Author: Joshua Glenn
Josh Glenn, HILOBROW's editor, is a principal of the commercial semiotics agency Semiovox. He is co-author and/or co-editor of several books, including The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, and the bestselling family activities guide UNBORED. In the ’00s, Josh was a columnist and blogger for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section; in the ’90s, he published the zine/journal Hermenaut. He lives in Kingston, NY.
Engaged vs. Disengaged Irony
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A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the Postmodernist Generation. Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting […]
Read This PostJohn Brunner
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The popularity of apocalyptic fiction in the Sixties (1964-73), it has been suggested, indicates that SF writers had become bored and suspicious of utopian idylls promising that ameliorative reforms could right modern civilization’s manifold wrongs; […]
Read This PostPostmodernists: 1924-33
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Those born from 1924-33 are nearly impervious to Middlebrow’s discourse.
Read This PostAmbivalent about New Age?
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HILOBROW is superficially similar, as we’ve noted, to Middlebrow. So HiLobrow despises Middlebrow for the same reason that idlers detest slackers, and punks detest rockists: we’re afraid that we’re really just like them. No wonder, […]
Read This PostMiddlebrow Bestsellers — this week
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A service that we may or may not continue to offer. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times for doing the primary research. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David […]
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New God Middlebrow
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack […]
Read This PostQuatschwatch (3): Words of Power
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The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]
Read This PostNew Gods: 1914-23
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The New Gods are stronger, faster, and smarter than other generations.
Read This PostHilobrow Comics
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R. Sikoryak is a versatile, witty, and well-read cartoonist and illustrator who’s retold Dante’s Inferno in the style of Bazooka Joe bubblegum comics, Crime and Punishment in a Bob Kane-era Batman mode (above), and The […]
Read This PostT.W. Adorno
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Even though there’s no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep.
Read This PostPartisan Middlebrow
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and 1953 Commentary essay, “The Plight of Our Culture,” are […]
Read This PostHigh-Mid shenanigans
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]
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Partisans: 1904-13
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“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”
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