3Q2017 Most Visited

By: HILOBROW
October 3, 2017

Here they are! The 10 most frequently visited HiLobrow posts published during July, August, and September 2017. Below this list, please find another list dedicated to the 10 most frequently visited HiLobrow posts published during all of 2017 so far.

Top posts published during 3Q2017

1. (Aug. 28) William Gibson’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: RACIST BOOK. “I don’t think I’ve encountered another author I’ve come to loathe quite so viscerally as Mr. Avirett, which seems a shame, in that he’s really quite a poor writer, even by the flowery standard of his day, and I’d prefer to detest someone more talented.”

2. (Aug. 20) Douglas Rushkoff’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: LEARY’S STASH BOX. “One guy used to bring vials of Ketamine injectable that we’d reduce in the microwave to a powder for Tim to snort. When Oliver Stone came by one afternoon, Tim hoped he was planning to direct a Leary biopic; alas, he was bearing a mason jar of some South American concoction that he wanted Tim to try.”

3. (Aug. 15) Melissa Gira Grant’s KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM installment: KLUTE. “Bree leads us with him, into forlorn crash pads, a jewel of Meatpacking District disco. He stays up with her in the dark while we watch, waiting for a predator who doesn’t show. What they share, more than intimacy, is paranoia.”

4. (Aug. 4) Paul Lukas’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: STOLEN CORKSCREW. “As I was leaving, I saw a wine bottle opener on the kitchen counter. Feeling a weird mix of grievance, entitlement, and shame, I picked up the opener and put it in my bag. Then I left.”

5. (Aug. 23) Lisa Jane Persky’s KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM installment: THE LONG GOODBYE. “As we approach each of his collisions with demand and disappointment, Marlowe repeats, “That’s OK with me.” His nonchalance, sardonic wit and cautious softness for the characters he encounters make him inviting in a way that other movie Marlowes aren’t.”

6. (Aug. 10) THE FIRST THRIFT SHOP, an installment in Lynn Peril’s PLANET OF PERIL series. “Rummage sales on the docks were men’s space, but these new sales were run almost exclusively by upper- or middle-class women. Somewhere along the line, the unsavoriness that could accrue to secondhand goods (fears of contagion or infestation, association with unscrupulous pawnbrokers, the fear of being thought poor) was overcome by the pleasure of finding bargains in the guise of assisting the needy.”

7. (July 1) Kio Stark’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: PEEPSHOW TOKEN. “I’m not saying the girls stripped for their own thrill or that they didn’t. Only that even in the slapdash iconography of the place, the idea was that everybody gets their rocks off here. And that may have been a fiction, but it was the brilliant, animating fiction of the place.”

8. (July 22) Catherine Newman’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: HOARDED VICODIN. “Swallow one and you will still be a marionette in an anxious puppet show about bills and deadlines and Trump and death, but your strings will go slack, your wooden arms dangling peacefully by your sides while you laugh and laugh through a dumb Paul Rudd movie.”

9. (Aug. 28) MY BACK ISSUES, an installment in Adam McGovern’s THIS: series. A Q&A with cartoonist Josh Bayer about Fantagraphics’s ALL TIME COMICS project. “But I’ve always, for a lot of different reasons, read as much as I can about prisons. Also, [I think about] the way convicts are such outsiders to society, and they’re figures of alienation. So, people in prison are really hungry for identity, and that’s a lot of what’s going on now with this weird white-supremacist shit going mainstream; it’s like this fringe culture, which very much is a part of prison culture, is strangely becoming more and more of the larger world.”

10. (July 14) Wayne Chambliss’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: RADIOACTIVE TRINITITE. “Emu Field looked like a window onto extinction smashed from the inside: irradiated shards of a glass I could see myself in, however darkly. What I magpied home from Operation Totem is a sample of that bleak, private geology – anthropogenic, nihilistic, almost black. My ruin stone.”

Top 10 posts published during 2017

Four posts from 3Q2017 elbowed their way onto this list…

1. (1Q2017) Transcript of Benjamen Walker’s THEORY OF EVERYTHING podcast titled THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY. “JOSH GLENN: After the fall of the Soviet Union, with help from his ex-KGB handlers, Trump spent 25 years in training — purposely making a buffoon of himself.” Still our #1 post for 2017.
2. (3Q2017) William Gibson’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: RACIST BOOK. “I don’t think I’ve encountered another author I’ve come to loathe quite so viscerally as Mr. Avirett, which seems a shame, in that he’s really quite a poor writer, even by the flowery standard of his day, and I’d prefer to detest someone more talented.”



3. (1Q2017) Adam McGovern’s THIS: installment LOOK AT THOSE CAVEMEN GO. Mark Russell: “I envision [Snagglepuss] like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure; Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they’re in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go.”
4. (3Q2017) Douglas Rushkoff’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: LEARY’S STASH BOX. “One guy used to bring vials of Ketamine injectable that we’d reduce in the microwave to a powder for Tim to snort. When Oliver Stone came by one afternoon, Tim hoped he was planning to direct a Leary biopic; alas, he was bearing a mason jar of some South American concoction that he wanted Tim to try.”
5. (3Q2017) Melissa Gira Grant’s KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM installment: KLUTE. “Bree leads us with him, into forlorn crash pads, a jewel of Meatpacking District disco. He stays up with her in the dark while we watch, waiting for a predator who doesn’t show. What they share, more than intimacy, is paranoia.”



6. (1Q2017) Stephen Duncombe’s POLITICAL OBJECTS installment PROTEST SIGN: “Our funny, ironic, and oh-so-clever message backfired.”
7. (1Q2017) Anne Boyer’s POLITICAL OBJECTS installment, ALL KNEES AND ELBOWS OF SUSCEPTIBILITY AND REFUSAL. “Politics right now is kept off-limits via paradox: the not-any of what we really need packaged in the too-much we can’t stand.”
8. (2Q2017) Mike Watt’s DASHBOARD TOTEMS: The legendary indie rocker’s installment in our TALISMANIC OBJECTS series. “These totems keep me centered and help focus my thoughts when I got driving duty. I have only three goals: 1) I gotta get my men home safe; 2) We gotta play these gigs the best we can for the cats who work all week to come to them; and 3) everything else.”



9. (1Q2017) Ben Greenman’s POLITICAL OBJECTS installment, MATCHBOX CAR. “Prince had just died. I had just started writing a book about him. I knew that I needed a little red Corvette, somehow, as a talisman.”
10. (3Q2017) Paul Lukas’s ILLICIT OBJECTS installment: STOLEN CORKSCREW. “As I was leaving, I saw a wine bottle opener on the kitchen counter. Feeling a weird mix of grievance, entitlement, and shame, I picked up the opener and put it in my bag. Then I left.”

In addition to 2017 posts like THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY, William Gibson’s RACIST BOOK post, and Adam McGovern’s LOOK AT THOSE CAVEMEN GO installment, a list of the most-visited posts and pages of 2017 would have to include perennially most-visited posts and pages like: Josh Glenn’s 200 GREATEST ADVENTURE NOVELS, Ingrid Schorr’s ROCKVILLE GIRL SPEAKS, and Josh Glenn’s 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI NOVELS.

Thanks to all our HiLobrow contributors of 3Q2017! On to 4Q2017…

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