the cool school & Lenny Bruce

[Fiona Shnapple]

In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic
guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth
to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the
racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating
their own dissident networks. Whether labeled Bop or Beat or Punk,
these outsider voices would merge and recombine in surprising ways,
changing America forever.

To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex.
Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays,
and song lyrics, O’Brien creates an unparalleled literary mixtape
spanning decades of tumultuous and exuberant change. In the Forties,
the era when the strands of hip begin to converge, Miles Davis joins
Charlie Parker in a revolutionary musical collaboration that also
signals a revolution in attitude; Henry Miller, back from Paris,
dissects the grotesque hypocrisies of a Hollywood dinner party; and
Beat avatar Neal Cassady writes to Jack Kerouac about his life on the
road.

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