Thanks Alisa Slaughter!
Animation by Joanna Neborsky. We recently published a book based on the panel.
My son and I used to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was once in his stroller on Bedford Avenue when a twentysomething guy emerged from his apartment on North 8th Street decked out in full hipster uniform. He was as skinny as OC-era Mischa Barton, with minuscule black pegged jeans, a black hat of the sort Zorro might wear. My son gazed at him and said in the voice of the unselfconscious toddler, “Look at that old witch!
—from “Williamsburg Year Zero” by Jennifer Baumgardner in What Was The Hipster?
The lengthy journey made by What Was The Hipster? or Issue 10: Self-Improvement if ordered through Amazon (British or otherwise).
The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff.
—
Mark Grief’s “The Hipster in the Mirror”
More on the unspeakable H from other n+1 voices: What Was The Hipster?
Hipster History: Mark Grief on Brian Lehrer
From WNYC:
Mark Greif, co-founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and frequent contributor to The American Prospect, discusses the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Greif also participated in a writers’ debate on the topic, published in What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1 Foundation, 2010).
Listen to it here:
Promotional materials, post-factcheck
Dear Friends,
The hipster book (see the table of contents) has been receiving some nice notices, as well as angry denunciations, all across the land—and in other lands too (England, Canada, Norway, Germany, South Africa). Mark Greif’s essay on the white hipster was excerpted in New York magazine, also to much consternation and argument.
We’ve managed to get the book into some of the better independent bookstores, but there are fewer and fewer of these, and larger distributors have declined to take us on. So we need your help! If you know of a great bookstore that doesn’t carry the book, or a great coffee shop in your town that only has a B&N in it, or a clothing store, or frankly any other kind of store—or even if you want to become your own independent one-person bookstore, walking around town with the hipster book and selling it to people on the streets, Mark Twain-like—please write to us us and we’ll figure something out.
Sincerely, and with thanks as always,
The Editors
Come: buy books, shred hipsters, spill booze in mourning.
iBookstore feature brick!
Upcoming n+1 talks & appearances – clickthrough for more information!
Wednesday, October 27, 3:30 PM, “A Conversation on Periodicals and Publishing,” Paley Library Lecture Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
Friday, October 29, 7 PM, What Was the Hipster? book party, Spoonbill & Sugartown, Brooklyn, NY
Monday, November 8, 7 PM, “Reflections on the public, private intellectual,” The Kitchen, NY, NY
Friday, November 12, 9 PM, Issue 10 launch party, Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn, NY
Tuesday, November 16, 7 PM, “The Death of Print,” Theresa Lang Center, The New School, NY, NY
Hipster now available in digital form thanks to HarperCollins.
Exchange in a Subway Station, 11pm
Guy: “How’s that book? What are you reading?”
Alex: “It’s called What was the Hipster?”
Girl: “So what was the hipster? Are you a hipster? Do you know hipsters? Were your parents hipsters?”
Guy: “You kind of look like a hipster.”
Alex: “Why do you say that?”
Guy: “Just being prejudiced, I guess.”
Courtesy of The Atlantic’s Alex Eichler
