The Cool School
Authors: Glenn O'Brien
COOL
SCHOOL
writing from america’s hip underground
edited by
glenn o’brien
A Special Publication of
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Introduction, headnotes, and volume compilation copyright © 2013 by
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
All rights reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced commercially by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the publisher.
Some of the material in this volume is reprinted by permission of the holders of copyright and publication rights. Sources and acknowledgments begin on
page 465
.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941522
ISBN
978-1-59853-256-2 (Print)
ISBN
978-1-59853-288-3 (ePub)
M
EZZ
M
EZZROW
/B
ERNARD
W
OLFE
: If You Can’t Make Money
M
ILES
D
AVIS
: from
Miles: The Autobiography
H
ENRY
M
ILLER
: Soirée in Hollywood
B
ABS
G
ONZALES
: from
I Paid My Dues
N
EAL
C
ASSADY
: Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.)
A
NATOLE
B
ROYARD
: A Portrait of the Hipster
D
ELMORE
S
CHWARTZ
: Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong With Everyone
C
HANDLER
B
ROSSARD
: from
Who Walk in Darkness
T
ERRY
S
OUTHERN
: You’re Too Hip, Baby
D
IANE
DI
P
RIMA
: from
Memoirs of a Beatnik
J
ACK
K
EROUAC
: The Origins of the Beat Generation
J
OYCE
J
OHNSON
: from
Minor Characters
B
OB
K
AUFMAN
: Walking Parker Home
L
ESTER
Y
OUNG
/ F
RANÇOIS
P
OSTIF
: Lesterparis59
F
RANK
O’H
ARA
: The Day Lady Died
A
MIRI
B
ARAKA
(L
EROI
JONES
)
: The Screamers
A
LEXANDER
T
ROCCHI
: from
Cain’s Book
F
RAN
L
ANDESMAN
: The Ballad of the Sad Young Men
J
OHN
C
LELLON
H
OLMES
: The Pop Imagination
D
EL
C
LOSE
: Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases
L
ENNY
B
RUCE
: Pills and Shit: The Drug Scene
M
ORT
S
AHL
: The Billy Graham Rally
B
OB
D
YLAN
: from
Chronicles: Volume One
J
ACK
S
MITH
: The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez
W
ILLIAM
S. B
URROUGHS
: Last Words
E
D
S
ANDERS
: Siobhan McKenna Group-Grope
B
OBBIE
L
OUISE
H
AWKINS
: Frenchy and Cuban Pete
R
ICHARD
B
RAUTIGAN
: The Kool-Aid Wino
G
ERARD
M
ALANGA
: Photos of an Artist as a Young Man
H
UNTER
S. T
HOMPSON
: from
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
R
ICHARD
M
ELTZER
: Luckies vs. Camels: Who Will Win?
D
AVID
R
ATTRAY
: How I Became One of the Invisible
L
ESTER
B
ANGS
: How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying
L
YNNE
T
ILLMAN
: Madame Realism Asks What’s Natural About Painting?
C
OOKIE
M
UELLER
: Abduction and Rape—Highway 31—1969
R
ICHARD
P
RINCE
: The Velvet Well
G
LENN
O’B
RIEN
: Beatnik Executives
1.
I’m hip.
That means “I know.”
My friend Eric Mitchell says Hip comes from the West African word “hipi” meaning “to open one’s eye.” (Some philologists disagree but Eric is hip.)
If you’re hip your eyes are open, all three of them.
Hip is kind of like being gnostic. How do I know? I don’t know, I just know.
Hipness is a pre-existing condition, something you discover in yourself by yourself.
To be hip is to be an outsider who connects with other outsiders to become insiders of a sort.
To be hip is to belong to an underground, a subculture or counterculture, an elective tribe located within a larger community, outsiders inside. It is detached from the main thing and proud of its detachment. Hip is not always an option but it is always optional.
To be hip is to be Other. (Rimbaud: “I is another.”) We all feel other sometimes and some feel it all the time. The other is the outsider within: the shunned, the excluded, the non-conformist, the escapist, the oddball, the misfit, the square peg, the freak. One of “us” gone rogue, gone haywire, gone wrong trying to get right.
The hipster is either the next step in evolution or the type next destined for extinction.
Cab Calloway defined hep cat as “a guy who knows all the answers.” Thus hep cats date back to Socrates (470–399
B
.
C
.
E
.), who knew all the questions.
So Socrates was probably the first historical hipster. The first real beatnik might have been Diogenes (412–323
B
.
C
.
E
.), the philosopher who lived in a barrel in Athens during the time of Plato. When Alexander the Great asked him if he wanted anything, he said “Yes, don’t block my sunshine.” He was a dropout.
The original hipster was an underground figure: an outlaw, an outsider, an outcast, an exile, a heretic, a Bohemian, a misfit, a pariah, a fugitive—a street person, a criminal, a sexual outlaw, a madman. America had known many such.
“So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”—Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”
In the early twentieth century black culture, rooted in jazz with its free sexuality and use of marijuana and other drugs, was an outlaw culture that required an opaque language and a speakeasy limited access to survive.
“And Newark always had a bad reputation, I mean, everybody could pop their fingers. Was hip. Had walks.”—Amiri Baraka
The hipster is identified by language reflecting an alternate set of values—a lingo or slang not understood by the mainstream. It is a language whose meaning may be multileveled and whose surface may be deliberately misleading. Thus, to understand—to catch the deliberate drift—is to dig.
“Dig
: Understand, appreciate . . . Often used as interjectory verbal punctuation, to command attention or to break up thoughts. ‘Dig. We were walking down Tenth Avenue, you dig it, and dig! Here comes this cop. So dig, here’s what we did.”—Del Close
Hip language is a living medium. The dictionary of hip is unprintable as it is always mutating faster than fruit flies, too fast for the squares to catch on.
“By the time they catch us we’re not there.”—Ishmael Reed, “Foolology”
To get it you have to have, like Jesus put it, “ears to hear.” Like Antony said, “Lend me your ears.” Like Lord Buckley said, “Knock me your lobes.”
The hipster spoke jive talk. Jive was jazz talk. A 1928 dictionary defined it as “to deceive playfully” (v.), also “empty misleading talk” (n.). It was ironical language copped from blacks and Jews, gays and jazz musicians and junkies, bootleggers and second story men. Jive was an underground, initiatory language existing, the vernacular as survival strategy, a way of speaking in front of the enemy without being understood. It is the language of the marginalized—although sometimes it isn’t simply a way of excluding people outside the group from understanding, but also of bonding and affirming status within the insider/outsider group: converting exclusion into exclusivity. Can you dig it?