Mark Greif

I could quibble--anyone can, with the details, which asidewards are totally different from place to place--one undernoticed positive about hipster culture is the way it's made clear to us that geography still matters, that within a standard form, platform, uniform, our regional differences will still out. Terry Richardson was not a thing here, or not till later, and flannel was always. But as a first salvo, the two-wave theory of hipsterdom--a gross faux-Americana that people got sick with show more and of and that dissolved back into real suburbia--think of the difference between the hardcorey, punkwhenpunkwasstillalittlebitaliveandkickingy emo of 2001 and the screamo of today--and a second wave that was all beards and bears and the struggle of a consumer nightmare to overcome itself through a more peaceful and sustainable kind of consumption(--which, I suddenly note, recapitulates the Britpop moment, from pill party to We Love Life)--this kept me reading and convinced me to probably pick up the book. Let's start making some sense of the dead culture we belonged to. Let's start rendering the fat, boiling down, making some soup and getting better. Relaxing on the porch with your cup of soup on a cold November morn was okay before the hipster was ever born. show less

I liked the essays "The Concept of Experience" and "Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution", from the series labeled "The Meaning of Life". The first discusses the limitations of the thirst to collect experiences and explores two alternatives, aestheticism and perfectionism. The second is a short, strong argument on the morality of redistributive taxation. "Thoreau Trailer Park", which finds Thoreau's legacy not so much at Walden Pond as in occupied Zuccotti Park, isn't bad. The rest, on show more current-ish topics from gym-going to reality TV to military heroism, meander dryly and fail to connect. show less

I wished these essays were a little more tightly edited. Greif has a lot of ideas that I find sympathetic, but I kept feeling disappointed in the softness of the execution.

I confess to only understanding perhaps half of this book which is to say the book is not written for the lay philosopher. Terms were used without intelligible definitions. None the less there were interesting concept particularly in the reviews of Bellow and Ellison.