HiLobrow 4Q2015

By: HILOBROW
December 31, 2015

Here are a few of HILOBROW’s highlights from October, November, and December 2015.

BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 1Q2020 | 2Q2020 | 3Q2020 SNEAK PEEK.

THE HERMENAUTIC TAROT

In October, we kicked off the HERMENAUTIC TAROT series, a comic-book rorschach creative writing experiment in symbol-making and oracular speechifying.

John Hilgart is editor of the HERMENAUTIC TAROT series. More installments to come in 1Q2016!

ADAM McGOVERN’s THIS:

HiLobrow friend and regular Adam McGovern recently began contributing a weekly series, THIS:, to the website. Thrilled by this turn of events, we’ve named him a contributing editor.

Here’s what Adam published on HiLobrow during 4Q2015.

OUT OF CONTROL — A binge-analysis of The Honeycomb Trilogy series of plays.
SONG-AND-DANCE MACABRE — Dying to tell the tale of the neo-Weimer Love Und Greed, a performance by Mad Jenny and the Society Band.
TAKING SIDES — Reliving the traumatic, triumphant first issue of the comic book Monstress (Image), by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda.
DADA ENTRY — Making nonsense of the performance-screed Nord Hausen Fly Robot (invisible republic #3).
ALIVE AS YOU AND ME — Time-commuting to the worker’s sci-fi prophecy The Oracle, by The Operating Theater Company.
MR. UNNATURAL — Reading the signs of David Bowie’s ritualistic short promotional film for “Blackstar.”
YOUR OWN STRENGTH — In the ring (of hell) with the ordeal-heroes of Netflix TV show Jessica Jones.
DEAD MAN WALKING — Hearing the voices of David Bowie’s musical Lazarus.
’TIS THE AFFECT DISORDER — Drowned out in Christmas music.
CULTURE WAR — A Q&A on made-up history and unseen truth with artist Michael Allred, co-conspirator on the Vertigo comic book ART OPS.

LIMERICKANIA

In October and December, we posted new installments in Douglas Wolk’s LIMERICKANIA series, featuring limericks inspired by comic-book details from John Hilgart’s 4CP archive.

JOSHENILIA

In November, we began publishing JOSHENILIA, a series dedicated to exhuming the juvenilia and significant objects of HiLobrow’s editor and publisher.

Posts from 4Q2015 include: MR. NATURAL PATCH, STRAY TRADING CARDS, VINTAGE STICKERS, IDENTIFICATION PLEASE, JOSH’S FIRST SELF-PROMOTIONAL EFFORT, TWO MROE GOODE WOERKS OF THE LATENGRATE O’MALLEY SCHWARTZX, and ZENMAN COMICS.

SCREEN TIME

In 4Q2015, we published a 10-part series, SCREEN TIME, reprinting HiLobrow contributor Jacob Mikanowski’s film and TV writing from Bright Lights Film Journal, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

Productions discussed include: Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee, Errol Morris’s Tabloid, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and three 1990s TV shows (Cowboy Bebop, Batman: The Animated Series, Renegade).

THE UNCLE HYPOTHESIS

In December, we republished an essay originally published, earlier this year, by PRIMER. Josh Glenn’s “The UNCLE Hypothesis” cracks a literary mystery concerning midcentury bad-boy author J.P. Donleavy and a cult series of English children’s books by a mild-mannered minister.

HILO HEROES

This winter we’re wrapping up our long-running HILO HEROES series. It’s been an amazing run: Over 1,400 posts, since 2009!

During 4Q2015 we added a couple of dozen final installments to the series, including the following:

Tor Aarestad on Richard Hell. Brian Berger on Dick Gregory, Victoria Spivey, Dory Previn, Hampton Hawes, and Virgil Thomson. Suzanne Fischer on Mary Oppen and Ellen Swallow Richards. Amanda French on Bob Mould and Sylvia Plath. Mark Kingwell on Henri Bergson and Lewis Mumford.

Devin McKinney on Gore Vidal, Arlene Smith, Laud Humphreys, Kon Ichikawa, Julee Cruise, and Romer Wilson. Anthony Miller on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Thek, and Rod Serling. Tom Nealon on Kool Keith. Karinne Keithley Syers on Muriel Rukeyser.

Josh Glenn is editor of the HILO HEROES series.

LIT LISTS

In 4Q2015, we published the following Best-of lit lists:

A 65th-anniversary list of the 10 Best Adventures of 1950 — from Mickey Spillane’s My Gun is Quick to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train to C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
A 55th-anniversary list of the 10 Best Adventures of 1960 — from Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows to Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade to Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet.
A 45th-anniversary list of the 10 Best Adventures of 1970 — from Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death to Peter Dickinson’s The Devil’s Children to James Dickey’s Deliverance.
A 35th-anniversary list of the 10 Best Adventures of 1980 — from Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.
A 50th-anniversary (as of 2016) list of the 10 Best Adventures of 1966 — from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 to Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 to Lionel Davidson’s A Long Way to Shiloh.

Thanks, Boing Boing, for linking to the Best of 1966 list!

SERIALIZED FICTION

During 4Q2015, HiLoBooks serialized the following adventures, here at HILOBROW:

Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1928 sci-fi novella When the World Screamed. In the fifth and final Professor Challenger adventure, Challenger proposes to drill his way eight miles beneath the planet’s epidermis! Our serialization concluded in November.
James Branch Cabell’s 1919 comical fantasy Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice. The titular protagonist seduces women everywhere he travels — including into Arthurian legend and Hell itself. Our serialization will continue through 1Q2016.

For more information about HiLoBooks, and the 10 Radium Age science fiction novels we’ve reissued in gorgeous paperback format, please visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

MORE HILOBROW SERIES

We posted new installments in Josh Glenn’s semiotic CODE-X series, which surfaces and dimensionalizes a few of the “codes” that make up the a priori network of classifications, categories, and concepts through which each of us intuitively makes sense of everyday life. Codes posted to the series during 4Q2015 include: WOMEN WITH CAMERAS, BEER FEAR, THERAPEUTIC PLEASURE, BON VIVANT, LOUCHE LIFE, BUSTING LOOSE, CREATIVE SPACE, GOING NATURAL, SEXY DAD, CURL CONTROL, ESSENTIAL GEAR. Thanks to our UK semiotician friend Louise Jolly, who contributed to this series, too.

We posted new installments in the RADIUM AGE 100 series, via which Josh Glenn aims to identify the best science fiction from 1904–33. Installments from 4Q2015 included: Gustave Le Rouge’s Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars (1908), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Olaf Stapledon’s The Last and First Men (1930), Frigyes Karinthy’s Voyage to Faremido (1916), Philip Gordon Wylie’s Gladiator (1930), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920/21).

Thanks, HiLobrow readers! On to 1Q2016…

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BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 1Q2020 | 2Q2020 | 3Q2020 SNEAK PEEK.

HiLobrow 4Q2015

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