Word: hipsters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Clinical candor about sex and the uncommuncative discourse of the hipster are poor substitutes for sound thought and mature craftsmanship, whch explains why so few of the works of the Beat literati have been interesting, let alone readable. Easy Living, at least, is comprehensible, but the hippies who hop in and out of the beds Zane has made for them are, on the whole, lifeless forms. Rarely to they seem human; often they seem to be nothing more than sex machines. One more pot of hashish or an additional romp in the love bed could not save the book. Zane...
...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...
Said Shorty of the new Up-Beat Generation: "We eschew the verbal shorthand popularly supposed to be the language of this ingroup, and we reject the death-wish symbolism of the dark shirt and black stockings. The square has come full circle, so to speak. The hipster today is exactly what the tourist doesn't see. What he sees are the other-directed camp followers making themselves over in the image of an in-group they never knew...
...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...
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...