HILOBROW 2023
By:
December 31, 2023
Here’s what HILOBROW published in 2023!
HILOBROW editor Josh Glenn is very grateful to our many stalwart contributors, as well as to newcomers Steacy Easton, Annie Zaleski, Elizabeth Nelson, Francesca Royster, Amanda Martinez, Erin Osmon, David Warner, Will Groff, Natalie Weiner, Nadine Hubbs, Jada Watson, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Alan Scherstuhl, Alex Brook Lynn, Paul Finnegan, Carolyn Campbell, Amy Keyishian, Cynthia Scott, and illustrator Ena Nealon.
Josh is also grateful to 2023’s guest editors Adam McGovern and Heather Quinlan; to David Cantwell, who recruited Country music writers and offered helpful feedback on every DOLLY series installment; to Tom Nealon and Adam McGovern, for their regular-ish columns; and to Colin Dickey and Nikhil Singh, who each contributed an excellent one-off series to HILOBROW.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024 SNEAK PEEK | 2Q2024.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 2023.
During 2023, we published the following “enthusiasm” series. We are very grateful to the series’ contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Covenant House, which provides housing and supportive services to youth facing homelessness.
Contributors to DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series edited by Josh Glenn, enthused about favorite country songs from the Sixties (1964–1973). Here’s a selection of installments from the series:
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.
Contributors to TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series edited by Heather Quinlan, enthused about heartthrobs from our adolescences. Here’s a selection of installments from the series:
Carlo Rotella on VALERIE BERTINELLI | Miranda Mellis on EDDIE VAN HALEN | Paul Finnegan on KIM WILDE | Heather Quinlan on MIKE PATTON | Mariane Cara on NKOTB.
Contributors to CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series edited by Adam McGovern, enthused about reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Here’s a selection of installments from the series:
Bishakh Som on SUMMER | Jeff Lewonczyk on WHOLE BELLY CLAMS | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER | Nikhil Singh on LOVE ISLAND UK | Adrienne Crew on CILANTRO.
Contributors to STOOGE YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series edited by Josh Glenn, enthused about proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973). Here’s a selection of installments from the series:
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 | Adam McGovern on ELP’s BRAIN SALAD SURGERY | Mimi Lipson on The Shaggs’ MY PAL FOOT FOOT.
Adam McGovern continued to deliver over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship via his monthly-ish series OFF-TOPIC. Here’s a sampling of the 2023 series lineup:
PASSION PROJECT: Endless summer of soul — talking cosmic surfers and Black resurrection with JOHN JENNINGS | FEELING THE STRAIN: Q&A with Dean Haspiel about COVID COP… | MY COLLOQUIUM WITH CARLOS: BOWIECON (2): D.A.M. straight with CARLOS ALOMAR | LOCKED IN PARADISE: Healing history with searcher of lost time WENDY CHIN-TANNER | NO LAST STAN: Revisitations of STAN LEE with graphic biographer TOM SCIOLI.
This year, HILOBROW friend and stalwart contributor Tom Nealon returned to us with CONDIMENT ABECEDARIUM, an apophenic food-history series. Here’s a sampling of the 2023 series lineup:
AIOLI / ANCHOVIES | BANANA KETCHUP / BALSAMIC VINEGAR | ENCURTIDO / EXTRACT OF MEAT | FURIKAKE / FINA’DENNE’ | GREEN CHILE / GARUM | JALAPEÑO / JIMMIES | KECAP MANIS / KIMCHI | NƯỚC CHẤM / NUTELLA | OLIVE OIL / OXYGALA | PIKLIZ / PYLSUSINNEP SAUCE.
Here are a few one-off series and posts from the past year…
The series 49TH PARALLEL is a 20,000-word epistolary exchange — between Josh and University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell — about real-world and fictional adventures. The series title references not only their cross-border collaboration but one of their favorite WWII movies. Here’s a sampling of the 49th PARALLEL lineup:
FULL OF BEANS | DERRING-DO | ON THE BEAM | A WIZARD DODGE | RURITANIA | ROBINSONADE | CAMARADERIE | WISH I WERE HERE | PICARESQUE | TILTING AT WINDMILLS | PLUCK | SKOOKUM.
IN THE MYSTERY CAVE is a three-part series, by HILOBROW friend Colin Dickey, on Betty Boop’s Snow-White, Twin Peaks, and the erotic life of things.
Josh’s 2023 series MOUSE “reads” Mickey Mouse within the context of his fellow twentieth-century pop-culture mice. Josh first began analyzing Mickey Mouse as a cultural symbol when he was asked to participate as a semiotician/historian in Jeff Malmberg’s 2022 documentary Mickey: The Story of a Mouse. Here’s the trailer.
South African artist, writer and musician Nikhil Singh contributed an illustrated series — ARCADE KID — that revisits his formative years in the ’90s.
TEN STAGES OF MAN is a series of posts elaborating on Josh’s ten-stages-of-man hypothesis — as first floated in January. Here’s the 2023 series lineup:
TEN STAGES OF MAN: 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.”
Technically, this is an ongoing series. But don’t hold your breath….
During 2023 the series HERMENAUTICA presented pages scanned from back issues of Hermenaut, the DIY intellectual zine/journal that Josh edited and published from 1992–2001. Along with some commentary.
HILOBROW friend (and brother-in-law) Lawry Hutcheson returned with a third year’s worth of gorgeous linocut calendar art — via the series LINOCUT 2022.
Charlie Mitchell’s HAIKAI is a series of six informal, spontaneous collections of linked haiku-like poems. Here’s the series lineup:
GOOSE: “Weaving skeins of kind worries / with surgical hands.” | THE NORTH RUSTS IN MAY: “pause to taste Dasein…” | DIP CUP CAST BY THE GREAT COWBOY IN THE SKY: “gulp in cloud castles / adrift above granite sieges” | BEFORE A DROUGHT BREAKS: “lit dart wafts past the rattle/of an AC’s toil” | HERMENAUT FM: ‘that town’s four beers yonder’ / Wild West’s cocked yardstick | GOD’S LITTLE INSIDE JOKES: “power steering / made monsters of all of us.”
SCHEMATIZING is a new series via which Josh attempts to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.
Josh’s other ongoing series, both of which started up in 2023, are: SCREENSHOTS and PHOTO DUMP.
HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn is editor of the RADIUM AGE series of reissued proto-sf adventures from the MIT Press. During 2023, five series titles appeared, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD and THE POISON BELT (Feb. 21, introduction by Conor Reid, afterword by Joshua Glenn).
During 2023, Josh continued to research stories and novels for potential future publication. Here, we’ll just mention a few of Josh’s HILOBROW-specific RADIUM AGE activities from 2023. Please see the post RADIUM AGE 2023 for full info.
In June, HILOBROW published SISTERS OF THE RADIUM AGE — an amazing resource of proto-sf stories by women; compiled by Lisa Yaszek and her students.
HILOBROW published dozens of installments in Josh’s RADIUM AGE POETRY series. Here’s a sampling of the lineup:
D.H. Lawrence’s FUTURE WAR | Frederik Pohl’s ELEGY TO A DEAD PLANET: LUNA | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Blaise Cendrar’s ORION | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Edna St. Vincent Millay’s EUCLID ALONE | W.J. Turner’s IN TIME LIKE GLASS | Mina Loy’s LUNAR BAEDEKER | Robinson Jeffers’s ROAN STALLION | Velemir Khlebnikob’s “THERE IS THAT SMELL…” | D.H. Lawrence’s ROBOT FEELINGS | Irma Valeria’s LET’S LAUGH AT THE UNIVERSE | Jean Toomer’s HER LIPS ARE COPPER WIRE | & many others.
To see the full series lineup, organized thematically into such categories as CATASTROPHE and FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS, please visit this page.
Here at HILOBROW, as we have been doing for a decade now, during 2023 we serialized a few of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s a sampling of the lineup:
- Gertrude M. Barrows’s “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” (1904)
- An excerpt from George Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (dictated 1924–1927; intended to be the first section of All and Everything)
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom” (1903)
- Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fifth Dimension” (1928)
- Leslie F. Stone’s “When the Sun Went Out” (1929)
- Lilith Lorraine’s “The Brain of the Planet” (1929)
- Perley Poore Sheehan and Robt. H. Davis’s “Blood and Iron” (1917)
During 2023, we continued to publish HADRON AGE 75 — a series via which Josh attempts to identify the 75 best sf adventures published during the genre’s Hadron Age era (from 2004–2023). Here’s a sampling of the 2023 lineup:
Jeff Lemire, Dean Ormston, Dave Stewart, and Todd Klein’s BLACK HAMMER | Becky Chambers’s A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT | Nisi Shawl’s EVERFAIR | Jonathan Lethem’s THE ARREST | Martha Wells’s NETWORK EFFECT | Lydia Millet’s PILLS AND STARSHIPS | Ann Leckie’s PROVENANCE | Charlie Jane Anders’s VICTORIES GREATER THAN DEATH | Ray Nayler’s THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA | Annalee Newitz’s THE TERRAFORMERS.
The series, which kicked off in January 2022, wrapped up in November 2023. Here’s the complete HADRON AGE SF 75 list.
SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series via which Josh is attempting to surface examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s a sampling of the 2023 series lineup:
THE GLASS BEAD GAME | FLATLAND | THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER | EXPLOITS AND OPINIONS OF DR. FAUSTROLL, PATAPHYSICIAN | A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS | THE MAN WITH SIX SENSES | THE SPACE MERCHANTS | ODD JOHN.
12 DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE is an ongoing, seasonal series of stories originally written — by HILOBROW contributors and friends — for Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s 2009–2010 anthropological-literary experiment SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS. Here’s a sampling of the 2023 series:
Ben Ehrenreich on JAR OF MARBLES | Glen David Gold on KNEELING MAN FIGURINE | Lizzie Skurnick on PEN STAND | R.K. Scher on INDIAN MAIDEN | Christopher Sorrentino on MR. PICKWICK COAT HOOK | David Shields on MILITARY FIGURE.
Via the series PALIMPSEST, installments in which were originally posted by Josh to Instagram, we shared some of his street photography of “texts” where later writing has effaced original writing — of which traces remain.
On to 2024…