Word: hipsters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...real crazy short, and starts to stink up the upholstery. Man, he's got life with a belt in the back. He bugs the teach and rains the warden, a real sad square: "Man, you're draggin' your rear axle in waltztime." Pretty soon the hipster is smitten with a kitten who is all the way out and talking tight. But this boy is looking for more than a ball. He's hip that half the oofuses in this school are on, and he's got a stack of big ones to buy the hard...
Jungle Waif. The central Beat character that unintentionally emerges is a model psychopath. The hipster has a horror of family life and sustained relationships. In a brilliant, poignant story, Sunday Dinner In Brooklyn, Anatole Broyard recounts the ordeal of a highbrow Greenwich Village bohemian returning for an hour or two of strained parental nuzzling. Says the hero plaintively: "I realized that I loved them very much. But what was I going to do with them?" The hipster is also estranged from nature. In George Mandel's The Beckoning Sea, the suicide-bent hero runs screaming along a beach...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
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...