Book Review: Glenn O’Brien, Ed., The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground

Abstract

Book Review: Glenn O'Brien, Ed., Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground. New York: Library Classics, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-598532562 (Hardcover). 471 Pages. S27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2015 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]A memorable scene in Robert Stone's National Book Award winning novel Dog Soldiers (1974) features Hollywood hustler Eddie Peace introducing the protagonist Ray Hicks to a couple of adventure-seeking squares. Adventure, in this case, is heroin, intravenously injected, which Hicks arrives on the scene to administer. Raymond [Hicks] is the operator, Eddie Peace tells the squares. He's the original hip guy. whole world is goofs to him.In one indelible moment, Stone collapses nearly all the qualities that manifest as hip or cool or underground in Glenn O'Brien's anthology, Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: illicit substances (in some cool schools, the harder the hipper), hustlers, thrill seekers, danger, and, in the center of it all, a character who knows the score better than anyone and cannot be surprised. [NB: Stone's scene does not appear in O'Brien's anthology-I'm not complaining-but it could, especially because so many of O'Brien's selections conjure its action, milieu, and characters.] Stone has commented that the creation of Hicks derives in part from Neal Cassady, whom Stone knew. Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a cool school bible, might qualify in his own right as an original hip guy. Indeed, his Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.) appears in the book, as, of course, does Kerouac in essay form in his The Origins of the Beat Generation. Kerouac and Cassady flow-chart into so many of the book's other hipster representatives: Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ed Sanders, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and so on-the Beats and their constellation are well represented, but Cool School shows that America's hip underground flows within them and without them.Can one quibble with the selection? Well, let's look at the numbers: of the fifty-seven entries, forty-six are male, nine female. Two of the entries by women are song lyrics (Fran Landesman's The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Annie Ross's Twisted), and as such, nearly throwaways, but we also get two lyrics from the men (King Pleasure's Parker's Mood, and Richard Hell's Blank Generation). That leaves forty-four prose (or play or transcript) entries from men up against a mere seven from women, which begs the question: whither Patti Smith, Jane Bowles, Karen Finley, Hettie Jones, Memphis Minnie, Kathy Acker, Jayne Cortez? collection includes a half-dozen entries that directly or indirectly celebrate black culture, including Mezz Mezzrow's If You Can't Make Money, Teny Southern's You're Too Hip, Baby, Jack Kerouac's The Origins of the Beat Generation, Bob Kaufman's Walking Parker Home, Norman Mailer's The White Negro, Del Close's Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases, but only seven black writers-six, if you don't count Anatole Broyard's A Portrait of the Hipster, given that Broyard passed as white in his hip-cool-beat NYC life. One may also wonder if his long-term employment at the New York Times Book Review compromises any of his hipster cred? At any rate, four of these seven come from the world of jazz, including excerpts from Miles Davis' Miles: Autobiography, Babs Gonzales' I Paid My Dues, Lester Young, from the interview LesterParis59, and the aforementioned Parker's Mood by King Pleasure. In contrast, there is nothing from Melvin Van Peebles, Claude McKay, Greg Tate, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Chester Himes, or Claude Brown. …