HYPOCRITE IDLER 2023

By: Joshua Glenn
December 30, 2023

To idle is to work on meaningful and varied projects — and to take it easy. The title of the series refers to this self-proclaimed idler’s inability to take it easy.

HILOBROW is a noncommercial blog! The info below should not be construed as a vulgar advertisement for SEMIOVOX, MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series, SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, GO WEST, or any of my other more-or-less profitable projects. It is merely an update on my doings and undoings — in this case, during 2023.

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024.

Also see: HILOBROW 2023.

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled consultancy SEMIOVOX. Our methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

Here’s a sampling of our 2023 projects:

CANNABIS CODES: Working with one of the top cannabis edibles companies in the USA, we analyzed packaging, social media, and other brand communications within the cannabis space — selecting our stimuli with a specific demographic in mind.
MULTISENSORIAL EXPERIENCE CODES: On behalf of a multinational beverage company, my global colleagues and I analyzed codes of multisensorial experience — covering multiple categories — in six markets including China, India, and Mexico. A combination of semiotic analysis and consumer research (conducted via our sister agency, Consumer Eyes). Marketing optimization across all channels, including pack design.
FANTASY CODES: Via our friends at Labbrand Paris, we consulted with the brand and design teams at a French videogame company on a new game and rebooted fantasy franchise.

For more info on this year’s projects, see: SEMIOVOX 2023.

TEACHING & SPEAKING

In the Fall, Monica Nelson and I taught two sections of GRADUATE THESIS MAPPING & NARRATIVE I in RISD’s MID (Master of Industrial Design) program. (Here’s my faculty page.) My first class; it was a blast.

In the Spring, I was a guest critic and lecturer for Tom Weis’s RISD class GRADUATE INTRODUCTION TO INDUSTRIAL DESIGN — the topic of which is Objects and Exhibitions, and one key theme of which was “lost objects.” (The theme was inspired by the 2022 book of that title that I co-authored with Rob Walker.) I was also a guest critic and lecturer, this Fall, for Kate Dannessa’s RISD ID class SPECIAL TOPIC DESIGN STUDIO.

In February, I enjoyed speaking (via Zoom) with Andreina Sosa’s INTRO TO VISUAL SEMIOTICS class, at Paier College in Connecticut. And in July, I moderated three panels at Readercon — an sf convention held annually in Boston.

RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF

I’m founding editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series. During 2023, we published five RADIUM AGE series titles:

Cicely Hamilton’s THEODORE SAVAGE (Feb. 7, introduction by Susan R. Grayzel). “Challenging last century’s assumptions about the invulnerability of imperial civilization, Cicely Hamilton’s 1922 novel is a grim, swift read — and an argument for pacifism as the first principle of survival.” — Nisi Shawl.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD and THE POISON BELT (Feb. 21, introduction by Conor Reid, afterword by Joshua Glenn). “[MIT Press’s] The Lost World and The Poison Belt is a wonderful snapshot of the Edwardian scientific mind, both its virtues and its defects.” — Katherine Addison.
G.K. Chesterton’s THE NAPOLEON of NOTTING HILL (August 1, introduction by Madeline Ashby). “More modern than the moderns, more medieval than the medievalists, funnier than all of them — reading Chesterton today is like watching someone give a speech of unimpeachable common sense from the bridge of a departing UFO.” — James Parker.
MORE VOICES from the RADIUM AGE (August 1, edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn). An essential collection for any sci fi fan, More Voices from the Radium Age is a wild and darkly cathartic ride through the anxieties, fantasies, and nightmares that ultimately shaped the genre we now know as science fiction.
William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND (ABRIDGED) (August 15, introduced by Erik Davis). “For all its flaws and idiosyncracies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.” — China Miéville.

For a full update on what’s been going on with the series this year, please see RADIUM AGE 2023.

For a sampling of 2023 press for the RADIUM AGE series, please see the GOOD VIBRATIONS section below.

Visit to the (excellent) MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square, in March.

Also this year, we sent the following Spring 2024 titles to press: THE INHUMANS AND OTHER STORIES: A SELECTION OF BENGALI SCIENCE FICTION (March 12, edited and translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay) and Charlotte Haldane’s MAN’S WORLD (March 12, introduced by Philippa Levine). We also advanced our Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 titles….

In June, here at HILOBROW, we published SISTERS OF THE RADIUM AGE — an extraordinary resource compiled by Lisa Yaszek and two of her students. Also at HILOBROW, during 2023 I continued to to publish the series RADIUM AGE POEMS. To see the full lineup from this series, visit this page.

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is published by King Mixer LLC; I’m the editor. To see everything that we’ve published this past year, please check out HILOBROW 2023. To see my solo HILOBROW series and posts from 2023, please check out the WRITING (HILOBROW) section of this post. Here, I’ll just mention two 2023 series that I edited.

DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM features twenty-five of our favorite country records from the Sixties (1964–1973). Here’s a sampling of the DOLLY lineup:

David Cantwell on Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton’s WE FOUND IT | Lucy Sante on Johnny & June Carter Cash’s JACKSON | Mimi Lipson on George Jones’s WALK THROUGH THIS WORLD WITH ME | Steacy Easton on Olivia Newton-John’s LET ME BE THERE | Annie Zaleski on Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM is a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973). Here’s a sampling of the STOOGE lineup:

Mandy Keifetz on The Trashmen’s SURFIN’ BIRD | Nicholas Rombes on Yoko Ono’s MOVE ON FAST | David Cantwell on ? and the Mysterians’ 96 TEARS | James Parker on The Modern Lovers’ SHE CRACKED | Lynn Peril on The Pleasure Seekers’ WHAT A WAY TO DIE | Lucy Sante on The Count Five’s PSYCHOTIC REACTION | Jonathan Lethem on The Monkees’ YOUR AUNTIE GRIZELDA.

I am very grateful to HILOBROW’s contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Covenant House, which provides housing and supportive services to youth facing homelessness.

SEMIOVOX.COM

SEMIOVOX, my branding consultancy’s eponymous website, is published by SEMIOVOX LLC; I’m the editor. Here, I’ll just mention two of our 2023 series.

The MAKING SENSE WITH… series of Q&As is dedicated to understanding what makes semioticians tick. Here’s a selection from the 2023 series lineup:

The series COLOR CODEX explores the unexpected associations evoked for us by specific colors found in the material world. Here’s a sampling of the COLOR CODEX lineup:

Martha Arango (Sweden) on FALUKORV RED | Maciej Biedziński (Poland) on SKIN-DEEP ORANGE | Aiyana Gunjan (India) on LETTERBOX RED | Rachel Lawes (England) on DEVIL GREEN | Charles Leech (Canada) on STORMTROOPER WHITE | Greg Rowland (England) on LAUNDROMAT FUTURA | Alfredo Troncoso (Mexico) on BORGES GLAUQUE.

For a full update on what SEMIOVOX published this past year, please see SEMIOVOX 2023.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m coordinator for SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, a series of online get-togethers — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community. Here are a couple of 2023 examples:

APRIL: BIOSEMIOTICS, featuring Paul Cobley, Natasha Delliston, Malcolm Evans, and Yogi Hendlin. Proceeding from the premise that semiosis is intrinsic to all living nature, biosemiotics practitioners have developed a holistic and integrated understanding that radically challenges — and can also reboot and revitalize — the way that we applied semioticans think about and practice our craft.

OCTOBER: SEMIOTICS & THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Session host Vijay Parthasarathy led a discussion — with Román Esqueda, Jamin Pelkey, and Hamsini Shivakumar — on the following questions. Does commercial semiotics lack scientific rigor? Is the approach too ad hoc? How should commercial semioticians counter perceived “expert” bias? What is the optimal balance to strike between “science” and “art”?

For a full lineup of 2023’s Semiofest Sessions, please see SEMIOVOX 2023.

WRITING (HILOBROW)

During 2023, I wrote the following HILOBROW series and posts.

Paul Klee’s *The Barbed Noose with the Mice* (1923)

My 2023 series MOUSE “reads” Mickey within the context of pop-culture mice throughout the course of the century. Here’s the lineup:

HADRON AGE SF is a weekly series — begun in 2022 — via which I’ve aimed to identify my 75 favorite sf adventures published between 2004 and 2023. (I finished up the series this Fall.) The complete list is here. Here’s a sampling of the 2023 lineup:

SEMIOPUNK is a new series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” The 2023 lineup includes:

49th PARALLEL serializes a 20,000-word epistolary exchange — between Mark Kingwell and myself — about real-world and fictional adventures. The series title references not only my cross-border collaboration with Mark, but one of our favorite WWII movies. Here’s a sampling of the 49th PARALLEL lineup:

TEN STAGES OF MAN is a post from January introducing my theory of humankind’s life-stages. This summer, I expanded the post into a series, of which the following installments have appeared thus far:

CHILDHOOD 00–03: PROTO-CHILDHOOD | 04–13: EARLY & MID-CHILDHOOD | 14–23: MID- & LATE CHILDHOOD / “TEENS.” ADULTHOOD 24–33: EARLY ADULTHOOD / “TWENTIES” | 34–43: MID-ADULTHOOD / “THIRTIES” | 44–53: LATE ADULTHOOD / “FORTIES.”

The following solo posts are ENTHUSIASM-related…

1Q2023: INTRODUCTION to the DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM series.
1Q2023: DOLLY series installment on Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen’s BACK TO TENNESSEE.
2Q2023: TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM series installment on SHAUN CASSIDY.
3Q2023: CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM series installment on FOOTLOOSE.
4Q2023: INTRODUCTION to the STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM series.
4Q2023: STOOGE series installment on Gillian Hills’ TUT, TUT, TUT, TUT….

My other 2023 HILOBROW series include: SCHEMATIZING, HERMENAUTICA, PALIMPSEST, SCREENSHOTS, PHOTO DUMP

WRITING (ELSEWHERE)

I contributed an afterword (“Challengers of the Known”) to the MIT Press’s new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger adventures The Lost World and The Poison Belt, which was published in February. Here’s an excerpt:

The Challenger-Summerlee dialectic is central to The Lost World… and yet, as noted, the over-the-top action of the duo’s first outing rather overshadows the lesson that Doyle intended to impart via their bickering. By contrast, within the Oulipian constraints of The Poison Belt, Challenger and Summerlee cannot act; instead, they can only interact. As a result, the reader of The Poison Belt will realize, belatedly, that The Lost World — like the subsequent Challenger stories — is a philosophical thriller.

I contributed an introduction (“Radium Age Ultra-Potentialities”) to the MIT Press’s More Voices from the Radium Age proto-sf anthology, which was published in August. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout the nineteen-aughts and -tens, scientists and snake-oil salesmen alike would ascribe to radium — and radiation in general — vitalizing, even life-giving powers. By the 1920s, then, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin and the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane could independently propose that radiation, acting upon our planet’s inorganic compounds billions of years ago, had produced a primordial “soup” from which emerged life. Science fiction, too, emerged during the genre’s 1900–1935 Radium Age from out of a hot dilute soup of sorts, this one composed of outré genres of literature — from occult mysteries and paranormal thrillers to Yukon adventures and Symbolist poetry — acted upon by the energy of new scientific and technological theories and breakthroughs.

(The full introduction was published this August at LitHub.)

At the invitation of MINUTE 9 series editor Nick Rombes, in September I contributed an installment — on Three Days of the Condor — for the “irreverently highbrow” online literary journal 3:AM.

Also: In July, I contributed an installment — on the subject of TOLKIEN GREEN — to the SEMIOVOX international series COLOR CODEX.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Getting the word out, during 2023…

RADIUM AGE SERIES

For a full update on RADIUM AGE series publicity from this past year, see RADIUM AGE 2023. Here are a few examples:

“It’s an attractive crusade,” Niall Harrison writes in a January 2023 Los Angeles Review of Books essay. “Glenn’s project is well suited to providing an organizing principle for an SF reprint line, to the point where I’m a little surprised that I can’t think of other similarly high-profile examples of reprint-as-critical-advocacy.”
I was interviewed by Arley Sorg for the August issue of the sf/f magazine Clarkesworld.
In November, I was interviewed by Miranda Melcher for England’s NEW BOOKS NETWORK podcast.

OBJECT STUDIES

Lost Objects (Hat & Beard Press), edited by Rob Walker and yours truly, was published in 2022 — and received some nice publicity at the time. For example:

Rob Walker on NPR’s “Marketplace” (Jan. 10): “I’m an advocate of honoring the seemingly sort of hard-to-defend affection that we have for objects.”
In 2Q2023, the Hat & Beard Press / Dublab / Invisible Republic podcast Big Table interviewed us about Lost Objects. Here’s a Spotify link to the LOST OBJECTS episode.

See: LOST OBJECTS 2023.

Rob Walker and I make few appearances in the 2021 documentary Objects, which explores how objects can help people “preserve memories, conjure experiences, and find meaning in their lives.” This fall, Objects became available for streaming.

GO WEST

I continue to oversee operations at GO WEST, the coworking space that I cofounded in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood. This year, we built a fancy new “Zoom room” and welcomed several new members, including 1587 Sneakers. That’s Adam King featured above….

***

On to 2024…

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024.

HYPOCRITE IDLER 2023

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