HILOBROW 2Q2024
By:
June 30, 2024
Here’s what HILOBROW published during April, May, and June 2024. We’re grateful to our many stalwart contributors, and also to first-time contributor Micah Nathan.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024 | 3Q2024 | 4Q2024 SNEAK PEEK | 4Q2024 | 2024 | 1Q2025 SNEAK PEEK.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 2Q2024.
REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM is a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Here’s the series lineup:
Annie Nocenti on AFTER HOURS | Lynn Peril on BRAZIL | Mandy Keifetz on BODY DOUBLE | Carlo Rotella on ROBOCOP | Marc Weidenbaum on GROUNDHOG DAY | Erik Davis on REPO MAN | Mimi Lipson on STRANGER THAN PARADISE | Josh Glenn on HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | Susan Roe on HOUSEKEEPING | Gordon Dahlquist on SOMETHING WILD | Heather Quinlan on EATING RAOUL | Anthony Miller on MIRACLE MILE | Karinne Keithley Syers on BETTER OFF DEAD | Adam McGovern on WALKER | Ramona Lyons on MILLER’S CROSSING | Vanessa Berry on WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | Elina Shatkin on NIGHT OF THE COMET | Susannah Breslin on MAN BITES DOG | Tom Nealon on DELICATESSEN | Lisa Jane Persky on RUMBLE FISH | Dean Haspiel on WEIRD SCIENCE | Heather Kapplow on HEATHERS | Micah Nathan on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | Deborah Wassertzug on ELECTRIC DREAMS | Mark Kingwell on WITHNAIL AND I.
Josh is the REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM series editor. He is 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.
Adam McGovern continued to deliver over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship via his monthly-ish series OFF-TOPIC. Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
BLACK HOLE SUN: On the mourning commute, with In Perpetuity’s PETER & MARIA HOEY | THE KINDEST CUT: Reading the movie and living the comic with R. SIKORYAK | THE NEW BARD: Trading childhood fairytales of cosmic trauma with Barda’s NGOZI UKAZU | NEW ABNORMALS: Spinning storylines and threading the labyrinth with Dakini Atoll’s NIKHIL SINGH.
Tom Nealon continued to contribute new installments to CONDIMENT ABECEDARIUM, an apophenic food-history series. Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
VEGEMITE / VERJUS | WHITE GRAVY / WOW-WOW SAUCE.
Josh Glenn’s series SEMIOPUNK is dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
RIDDLEY WALKER | ENGINE SUMMER | LE GARAGE HERMÉTIQUE | VALIS | RODERICK | PATTERN RECOGNITION | THE PLAYER OF GAMES.
HILOBROW’s series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY is devoted to surfacing examples of a recursive, often middlebrow syndrome whereby comedy is adapted (without acknowledgment) as drama. Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
THE SAVAGE GENTLEMAN vs. DOC SAVAGE | GULLIVAR JONES vs. JOHN CARTER | THE PHONOGRAPHIC APARTMENT vs. HAL | HIGH RISE vs. OATH OF FEALTY | JOHNNY FEDORA vs. JAMES BOND | MA PARKER vs. MA BARKER | DARK STAR vs. ALIEN | SHOCK TREATMENT vs. THE TRUMAN SHOW.
Additional ongoing HILOBROW series: SCHEMATIZING, SCREENSHOTS, and PHOTO DUMP.
STREET SCHEMA was a 2Q2024 miniseries — within Josh Glenn’s ongoing series SCHEMATIZING — via which Josh shared photos of manhole covers that help him think about how best to diagram a “semiosphere.”
The ongoing series NOT TODAY, EBAY, via which Josh will share examples of stuff that he was tempted to purchase from eBay but heroically didn’t, kicked off in 2Q2024.
HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn is editor of the RADIUM AGE series of reissued proto-sf adventures from the MIT Press.
During 2Q2024, we continued publishing RADIUM AGE ART, a series exploring sf-adjacent artwork created during the genre’s emergent Radium Age (1900–1935). Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
1909 | 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917.
We continued publishing RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a selection from the 2Q2024 lineup:
Kenneth Rexroth’s “HEAVEN IS FULL OF DEFINITE STARS…” | Leslie Pinckney Hill’s ARMAGEDDON | Wallace Stevens’s THE IDEA OF A COLONY | Adele Gloria’s EXPRESS TRAIN NO. 89 | Valery Bryusov’s THE DAYS SHALL COME OF FINAL DESOLATION | Aleksei Kruchenykh’s “I COOKED MY BRAIN…” | Gertrude Stein’s A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
As we have done for over ten years now, we’ve continued to serialize some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the 2Q2024 lineup:
- Van Tassel Sutphen’s The Doomsman (1905–1906)
- Rudyard Kipling’s “Unprofessional” (1930)
- Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909)
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024. FULL SERIES INFO.
On to 3Q2024…