Doreen St. Félix wrote about the racial politics of "The Bachelorette," normally "a pleasantly arcane sociological fantasy" that, with the casting of the first African-American Bachelorette, has become tinged by racial provocation.
Conspiracy theorists and true believers have flooded the World Wide Web with rant, screed, pseudoscience, paranoid fantasy, arcane enigmata, fifth-hand rumor and just plain fiction on the subject of unidentified flying objects.
Start scrolling through Obscure Video Games and you'll get sucked into a veritable wonderland of arcane (and, well, arcade) digital fantasies.
To outsiders, Rotisserie baseball -- the name comes from a New York restaurant where some baseball enthusiasts got together what is believed to have been the first fantasy league -- is an arcane and complicated pastime laden with statistics and played by fans of an intellectual bent who are not satisfied with merely keeping up with what's happening in the real baseball world.
He now understands that such fantasies obliterated "the Tibet of filth, ferocity, arcane religious practices, grinding poverty, barren wastes, inhospitable weather, serfdom, disease and theocratic absolutism".
That mash-up of Victorian and Industrial Revolution visual motifs with science fiction or Tolkien-esque fantasy is represented in "Riese" by the usual goggles and arcane headgear, and a few dirigiblelike sailing ships floating in the air.
The novel reads like a manifesto for his obsessions: London, both everyday and arcane; a radical political sensibility; and a determination to resist the standard tropes of fantasy whereby quests are followed, chosen ones fulfil their destiny and evil is vanquished.
"After all, one consists of sad individuals living out their fantasies for long hours in the company of other nerds, reciting arcane jargon and recording strange statistics on a grubby piece of paper.
He even got to chat to the great man after the show, with some arcane question that had been bugging him for years about a tune they'd played called Black and Tan Fantasy.
It all feels like a pleasantly arcane sociological fantasy a libidinous, wine-drunk love Olympics that is perpetually twenty-five years too late.
