HILOBROW 1Q2025
By:
March 31, 2025
Here’s what HILOBROW published in January, February, and March 2025.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 SNEAK PEEK.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 1Q2025.
During 1Q2025, HILOBROW published MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Here’s the lineup:
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
Josh Glenn is the MacGYVER 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.
In 2010–11, we serialized James Parker’s swearing-animal novel COCKY THE FOX. Following the publication of his collection Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive, during 2025 James will re-tell the Cocky saga, here at HILOBROW… this time, in the form of an opera!
Here’s the 1Q2025 COCKY: THE OPERA lineup:
- PRELUDE / ACT ONE, SCENE ONE. Excerpt:
CORVIN: Fuck the face in empty space!
Fuck the broken weather!
Fuck the rhyme, the sacred slime
that sticks the words together!
New installments each month, through December.
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 1Q2025 lineup:
MAGNIFICENT COMPULSION: Dancing into the subject with TANA SIROIS. Excerpt:
It’s interesting to “perform” OCD, because it is such an internal experience. How can you perform it, when the very act of expressing it physically or putting it into poetry or song is therapeutic in itself? As soon as I’m doing something active and absurd like communicating with a plastic bag puppet about my fears, those fears sort of decrease in severity and become a bit more manageable.
SAMIZDAT NIGHT FEVER: Second drafts of tragedy. Excerpt:
Like the media coverage of Election 2024 and the Harris campaign itself, the entire focus [of Daredevil: Born Again] is on the badguy; Vincent D’Onofrio’s brilliant semi–hinged performance, like Fisk’s newfound position in power, commands the center of attention.
Also: RED GAMMA, WHITE HOUSE BLUES: “Captain America, just past the nick of time.”
Josh Glenn’s SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:
- Samuel R. Delany’s THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. Excerpt:
All of us inhabit a cultural system whose lineaments are invisible, inherited, and seemingly natural and inevitable. Our perceptions are warped by this system, our values and decisions influenced by it, our actions to some extent guided by it. We’ve inherited it, but we don’t entirely understand it…
- Roger Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT. Excerpt:
The Hindu pantheon of “gods” are not considered separate gods in their own right; they are useful illusions generated in order to give mortals an object lesson in restoring Dharma. There’s a parallel between this religious tradition and semiotics, which understands each “node” in a network of meaning to be merely a symbol or metaphor for some underlying, impossible-to-represent meaning.
- Philip K. Dick’s UBIK. Excerpt:
Joe Chip finds himself immersed in an alien semiosphere, if you will: This altered reality in which he and his teammates are moving back in time, in which things keep crumbling and dissolving, and in which Runciter keeps manifesting in unexpected ways. So Joe does what semioticians do: He analyzes the semiosphere’s norms and forms, seeking patterns that might reveal insights about what’s going on… and how what’s going on is going on.
HILOBROW friend (and brother-in-law) Lawry Hutcheson returned with a fourth year’s worth of gorgeous linocut calendar art — via the series LINOCUT 2024.
Additional ongoing HILOBROW series include the following:
SCREENSHOTS | PHOTO DUMP | NOT TODAY, EBAY
HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn is editor of the RADIUM AGE series of reissued proto-sf adventures from the MIT Press. During 1Q2025, the following titles were published:
- J.D. Beresford’s THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER (March 2025, with a new introduction by Ted Chiang). “Extravagance… but of so remarkable a character that it keeps you almost spell-bound. What follows is philosophy, psychology, poetry, allegory, what you will.” — The Bookman (1911) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
- John Taine’s THE GREATEST ADVENTURE (March 2025, with a new introduction by S.L. Huang). “A mixture of H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Roy Chapman Andrews, and a bottle of excellent gin.” — California Tech (1929) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
For more details, see the post RADIUM AGE 1Q2025.
Exciting projects for Fall 2025 and beyond are also in the works…
As we have done for over ten years now, we continued to serialize some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:
- Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors (1901)
- Naomi Mitchison’s “The Goat: Cardiff, A.D. 1935” (1929)
- Frank L. Pollock’s “The Skyscraper in B Flat” (1904)
HILOBROW published further installments in the series RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a sampling of the 1Q2025 lineup:
Valery Bryusov’s THE VOICE OF OTHER WORLDS | Charles Wharton Stork’s THE STATISTICIAN | Hart Crane’s LINES SENT TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ | Frederick Soddy’s THE KISS PRECISE | Jakob von Hoddis’ WELTENDE | Harriet Monroe’s A POWER-PLANT | Charles Bertram Johnson’s THE DREAMER | Zinaida Gippius’ ELECTRICITY | Agnes Lee’s RADIUM.
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025. FULL SERIES INFO.
Cross-posted to HILOBROW from elsewhere, during 1Q2025:
12 DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE is an ongoing, seasonal series of stories originally written — by HILOBROW contributors and friends — for Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s 2009–2010 anthropological-literary experiment SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS. Here are the series installments that appeared (as part of the tenth edition of this series) in January 2025:
Sari Wilson on PENGUIN CREAMER | Sloane Crosley on RAINBOW SAND ANIMAL | Teddy Blanks on PORCELAIN SCOOTER | Terese Svoboda on HEART-SHAPED CANDLE | Todd Levin on ZIGGY HEART
On to 2Q2025…