What does it mean to be a hipster? The anthology The Greenwich Village Reader: Fiction, Poetry, and Reminiscences, 1872-2002 offers a chorus of often-contradictory answers.

This hefty anthology is a not inconsiderable read. It's an anthology about place, offering not just a sampling of Village-associated writers but an extensive selection of fiction and non-fiction about the Village itself, including memoirs and recollections. It also makes an exhaustive--and exhausting--attempt to define the meaning of "Bohemian" (in a lifestyle sense) and how that meaning changed over the years.

This approach is admirably consistent, though it leads to some odd omissions--eg., James Baldwin appears as a character in a number of reminiscences, but his work isn't actually represented.

We hear from all of the usual suspects, from Henry James to Kerouac and some of the other Beats, as well as famous naysayers such as Norman Podhoretz, but the book also offers glimpses of Village anti-celebrities who are fading into distant memory, like Joe Gould and Maxwell Bodenheim. For me, the most compelling read was actually a work of fiction--Willa Cather's "Coming, Aphrodite!"

The book is certainly long on detail and atmosphere, but it's not as complete as its title implies. Don't expect to see New York as we know it, or even pre-9/11, depicted here. It glosses over more recent history--Stonewall is mentioned in passing, but we hear nothing of AIDS. In fact, except for Madison Smartt Bell's story of a 1980s drug dealer, there's really no writing set in the last two decades. True, there are pieces published in the '90s and early 21st century, but they're all nostalgic looks backward to an earlier time. (Memo to self: Have all the writers moved away? Check on this.)

Despite this weakness, this anthology is still a good read for those interested in subcultures and countercultures. The questions it raises--Has the counterculture died? Answer: Before you were even born, kid--are still worth asking. As one author puts it a few decades ago, "the mass counterculture may be a reflection of the very hyped and videotaped world it professes to despise." That's as true now as it was then.

Link fun: Willa Cather's New York

Place Matters: a New York project to "discover, interpret, celebrate, and protect places that hold memories, anchor traditions, and help tell the history of our communities and city. "