Jonathan Letham used to think he was a hipster—until he realized the amount of nastiness people intended when they used that word.

Question: Are hipsters ruining Brooklyn?

Jonathan Lethem:  Well you know I’m really strangely tone-deaf about certain things, just as I think in the '50s the word "beatnik" was made up to try to put something obnoxious or pretentious in its place and then there were people who came along, the Maynard G. Krebses of the world who were like "Hey I’m a beatnik" and they, just almost in a kind of idiot savant way they made it a good thing to be a beatnik because they liked to be one. 

It took me a little while to understand how much nastiness people generally intended when they used the word hipster.  It just sounds sort of attractive to me, a hipster.  I thought yeah, I guess that is sort of my culture.  Those are my people and I was just about able to go on thinking that it was a perfectly nice thing to be until someone pointed out to me or it finally sank in that it was meant contemptuously and I really I’m not sure I accept the premise that I think it’s a self-loathing term and I’ve come to be very alert to this self-loathing propensity that surrounds certain kinds of cultures of what are essentially connoisseurship, generational affiliation.

Recorded on September 25, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller