The first quotation in the OED for the word “hooey” is “My prof’s full of hooey. He doesn’t know a C theme from an A one. ”

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An example of a scholarly investigation of a topic or figure which finds that the conventional representation of such is in fact exhaustive and accurate.

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I learned from Michael Kandel’s essay* in Peter Swirski’s collection The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (McGill UP, 2006) that crew member Harrach’s feelings about the absurdity of women appearing in science fiction novels (on pp. 313-14 of the Polish original according to Kandel) which expands into a rant was dropped from Kandel’s translation [...]

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Does this sentence from a Janet Malcolm piece on Gene Stratton-Porter qualify? They became the central theme of a noxious novel called Her Father’s Daughter, written in 1921, after she had moved to Los Angeles and enthusiastically embraced the hatred for Chinese and Japanese immigrants by which early-twentieth-century California was seized. It’s close, in any [...]

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What is there to say about the writing machines? According to the IMDB trivia page, Cronenberg wrote the script to this movie while he was playing a character (a psychiatrist, as I remember) in a Clive Barker film who would put on a mask and slaughter entire hotels because the mask told him to. The [...]

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Clancy and I just watched this now, and I’ve had a chance to scan over a couple of the reviews. Ebert’s is surprisingly sloppy; several people do pronounce “Chigurh” in No Country for Old Men, and Woody Harrelson’s character is the only one who knows how to say it correctly. I mentioned to Clancy while [...]

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It’s pretty easy to tell if I’m in a sentimental mood when I’m listening to music on my computer. If the Arcade Fire song “Intervention” comes up and I don’t skip it when he gets to the line about “working for the church,” then the natural lights of the season or something have gotten to [...]

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I’ve always thought that the manifest ludicrousness of the Quebecois elements in Infinite Jest was a clear indicator of the diegetic embeddedness of much of the book, but I have learned from two review articles* in SFS that bizarre extrapolations about many different varieties of Canadian separatism have a rich literary history. Wallace, who enjoyed [...]

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I realize that the Library of Congress has chosen to transliterate out of the Crillic [sic?] into some quite private language, so that Chekov, for instance, turns up as “Cexov,” which sounds like an anaphrodisiac breakfast cereal; but these weird pedantries needn’t infect the rest of us. (SFS 1.3 [1974] 182).

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Perry Anderson, from the new series of NLR: No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon. We are in a time, as genetic engineering looms, when the only revolutionary force at present capable of disturbing its equilibrium appears to be scientific progress itself—the forces of production, so unpopular [...]

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