HILOBROW’S MOST VISITED: 2016

By: HILOBROW
January 6, 2017

Top 10 HILOBROW Posts of 2016

During 2016, HILOBROW served up ~375,000 page views. Of these, which 2016 posts did our readers visit most frequently? Here’s the lineup.

We’re very grateful, to our contributors and readers alike, for a terrific 2016!

(3Q2016) PLANET OF PERIL #7: Lynn Peril’s true-crime story I’M YOUR VENUS. “Mattie let loose with a bombshell. She shot Ernest Turley on purpose — because the Ouija board she and her mother consulted said that her father must die in order for Dorothea to marry a handsome cowboy.”

(3Q2016) QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM #14: Luc Sante on The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette.” “More even than the exhortation to quickly make love before you die, the song’s punctum is the off-rhyme of ‘burning flesh’ and ‘luminescent dash.’ The juxtaposition of images inscribes Ballard’s method on the head of a pin; the extra syllables of ‘luminescent’ introduce a further pedantic distance; the progression from esh to ash traces a dying fall.”

(3Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #36: Anshuman Iddamsetty on THE FULL BODY PROJECT. “All recorded history is an operating system, six feet deep, installed by male pleasure to enact unspeakable violence on women, but women who are fat, and with darker skin, or with disabilities, who do not conform to expectations of gender identity, bear the full extent of its circuitry.”

(3Q2016) QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (INTRO): Josh Glenn’s brief notes on the New Wave moment. “By 1979 (that is, the apex of the Seventies), the liberating possibilities of a weird, uncool, ironic-yet-passionate inauthenticity — which existentialist philosophers, rather confusingly, sometimes describe as ‘authenticity’; and which has also been called ‘camp’ — were everywhere on display.”

(3Q2016) ON BEYOND ZARATHUSTRA #1: The first installment in John Holbo’s HILOBROW run of pages excerpted from Nietzsche’s abandoned graphic novel, On Beyond Zarathustra. “For what good would it be/To fulfill to the letter/Grandma’s old recipe/For being better and better?”

(1Q2016) BEST OLDER KIDS’ LIT 1966: Josh Glenn celebrated the 50th anniversary of some of his favorite older kids’ adventures, from Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds on Nantucket to Sid Fleischman’s Chancy and the Grand Rascal. Thanks, Boing Boing, for driving quite a bit of traffic to this post…

(1Q2016) PLANET OF PERIL #2: Lynn Peril on THE CONTROL OF CANDY JONES. The strange but true story of a 1950s supermodel turned 1960s CIA-brainwashed killer. “Candy’s ongoing mood swings and insomnia (a side effect of cohosting her husband’s show) led Nebel to hypnotize his wife. What emerged, in addition to repressed memories of childhood trauma, was a story of mind control and torture as Candy Jones worked as a courier and then became a guinea pig for the CIA.”

(4Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #46: Mimi Lipson on TRASH PICKING. “Will my millennial friends have any way of understanding how unremarkable it once was to put a trash-picked wig on your head? It’s like trying to explain the mass appeal of Quaaludes, or how everyone under 25 once subsisted on hot dogs, Bustelo, and 10-cent popsicles.”

(3Q2016) GROK MY ENTHUSIASM #28: Annie Nocenti on MARKS ON WALLS. “The hobo code, written in chalk, charcoal, carved on railroad posts, were pictogram messages between a brotherhood, meant to lift the spirits of the next fellow traveler. … Those who could read the code knew how to find food and avoid the dangers of mean dogs and meaner men.”

(3Q2016) THIS: STRANGERS WITH EAR CANDY. Adam McGovern on shows at Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn. “Knapp understands that an accordionist needs to come right to your table or go home, so she was stomping up and down the dive’s one narrow aisle as soon as she started. She would return to the technically-a-stage periodically, to wail French music-hall covers and spin (while never missing a key) like a jewelry-box figure on a wayward space-station.”