Word: hipster
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...idle hour, Jazz Columnist Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle staged a tongue-in-cheek interview with a fictional hipster named Shorty Pederstein. His old friend, he reported, had deserted the beard-and-sandal set of the Beat Generation, now boasted a Nob Hill address, clean shaves and tennis togs...
...confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman Wouk bestride this cultural colossus, alternately sagacious and sadistic with their American public...
Eager to Belong. The Angry Young Men are scarcely beat; yet British reserve merely muffles several striking similarities in theme and attitude. When Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) virtually dismisses politics as a "mug's game," any hipster would reply "Yes, man, yes!" When one of John Wain's characters in Hurry on Down tries to avoid introducing his parents to a friend because he is ashamed of their working-class manner and appearance, there is more than an echo of Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn. When Colin Wilson proclaims that the Outsider "is the one man who knows...
There is also a central difference between the Beats and the Angries. Where the hipster is asocial-society's Underground Man-the Angry Young Man is eager to belong, feeling as he does that the welfare state has given him the credentials of a gentleman without the cash to be one. George Scott, a young Tory by conversion, puts this plaint best in a section of his autobiography Time and Place: "And so here we are, with our degrees and our posh education, our prideful positions in the public service, our ambitious names in print, trying...
Self & Sensation. The case of the hipster is not so hopeful. He is a rebel without a cause who shirks responsibility on the ground that he has the H-bomb jitters. His disengagement from society is so complete that he treats self as the only reality and cultivates sensation as the only goal. But the self-revolving life is a bore, a kind of life-in-death that requires ever intenser stimulants to create even the illusion of feeling. Stepping up the tempo, "go, go, go" becomes the rhythm of madness and self-destruction. The future of the Beat Generation...