4Q2016 Most Visited

By: HILOBROW
January 1, 2017

Here they are! The 10 most frequently visited HiLobrow posts published during October, November, and December 2016.

  1. (4Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #46: Mimi Lipson on TRASH PICKING. “Will my millennial friends have any way of understanding how unremarkable it once was to put a trash-picked wig on your head? It’s like trying to explain the mass appeal of Quaaludes, or how everyone under 25 once subsisted on hot dogs, Bustelo, and 10-cent popsicles.”
  2. (4Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #48: Roxane Gay on AUTOMATED CAR WASH. “I love how alone I feel during the middle of the car wash, how I am held in that moment because there’s nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go.”
  3. (4Q2016) ON BEYOND ZARATHUSTRA #9:. By John Holbo and Friedrich Nietzsche. “Nope, your singular hope/Stretches, slim as a rope!/Your precarious best/Is a wave on whose crest/You may tempt, without cease/Death’s abysmal release!/Hear my song of the sea,/Each new wave’s solemn vow:/Now is NOW!/Now is NOW!/Now is NOW!/Now is NOW!”
  4. (4Q2016) THIS: MASTER OF NONE, by Adam McGovern. “CANT, um, can’t be about forgetting the past and repeating anything, because the ascendant demagoguery being dramatized is without precedent. This is a play and cast (and one could now argue, a country) that has a memory of everything, just no ability to process any of it.”
  5. (4Q2016) ON BEYOND ZARATHUSTRA: NOTES, by John Holbo. “I think that, just as Seuss books are children’s books for adults, so Zarathustra — and other philosophy I might mention — is seeming YA fiction, secretly written as non-fiction for older adults. Who are, in a sense, true children at heart.”
  6. (4Q2016) ALL MY STARS 43: BLACK MIRROR’s “San Junipero” episode, by Joanne McNeil. “I found myself thinking what it might have meant to have a love story like Eternal Sunshine with queer characters. Queer characters in fiction fall in love in the subplot; or if it is their story, it’s doomed — or the connection is fraught in some way. But this was meant to be a universally relatable love story that happened to be between two women.”
  7. (4Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #39: John Overholt on DECKLE EDGES. “As the practice of bespoke binding was supplanted by cheaper edition binding, supplied by the publisher and the same on every copy, so too did machine-made paper, trimmed to whatever size was required, eliminate the deckle edge. This clear improvement in efficiency and functionality was met almost immediately with nostalgia for the vanished deckle, like music buffs praising the warmth of vinyl as they abjured the CD.”
  8. (4Q2016) PLANET OF PERIL #9: Lynn Peril on SPALINGRAD. “Travers’s group visited a footwear factory, model daycare, and prison (she refused to tour the “House of Prostitutes”). Wandering about unaccompanied was forbidden. Visitors wondered if they were being spied upon. They usually were.”
  9. (4Q2016) STUFFED #18: Tom Nealon on WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE. “Worcestershire Sauce was the first global, virally marketed food. Wherever the British and their ships went, so went this sauce. So what if it made all the food taste the same? The point is that the world’s populace came into contact with this strange sauce and was forever changed, its many palates bending just a little further towards one another.”
  10. (4Q2016) THIS: THE JONI THAT MATTERS, by Adam McGovern. “‘Big Yellow Taxi”’is a song I didn’t think I could ‘hear’ anymore, after decades of hit-record revisitings, but the reflective, somber reading Block and her musical collaborators give it finds new things for it to say. It could be that this cheery counterculture-era song, not the inherently tragic ‘Both Sides, Now,’ is the one that is best sung in downbeat retrospect.”

Thanks to all our HiLobrow contributors of 4Q2016! On to 1Q2017…

*

BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 1Q2020 | 2Q2020 | 3Q2020 SNEAK PEEK.

Categories

Kudos

Tags