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Hamptons Hipsters

Last weekend, I went to Sag Harbor, which is more or less a Hampton and so has its own branch of Bookhampton, the main (indie) bookstore chain out there. Bookhampton has many well-curated special sections, but one in particular caught my eye:

You can click that image to enlarge, but allow me to zoom in on the crucial detail:

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The titles listed under Hipster Lit are:

“King Rat,” by China Miéville.
“2666,” by Roberto Bolaño.
“The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago.
“House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski.
“High Fidelity,” by Nick Hornby.
“Elliot Allagash,” by Simon Rich.
“Scorch Atlas,” by Blake Butler.
“Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems,” by Billy Collins.
“Illuminations,” by Arthur Rimbaud.
“Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” by George Saunders.
“Siddhartha,” by Herman Hesse.
“Lush Life,” by Richard Price.
“A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism,” by Peter Mountford.
“The New York Trilogy,” by Paul Auster.

I think this is a very good selection of hipster lit, though I can already hear the banshees howling that it’s incomplete. Where is Eggers? Where’s D.F.W.? Where’s Murakami? (Op! He’s on the shelf above, which I believe belonged to the plain old “literature” section.) Where are Lydia Davis, Miranda July, and Vendela Vida? Why are there no female authors?*

A few points:

  1. It is possible to fit only so many books on two shelves.

  2. Seeking a working definition of the recent hipster movement has been a favorite pastime of literary younger adults over the past few years, and although it’s yielded some excellent results, they are inconclusive. The field is still open, and probably will be as long as hipsters walk the globe. As the preface to n+1’s “What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation” put it:

All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know.

So a bookstore in the Hamptons can make suggestions about what literature it feels most embodies the movement without having to get it “exactly right.”

  1. The lack of female authors on these shelves (and on other hipster-lit lists around the Internet) suggests that the recent hipster movement will one day provide a rich vein for serious scholarly inquiry of a feminist bent, even if it still today provokes ridicule. n+1 has obviously begun some of the work, identifying what Mark Greiff calls a “relentlessly male” strain of a movement that has also often been thought of as relentlessly white and relentlessly privileged. The gender and class issues associated with hipsterism are both broad and deep, and merit much more investigation. Plentiful are the accusations of anti-feminism in the movement (or of “Sofia Coppola Feminism”: “SCF or ‘hipster feminism’ is a parasitic feminism that not only ignores but is dependent on class, race, and cultural appropriation and subjugation”). And some criticism of the n+1 investigation centered on the absence of a broad consideration of “the structures that enforce inequality,” and its confusion about the hipster feminine, as Phoebe Connelly put it in Bookforum.

The Hipster Lit section at Bookhampton brought these ideas flooding to mind, appearing as it does a monument to the ickier side of hipsterdom: not only does it contain all male and all white (save, if you prefer, Bolaño and Saramago) authors, it is, to state the very obvious, in the Hamptons.

This doesn’t mean the section shouldn’t exist: hipsters like good literature, and their preferences provide a helpful means of thinking about and organizing books. To me, it’s just another (very visible and concrete) example of why we should continue to assess a movement that is often irritating and often confusing but nonetheless rife with cultural significance.

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** For a good selection of angry questions and comments about incomplete lists of hipster lit, visit the courageously titled post “The Ultimate Hipster Reading List” at Flavorwire.*{: .small}

Update: I just got a note from Kim Lombardini, the marketing manager of Bookhampton and one of the curators of the hipster shelf, informing me that they have an in-word for all the hipsters that come into the shop. They are, perfectly, “Hampsters.”