4Q2017 & 2017 Most Visited

By: HILOBROW
January 1, 2018

Here they are! The 10 most frequently visited HILOBROW posts published during October, November, and December 2017. We served up ~100,000 pageviews during 4Q2017 — let’s see what all the excitement was about.

Below this list, please find another list dedicated to the 10 most frequently visited HiLobrow posts published during all of 2017.

Top posts published during 4Q2017

  1. (Nov. 6) Adam McGovern’s THIS: installment “Allegories of the Stage”: An inquiry into Gemini CollisionWorks’ Twentieth Anniversary of Hysteria on the occasion of its newest theatrical episodes, ReFUSE and Harakiri Kane.
  2. (Oct. 6) Paul Lukas’s LOST OBJECTS story “Vanilla Bean”: “What happened to it?” I demanded. “Well, you were always going on about it, telling me I should get rid of it, and I decided you were right,” my mother said, a bit of sadness in her voice. “I was never going to use it, so I threw it away.” Illustrated by Allison Bamcat.
  3. (Oct. 10) Brian Berger’s MONK 100: “While recently engaged in some period-related research, I decided to look around for young Monk. I was shocked by what I found: the 12-year-old boy Thelonious, harmonica player, in his first known public performance.”
  4. (Dec. 14) Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s LOST OBJECTS story “Glass Clock”: “The clock and the mantel were decorative pieces in the decorative sitting room where no one ever sat, until that summer, and only then to keep company with our mother’s corpse.” Illustrated by Rose Wong.
  5. (Oct. 16) Nina Katchadourian’s LOST OBJECTS story “Fountain Pen”: “My grandfather’s name, Jarl Lindfors, was engraved on its side. It had a fat, soft, hardy nib that could accommodate my heavy press, unloading broad, inky lines onto the journal page.” Illustrated by Lisa Congdon.
  6. (Nov. 9) Douglas Wolk’s WTC WTF installment “Thousands Are Dead.”
  7. (Oct. 8) Mimi Lipson’s LOST OBJECTS story “Dodge Dart”: “The bench seats had a pleasant rubbery smell, and instead of a shift lever there was a vertical row of buttons on the metal dashboard that said R-N-D-2-1. I parked outside my house and slept in the back seat for the first two nights, dreaming of two-lane blacktops and Arizona stars.” Illustrated by Mister Reusch.
  8. (Nov. 29) Deborah Wassertzug’s #SQUADGOALS installment THE BLOODHOUND GANG: “We’ll protect the elderly from being swindled at the sale of a rock chunk that supposedly flew off a white dwarf, aided by a compass fashioned from a sewing needle, a glass of water, and a slice of wine cork. We’ll keep a greedy lawyer from siphoning off the estate of a bird aficionado, because a quick call to the Audubon Society confirms that passenger pigeons are long extinct!”
  9. (Nov. 1) Jessamyn West’s LOST OBJECTS story “Engineer Ring”: “​I wore that ring as my only hand adornment for years. A ring that was designed to fit on his pinky just fit on my ring finger. I enjoyed the metaphor of me, the unmarried woman in tech​, somehow wedded to the idea of engineering.” Illustrated by Amanda Clarke.
  10. (Dec. 4) Lynn Peril’s PLANET OF PERIL installment “My Boss is a Rather Flirty Man”: “Long before the phrase ‘sexual harassment’ was coined by a group of activists in 1975, most of the advice given to the victims of ‘flirty’ bosses with busy hands was to avoid and ignore such behavior. Frequently, this was served up with the insinuation that the woman worker somehow ‘asked for it.'”

Top 10 posts published during 2017

HILOBROW served up ~460,000 pageviews, during 2017. Some 55,000 of those views were visits to our homepage; and another 60,000 were visits to our perennially popular lit-list page THE 200 GREATEST ADVENTURE NOVELS OF ALL TIME. What was everyone else reading? Here are the 10 most popular posts first published during 2017.

  1. (1Q2017) Transcript of Benjamen Walker’s THEORY OF EVERYTHING podcast titled THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY. “JOSH GLENN: After the fall of the Soviet Union, with help from his ex-KGB handlers, Trump spent 25 years in training — purposely making a buffoon of himself.” Nearly 20,000 views this year!
  2. (3Q2017) William Gibson’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: RACIST BOOK. “I don’t think I’ve encountered another author I’ve come to loathe quite so viscerally as Mr. Avirett, which seems a shame, in that he’s really quite a poor writer, even by the flowery standard of his day, and I’d prefer to detest someone more talented.”
  3. (1Q2017) Adam McGovern’s THIS: installment LOOK AT THOSE CAVEMEN GO. Mark Russell: “I envision [Snagglepuss] like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure; Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they’re in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go.”
  4. (3Q2017) Douglas Rushkoff’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: LEARY’S STASH BOX. “One guy used to bring vials of Ketamine injectable that we’d reduce in the microwave to a powder for Tim to snort. When Oliver Stone came by one afternoon, Tim hoped he was planning to direct a Leary biopic; alas, he was bearing a mason jar of some South American concoction that he wanted Tim to try.”
  5. (1Q2017) Stephen Duncombe’s POLITICAL OBJECTS installment PROTEST SIGN: “Our funny, ironic, and oh-so-clever message backfired.”
  6. (3Q2017) Kio Stark’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment PEEPSHOW TOKEN: “I’m not saying the girls stripped for their own thrill or that they didn’t. Only that even in the slapdash iconography of the place, the idea was that everybody gets their rocks off here. And that may have been a fiction, but it was the brilliant, animating fiction of the place.”
  7. (3Q2017) Melissa Gira Grant’s KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM installment: KLUTE. “Bree leads us with him, into forlorn crash pads, a jewel of Meatpacking District disco. He stays up with her in the dark while we watch, waiting for a predator who doesn’t show. What they share, more than intimacy, is paranoia.”
  8. (1Q2017) Anne Boyer’s POLITICAL OBJECTS installment, ALL KNEES AND ELBOWS OF SUSCEPTIBILITY AND REFUSAL. “Politics right now is kept off-limits via paradox: the not-any of what we really need packaged in the too-much we can’t stand.”
  9. (4Q2017) Adam McGovern’s THIS: installment ALLEGORIES OF THE STAGE: An inquiry into Gemini CollisionWorks’ Twentieth Anniversary of Hysteria on the occasion of its newest theatrical episodes, ReFUSE and Harakiri Kane.
  10. (2Q2017) Mike Watt’s DASHBOARD TOTEMS: The legendary indie rocker’s installment in our TALISMANIC OBJECTS series. “These totems keep me centered and help focus my thoughts when I got driving duty. I have only three goals: 1) I gotta get my men home safe; 2) We gotta play these gigs the best we can for the cats who work all week to come to them; and 3) everything else.”

We are very grateful to HILOBROW’s 2017 contributors.

In addition to the above posts which were published in 2017, a list of the most-visited posts and pages of 2017 would have to include perennially popular features like Josh Glenn’s CAMP, KITCH & CHEESE and Ingrid Schorr’s ROCKVILLE GIRL SPEAKS (both of which originally appeared in Josh Glenn’s 1990s zine Hermenaut), not to mention one-offs like Molly Sauter’s GUY FAWKES MASK-OLOGY. In addition, when one looks at the 5.5 million page views that HILOBROW has served up since 2009, one gets the sense that we should publish nothing but lit-list pages like THE 200 GREATEST ADVENTURE NOVELS OF ALL TIME and generational-schema posts like REVIVALISTS: 1974–1982.

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On to 2018!

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