Category: Semiotics
Not what, but how things mean.
RBP, RIP
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Crime writer Robert B. Parker is dead. HiLobrow.com contributor Sarah Weinman, who writes “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times, and “The Criminalist”, a monthly online column for […]
Read This PostHilo Iconography, still inchoate
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Chess sets, and Scrabble, certainly. But not Battleship, Mastermind, Risk, Monopoly, Clue? Bicycles, and pipes (the kind you smoke). But not skateboards or cigarettes, muscle cars or cigars? Teapots and typewriters. But not coffeepots or […]
Read This PostGladwell Moore’s Guide to Girls (2)
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Last week’s advice was not for everyone, Gladwell Moore recognizes that. What if you don’t want to be a playa? What if you just want one, the one, with whom you can hang out at […]
Read This PostQuatschwatch (4): Cuddly Cthulhu
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The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]
Read This PostNeal Stephenson
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No one writes edge-of-your-seat, action-packed, cinematic cliffhangers better than NEAL STEPHENSON (born 1959), and that’s just the talking-heads parts of his novels of ideas. He mashes up solid theoretical discourse (physics, cryptography, philosophy, semiotics) with […]
Read This PostDouble Exposure (8): Soul Food
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A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]
Read This PostMiddlebrow Disinfo
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Every now and then, a well-meaning intellectual mounts a three-quarters-hearted defense of Cold War-era High Middlebrow — i.e., the Great Books of the Western World collection, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Masterpiece Theatre, the arts magazine Horizon, […]
Read This PostMiddlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 10/11/09
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1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]
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