1. Decide what it is about being a hipster that so appeals to you. Wikihow says, “For many people, being hipster is about being alert to the way in which consumer culture can easily subsume us and lead us, rather than us standing back and critically assessing it.”For us nineteenth-century folk, this means we recognize the evils of the industrial revolution and are into folks like Charles Fourier. He writes that "we find the industrial regions sprinkled with beggars to as great, or, perhaps, a greater extent than those countries which are indifferent to this sort of progress. ... This is slavery actually restored." (Fourier 337)
2. Be in the right age group. Check. Daddy Hawthorne says I'm 21-22 (29).
3. Be where the hipsters roam. Okay, so Salem is no Concord, with its Thoreaus and Emersons, I get it. But look, everybody knows about Concord by this point. It's totally overexposed. Salem is way more obscure, and therefore, way hipper.
4. Be educated. Here's where the cultural differences come into play. I didn't go to school. Well, I went to the university of life. In 1850 it just wasn't that big of a deal. You could really only go to like, Harvard, anyway, which was way too mainstream.
5. Be an early adopter. Wikihow says, "Hipsters tend to sense what's worthwhile before the trend or item becomes more popular. ... Many technical gadgets are taken up by hipsters first, only to become mainstream goodies later."
So yeah. Daguerreotypy. Lara Langer Cohen notes that it was invented in 1839 and reached its height of popularity in America during the 1850s (40). Why? Because hipsters like me started the trend.
Also, mesmerism. According to Howard Kerr, "Spiritualism began in America in 1848" (quoted in Swann 5), which means that when Hawthorne put it in his 1851 book he was really getting in on the cutting edge of cultural fads.
6. Make what’s old new again. This blog, for one. My ironic abode in the attic of the Pyncheon house. My retelling of old family legends for fun and profit. Also, playing out a century-long hereditary curse/family feud.
7. Get your reading matter sorted out. We transcendentalists have this magazine we like to call The Dial. Check it.
8. Hone your humor. "A hipster is known for their strong sense of irony and sarcasm." Okay, so maybe I need to work on this a bit. The funniest thing I can remember saying is, when I talk to Phoebe about sharing work in the garden, I say, "So we will be fellow laborers, somewhat on the community system" (64). See, that's really only funny if you were around for the whole utopian community craze. You wouldn't get it.
9. Listen to newly emerging, independent music. In 1850, concerts were called lectures (we didn't have phonographs yet). All the cool kids went to see Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and whoever give public lectures. I even gave lectures on mesmerism for awhile, but I gave that up to concentrate on my art.
10. Get the fashion worked out. My friends: "men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments" (58). We're trend setters.
11. Get the lingo and the attitude. Ahem. "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past! It lies upon the Present like some giant's dead body!" (126-7)
12. Start growing your own food and turning vegetarian. I love working in the Pyncheon garden out back: "I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black, old earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime" (62).
Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott also advocated for veganism in their transcendental community, Fruitlands.
13. Start dancing. I don't dance. I'm probably not far enough removed from Massachusetts' Puritan past.
14. Date other hipsters. In the 1850s, transcendentalists were basically all men (except you, dear Margaret) We could pretty much date whoever we wanted, because it wasn't like they were going to have their own careers, anyway.
15. Be aware that hipsterism is frequently parodied or derided because hipsters bug some people. Yep, that hasn't changed. In July 1850, Holdens Dollar Magazine of Criticisms, Biographies, Sketches, Essays, Tales, Reviews, Poetry, etc. published a section called "The Literary Cocked Hat and Transcendental Tea-Pot," which was totally just a parody of the transcendentalists. They mocked the flowery language of people who wrote for The Dial, like Bronson Alcott, made up fake characters corresponding from Egypt and Washington D.C., wrote punny book reviews. It was quite humorous. Hipsters always deny that they are hipsters, so I wouldn't be surprised if the authors of this piece weren't downing the PBR (Pabst was founded in Milwaukee in 1844) and chuckling ironically as they wrote it.
16. Don't define yourself to others. We transcendentalists consider this a bit of an art form. Check out the first part of this prezi presentation, if you don't believe me. There was a whole series of articles in the Boston Recorder in 1839 trying to answer the question "What is Transcendentalism?" The first article in the series is a whole column about what it isn't.
17. Know what's going on at all times within the hipster community
and 18. Try social forums. Voila, this blog.
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