HILOBROW 3Q2019
By:
September 30, 2019
Here’s what HILOBROW published in July, August, and September 2019.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 1Q2020 | 2Q2020 | 3Q2020 SNEAK PEEK.
Throughout the month of August, HILOBROW published 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite action movies from the Seventies (1974–1983). Here’s the CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM series lineup:
INTRODUCTION | Madeline Ashby on BLADE RUNNER | Erik Davis on BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA | Mimi Lipson on CONVOY | Luc Sante on BLACK SUNDAY | Josh Glenn on THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR | Lisa Jane Persky on SORCERER | Devin McKinney on THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE | Adam McGovern on QUINTET | Mandy Keifetz on DEATH RACE 2000 | Peter Doyle on SOUTHERN COMFORT | Jonathan Lethem on STRAIGHT TIME | Heather Kapplow on THE KILLER ELITE | Tom Nealon on EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE | Mark Kingwell on THE EIGER SANCTION | Sherri Wasserman on ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK | Gordon Dahlquist on MARATHON MAN | David Levine on PARALLAX VIEW | Matthew Sharpe on ROLLERBALL | Ramona Lyons on ALIEN | Dan Piepenbring on WHITE LINE FEVER | Marc Weidenbaum on THIEF | Carolyn Kellogg on MAD MAX | Carlo Rotella on KUNG FU | Peggy Nelson on SMOKEY & THE BANDIT | Brian Berger on FRIDAY FOSTER.
Josh Glenn is editor of the CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM series. He is very grateful to the series’ talented and generous contributors — many of whom have donated their fees to the ACLU.
The weekly ENTHUSIASM series, at HILOBROW in 2019, is: SERIOCOMIC. We’ve invited 52 of HILOBROW’s friends and contributors to wax enthusiastic about some of their favorite comic books and strips. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
James Parker on 2000 AD | Adrienne Crew on NUTS | Vanessa Berry on MEAT CAKE | John Holbo on WITZEND | Michael Campochiaro on SPIDER-WOMAN | Miranda Mellis on RED SONJA & BÊLIT | Michael Grasso on THE NEW MUTANTS | Ty Burr on BINKY BROWN | Bishakh Som on AMAR CHITRA KATHA | Mark Kingwell on CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED | Brian Berger on JIMBO | Kenya (Robinson) on AGENT 355 | Seth on THE ETERNALS ANNUAL
Josh Glenn is editor of the SERIOCOMIC series. He is very grateful to the series’ contributors, many of whom have donated their fees to the ACLU.
During 3Q2019, HILOBROW published two final installments in AFROFUTURISM, a 10-part series exploring the aesthetics and visual rhetoric of Afrofuturism, by HILOBROW friend Adrienne Crew. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
- STARSEEDS: Might humankind have come from outer space?
- BLACK UTOPIA: The fantasy of an African nation that has enjoyed the liberty to actualize its full potential.
Lynn Peril continued to surface and dimensionalize examples of “pink think” — ideas and attitudes about what constitutes proper female behavior — among other things, in her PLANET OF PERIL series. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
- SPACE SECRETARY: “This girl’s a scientist?”
- THE CAVE MAN LOVER: “Find Out How a REAL Cave-Man Makes Love”
- THE GUIDE ESCORT SERVICE: Escorts were to “be polite but impersonal at all times.”
Tom Nealon continued to interrogate suspect food history, and embellish his findings with outlandish, yet compelling theories of his own, in his series STUFFED. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
- DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: Did eating diseased rye lead to mass hysteria, in the Middle Ages?
- THE ISLAND OF LOST CONDIMENTS: Did the CIA create the Manwich — and why?
- FLASH THE HASH: 18th century food-related slang, from ADAM’S ALE to HUCKLE MY BUFF.
Adam McGovern’s irregular series OFF-TOPIC continued to deliver over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
- INTO THE ARENA: Musical questions and uncharted journeys with GUNNING FOR HITS’ Jeff Rougvie
- HELL IS EACH OTHER: Speaking the multiversal language with CRUSHING BABY ANIMALS’ inventors.
- OUR ROBOT OVERTIME: Trained poets, astral planes, chord progressions and audiomobiles
Returning from a four-year hiatus, Peggy Nelson continued to investigate art and the virtual life — including through her previous series EYE CANDY, and a new series, CROSS-POST. 3Q2019 installments include:
- The CROSS-POST series intro introduces HILOBROW readers to the blogging of Marc Weidenbaum.
- EYE CANDY #21 celebrates the mesmerizing altered photographs of Amy Friend. (Example above.)
We published five new installments in the BEST ADVENTURES series, which chronicles Josh Glenn’s attempt to identify the 10 best adventures he’s read from each year of the 20th century. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup:
- BEST 1939 ADVENTURES, from Rogue Male and The Confidential Agent to Batman.
- BEST 1949 ADVENTURES, from Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Fabulous Flight to Earth Abides.
- BEST 1954 ADVENTURES, from The Lord of the Rings and The Eagle of the Ninth to The Horse and His Boy.
- BEST 1959 ADVENTURES, from Time Out of Joint and The Haunting of Hill House to The Manchurian Candidate — to be completed in 4Q2019.
- BEST YA & YYA LIT 1972, from Watership Down and The Farthest Shore to Kamandi.
Each BEST ADVENTURES installment was first published as 10 individual posts.
During 3Q2019, we continued to publish DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI 75, a weekly lit-list series that aims to identify Josh Glenn’s 75 favorite science-fiction novels published during the Eighties (1984–1993) and Nineties (1994–2003).
Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup: Octavia E. Butler’s IMAGO | Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s DOOM PATROL | Shirow Masamune’s GHOST IN THE SHELL | Dan Simmon’s HYPERION | Lois McMaster Bujold’s THE VOR GAME | Iain M. Banks’s USE OF WEAPONS | William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE | Karen Joy Fowler’s SARAH CANARY | John Barnes’s ORBITAL RESONANCE | Pat Cadigan’s SYNNERS | Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH | Kim Stanley Robinson’s RED MARS | Maureen McHugh’s CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG.
Josh Glenn’s LISTEN, HOLLYWOOD! series continued to offer unsolicited advice about which 20th-century adventure novels should be adapted as movies. Here’s the 3Q2019 lineup: G.K. Chesterton’s THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL | Michael Innes’s THE JOURNEYING BOY | Alfred Jarry’s EXPLOITS AND OPINIONS OF DR. FAUSTROLL, PATAPHYSICIAN.
HILOBROW continued to publish A IS FOR ADVENTURE, an irregular series featuring notes towards Josh Glenn’s The Adventurer’s Glossary, a work in progress which — like his previous books, The Idler’s Glossary and The Wage Slave’s Glossary — will smuggle ideology critique into a simple defining vocabulary or clavis.
Here’s the 3Q2019 A IS FOR ADVENTURE series lineup: JACK to JURY-RIG | KAPUT to KNUCKLE UP | LABONZA to LOCK AND LOAD | MACGYVER to MOXIE | NAIL to NUTS | O.G. to OUTRÉ | PACKING to PUNK.
In his September 25 Washington Post column, book critic Michael Dirda offered a belated but heartfelt shout-out to HiLoBooks’ reissue of E.V. Odle’s Radium Age sci-fi novel The Clockwork Man. Excerpt:
This edition features an excellent introduction by Annalee Newitz, who opens with a funny but accurate summary of the novel:
“If you don’t stop making war on each other, one day women will team up with benevolent, naked aliens and implant you with a clock that controls your behavior and sends you into a timeless multiverse. Oh and also? That timeless multiverse will be full of hat and wig stores.”
Is The Clockwork Man, then, serious or slapstick? In fact, it’s both, very much in the manner of H.G. Wells’s comparably serio-comic The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon.
“Given ongoing advances in robotics and medical technology, not to mention the possibility of uploading consciousness into a computer,” Dirda’s review concludes, “The Clockwork Man seems, so to speak, both timely and alarming.”
In July, we presented HERE BE MONSTERS, a 10-part series featuring monster drawings by the talented artist-illustrator and HILOBROW friend Mister Reusch.
HiLoBooks continued to serialize P.G. Wodehouse’s LEAVE IT TO PSMITH (1923), the last and most rewarding of four novels featuring the dandy, wit, and would-be adventurer Ronald Eustace Psmith, here at HILOBROW.
On to 4Q2019…