The Cool School

October 7, 2013
Former Rolling Stone editor O'Brien (How To Be A Man) gathers selections from those associated with the Beats in an attempt to shed light on the "original hipsters." Del Close's "Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases" offers the observation that "beatnik" is a word used to denote anybody "you don't happen to like," while Norman Mailer suggests that a hipster is "a philosophical psychopath." Kerouac, who claims credit for the term's adoption, offers both the slang term "beat," meaning "poor, down and out," and his own interpretation of it as being short for "beatific." By the end of the book, which draws on memoirs, poems, novels, letters, essays, song lyrics, and other sources, the reader has been inundated with so many differing philosophies about the era that no clear picture emerges. With the current generation of hipsters losing its luster, there's a sense of desperation underlying this book's existence, as if by going back to the originals, one can somehow resuscitate "the sense that we were engaging in the real Scene that lay buried somewhere under the glum hypocrisies and lofty nonsense..." But try as O'Brien might, studied nostalgia can't recreate the Beat generation. Illustrated endpapers. No agent.

October 15, 2013
O'Brien has been on the cutting edge since his days at Andy Warhol's Interview and through stints at Rolling Stone, Spin, High Times, and GQ, where he's the Style Guy. In his rev-it-up introduction to this brilliantly conceived, must-have Library of America anthology, he orients us to what the original hipsteroutlaw, misfit, rebel, hereticwas all about and how hipster language embodies radical points of view and ways of being. O'Brien also tells us, Cool is like grace. It can be sold but not bought. So who are the exemplars of cool according to O'Brien? The Beats contingent is here, of course, and so are establishment-blasting comedians Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and George Carlin. Indelible passages from the autobiographies of jazz musicians Mezz Mezzrow, Miles Davis, and Art Pepper cast light on the dangers of all-out creativity. Norman Mailer's knockout manifesto, The White Negro, is as riling now as it was in 1957, as is Seymour Krim's electrifying 1961 riff on making it. With Ishmael Reed, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs, and dozens more, this is one red-hot book of cool.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)