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.
Laylah Ali: Doodler
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Another postscript to Matthew Battles’ meditation on doodling. I originally wrote this item for Laylah Ali: 5 Responses to 5 Paintings, an exhibition brochure published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2002. *** Late […]
Read This PostGary Cooper on Doodling
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Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be “pixillated” — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes […]
Read This PostOGXers in all but name
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In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 […]
Read This PostDouble Exposure (7): Free-Range Children
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“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]
Read This PostPsychonauts: 1874-83
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The 1874-83 cohort travel far and wide in search of new visions.
Read This PostDouble Exposure (6) — Food Fight
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Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]
Read This PostRené Goscinny
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Unlike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault, exact contemporaries of his who were merely inspired by pop culture, the French-born comics writer RENÉ GOSCINNY (1926-77) cranked the stuff out. Les Aventures d’Astérix, which he authored (and Albert […]
Read This PostAnarcho-Symbolists: 1864-73
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The 1864-73 cohort is a lost generation of absurdists and experimenters.
Read This PostOn the difficulty of identifying Hilobrows
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Nobrows are easily recognized, for their gait is dancing and bold. But HiLobrows frequently deceive one because their bearing is curiously like that of a class of people heartily despised by Nobrows as well as […]
Read This PostComedy and the Death of God
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Hey, PhD students looking for a thesis topic — here’s a freebie. These sketchy notes are inspired by a B&N.com review of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, by HiLobrow.com friend James Parker. Parker writes: […]
Read This PostThe YHWH Virus
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Moses was obsessed with microorganisms like yeast… because God is an alien.
Read This PostThorstein Veblen
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“The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture….” That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the […]
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