Josh Glenn
Josh Glenn is a Boston- and Kingston (NY)-based consulting semiotician. He is cofounder of the consultancy Semiovox, editor of the websites SEMIOVOX and HILOBROW, and founding editor of The MIT Press's proto-sf RADIUM AGE series. He is an adjunct instructor at RISD and convenor of the monthly online Semiofest Sessions. His books include The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, and the family activities guide Unbored. In the ’90s, Josh published the intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut; in the 2000s, he was a founding staffer and columnist for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section.
Buckaroo Banzai
For one moment, it seemed as though the Eighties might turn out OK.
Seth’s Dominion
"I am still trying to approach my work with the same intentions I had as a child."
Sixties Backlash
Parody is an art form for "children who have had imposed upon them a meaningless iconography."
Meet the Semionauts
"Between the experiential cunning of the animal and the more self-disciplined and attentive cunning of the man."
Fifties Backlash
"Disney sold him into slavery, and he’s nothing. He's nothing."
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
A non-compact topological group of bare-breasted women in G-strings.
Thick Description (Abduction)
How do we identify codes, and in doing so begin to construct a meaning matrix?
Disney Co. Mascot
"He’s so much of an institution that we’re limited in what we can do with him."
The African Queen
How to survive not war, but peace, with one’s humanity intact?
Thick Description (Deduction)
How do we identify paradigms and thematic complexes?
Forties Backlash
"A degenerate 'middlebrow' horror, mass-produced for profit."
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Comical yet not funny, equal-opportunity in its portrayal of human folly, artificial in the extreme.