all-conquering success.

meretricious (adj) 1: (archaic) like or relating to a prostitute 2: tastelessly showy [syn: brassy, cheap, flash, flashy, garish, gaudy, gimcrack, loud, tacky, tatty, tawdry, trashy] 3: based on pretense; deceptively pleasing [syn: gilded, specious] – source: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, p. 99

Artikkeli NYT:ssä (r) kyykyttää bisnesjargonia. Päivän sitaattisuosikkini vaihtui, ja nyt se on ’Cascade this to your people and see what the push-back is.’ If that sentence were a person, it would walk like George W. Bush.

In his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), the human race of the year 802,701 has bifurcated into distinct species: an upper crust of twitty Elois and the subterranean-dwelling, predatory Morlocks.

bifurcate (v) 1: split or divide into two 2: divide into two branches – source: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, p. 63

Only if workers and servants can be shown to be something other than human is it possible to express, guiltlessly, a disdain for, as milord would have it, the canaille.

canaille (n) 1: the lowest class of people; the rabble; the vulgar 2: shorts or inferior flour – source: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, p. 9

Derby now came to lugubrious attention.

lugubrious (adj) : excessively mournful – source: Slaughterhouse 5, p. 73

For years I have been dipping into this priceless archive (or at least its English language subset; is there a great Dutch-English translator out there who would do the world the incalculable favor of translating the rest?) and I have yet to scratch the surface of its treasures. But I continue to follow the trail; the archive is redolent of the spoor of Dijkstra’s intellectual evolution, the physical evidence of a great mind thinking aloud.

redolent (adj) 1: serving to bring to mind [syn: evocative, remindful, reminiscent] 2: (used with of or with) noticeably odorous [syn: smelling] 3: having a strong distinctive fragrance [syn: aromatic] – source: The Salon: GOTO considered joyful