THE VILLAGE BEAT SCENE: SUMMER 1960 [Offprint from Summer 1961 Issue of DISSENT] by Polsky, Ned - 1961

[New York: Dissent Publishing], 1961. First Separate Edition. Softcover. Near fine. [1961]. 23 pp. Printed self-wrappers, saddle-stapled. Tiny stain (one-eighth inch) at fore-edge of front wrapper, light toning in wrappers, else fine.

The first published sociological account of beat counterculture, here in a scarce offprint from the Summer 1961 "New York, N.Y." issue of DISSENT magazine. The article would later be published in Polsky's 1967 HUSTLERS, BEATS, AND OTHERS. Ned Polsky (1928-2000) taught sociology for a number of years at SUNY Stony Brook before joining the antiquarian book trade in his retirement. He first came to national attention in 1957 with his critique of Norman Mailer's essay, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" - his response, and Mailer's counter-response, were published in both City Lights' book version of Mailer's essay and the Winter 1958 issue of DISSENT. (Polsky was less sanguine than Mailer about the white male hipster's supposed sexual revolutionariness and racial radicalism. On the fomer topic: "When Mailer glamorizes the hipsters' 'search after the good orgasm' he is simply accepting at face value their rationalization for what is in truth a pathetic, driven sex life in which the same failures are repeated again and again. On this matter as on others, Mailer confuses the life of action with the life of acting out.")In the present study, Polsky differentiates the "hipster" from the "beat" (see below) and covers a broad range of topics, including anti-bourgeois attitudes, work (and oppostition to work), sex and sexuality, race, drugs (especially marijuana and heroin), and jazz. On beats vs. hipsters: "Until recently 'hipster' simply meant one who is hip, roughly the equivalent of a beat. Beats recognized that the hipster is more of an 'operator' - has a more consciously patterned lifestyle (such as a concern to dress well) and makes more frequent economic raids on the frontiers of the square world - but stressed their social bonds with hipsters, such as their liking for drugs, for jazz music, and, above all, their common scorn for bourgeois career orientations. Among Village beats today, however, 'hipster' usually has a pejorative connotation: one who is a mannered showoff regarding his hipness, who 'comes on' too strongly in hiptalk, etc. In their own eyes, beats are hip but definitely not hipsters" (pp. 3-4).