"Hipster Kremlinology"

2.12K

Hamilton Nolan

07/10/14 08:30AM

Filed to: books

I object to the word "hipster" on general principle but the more general point the musty old Wall Street Journal makes is true!

Brooklyn's litterateurs write about themselves and their friends and then are published and publicized by that same clique. This is hardly unprecedented in the annals of literature—as the critic John Leonard wrote of one of the late Manhattan literary gangs in 2006, "cohorts of scribblers have always herded together like zebras on the African veldt." But the narcissism that online platforms like Twitter and Tumblr tend to enforce has made Brooklyn books especially mystifying to non-belongers. To even begin to understand the recent memoirs by Benjamin Anastas and Jon-Jon Goulian or the new novel by parody blogger David Shapiro, you have to be a master of hipster Kremlinologyy: to know who's dating whom, who goes to whose parties and who's favoriting whose tweets.

The olds would have better arguments if they lost their fascination with "Brooklyn" and "hipsters" but other than that this is a factually accurate description of a certain segment of reality in the media world.

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Max Read Hamilton Nolan 07/10/14 08:35AM

I can't think of any examples right now but I am deeply suspicious of anything that attributes a perceived literary trend to "the narcissism that online platforms like Twitter and Tumblr tend to enforce[.]"

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Hamilton Nolan Max Read 07/10/14 08:38AM

The whole "hipster/ Brooklyn/ Twitter/ blah blah" thing is just cranky old people being old and if they left it out it would strengthen their argument, because I think the core of the argument—on the insularity of NYC— is solid

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Max Read Hamilton Nolan 07/10/14 08:40AM

Yeah, though I also wonder if it's particularly different from any past era in NYC media/publishing? I imagine the most insular stuff from any decade in the 20th century was just as incomprehensible and is now mostly forgotten on that account.

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Hamilton Nolan Max Read 07/10/14 08:42AM

I don't think it's different. But I do think it's worth pointing out, given the fact that every up and coming generation imagines that we will be *better* than previous generations and we will *avoid* the insularity that drove us crazy when we were not on the inside of it.

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Jacob Clifton Max Read 07/10/14 09:57AM

I think it is absolutely different, Max. We are more connected, we share ourselves in ways that history can't account for. If I wrote you a letter a hundred years ago, by the time Pony Express brought your response I would have two kids and the other one would be dead of dysentery. You cannot build anything that way. Generational cycling is a thought-terminating cliche; the arc is long but bends toward justice, etc.

But I don't think it's a coincidence that all of these "twitter millennials" stories are about women. It's Emily G right now but you know that rule of, you are never more than five feet from a spider? I feel like you are never more than two paragraphs from the word "millennial" to a place where you are complaining about women thinking they're interesting just for being alive. Not even making a feminist point: I just literally have never observed that to be true.

So to me the question loops back around: Old man writes about the young literary men, and but also the young literary everybody. And they're all talking about things without him, that don't matter because they are not relevant to him, so then clearly they are talking behind his back, about him, because he is inherently fascinating: It's not Brooklyn that's the problem, it's any area of any city with a narrative he doesn't own.

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Taylor Berman Hamilton Nolan 07/10/14 08:37AM

I played David Shapiro in ping pong (he's pretty good) once so if you have any questions about his memoir let me know.